My Top 1000 Songs #857: Lying In State
[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.]
The Verlaines were among the New Zealand indie bands on the Flying Nun label I got really into back in the mid-80s through early 90s. Their sorta arty, offbeat garage rock was a little more challenging than the more straightforward (yet still plenty skewed) rock/pop of the Clean, the Chills, and the Bats, my go-to faves, but their long career is still peppered with some great songs. "Lying In State," off the 1985 long-player debut Hallelujah All The Way Home, is probably the most immediate song they ever recorded, a rousing, breathlessly cathartic three-chord rocker that would almost qualify as power pop if it weren't so ragged around the edges. I've never been able to make out the lyrics--though the line "you take your car keys out of your purse" for some reason pops into my head every single time my wife picks up her purse, some 40 years after I first heard it--but it still gets me all excited whenever I crank it up for a spin. (And made for a fail-safe pick-me-up during my college radio shows back in the day.)
The track long felt like a private pleasure, one of those obscurities I couldn't believe hadn't caught on, but a few years later Superchunk amped it up even further (while making the lyrics all the more indecipherable) on a b-side, giving it new life.
Superchunk cover:
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