"One with the freaks"

Recently I've been combing through my iTunes library and finding and/or re-finding all kinds of great stuff I had forgotten about. I made a killer powerpop mix (Teenage Fanclub, Matthew Sweet, A.C. Newman, all the greats) and I also put The Notwist's amazing album Neon Golden back up on my iPod.

The song that really grabbed me this time around is "One With the Freaks," which you can listen to on their MySpace page here. I suggest you go there now and listen to it. I'll wait.

Neon Golden spent about three months as my favorite album back in the spring of '04, and my favorite song ping-ponged back and forth between "One With the Freaks" and "Consequence." What's all the more unbelievable is that these guys used to be a serious German punk band. I went back and got 12, which was their first record to dabble in electronics, but man, it's still got nothing on this one. I'm listening to "One With the Freaks" again. When it kicks in at the close of the first chorus, there can't be anything better than that sound. Plus, there's something extra-touching about Markus Acher's German accent: "Have you ever / Have you ever / Been all messed up?" I interviewed him via e-mail when 13&God came to play the Walker and I asked him about writing in a foreign language.

“[I]t’s difficult and strange,” he said of writing songs in a non-native language, “but I grew up with music with English lyrics, so I never thought about it when I wrote my first song. It was the language of pop music for me. Now I’ve thought a lot about it and I think it makes me very limited, but it also offers me possibilities of using language different[ly] than native speakers do, which is a special, more unconscious way to poetry. I don’t try to sound like a native speaker; I want to stumble through the English language and maybe find some truth by saying it differently.”

And I think he does, you know? He uses some weird syntax and vocab, and it has this strangely sweet aspect to it. Like in "Consequence": "You're the color / you're the movement and the spin / Never / couldn't stay with me the whole day long / Fail with consequence / lose with eloquence / and smile / I'm not in this movie / I'm not in this song / Never / leave me paralyzed, love."

Damn. You can listen to "Consequence" on their MySpace page, too. I should probably start keeping that best of the '00s list right now, because Neon Golden needs to be on it.

Also? I had a dream I was playing on the Nuggets with Allen Iverson. Seemed like a cool guy, but man, that new ball does suck. When I was coming up for the court for a layup, it was squeaking or something really weird.