My Top 1000 Songs #510: Nemesis

 [I've been writing up my Top 1000 songs on a daily basis--you can see them all in descending order by hitting the All My Favorite Songs tag.]

Maybe this belongs in the "you had to be there" file, but this track, from Shriekback's 1985 Oil & Gold, was a huge college-era mainstay for me me. A dark, swampy dance track--and presumably the only song to ever include Parthenogenesis in the lyrics--it was a constant fixture on our college radio setlists for a few months, as well as ending up on countless party mixtapes, a failsafe way to get people on their feet. A merger of goth and new wave, it sounds a little of its era, but there's nothing else that sounds quite like it, and I still enjoy cranking it up now and then. (Sadly, the early Shriekback albums don't stream, limiting my ability to translate those old mixtapes into playlists.)

Live 2017: