Tuesday, September 6, 2016

The 2015/1967 Countdown - 09/06/2016 Update

Today, we turn to the 2015 version of Nancy's Favorites, and look at a couple of songs she pilfered from the original version of my 2015 Coachella Starters mix, and one additional song I used to replace them.

Like A Mighty River comes to us courtesy of the Birmingham, Alabama retro-soul act St. Paul & The Broken Bones, from their 2014 full-length debut Half The City.

A blistering live act, fronted by the pudgy, bespectacled Paul Janeway who looks much more like a miniaturized John Candy than a classic soul singer until he starts ripping into the band's songs like a possessed Al Green/James Brown cross, I was lucky enough to catch some of their 2015 set at Coachella, where they were, quite simply, on fire.

Like A Mighty River itself, however, is a bit of an anomaly from the just decent Half The City, one of only a few bouncy, uptempo barnburners on an album too repetitively stacked with individually good but too samey Try A Little Tenderness-like slow-building ballads. A few more tunes in the vein of River to break things up would have really served the album well.



As good as St. Paul was at Coachella, a quartet of young Chapman Film School upstarts that go by the name of Saint Motel was even better - lively and joyous as one can be, boasting a Tropicalia meets Franz Ferdinand musical style and joined by a sextet of young Can-Can dancers on stage.  It comes as no surprise to me that Nancy lifted their unbelievably catchy hit single and set closer My Type to open her mix this year.



To replace My Type on my 2015 Coachella Starters mix, I pulled another recent song from the band, Cold Cold Man, which is almost as good, and in its playful James Bond-inspired music video clearly betrays the act's film school roots.  If Saint Motel can deliver another few songs like these two on their October 2016 full-length follow-up, they could be in for very big things in the years ahead.

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