Filed under: mixtape, music | Tags: abba, abba covers, mamma mia!, mixtapes, pulp, Stephin Merritt
I can’t think of a current movie that makes me want to have sex less than Mamma Mia! does. Nevertheless, I’ll take any excuse I can to write about how much I love ABBA (a lot!)
Oddly, while the group’s songs are for the most part perfectly crafted, there aren’t that many great covers of ABBA songs, and the most popular ones (the ones in Mamma Mia!, the A-Teens and Erasure’s ABBA phase) are all pretty boring, I think.
Nevertheless, here’s slightly less than an hour’s worth of ABBA covers, ABBA interpolations, and songs that I think sound like ABBA. There’s equal parts cheese and shoegazing, which I think is interesting. (More than one of the fuzzier songs come from ABBAsalutely, the Flying Nun tribute from 1995.) The only really glaring omissions, I think, are Evan Dando’s Knowing Me Knowing You (which I like a lot, but only have taped off the radio about ten years ago) and Elvis Costello and Anne Sofie Von Otter’s Like An Angel Passing Through My Room, which I also don’t have and which would have probably sounded terribly out of place, anyway.
1. Camera Obscura, Super Trouper
2. Bike, My Love My Life
3. Lush, Hey Hey Helen
4. The Leather Nun, Gimme Gimme Gimme (A Man After Midnight)
5. Loves Ugly Children, Honey Honey
6. Pulp, We Can Dance Again
7. Salma & Sabina, Mitha Maze Dar
8. Army Of Lovers, Hasta Manana
9. The 6ths (featuring Anna Domino), Here In My Heart
10. Information Society, Lay All Your Love On Me
11. JAMs, The Queen and I
12. Martha Wainwright, The Name of the Game
13. The Headless Chickens, Super Trouper
14. Boney M, Felicidad
15. Tall Dwarfs, On and On and On
Filed under: music
Mysteriously, the header for this blog disappeared the other day, so I put up this new one, taken at a karaoke bar in Portland last April. I don’t know this lady, and I’m not implying that she’s a hooker. I will say she wasn’t so hot with the No Doubt songs, though.
Okay, not really, but it’s nice to think about. The video for Clinic’s song Tomorrow (off their totally undervalued Do It! album) is kind of like one of those hip-hop videos where everything’s going along just fine until the second chorus and then all of a sudden it’s suddenly a clun with lots of dancing and blue lights and comical product placement. Except that it’s not set in a club, there’s no blue lights, nobody’s drinking Campari, and everything looks really disturbing in a Czech sort of way. But wait for the dancing!
