Shelby Sifers - "Blackberry". A song with distractions: unwanted phone-calls, a glockenspiel, a joke, a clever rhyme, a chorus. Shelby doesn't need this stuff. She's trying to impress us but she doesn't need it. She wrote a perfect first verse - if one could knit words onto a wall, and I could knit, I would knit the first verse into my wall. I'd lie in my bed with the sun coming in and watch the curling wool. She sings it strangely, slowly, beautifully. Her words are deliberated, like the notes of her guitar. Her feelings are measured into syllables. We can only feel so many things in a day and this first verse gives me all I need for Monday. It meets all my dietary requirements. I'm not hungry any more.

From this
blackberry bush
we can pick flowers in June.
or harvest berries in October.
and bake cobblers for our lovers.
and spill sugar on the tables.

Mixylodian - "River of Milk". This song's finest moment is when the room suddenly starts to spin at 1:45ish. He sings the lines with a greedy desperation, like someone who really wanted this to happen. And then the synths and drum machine pile on and you can see all the little automaton parts of the party he's at - the taking off the shoes, the hey dude!s, the fridge opening, the hunting for the bottle-opener, the bottle-opening, the tired cheerses, the two people left alone in a room when everyone else leaves for the kitchen & who don't want to talk to each other but do so out of social obligation & pretend like it's fascinating & the guy misunderstands her enthusiasm and goes home that night wondering if maybe he should track her down on Facebook and see if she likes good movies & if so then ask her out - but when the breakdown stops, the protagonist is in the street, drunk as Stephen Dedalus, doing a Sunset Rubdown impression, waving goodbye. The next morning he wonders where the hell he left his clarinet and why he keeps doing this. Is he an alcoholic? Does he still love her? Does he hate himself? That night he buys another old keyboard and stays up till 1:30 am eating Ritz crackers, listening to each drumbeat in turn, waiting to hear the right right right one.

[Mixylodian is from Montreal - MySpace]