It was with great sadness that I learnt today that Joe Cocker had passed away after a long battle with lung cancer. I greatly enjoyed his music and figured the best way that I could honour his memory would be with this little post about his most famous work.

A cover of the Beatles song, Cocker made it entirely his own with this wonderfully soulful, sentimental arrangement that has become as ubiquitous as the original version (if not more so). His raspy but powerful vocals perfectly compliment the backup singers in a way that, on paper, really shouldn’t work.

You will be missed, Mr. Cocker.

Once upon a time, there was a film called Sucker Punch. There’s no more to that story, because the film was pretty dang sucky (how on earth do you make a film featuring kick-ass women and robots so dang boring), but there is certainly a good takeaway from it, in the form of this tune.

I am a pretty big fan of the original song, which usually spells doom for any subsequent cover version, but this is quite delightful. It takes an already fairly psychedelic song and gives it a kind of Massive Attack style aura, to which I cannot say no!

This song popped into my head this morning for some reason, and I felt that given the mood of Sydney (where I’m based) this week, it seems ideal.

This is quite the lovely little song from Australian group Axiom. Though that name is perhaps not particularly well known in Australia, it was the progenitor of Little River Band being as how Glenn Shorrock and Brian Cad were both members of it. So kick on back and ride out the week with just a little more joy.

Did you stop after reading one of my posts and think “This is brilliant, but I sure wish he wasn’t so gosh-danged silly with his writing! And also, I wish the writing was about video games and movies and stuff”. Then, my friend, you are overflowing with luck today! Perhaps you ought to buy yourself a lottery ticket, or gamble away your life savings?

Yes, it’s true: I have other websites. I am an internet whore, apparently. A redesigned version of Invert-x has just gone live with a post about the film this here track was written for! Isn’t that exciting? Anyway, that post is all serious and full of crazy words like ‘magnum opus’, whereas this post is all about how this track sounds kind of heroic and also sad and also metallic-y as well (because it’s a film about robots). Enjoy!

I do love ethereal electronica: it kind of skirts the area between downtempo and electronic by creating a hazy blend of the two. Much like how this post is a hazy blend of coherent, grammatically correct english and the wild ramblings of an alcoholic. Fortunately, this tune isn’t as rubbish as that combination.

There are songs that don’t ask to be listened to as such, but instead take you somewhere. A warm, comfortable and safe place within yourself, person with the person you love – a universal theme, but awfully intimate at the same time. It is a nice place to be! It reminds me of DAVIDS Dead Walkie, which gives off a similar kind of aura.

Sometimes, I bemoan our tagging system. Mostly because I’m no good at categorising music, but sometimes because I want to tag music with “intimate” or “haunting”, which would ensure that the amount of tags on the website would eclipse the amount of posts in a matter of minutes.

Here is Oh Wonder, a London-based songwriting duo who are cranking out a song a month for a year. Their output so far would certainly fit the hypothetical tags that I mentioned earlier, though I would also add “beautifully sad”, “upliftingly melancholic” and “wrap yourself up in something warm and wile away a day to it”. Quite lovely.