Thursday, March 19, 2009

Song of the day

"Kidney Bingos", by Wire. If Wire were ever going to have a tilt at megastardom, this gorgeous song was it. (Clearly, they failed. I suspect its name may not have helped.) Sure, it suffers today from an unwanted eighties sheen (especially that (un)classic mid-80s bass sound, what do you call that anyway, "flanged"? "phased"? just plain old "overproduced"?), but in the actual mid-80s that would only have helped their cause. If you close your eyes, you might be listening to a good U2 song [ahem - ed], well, if you were able to imagine U2 without the stadium-targeted bombast, and if you were able to scale down the size of Bono's ego to something like the size of a normal person's (and lose those stoopid glasses).