The Fire This Time

I'm very happy that Tina Fey is hosting the season premiere of Saturday Night Live tomorrow tonight, but I'm even happier that the musical guest is Arcade Fire. Their new album Reflektor will be released in about a month, so I guess this is the first of their promotional appearances.

UPDATE: After SNL, NBC will broadcast a 30-minute Arcade Fire concert special. Adjust your DVRs accordingly.

There's a video for the single, also called "Reflektor."



The giant paper-mache heads are weird, but I found that opening it in a separate tab and listening to it without looking at the video helped me get into the song more. If you preorder the album directly through them, you get early access to concert ticket sales.

Also of note re: their SNL appearance: David Bowie sings background vocals on this song, and I'm totally speculating here, but he does live in New York so it's not out of the question that he'd show up for the live performance.

Retro Video Unit (9/20/13)

Today I'm going back to my college years for a song for which I never even realized there was a video. Yaz, known as Yazoo at home in England (there was a band in the US already using the name Yazoo at the time), was a synth-pop duo started by Vince Clarke, an original member of Depeche Mode who left early on to do his own thing.

He teamed up with vocalist Alison Moyet for a brief but influential period in the early 1980s; they only released two albums, Upstairs at Eric's and You and Me Both, before deciding to go their separate ways. Moyet pursued a solo career while Clarke formed the long-running duo Erasure with Andy Bell, a singer who sounded uncannily like Moyet.

This song, "Situation," is from the first album and is almost certainly the first song by them I heard. It's bouncy and upbeat, and would probably be good on a workout playlist.

Retro Video Unit (9/6/13)

In the portion of the internet's attic where old music videos are stored, there are songs that I've always liked for which there are videos that I have never seen. That's the case with today's nugget, "Fade to Grey" by Visage.



I'll admit to knowing very little about the group itself, but I've been familiar with the song for more than 30 years. The video certainly has its share of oddness, but I think it makes quite an interesting cultural artifact from the early 1980s.

Retro Video Unit (8/23/13)

I'd imagine everyone has seen this one, but that's no reason not to post it. "Sledgehammer" was pretty impressive technically when it premiered in 1986, and it's still a good song. (Isn't it about time for tab-collar shirts to make another comeback?)

Retro Video Unit (8/9/13)

Some old songs have videos that I wasn't aware of, like this one from Toronto band Martha and the Muffins. Yes, it's "Echo Beach":

Retro Video Unit (7/26/13)

Sometimes I just remember old bands and songs out of nowhere, with no prompting or a coincidental hearing of a song on radio somewhere—that's how this one got here. The band is Our Daughter's Wedding, and the song is "Lawnchairs" from 1981. I had a friend in college who was particularly fond of this one...

I've Been Waiting

Good news, finally: a new Arcade Fire album will be released on October 29th.

Retro Video Unit (7/12/13)

I thought of this band for no particular reason. A lot of their videos were kind of boring, at least this one has some camera movement, and this is arguably the song that put them on the map anyway, several years before the John Hughes movie borrowed the title and featured a reworked, inferior version of this song on its soundtrack.

So, here's "Pretty in Pink" by The Psychedelic Furs:

Retro Video Unit (6/28/13)

Sometimes a really good song got stuck with a mediocre video, like this one, "Let Me Go" by Heaven 17:

Retro Video Unit (6/14/13)

I've been looking at old Matthew Sweet videos for a while for this feature, and as good a song as "Girlfriend" is, I've decided to go with a different song, "Sick of Myself" from the 1995 album 100% Fun, because I think it's a near-perfect example of marrying bitter, self-loathing lyrics to a catchy melody. Sweet was by no means the first person to do that in a song, but he sure did it well. (And thanks to the blog Anthony Is Right for providing the idea.)



Also, those of us of a certain age will recognize and remember the "credits" that used to appear at the beginning and end of MTV videos like this one.

Retro Video Unit (5/31/13)

I've been trying to mix some memorable Boston bands into this feature, so this week we'll look at one that popped into my head recently: The Del Fuegos. Their single "Don't Run Wild" was very popular at the time of its release in 1985, and I saw the band play several times over the years.



The video is perhaps most memorable for the shots of the band playing on the Mass. Ave. bridge. The night shots are cool too; those appear to be in a parking lot on the waterfront, possibly on the Fan Pier?

Retro Video Unit (5/24/13)

With everything going on last week I forgot this again...

This is one of those obscure bands from the New Wave era that were really good and deserved to be more popular. They're called The Brains, they were from Atlanta, and the song is called "Money Changes Everything."



You may actually know this song, because Cyndi Lauper covered it on her 1983 album She's So Unusual, but this is the original. It's not much of a video, but it's slightly better than the ones people make with just a static picture of the band or the cover of their album.

I have a lot of bands like this filed away in my head. In many cases I have the music on vinyl. Once in a while songs like this show up on compilation albums. I found this one on an album called Gold: New Wave (but the cover says New Wave Gold) that has several other excellent obscure songs on it and is worth owning if you ever come across it.