The Undertones – Teenage kicks
The Undertones (1978)

A charmful ode to young lust and according to John Peel, the most perfect three minutes of music ever pressed into vinyl. While I beg to differ with him, truth is the man was right, nothing can be subtracted from this to make it any less perfect.

Nancy Sinatra & Lee Hazlewood - Some Velvet Morning
Nancy & Lee (1968)

A nightmarish, ambitious masterpiece about drug addiction. With its startling juxtaposition of Hazlewood’s wry, haunting delivery and Nancy’s dizzying chorus all drenched up in flowery, childlike experimentalism, ‘Some velvet morning’ distances itself far away from all the summer-of-love idealism and naiveté, coming up as one of the most strange and unnerving pop hits in the history of music.

Can – I’m so green
Ege Bamyasi (1972)

The contagious bounciness on this song underpinned by Jaki Liebezeit’s hypnotic, milimetrically precise drumming style and Damo Suzuki’s often unintelligible, playful vocalization catchs me off-guard all the time and sucks me deep into its spiral before I can even think of reaching for the skip button. Hard for me to choose for a favorite Can composition, but I’ll leave the high mark in between this one and ‘Bel Air’.

Captain Beefheart & the Magic Band – Her eyes are a blue million miles
Clear Spot (1972)

An oddly beautiful love song with a little jagged edge. The Magic Band stomp out a delightful rocker with a disjointed feel to it, while the Captain’s vocal tics are put in the service of a pleading emotionality, like a drunk just barely keeping it together but pouring out his heart nonetheless.

The Beatles – Lovely Rita
Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band (1967)

What appeals me the most about Lovely Rita it its strong transitive sense of kinetic, physical action being expended. Set to a rhytmic backbone that keeps chugging its way through a brilliant piano solo and an awkward climax, the composition menaces with falling apart at any moment as the vocal parts get increasingly complex and sound effects come and go. I always feel the urge to turn the volume up when this comes up on my stereo.

Belle and Sebastian – Dog on wheels
Dog on Wheels Ep (Jeepster / 1997)

Musically emulating Love’s Forever Changes with it’s vaguely hispanic rhythm, dark chord voicings and a gorgeous trumpet break halfway through, Stuart Murdoch sings a soft-voiced ode, both intelligent and humorous to one of his childhood toys. One of the band’s finest moments.

Devendra Banhart – Mama Wolf
Cripple Crow (XL / 2005)

Mama Wolf echoes the sinister dichotomy that lies at the heart of Devendra’s music, an uneven mixture of jocular humour and fey mysticism that places Devendra’s lyrics somewhere in between childlike innocence and sinisterly demented storytelling. At any rate, Mama Wolf, presents us Devendra at one of his shinier moments, a deceptively simple and effusive lullaby delivered with such phatos and a couple of wolf’s howls that makes it almost impossible not to fall hard for it.

David Bowie – Letter to Hermione
Space Oddity (1969)

Bowie’s gifts for building atmosphere are easily discerned in ‘letter to Hermione’, using nothing but a simplistic acoustic guitar strums and ocassional electric arpeggios as an accompanient, Bowie creates an unsettling, melancholic bubble inherent to the heartbreaking nature of the lyrics.

Images: Siggeir M. Hafsteinsson.
Also See: Moka’s Favorites No. 1