No new songs this week but here’s a Flashback featuring one of my favorite Fingertips selections of all time. Three new free and legal MP3s return after the Labor Day holiday here in the U.S.
“Every One of Us” – Goldrush
[from February 12, 2007]
We don’t seem at a loss here in the still-young year for brilliant, glistening rock songs. Here’s another, from the fine British band Goldrush. I love how the guitars add texture and tension to the song’s galloping beat, both the wavery synth-y line that arches like a siren above and the waves of skittery feedback-like chords that fade in and out below. But maybe the best thing on display here is Robin Bennett’s voice, which I find deeply affecting—a rubbery and slightly trembly tenor that at certain moments bring Ray Davies to mind (as, happily, do the melodies). And please listen to the words, which start out poignant and then turn transcendent, as the song makes that rare, exceptional link between the socio-political and the interpersonal. What begins as a moving statement on 21st-century alienation gains depth and spirit as the perspective angles in on a single human heart: “And if nothing is the way that it was/ Well there’s one thing you can be sure of, because/ We are not the way that we were/ She will forget about you/ So forget about her.” The title phrase proceeds to assume two competing, plaintive meanings. Nice nice work. “Every One of Us” is a song from the band’s new CD, The Heart is the Place, which is set for release next week in the U.K. on Truck Records, an impressively robust label run by Bennett and his brother Joe, who is also in Goldrush. The CD has been out since mid-January on City Slang, the band’s German label. No word yet on a U.S. release date. The MP3 is available via City Slang.
ADDENDUM: There is another band on the scene right now named Goldrush, from Richmond, Virginia. This is not them. As for the Goldrush featured here, The Heart is the Place remains their most recent album; the band seems no longer to exist. The most recent news I can find about Robin and Joe Bennett has to do with the popular Truck Festival, a music festival they ran in Oxford for 14 years. The Truck had a tough year in 2011, forcing the Bennetts to bow out. The Festival was taken over by new management and has continued.
Fingertips 