Welcome to the Hamper Store staff’s playlist for 2015. No, it’s not run-down of our favourite albums released throughout the past year but a small collection of songs our staff has enjoyed listening to. We recently asked our staff to submit songs they’ve played obsessively during 2015. To which we wanted to put some ‘liner notes’ and links to files on YouTube, Vimeo or wherever, that the Hamper Store could share with subscribers.

 

What came together was a surprisingly eclectic mix of musical genres, styles, periods and artists. We cannot bring you the full spectrum of music submitted (22 tracks in all), mostly because we figured you’d need the patience of Job to sit through and listen to the whole lot. Secondly, because trying to track down links to some of the more obscure tracks was turning out to be a Herculean feat. We decided instead to whittle the selection down to six choice tracks. This mini-compilation is our gift to you. The Hamper Store hopes you enjoy watching and listening to this selection as much we enjoyed putting it together.

 

Golden Years — David Bowie

Topping our list is none other than the late great David Bowie. The Thin White Duke is dead and what a legacy he left behind! Golden Years is David Bowie doing funk and doing it extremely well. That he performed this song on the American TV music show Soul Train — one of a few white musicians to ever appear on that show — is testimony. Golden Years is the first track on Bowie’s 1976 album Station to Station but he may very well have intended it for his 1975 album Young Americans. Bowie was at his most prolific between 1973 and ’76, shifting gears between musical genres, which may explain why it’s decidedly not in the same vein to the rest of Station to Station and discernibly closer to the funk style of Young Americans, which Bowie described as ‘plastic soul’. 

Click here . Or click here  to view Bowie’s performance on Soul Train, and though the quality of this link isn’t great, the Hamper Store believes it’s still worth checking out as much for the period fashion as for the on-the-spot interview with Bowie.

 

Lousy Connection — Ezra Furman

Ezra Furman’s Lousy Connection is the only song here to have been released in 2015. It’s from his third solo album, Perpetual Motion People, and as soon as you hear this track’s doo-wop opening, there’s just no turning back. With lyrics like “There’s nothing happening, and it’s happening too fast,” it comes across like an anthem for a generation of disaffected youth. And the chorus — “I don’t want to be the bad guy, I wanna see myself on the outside, Can you hear me now?” — sounds like a vain plea to wanting a better connection with … well, everyone and everything.  Then again, there’s still a flush of hope for this outsider, especially when Furman sings, “This century seems like it’s turning out okay.” Click here

 

Season Of The Witch — Luna

Donovan’s psychedelic rock classic has been covered many times and by very diverse artists, including Dr. John, Joan Jett, Richard Thompson, Robert Plant, and Low Rawls. And has also featured on several movie soundtracks including Gus Van Sant’s To Die For (the movie that cemented Nicole Kidman’s Hollywood career), George A. Romero’s film of the same name, and, unsurprisingly, The Simpsons movie (Matt Groenig and co. are such culture vultures!). But the Hamper Store believes one of best covers has to be by New York indie band Luna, who released it as a single after having performed it for the 1996 movie I Shot Andy Warhol. Luna’s version is just a smidge restrained, especially Dean Wareham’s vocals, but it’s still as trippy as the original, and perhaps darker and more hypnotic. Click here

 

 18 With A Bullet — Pete Wingfield

Here’s an ‘oldie but a goodie’ — the 1975 hit by Pete Wingfield. If you’re listening to this doo-woppy soul number for the first time, you can be forgiven for thinking Wingfield is an African-American with a one-hit wonder. Well, he ain’t. He hails from Hampshire, England, and early in his career was heavily into soul music. The song had something of a ‘come-back’ in 1998 when featured on the soundtrack to the Tarantino-inspired British gangster movie Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels. The interesting thing about Wingfield’s hit is that the lyrics are peppered with record industry parlance and are not at all about what you first think — “I’m eighteen with a bullet” may elude to being a testosterone-fuelled teenager, but it actually refers to hitting the 18th spot and rocketing up the music charts — “I’m high on the chart, I’m tip for the top”. Click here

 

 Express Yourself — NWA

Not surprising that the Hamper Store would revisit the hardcore hip-hop of NWA given the release last year of Straight Outta Compton, the biopic that charts the controversial rise of NWA in the late ’80s. Express Yourself is the only track on their debut album (same title as the film) that doesn’t contain expletives or patent gangsta lyrics. It still packs a whallop of social criticism though, expressing the band’s pent-up frustration with official censorship. As an aside, in 1989, Triple J apparently played the track 360 times in a row as a protest for having been censored for playing … you guessed it, NWA. For another aside, NWA sample another song by Charles Wright & the Watts 103rd Street Band, also titled Express Yourself, and also worth listening too. Click here

 

Be Brave — The Strange Boys

The Strange Boys is a garage-country rock band that formed in Dallas, Texas, in 2001. They released their first full-length album, The Strange Boys and the Girl’s Club, in 2009 (though it should be mentioned that they’d actually debuted with an EP titled Nothing EP in 2007). Be Brave is off their second album, also titled Be Brave, released in 2010 and after a few changes to their original line-up. But not for the worse — there’s a plodding beat to the whole album that’s distinctly hypnotic when compared to their first album. But what we love about this track is that Ryan Sambol, lead singer of The Strange Boys, sounds like he’s squeezed into a pair of pants that are three sizes too small. Sambol’s vocal delivery is kind of febrile but it fits perfectly with the song’s twangy guitar and laconic drums. Click here