The 2015/1967 Countdown - 10/07/2016 Update

Today, we return to our 2015 Coachella Starters mix, and take a listen to an unexpected 2014 indie hit that turned an off-the-cuff side project into one of the must-see artists of the 2015 Coachella festival.

When they first started collaborating, the sly, sexy, late-night electro-pop presented in Sylvan Esso's 2014 self-titled debut couldn't have been more of a departure for the Durham, North Carolina duo of Appalachian indie-folk singer/Mountain Man member Amelia Meath and electronic producer/Megafaun bassist Nick Sandborn, but the album's relaxed vibes and clever lyrics took hold with the public.

Their debut now stands as the most successful endeavor of either artist's career, due in no large part to the runaway indie success of this single here, the coy, Tommy James-referencing Coffee.

The 2015/1967 Countdown - 10/06/2016 Update

Today, we return to our 1967's Super Soulsters' Deep Cuts Review mix, and listen to There Is, which was an absolute career-changer for one of the most enduring vocal groups of the last half-century, The Dells.

By 1966, the future Hall of Famers and Harvey, Illinois-born Dells had already been scoring modest hits on the R&B charts and touring for thirteen years.  After a '66 tour serving as Ray Charles' backing vocalists ended and their label at that moment, Vee-Jay, went bankrupt, they returned to Chess Records for a third time, this time under sub-label Cadet, and were introduced to producer/songwriter Bobby Miller and arranger Charles Stepney.

The pairing would prove near miraculous.

There Is, the lead single (a Miller song the group initially hated) from their late 1967 album of the same name, became their first ever top-20 hit on the pop charts.

There Is the album would spawn three other major charters as well, including the six-and-a-half-minute Stay In My Corner, and catapult The Dells into the top echelon of the R&B world, where they remained, delivering hit after hit, until they left Cadet and moved to Mercury in 1975 and their career began to cool.

The band did remain active though well into the 2000s, scoring another hit in 1980 and then again in 1991 with A Heart Is A House For Love from the soundtrack to director Robert Townsend's The Five Heartbeats (a film loosely based on the career of The Dells and for which they served as primary musical consultants), making the The Dells one of only two recording acts in history to land songs on the singles charts in five different decades.

The 2015/1967 Countdown - 10/05/2016 Update

Boy, what a difference a few years and a little taste of monetary success can make.

Five years ago everyone, including this blog, was raving about this mysterious Canadian contemporary R&B artist carefully cultivating a decadent, reclusive, anti-record-industry persona with a series of free downloads dominated by bleak, drugs-and-elicit-sex-obsessed, sonically fascinating slow jams.

Today, thanks to mega-hits like The Hills and our selection for our 2015 Crowd Pleasers mix, the Off The Wall-ish disco banger Can't Feel My Face from his so-so second major label release Beauty Behind The Madness, The Weeknd is now one of the biggest and most commercially transparent mainstream artists out there, sub-headlining major festivals, collaborating with the likes of Drake and Ariana Grande, and performing as the season-opening musical guest on Saturday Night Live - even though his desolate lyrical obsession with the empty highs of a drug-fueled existence remains.

But whatever one may feel about the increasingly profit-oriented arc of The Weeknd's career, one can't totally fault him for his shift in direction when some of the results are as compulsively listenable as this.

The 2015/1967 Countdown - 10/4/2016 Update

Today, we return to our 1967's Super Spectacular Singles Superstars mix, and listen to another of the year's one-hit wonders, though in this case, much more was initially expected of the act.

When Columbia Records signed the Peanut Butter Conspiracy, they had high hopes that they had just hit the motherlode with the next Jefferson Airplane, and in some regards, they had every right to think this.

Not only was the band a psychedelic folk-rock quintet with a charismatic, counter-culture-channeling female lead in Barbara "Sandi" Robinson, but the band's prior drummer had been Spencer Dryden, who had just left the act to become the drummer for....you guessed it...the Jefferson Airplane.

But the label missed one thing, the Peanut Butter Conspiracy just weren't top-tier talented, especially on the songwriting front, and whatever rough of-the-moment edge they did possess was pretty much washed over on their debut album The Peanut Butter Conspiracy Is Spreading by producer Gary Usher's lush, clean, studio-musician augmented touches.

In the end, despite all the high hopes, things never took off for The Peanut Butter Conspiracy.

It's A Happening Thing would be the band's only song to make a dent in the charts.

The 2015/1967 Countdown - 10/03/2016 Update

Today we return to our 2015 Coachella Starters mix and take a listen to Elevate, a track by one of the stronger synth pop acts on the 2015 line-up, the Brooklyn-based St. Lucia

An emerging retro-80s act dominated by South African lead singer/principal songwriter Jean-Philip Grobler, they put on a fine show back in 2015, and tend to hit a lot of the same pleasure centers as M83 with their warm, John Hughes/Lionel Ritchie-type vibe, something this video for Elevate makes abundantly clear.

The 2015/1967 Countdown - 10/02/2016

Today, we return to our 2015 Bigger In Britain mix, and take a listen to a song from one of London's more exciting young bands.

The playful Shake And Tremble is my favorite song from Brit art-rockers Django Django's Born Under Saturn, the follow-up to their well-received 2012 self-titled debut.

Just like that debut, Born Under Saturn traffics in the same inventive, unique mix of precise, affectless group harmonies, surf-rock licks, and Devo-ish synth silliness, but, for my money, does so  less successfully this time around.

Still, a band this singular in vision is worth watching. More than needing to refine their song craft, I think they just need to get more draconian with their sequencing...all of their albums so far have felt a few songs too long.

The 2015/1967 Countdown - 10/01/2016 Update

Today, we turn again to our 1967's Super "Sensational" Summer Of Love mix and take a listen to one of the songs most purely and directly inspired by that cultural moment.

San Franciscan Nights, the humorous (the opening is a riff on a play on Dragnet's theme song) but ultimately sincere appreciation of the San Francisco scene, was written by Eric Burdon right on the heels of the Animal's Monterey Pop Festival appearance, and was the first and biggest (though far from only) hit for the fully revamped second major line-up of the group (now technically renamed Eric Burdon And The Animals).

Burdon himself has claimed that he felt San Franciscan Nights was one of the more impactful protest songs of the decade - that it got soldiers overseas to wonder what the hell they were doing fighting in a foreign land when all that groovy stuff was happening back home - but regardless of its sociological impact, the song ushered in a new, less blues-oriented, more psychedelic style for the band that would sustain them as a steady presence on the charts for the duration of the 1960s.