SOUNDTRACK: LOS BITCHOS-“The Link is About to Die/Turkish Delight” (2020)
This is Los Bitchos’ most recent single. The cover has the same style as their previous one which makes it seem like an album is in the works. Although it has been nine months between releases.
“The Link is About to Die” really fleshes out the band’s sound. It opens with some funky percussion–bongos and cowbells–before the groovy bassline introduces the guitar melody. There’s discoey synths on this track too. There’s even a surf-sounding echoing guitar slide straight out of the beach. This song even features a percussion solo. It’s still clearly Los Bitchos, but the new elements are a fun treat.
“Turkish Delight” is slower with a more reggae feel in the bass. The funky percussion is still there, perhaps even more pronounced. About two minutes in a new guitar sound in introduced which changes the feel of the song and makes it that much more interesting.I’m really looking forward to them putting out a whole album.
[READ: July 14, 2020] “Big Skies, Empty Places”
This issue of the New Yorker has a series of essays called Influences. Since I have read most of these authors and since I like to hear the story behind the story, I figured I’d read these pieces as well.
These later pieces are all about one page long.
Annie Proulx says that her biggest influence is the landscape of the hinterlands. She writes about rough weather, rural people living in isolation and with the decisions of the powers in distant urban areas.
She does not do this for nostalgia, but rather she likes imagining histories.
She speaks of the sculptor Robert Smithson who once photographed rocks and then removed the rocks to photograph the holes in the ground–absent presence.
She feels this absent presence is why she tends to write about men rather then women. That rural world was a man’s world. Women did work, of course, but for the most part women were an absent presence in rural events.
Mostly though she is interested in the language of that era and location and mourns the loss of estuary English, and marshland vocabulary that introduced words like guzzle, gundalow, schoon and bore. She worries that some dictionaries have censored language. Dictionaries of logging and maritime terms should be rich in graphic sexual imagery.
The reader is also an absent presence, leaning an influential elbow on her shoulder.
“The Link is About to Die” sounds like “Just Another Day in Paradise” by Phil Collins. It’s really weird that I can’t find anyone talking about this on Google.