Nonwrestler Blog

Weekly MP3 #6: Peter, Björn and John - Young Folks

This week's song is available to download from Better Propaganda , which is a relatively unannoying free downloads site.

Whistling intro! Druggy-sounding boy/girl duet! ESL lyrics! Spector-ish 60s throwback vibes! Exclamation marks! I've been listening to this song for a couple of years and haven't got bored of it, which is as good a sign as any that it's worth sharing.

I don't know think it makes a large amount of sense, but 'Young Folks' reminds me a lot of a couple of tunes from the 60s - Serge Gainsbourg and Brigitte Bardot's 'Bonnie & Clyde' and Nancy Sinatra & Lee Hazelwood's 'Some Velvet Morning'. It doesn't really sound that much like either of them (especially not the latter), but in generic terms they're all 60s-sounding duets between two kinda lazy, slightly druggy sounding vocalists, one male the other female. In this case the song is actually only 2 years old and was written in Sweden, but never mind.

The guest singer actually reminds me most of Hope Sandoval (of Mazzy Star), which, again, is a bit more about the vibe than anything quantifiable...

I checked out the album this song is from and was fairly uniformly unimpressed. None of it had the big sound, and the absence of the guest singer showed up how annoying the guy's singing is. :)

When I was living in Tokyo this song and its cute retro cartoon video seemed to win hearts, so you could hear this blaring away on the massive video screens above the big Hachiko crossing in Shibuya 7 days a week for a while. I have no idea whether it was much of a "hit" anywhere...

Labels: music, weekly mp3

Posted at 13:10