El Perro Del Mar - "Change of Heart (J Rintamaki remix)". A remix of one of my favourite songs of this year. And it is one of those rare remixes. You may have noticed we do not post them very often, remixes I mean, even though they are very popular. It's because this is a blog about "wonderful songs", not "other versions of songs". However this remix, it is one of the rare ones. It is itself a wonderful song. It takes "Change of Heart" and it changes the contrast. It changes the hue & saturation. It makes it darker in places, and brighter in others, and in places the differences are too faint to see. No longer is "Change of Heart" a glossed and despairing kind of Fleetwood Mac; now it is a doomed dive, a rain-soaked soft-rock Knife. It is terrifying, persistent, hurt. It is awful and rare.

The first time I wrote about "Change of Heart", I told the story of a dead relationship. But J Rintamaki's version tells the story of a relationship that is petrified; that has been haunted by ghosts for ten thousand terrible & unending years. No one has yet found an axe. [buy]

School of Seven Bells - "Half Asleep (alternate version)". Yes & yes, yes it's another, a different mix of my #6 "best song of 2008". And it's great, it's wonderful, this starry ballad written over with filigree. You see the chime of an electric guitar does a special thing to kids raised on the music i was raised on, who heard pearl jam and radiohead at a particular age, who closed their eyes and wished for teenage love even as coldplay were preparing their first hit... We, jaded now, knowing better, "traded our guitars for synths", but we still feel a special prickling thrill at the sound of pick on strings; and well here it is, golden; that prickling thrill; and all the song's treasures still shine like christmas ornaments. [buy the deluxe reissue of Alpinisms]

(drawing by Maxwell Loren Holyoke-Hirsch)