PBNSOTW

Madison Cunningham sneaks on to the list again with Who Are You Now. "It's not the notes you play/But all of the notes you imply." Great lyric, really special voice. And the bass doubles the soaring string line at the end of the bridge.



Our other three songs all suffer from the producer's inability to cut out the unneccessary shit at the top of the song. You could almost make a case for the feedbacky intro to ur a <stranger> by WILLOW, but that case is totally destroyed by how great the guitar sound is for the rest of the song. Seriously, put that guitar in the intro. Great addition to the long history of "my signifcant other left me and I'm pissed" genre. Wonderfully schizoid arrangement.



Clearing Up has that really stupid 4-bars-of-high-passed-drums-and-guitars-recorded-in-a-dumpster before the song actually starts. But Brockhoff crafts a great song: "Suck it up/I'm not following your beaten path/I'm clearing up/All the blush/That's been keeping me from getting on." Nice Ric Ocasek-style production with moments of Plasmatics woven through. Lovely chord leading in the chorus.



Broken Bells missed out on last week's list but scored this time with One Night. Their stupid 8 second intro inexplicably makes the bass player sound like he's not in the groove (he is, and this should have been fixed). Not a bad song, though: "You had me square in the middle/Between a bad dream and a careless girl." It's not particularly profound and maybe a little monotonous, but I like where this band is headed, and they have the 80's synth pop thing nailed.