poptimists | The League Of Pop Play-Offs: Results!

Thanks to Kat and Moggy for their rapid responses and comments!

Just to fill you in on who submitted what:

In the Pop Premiership play-off:

alexmacpherson submitted Aaliyah - "I Refuse"

strange_powers submitted Sparks - "Young Girls"

In the Chart Championship play-off:

jeff_worrell submitted The Tennors - "Weather Report"

lisa_go_blind submitted The Avalanches - "Frontier Psychiatrist"

Let's see how they fared!

I am not sure what to do about this really as I know both the songs... I think

freakytigger gets to pick now according to some rules I just found... even so, very nice tracks both of you.

Track One-: Piano, brass and pouring rain- could potentially turn into utter horror but instead goes Full On Goth and plunges into chamber music-via-Timbaland type clicky mutterings with occasional synth roar, as a girl dissects and dissolves a relationship. She refuses to do it all again but I suspect she will do just that, you can sense it, because he won't seem like such a cvnt tomorrow/in five minutes and for all the fist-clenching and determinedness, she isn't really going to do it. Brilliant, Unfortunately I happen to have had this album since it came out and this was always one of my favourite songs off it- it's 'I Refuse' by Aaliyah. Obv. this is

alexmacpherson unless some truly sneaky tactics are going on.

Track Two-: This song sounds a lot like the theme tune to a children's tv show from my youth- I'm not sure exactly what it was called except they rode through space on a galleon which was powered by bubbles and some of them looked quite a lot like Sea Monkeys. Obviously a key part of the series wasn't liking young ladies presumably below the age of consent, however, this is the subject matter of this song- craving young girls' innocence and with the same exploited-exploitary angle of anything along these lines. Unfortunately for this player, too, my boyfriend is fvcking OBSESSED with Sparks (periodically, when he is not obsessed with something else) and so I know this is them and that the song is, appropriately, called 'Young Girls.' By default this must be < lj user="strange_powers">.

Aaliyah would have come in first, by quite a long way, had I actually been choosing because I think that's far from one of Sparks' best songs although it's still a very good song.

RESULT: The game goes to penalities, but it's a win for

alexmacpherson, deserved after his side had the better of the play.

"Thanks for the tracks dudes! Comments below:

Track 1: I don't have an mp3 player and didn't want to burn a CD with just one track, so instead I played this song before bedtime and when I woke up this morning to assess its catchiness: if I could still hum it by the time I got to work and was able to write about it, then I would deem it successful. And guess what? Despite accidentally skipping to Shannon on my playlist straight afterwards, I can still hum the chorus. "Darlin', darlin', darlin', darlin' - here I am!" Awww, he sounds so sweet! And I love the little piano flourish just before the chord change. I love these simple reggae lovesongs, and can just picture Lee Perry slicing it up and putting a spooky vampire reverb noise where the verse once was. Rick mentioned that this was a cover version of Simon & Garfunkel's Only Living Boy In New York - as a closet (pff!) Carter fan the title makes sense, but the song is still unfamiliar to me. I'm not the world's biggest S&G fan (early memories of Paul Simon talking to lamposts, combined with seeing a rub S&G tribute band supporting the amazing Bjorn Again at the Watford Colosseum 8 years ago) but if they are indirectly responsible for this smashing tune then I'm prepared to give them the benefit of the doubt.

Track 2: Despite being heavily spoilered that this would be a track I knew very well ("you'll guess it from the first chord!"), but I still had no idea what to expect. I certainly didn't expect the whinnying horses from the beginning of Stand And Deliver by Adam & The Ants - but that's not what I got either! Samples plucked from here, there and everywhere, but most obviously from 50s sci-fi/horror B-movies. All serve to disorientate the listener and empathise with poor Dexter, whose parents are told he is clearly in need of medical help. All of this echoes 'Mr Kirk's Nightmare' by 4 Hero "Come down to the station-house - your son is dead!" "Dead...? How?" "He died of an overdose!"), but this time it's Mr Kirk that's the bringer of bad news. I wonder if it's from the same film? After ten seconds I turned it off - sorry Sally, but I ran an indie disco in 2001 and I never need to hear this song again!

So Track 1 is teh winnar, by default and by merit."

RESULT:

jeff_worrell romps into final.

So - what does this mean? In a change from the previous plan, I'm going to run one grand final with four tracks (which will also be a better dress rehearsal for the Pop Open - incidentally, 4 out of 41 tracks now in with a week to go - get them going!). So if the two play-off winners, plus

inhibitorylinks and

koganbot could submit a track each for the evaluation of the entire Poptimists community, and we'll try to get the files up on Monday or Tuesday.