The Indie Anthology 70: essential songs

We're back from holidays & ready to propose you some more eternal songs (in our humble opinion) at our anthology section! It's about two geniuses today, Mark E. Smith and Damo Suzuki... or, more precisely, two of the weirdest, evasive, unreachable and underrated geniuses music has ever had. One of the greatest and most particular music tributes ever written or, at the very least, just a hell of a song!

Song: I Am Damo Suzuki
Artist: The Fall
Year: 1985

A couple of songs ago in this section, I was writing about The Wedding Present, The Posies and The Fall's early mixtapes made by a long lost friend with obvious great music taste. Of course, the less immediate of the trio were The Fall's compilation of tunes and albums. But there was something that always kept me listening. And still does. A funny and/or grotesque lyric, a mysterious bass line, an occasional pop hook hidden into the apparent reigning chaos. And the perennial sense of threat and surprise. It was post-punk, but also krautrock, literature, cinema, politics, vaudeville... Anything could happen while Mark E. Smith was singing (or reciting, or shouting, or spitting?). A whole universe packed in a tape. And then there was 'I Am Damo Suzuki', epitomizing the aforementioned "Fall's sound" while, at the same time, inviting me to discover another strange band (from Germany and fronted by a Japanese!). A decomposed riff arriving to the listener in semitones, the atmosphere of a horror movie, a drum beat between the frantic and the somber, and a singer making collide each of his words into the angles of the music lines, howling the chorus?, which still sounds like a mad mantra summoning the spirit of the Can's one-of-a-kind vocalist. I would learn later that lyrics and sound were an incredible marriage, the perfect blend of shape and content in the form of a music tribute. What a trip! Vitamin C for the ears and the soul!