Today, let's celebrate the sound of melted cassettes, wherever we can find it.
This Neu! track is always welcome in the shuffle mix. Because it is the most destroyed a track can sound, and has these great careless edits, it comes on like a break from the monotony of "correct" production. "Cassetto," is from the album Neu! 2 and, with its warbly, tape-stretched sound, is aptly named.
I don't know how long you have to bake your mixes to get them to sound this crispy, but I have a feeling Neu! were using their own cookbook.
Neu! - "Cassetto"
In the book "Dream Brother," a biography of Jeff and Tim Buckley, there are some really strange anecdotes about the weeks preceding Jeff's death, stories that make it sound as if he were going batshit. Like the one where his tour manager walked in on him in the bathtub and found him giggling, with blood dribbling down his chin (the blood turned out to be red ink from a pen he had chewed through, but still). Or the friends and neighbors who told of how he'd show up to their homes at odd hours, wanting to talk but with no sense of what time it was, having been awake for days.
I don't know if he went crazy. But if you listen to the four-track cassette demos they found near the milk-crate studio in his shack of a Memphis house, Jeff sounds, at the very least, unwell. "Let's Bomb the Moonlight" was left off the commercially released collection of Jeff's works in progress Sketches For My Sweetheart the Drunk. Who knows why. Was it because it sounds like it was recorded inside a jet engine, mid-flight? Are the screeching tornado sirens that drop in at the 4:00 mark too beautiful? Or was it the unsettling contrast between his exorcist scream at 5:15 and the cherub coo harmonies he overdubbed?
Who cares why they shelved it. Music this oily has a way of seeping out anyway.
Jeff Buckley - "Let's Bomb the Moonlight"
2 comments:
I DO love "Let's Bomb The Moonlight" though.
In studio, I think it could've become an anthem, and maybe I'm just disturbed but the song means a lot to me, and I find the lyrics powerful, and some of his most subtly smart and interesting.
Having posted the above comment, I think I might add that a few of my favourite Buckley songs are "Opened Once", "Calling You","Last Goodbye", "Gunshot Glitter" "Lover, You Should've Come Over".
So it's not that "Let's Bomb The Moonlight" is necessarily my kind of song, just something I'm into.
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