Brooklyn’s French Kicks, who have been creating music together for nearly a decade, have recently released their fourth album, Swimming. With each record, the band reinvent and refine themselves, constantly exploring new territories. Their latest effort is no exception. Allowed more artistic freedom by producing and mixing the record entirely themselves, Swimming features some of the quartet’s most melodic recordings to date.
Neil Young / Comes A Time
Another one I just like and have been strumming around the house lately. Very sentimental, but I like ‘this old world keeps spinning round, its a wonder tall trees ain’t laying down’ Centrifugal force?
Bob Marley / Your Love
This sounds like a field recording, featuring gang choruses with girls and guys at the absolute top of their lungs, having the very time of their lives, and clear that no one cares in the least that they’re being recorded. It’s something you might find in an archive vault later, someone’s evidence that there was a time when this vibe was possible.
Bob Dylan and the Band / Joshua Gone Barbados
I just like this, and also it’s Josh Wise from the French Kicks’ birthday the day I’m writing this, and this song was probably recorded pretty close to the day he was born.
Mac St. Michael / How Do My Lovely
‘How do my lovely dress so slow’, romantic morning with the lover song, watching her from the bed perhaps, with a surprise twist, turning suddenly impatient and eye-rolling at the very end: ‘now it’s time to bend your damned eyelashes’. That gets me every time.
George Washington Phillips / Denomination Blues Part 1
I heard this on the radio and was taken with the sound of the instrument, which may or may not, depending where you read, be a Dolceola, a fretless zither instrument triggered by a miniature piano keyboard of which there are 26 known in the world. In any case, whatever it is, it sounds great.
Neil Michael Hagerty / Know That
Great drums, sort of wah organ sound, and the line which I love: ‘why would I like to know that?’ And you believe the song, he actually doesn’t care.
Randy Newman / Magic In the Moonlight
This is a depressing song about contemplating suicide, starting with ‘can’t help myself from searching for a deeper hole’, which he does something I love so much with by saying, ‘you’re gonna love this’ in the middle of singing the line, to his smugly chuckling intimate adult audience. And I love the way he does the piano fighting with itself, and the one moment where he starts to do a sarcastic four note walk up in octaves but then thinks better of it and just does some of them. Also, I very much dig the way he does the words to this. The crowd, gratifyingly, gives a confused and apologetic applause at the end: ‘I could hang myself, there’s a tree out in the yard. I could drown myself, but baby that’s so hard, there’s no way I’d’.
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