i first discovered the wonderful world of martin dosh, as i'm sure many folks have, via the clip above... i'd heard of him before, knew he was on the ever-interesting anticon label, knew that he'd drummed for the mighty fog at one stage but somehow never got round to checking him out...
one look at this nifty little live take of "call the kettle black" changed all that... the video had a lot to do with it - it makes a secret of nothing while managing to retain all of the mystery of the process...
dosh's music has the uncanny ability of never doing what I want it to... sometimes i love it when i can predict how a track will go - feeling exactly when those drums are going to kick in, knowing when that bass note will descend but dosh's music always goes left when my brain expects right, hovers when i think it will soar and takes off just when i think i've got my bearings...
the track that sealed the deal for me was "um, circles and squares" from 2006's the lost take... it has a giddy, exhilerating quality that i'm not sure i've heard in much music before... you hear the melody so so much during the songs short lifespan that you feel like you've known it all your life before the first listen is even over...
the other track i'll post a link to here is "if you want to you have to" from his latest album, wolves and wishes... i had the pleasure of seeing him perform this with his touring partner, mike lewis, back in june... as he noted that night, the track is named after one of his son's favourte sayings and that childish compulsion pulses through the entire track... dosh's family appear throughout his work, in the artwork, in the song titles, and on the tracks themselves - children's voices are a common part of his musical landscape...
best of all i love how these two songs bcame a part of my everyday life... each day i get the bus to work and (apart from two tragic occurences when my music delivery device was out of commission) the journey is permanantly soundtracked... two parts of the journey present the need for crucial, mission-critical music choices - the walk from my front door to the busstop and the walk from my departure from the bus to my place of work...
if I continue to keep this blog going (and i'm really, really going to give it a try), i imagine a huge portion of it will be dedicated to the song choices for these two short, daily walks... the first walk needs something to ease me in to the day, soothing enough for a weary head but with enough propulsion to get me to the bus stop on time (since having our first child, some days require a higher tempo than others)... more importantly, the second track needs to guarantee a smile on my face within 3 minutes, preferably giving me the urge to run, dance or raise my hands (rarely acted upon but necesary all the same)...
this may all sound quite trivial but it shows that the music has entered the fabric of my life...
these two dosh tracks fall into the latter category (both had to be forecebly removed from my music delivery device for fear of losing that feeling)...
and here they are, hosted in what I believe to be a fully artist-endorsed fashion at the Stereogum website:
...enjoy:)
*post title gratefully inspired by cut chemist
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