Wednesday, April 28, 2010

video: John K. "My Only Girl"

"Come on Baby Spend the Night"

John K.'s Lost in the Beat has been in constant rotation in my mind since I first became enamored with John's synthetic bedroom sound. Blurring the line between bedroom syn-phonics and beat-oriented '80s pop, John has an unseemingly natural way of connecting disparate emotions and sounds until they seem so familiar that their roots are hard to trace. I always hear bits of New Order and Madonna, as well as John Maus, when I'm listening to Lost in the Beat, but where their tunes often come off as anthemic, or beguilling, John's music tends to be more personal. It's easy to hear where it comes from, possibly because it's one man making it, or maybe because he's just a guy with some instruments who happens to record when he's not teaching. "My Only Girl," one of the standouts on Lost in the Beat, is a slo-funk trip down memory lane, complete with mega-delayed guitars, an intoxicating bass line and snappy drums that come together over John's falsetto to create a perfect pallate for thinking about your one and only. Fittingly, Alex from Leftist Nautical Antiques recently edited down a bunch of Super 8mm footage he found at a garage sale into a video for the tune. "My Only Girl" will appear on the cassette version of Lost in the Beat, scheduled to come out shortly via a collaboration between Leftist Nautical Antiques and The Curatorial Club.

1 comment:

Unknown said...

John is the best kept secret in music. I feel not for long though . . .