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Alex Winston - Medicine (2012)

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There are some videos on YouTube that, for whatever reason, I found in the distant past and have played over and over again and yet they've never really been widely discovered. Such is the case for this amazing live version of Medicine by Alex Winston: About 3,000 views but wow. What a performance. What a song. It's an echo from a time that wasn't even that long ago but feels like an eternity. I feel like in the early 2010s there was a phenomenal sense of optimism to alternative music and Medicine is a gorgeous paean to letting go, of living for the sake of living. The album version (from the eternally underrated King Con, one of the best albums of the 2010s btw, in case you wondered) is great but THIS. THIS live version. Nrgh. It's everything. I love the way her band just look like a bunch of random people who followed her into the record shop and just happen to be note-perfect. I love the energy of this performance. It's uninhibited and beautiful. It just bursts w...
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New Order - Temptation (1987)

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 Thank God music isn't a competition. If it were, all music would've been forced to stop in 1987 after New Order released this version of Temptation. Let's face it, no one's ever going to top this. New Order do more in 7 minutes than most bands manage in a whole career. It's bursting at the seams with all the joy and the sorrow in the world. The lyrics feel like a stream of consciousness - I've no idea if Barney improvised them or not. If you asked me to explain exactly what they mean, I'm not sure I could, but boy, can I feel them. Part of this is all the beautiful turns of phrase ( "Heaven, a gateway, a hope" is such a wonderful way to open a song) but mostly it's the music. It's so trance-like and repetitious. I love how it doesn't really have a structure as much as a build - like the lyrics, it just wanders from one place to another, like it's lost in some eternal moonlit alleyway, somewhere between Manchester and Mars. It...
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Mic check... Testing, testing, 1...2...3...

Is this thing on? It's a blog. In which I will post stuff about music. There will be no theme, no particular genre, no order. Just random thoughts about random songs as they come to me.
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