Jawbreaker - ‘Kiss the Bottle’
From about 1:32 to 1:50, Blake Schwartzenbach sounds very, very like Richard Butler, sparking at “I know I painted you a prettier picture, baby”. ‘Kiss the Bottle’ has been my favourite Jawbreaker song for a long time - not an unusual choice, it’s their most potent mix of emotions dragged through gravel, earnestness and melancholy, flat-broke romance - and I think I’ve thought about the comparison quickly every time I’ve heard it for at least the last couple of years, if not always.
The Psychedelic Furs are one of those bands in the unexplored hinterland, where I almost really like the little I know of their stuff but have never quite made the effort to go album-deep to see if that would mean really-really liking it.
(This is where things would rest if I could just listen. I’d play it a bit more and some time soon, I’d listen to the Psychedelic Furs too, and we’d end up somewhere else from there. There’s an appealing clarity to the scenario.)
Instead, there’s eleven open browser tabs and I find out for the first time that ‘Into You Like a Train’ is a Psychedelic Furs cover. It makes sense, not only because it’s a good song but because the Psychedelic Furs have a similar too-tight-across-the-shoulders fit with genre, clear affinities but kind of alone in their exact coordinates. It makes sense because it sounds really good, and now I need to go and listen to the Psychedelic Furs from the start.
The Psychedelic Furs - ‘Into You Like A Train’
