…during my formative years?
If I’d only heard this, I’d probably be far more well-adjusted nowadays.
…during my formative years?
If I’d only heard this, I’d probably be far more well-adjusted nowadays.
If you’re a Juliana Hatfield fan, you might want to visit her website, as she’s once again offering up 31 never-before released tracks for downloading. She’s presenting them with an honor system, in which her site spells out the problems between record companies suing file sharers and file sharers wanting everything to be free. If you like, you can grab all the songs (or as many as you like) and keep them, or make a donation through PayPal of whatever amount you like in exchange. There are indeed plenty of good songs here to be heard, and for 31 cents you can’t beat ’em. No, I jest.
Sponge was one of those bands that emerged post-grunge, attempting to take the mainstream version of that sound – as most popularly interpreted by the Stone Temple Pilots – to the top of the charts. They didn’t entirely succeed, but their 1995 debut album, Rotting Pinata, had a few choice moments, including the title track as well as the single, “Plowed.” By the time their second album, Wax Ecstatic, emerged the following year, however, it became evident that Sponge had already soaked up as much success as they were ever going to. Unfortunately, this meant that the alt-goth track, “I Am Anastasia,” wouldn’t get noticed…and that’s too damned bad, because it featured an absolutely perfect guest vocal by none other than Psychedelic Furs frontman Richard Butler.
When asked about his cameo in an interview with NineVolt Magazine a few years later, Butler spoke pleasantly of Sponge’s frontman, Vinnie Dombrowski. “Whenever we’d play Detroit, Vinnie would always come down and he’d say, ‘I love your voice! I’d love you do to the backing vocals on this song; would you do it?’ And I said, ‘Sure.’ So he sent me the DAT, and I recorded just the background track at home. It was just a favor, really; I never saw the guys while I was doing it!”
If you ever spot Wax Ecstatic in a bargain bin, pick it up. Trust me, it’s worth a few bucks just for that one song alone.
This song slipped by me in 1998, when it was originally released on Mezzanine, but I heard it during an episode of “Cold Case,” and now I’m hooked. It’s a moody, ethereal track that features the Cocteau Twins’ Elizabeth Fraser on vocals.
Listen to a song clip here.
Check out this track from the Guillemots, a UK-based band who played at SXSW this past Thursday. They’re on MySpace, where you can check out a few other tracks from their album. I’m sold on this track alone…
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