Something’s Wrong
Nine records where the surface is calm and the depths are not — plus one of ours that never had a calm surface to begin with. Ballads and pop songs that hum with unease: a mystery no one solves, a lover who’s a stranger, a riff borrowed from a sitar, a clock that’s forgotten how to count. Nothing here is quite what it says it is.
The Uncanny Hour
The eeriness is mostly in the arrangements. Dusty Springfield’s “Spooky” plays a come-on as a cold front. The Yardbirds bent a fuzz-box into a raga. David Alexandre Winter turns Michel Legrand’s windmills into a spiral you can’t climb out of. Messer Chups strip Chris Isaak’s “Wicked Game” down to Russian surf-noir with no words at all — which somehow makes it worse. And Lesley Gore’s 1963 refusal comes back remixed, the defiance intact, the room around it changed.
Dropped into the middle, the label’s own contribution to the unease: the Moss Twins’ “I am the Octopus” — a 1950s vocal-harmony riddle sung in three languages at once, about being, apparently, an octopus. It fits here the way a too-friendly stranger fits at a funeral.
Play it after dark. Don’t turn around.
Pairs well with a draught you can’t locate, a phone that rang once, and the certainty that you left the light on.
