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Tacks, the Boy Disaster "Frozen Feet"

Tuesday, August 8, 2006

Gotta thank a recent IM conversation with itinerant marathonpacks-er Hannah [ 1 | 2 | 3 ] for introducing me to “Frozen Feet” (mp3) (buy). It’s one of those songs that instantly—and I mean instantly—ingratiated itself to me with its gentle sense of unseen dread, like Midlake’s “Roscoe,” definitely this song’s close relative. But more importantly, this lyric is of a certain type that I’m inevitably drawn to—a brief chronicle of what seems to be an even briefer moment. A moment that should probably have been inconsequential and quickly forgotten, if not for all of those emotions and meandering backstories and things that are kept in old milkcrates for no specific reason. And this song encompasses not much more than a walk to a park, but does it with a detail-oriented sense of wonder that magnifies it way beyond how it would appear to outsiders, with that little mini-epiphany masquerading as a chorus. (Tacks’ Myspace)

And so that got me thinking (which I try to do at least once or twice a day) about other songs with a similar lyrical approach that sort of suspends time, drawing up the specific things typically elided in lieu of getting to the point. The first two to come to mind were Spoon’s “Everything Hits at Once” and The Flaming Lips’ “Suddenly, Everything Has Changed,” soon followed by PJ Harvey’s “You Said Something,” Death Cab for Cutie’s “I Was A Kaleidoscope,” and The Cure’s “10:15 Saturday Night” (and the Stooges’ “Real Cool Time” and the Beatles “She Loves You” and many other ones). It’s a specific type of fleeting-moment capture that seems to transcend a lot of the genre boundaries (for instance, Ghostface is a master of the breathless recounting of all manner of fucked-up incidents), and appeals to a very different part of my psyche than their opposite, the all-encompassing worldly sentiment songs, which I can still love, just differently.

As I think of more, I’ll post them and perhaps work them into a future podcast. Feel free to leave any in the comments.

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