My Top 1000 Songs #944: St. Catherine

[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 1985 LP Susan Sleepwalking, by Illinois duo The Arms of Someone New, was an obscure little off-label thing that showed up at the radio station back in my college DJ days and has haunted me ever since. Spooky, lo-fi, almost amateurish ambient/goth dream pop, seemingly easy to cast aside, yet I still find myself cueing it up from time to time. Probably because, as a life-long chronic insomniac, this was one of the records I got in the habit of playing to myself late at night, and I think it did something weird to my brain.

Opening track "St. Catherine" offers a cheap drum machine, some creepy keyboards, and off-key vocals, cradled in feedback and cavernous echo, feeling like a home-brewed stew of Brian Eno and the Cocteau Twins and early Cure. It's one of the songs on this list I know is entirely personal, something nobody else is likely to have heard, but--as I said in opening my book Jittery White Guy Music, my dreams have soundtracks, and this is what a lot of my more disturbing dreams sound like.