Listen Up: Ryan Adams' 70s-Rock Feel

Ryan Adams, "Destroyers"
The first track from Adams' forthcoming album Cardinals III/IV, which collects material recorded during the Easy Tiger sessions into "the Cardinals second double-album concept rock opera about the '80s, ninjas, cigarettes, sex and pizza," has more of a loose-limbed, '70s-rock feel. Not that this quality is necessarily a bad thing. (Adams' site also has some demos from that era available for download.)

OMD, "VCR"
Britain's New Wave stalwarts tip their collective cap to the next generation with this beautiful cover of a song by their much-buzzed-about fellow citizens the xx. This haunting track recalls the heights reached by the band's 1981 synthpop masterpiece Architecture & Morality. [Via]

Morose, "Tired"
The name of this band, and this song, will probably give you a good idea of just how downcast the music is. Thankfully, the misery the band wallows in comes off beautifully, thanks in part to a vocalist with a wail not unlike Morrissey's — and the three musicians who make up Morose figuring out a way to seamlessly segue autumnal shoegaze into a lovely pile of shimmering electropop.

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Song Stories

“Satisfied”

Tom Waits | 2011

Only the genius of Tom Waits could combine the subject of mortality, a reoccurring theme in his work, with wordplay that name checks both Mick and Keith, whom he calls "Mr. Jagger" and "Mr. Richards," and the title of their magnum opus, "Satisfaction." And to show just how cool Waits really is, he even got Mr. Richards to play along, one of nine guest appearances the guitarist has made on three Waits albums. "This growling roadhouse stomp is a late-breaking response to the Stones' greatest hit," Rolling Stone said of the track.

More Song Stories entries »

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