The Horse's Ha - "Left Hand"
from Of the Cathmawr Yards
(Hidden Agenda)

Two of my favorite sulking songbirds, Freakwater's Janet Bean and the Zincs' Jim Elkington, supposedly started this band as a comfortable acoustic lounge group with which they could capitalize on gentrified Chicago's wine bar scene, singing Sinatra and Peggy Lee songs perhaps for young besuited investment bankers shedding their punk pasts and trying to get their Mad Men on. There is a marked clink of fine crystal to this song, but look close into the prism of a cocktail glass once it's drained, you can see the real darkness, which happens to be the specialty of both of these songwriters. The protagonist languidy seeks solace at the end of the day in a moment alone from the rat race unable to find satisfaction in even the most tried and true manner revisiting "(his) back history, like a child endures bloodless play," only to be "let down by my own left hand." A sigh of Tom Scott lounge jazz offers his some comfort, but his own dissatisfaction persists everything. I'd suggest the poor fella try his right, but some people, you can't tell them anything. If there is a better song about a failed masturbation session released this year, I haven't heard it.

Stuart Murdoch - "Funny Little Frog"
from God Help the Girl
(Matador)

I happen to think Belle & Sebastian to be one of my favorite bands, so band mastermind Stuart Murdoch's little project of writing songs for girls to sing, amplifying his girl-crazy mind through the lens of actual girls excited me so much I told everybody about it immediately. Unfortunately the project doesn't bear the weight of such enthusiasm. As a whole, the album is too stylized, trying too hard to be something but just doesn't have the will to pull it off. The one bright spot I continually revisit, however, is the recasting of "funny Little Frog" off B&S's stellar The Life Pursuit as a slow burn disco ballad. Even this song has its faults - I want full disco onslaught, bongos, jazz flute. Bring it, Stuart! But the way Brittany Stallings curls around "you're my picture in my wall, you're the vision in my hall" gives me a shiver; the diva stops during "I had a conversation with you last night, it was a little one sided but that's alright" -ok, maybe there was another great masturbation song on this list—simply kills.  It takes the sweet and the sexual of the original and gives it a cocktail shake, something that should have happened with the whole album.