It may or not be a surprise to everyone that I, the same person who loved Ashlee Simpson's debut album, love a great emotional track. Back in '07 I had ran into The Oohlas on myspace, the same place where I found a majority of music that I liked back then, but recently I rekindled myself with their album Best Stop Pop. I remember now that I had a podcast and I ended up playing "TV Dinner" on there, which in my opinion is the one song that everyone needs to know off the album--not "Small Parts" that ended up on the original soundtrack for Spiderman 3.


Here's a chunk of lyrics from "TV Dinner" off a lyrics site:

 Now that i have fallen in love with you, i don't know what to do. so i'll sit here patiently and hope that you will call me, please 'cause i don't know where to go anymore. there was a time when it was quality time, i would sit with my guy, watching tv, eating drugs and it would come so easily but i don't know where to go anymore. why don't you love me? (repeated like 30 times) 

Anyways, the album itself is the epitome of emotional guitar tracks that were a minimal rage back in the myspace days. You know I was thinking a lot about the past couple of years, especially myspace and thinking that it had a profound inner movement where it seemed to harbor angst, emo(tions) and over all puberty stricken issues. Sure a lot of those things were corny and overall just graduated to scene and what not. But if you dug well enough you could always find some gold, like Best Stop Pop. Not only that but it in many ways allowed musicians who grew up during the short-lived myspace era to be more meta, or at least that's my hypothesis. Something about myspace allowed one of the first generations to express common life things and make them mean something, or at least try to. I mean now if someone was like that on Facebook it would seem out of place and counselors would be called. But myspace let people design, adorn and add soundtracks to how they felt. Or maybe we we were all always emotional, but the fact is that in the past couple of years technology has allowed our collective emotions to gather into spaces where we can read into them and mold them into hyper speed cultural movements.


Another album I recently came back and visited was that of Italian producers and singer, Milky. I would give you more information but there isn't any around that I can seem to find. The only song I knew back then was "Be My World" radio edit (off the Be My World EP) which I repeated everyday and night for a really long time--one other album I did that with was Corinne Bailey Rae's debut album, I repeated that one every night for about 4 months.  Anyways, I never actually listened to the album because the only way we could listen to music before was what was randomly selected to be on myspace, youtube and now luckily we all have spotify! This was even more difficult when the band was so obscure.

So the album Star, which according to spotify was released in '08, includes tracks that are dance and these beach-like guitar songs that now have made Colbie Caillat famous, and some random songs that seem to be inspired by Spanish beaches. I don't know what I love so much about this album. I feel like I can hear other critics rolling their eyes at it but it's so beautiful when it's right. There are songs on there like "Gold" that almost make me wanna cry and dance. Partially this album is like someone professing their love for someone and the other person being oblivious to it or just not caring. I mean one of the lines of "Be My World" reads: "And I like to watch you when you're walking alone but there's nothing I can say to make you feel the same way". Ultimately though "Be My World" is just the song that can not be beat (possibly because of it's cruel emotional baggage), not even "Just The Way You Are", which was a number one U.S. airport hit (whatever that means).

Labels: Best Stop Pop, Milky, myspace, Star, The Oohlas

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