WHEN YOU FEEL SO LONELY IN YOUR HEART

I'm going to tell you something now, that I obviously don't need to: There are a lot of pleasures in listening to music. Like, yea Frank, I know! One of them though, is when you get stuck on a single track off an album (for instance, on !!!'s newest LP it's "Must Be The Moon"). Slightly strange however, when you're stuck on Track One Side One, as they say. It's not that the CD player's broken, but your fingers are. It's an uncontrollable urge to sacrifice hearing any other song and contentedly settle on the first song instead.


(image: Euro Disco)

Sally Shapiro

I'll Be By Your Side

Well, that's how it is with Sally Shapiro's Disco Romance, anyway, (the track in question called "I'll Be By Your Side"). It's almost shameful how much I like it; it feels like a guilty pleasure. It's a throwback to eighties Euro-Disco, full of melodramatic flourishes and pretty vocals (with the occasional one awash in synths). I can't shake the feeling that I'm listening to an indie version of "Final Countdown" (yea, that one, by Europe). In the end though, I'm not too fussed. I'll stick to my guilty pleasure, my hairbrush hit (as Radio 1's detest-worthy Sarah Cox would say), 'cause my fingers move and all of a sudden it's on repeat; so what's a guy to do but give in?

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Sally Shapiro's Disco Romance got a glowing review in Pitchfork. I don't know whether it was merited, because, as you know, you can't judge a book by its cover (incidentally, that's how I decide which books to consider buying), and you can't judge a CD by its first song (I have the CD is its glorious entirety, but I'm not feeling inclined to turn off "repeat" just yet). Pitchfork probably had a similar problem: "I'll Be By Your Side" came in at #27 on their Top 100 Tracks of 2006. [Buy]