Clenched fist in a glove-puppet!

"I'm a good guy for a girl, so won't you look my palm over?"Friends of P, by the Rentals
Wontedly, I love a male vocalist with a voice to be heard. A guttural English growler. A low and slow odist. An adolescent screamer, telling me about his lifetime of love. Voices that break and bend and bellow and don’t smoothly skirt around the lyrics. The Rentals fall safely into this category, though they are not my usual garage-barrage of drums and alley-cat yowling, or my second-favorite, stringy softness. There are traces of something saccharine in the chorus, where the guitars liven and the chorus girls intone, something that I like very much. His voice trips into the buzz of the guitars occasionally, as up-and-down as the strumming is, and they slip some steady drumming into the equation. Cool. This is the sort of song I want to walk down the street (hands in my pockets) listening to.
WEBSITE: TheRentals.com
LYRICS @ STLyrics.com
DOWNLOAD @ YouSendIt.com



"Is Lump fast asleep or rocking out with the band?"Lump, by the Presidents of the United States of America
Most of my favorite twenty songs vie for top-dog in constant rotation – not so with Lump. Number seven, since I heard it on one of my father’s mix compact-discs. Guitars can be ironic and as expressive as an arched eyebrow; they prove it, with well-timed twangs and cymbals smacked at appropriate verses. Also, they know how to fuck with the tempo like fucking pros, man. Build up, build up, a slash of guitar and then slow speed again. Such a song squirms into your brain and pupates. You bob your head, you nod, your knee wobbles, you snap your fingers – a musical seizure. (I’m usually shaking my shoulders, too.) Unclouded vocals combine with excellent, excellent lyrics to make a tongue-lashing I think you should love, a song so awesome its meaning has swung from the story of a lazy groupie to necrophilia to the frontman’s penis. Boy howdy.
WEBSITE: PresidentsRock.com
LYRICS @ SongMeanings.net
DOWNLOAD @ YouSendIt.com



"If your mind should ever start changing, how would I know?"N over C, by the High Strung
Such a strange, strange, soft song. Like the other two, this is something to be digested alone, but where Lump should send your nerves fizzing and Friends of P. should send you on a stroll through suburbia, N over C should raise a small aural palisade around you. You never know – not for absolutely sure – what another sentient is thinking; only you and solely you understand what’s in your head. Lonely, eh? Very much so, especially when applied to romantic relations. 'N over C' is reference to the abbreviation n/c, for 'no comment.' That's a marvelous title for a song asking how you can ever comprehend what's in another's head without ever answering the question.
WEBSITE: TheHighStrung.com
DOWNLOAD @ TheHighStrung.com