A (Kinda) Kate Two-Fer!
At the start of the new millennium, the brilliant but hiatus-prone Kate Bush was a little more than halfway through a 12-year intermission between albums. Die-hard fans of the beloved Brit had to content themselves with Maxwell’s lovely take on “This Woman’s Work,” a minor hit in 2001. Then, finally, in 2005, Bush broke her lengthy silence with the double-album “Aerial.” It was totally worth the wait. Definitely an album to be listened to in its entirety, but here’s a typically stunning excerpt.
Kate Bush – “How to Be Invisible.”
Joe Pernice is another one of those songwriters, like
We’ve had prettiest, saddest, and grooviest song selections on our journey from the ‘90s through the 2000s, but we haven’t had a cutest pick until now. Call and Response, an obscure West Coast fivesome—the group doesn’t even have a Wikipedia entry—released its self-titled debut in 2001 and it’s so sugary sweet it should come with a dentist’s warning. A Pitchfork review at the time deemed the record “a brief flash of enjoyable fluff.” I like to think of it as Stereolab meets the Teletubbies. And 
Remember when whistling was all the rage back in the 2000s? People whistled while riding their Segways and Razor scooters, while clicking through MySpace pages, while watching the West Wing. Or maybe I just dreamed all this. But whistling did find its way into popular music, perking up 
The other day I was rebuking myself—if you’ll pardon the expression—for not posting a song from Annie Lennox’s “Medusa” when I was doing 
Terry Callier is one of those artists who deserved massive success but never quite achieved it. Perhaps because his sound, which draws from rock, soul, folk and jazz, is hard to pigeonhole, he couldn’t parlay his cult status into mega-stardom and after releasing several brilliant, under-heard albums in the ‘70s, he quit the music business in the ‘80s to become a computer programmer. Callier experienced a mini-resurgence in the 2000s, becoming a go-to guest singer for such electronic acts as Massive Attack, Grand Tourism, and the Swedish duo Koop, who featured his sublime vocals on the 2001 album, “Waltz for Koop.” I was lucky enough to see Callier perform a few years before his death in 2012 and he was wonderful. Here he is on Koop’s “In a Heartbeat,” and check out some of his ‘70s solo stuff. You won’t be sorry!
Before “Titanium,” before all the Grammy nominations, and LONG before the two-toned hair veil, Sia was a journeyman Aussie singer who lent her golden pipes to the first three albums by British electronic duo Zero 7. While I applaud the fact that she’s now a superstar in her own right, I have to say that I much prefer the earlier, chilled-out Sia to the current dance-pop sensation. Check out this gorgeous track and tell me if I’m wrong. (Although the video is a bit aggressive!)
dugoutdiscs 