ON REPEAT #7: Debby Friday, Buddy Crime, Lifeguard, Sweeping Promises, Jun Togawa, Aphrodite's Child, Vitamin C

EE EE AAAAH! AAAAH! (Egyptian Shumba!)

In this week’s post, I talk about my favorite GUTTURAL SCREAMS AND SCREECHES in popular music, as well as my favorite piece of classical music.

As always you can find these picks in this Spotify playlist, which dates back to when these picks were all on Instagram.

Sweeping Promises “Egyptian Shumba”

Sweeping Promises is my favorite band right now. They were the first band I mentioned on this thing. Every song they put out, from my pandemic anthem “Hunger For A Way Out” to my post-pandemic anthem “Pain Without A Touch,” I genuinely love (and the new album seems great so far).

I tuned into my pal Darren’s WFMU show to hear them covering an all-time favorite song, “Egyptian Shumba” by The Tammys. It’s a girl group classic about “dancing Egyptian style” that devolves into GUTTURAL SCREAMS AND SCREECHES.

This seems like an impossible song to cover properly, but my favorite band does it. The screams are, admittedly, less frightening, but they nail the musicianship of the original while adding a bit of an edge.

Debby Friday “So Hard To Tell”

Sometimes you hear a song (this once) only once (yesterday morning) and you think, well this is gonna be my song of the summer. I listened to this once, took a shower, made some food, and “ooh so hard to tell” was BURNED INTO MY BRAIN FOR THE ENTIRE DAY.

I am now infecting you with the same earworm.

Debby self-describes as a “zillennial anti-heroine” and just sampling a few of the older records, I bounced from noise punk to hip-hop to dub to house sometimes all at the same time, so there’s a lot of range to say the least. I might just have a new favorite artist, and I’m excited to dig into these albums.

Lifeguard “Alarm”

I caught Lifeguard’s recent show at Genghis Cohen (I had the pork dumplings, too) and they blew me away. They are young but mighty coming from the same Chicago scene as Horsegirl. It feels like something really special is going on there.

It was one of those great show experiences when you’re not fully familiar with a band and go from “hm😏—not bad…for a bunch of kids” to “oh, wow 😳” to “YEAH frhekherkjfekjern 😵‍💫” as the band jumps math rock to post-punk and you realize the glass window you’re leaning against is vibrating so much it kinda hurts. They ended the set covering The Jam while sounding like Fugazi, which is a sentence that makes music nerds salivate.

OF COURSE, Steve Albini produced this track.

Buddy Crime “Always Love You”

I initially learned about Buddy Crime via a collaboration with the great Jennifer Vanilla, and posted it on my Instagram over video of Jack Nicholson’s Joker in the parade in Batman, because that seems like the ideal environment to experience it, including the part where he blasts the citizens of Gotham with infectious nerve gas.

Most of these songs would work in a Joker parade, because Buddy’s music sounds a juuust a little bit like Prince, and we all know Jack Nicholson Joker loves Prince for some reason. But the only thing infectious about Buddy Crime, is the energy!

Where Prince would stand back and strike a pose, Buddy is the opposite—teeming with pep and not afraid to jump into the audience.

THE GOLD STANDARD

Johann Pachelbel “Pachelbel’s Canon”

This is probably one of the few times I’ll put Christian music on here. I’m assuming this song is about God, though a cursory Wiki says it might have been composed for Bach’s son’s wedding! You’ve heard it at a wedding too, most likely. But it inspires a great pop song as well.

Aphrodite’s Child was the 1960’s project of Vangelis Papathanassiou, best known for the Chariots of Fire theme from the movie of the same name, and this Mr. Bean moment at the Olympics, one of my favorite Olympic opening ceremony comedy sketches.

I got into this song because it’s used in the great film Three Times by Hsiao-Hsien Hou, which tells three stories with the same actors in 1911, 1966 and 2005. This soundtracks my favorite segment of the film (1966) where a returning soldier tries to reconnect with a girl he met in a pool hall before deployment.

Jun Togawa is…well, like me, kinda! She plays a lot of different characters: a Japanese idol singer, a glamourous model with a fake hand, a excitable child, a schoolgirl, a nurse, an ax murderer and a queen of insects. On this song, she takes on a punk rock persona, giving some of those GUTTURAL SCREAMS AND SCREECHES that I love.

Jun Togawa is fucking awesome and I will be talking about her more on this thing.

I didn’t graduate high school when this song came out, but I did complete elementary school, so there’s a weird nostalgia there for me. The version that Z100 in New York would play had all these very New Jersey-sounding students from Lyndhurst High School talking about how they’ll miss their friends. I saw all of my friends the next year because I was just going into 7th grade or whatever.