This is from one of my favorite YouTube musicians, iamRottenRon. Don’t know who the guy is, or even what he looks like, but he covers great music and shows how he plays it. His bass work is fantastic for me to watch and learn from.
It has been a long time since I’ve done one of these, but I found this song in the SXSW 2012 Showcasing Artists collection and I CAN’T STOP LISTENING TO IT. The bass line is simple (which means I can figure out how to play it) but compelling, and the beat is infectious. The lead vocalist sounds uncannily like Robyn Hitchcock, and combined with the spacy/trippy lyrics (“I was living the life of a wrecking ball, swinging dangerously low at everything in sight”), it makes me think this is what The Soft Boys would have sounded like with a horn section.
The John Steel Singers is (are?) from Australia. Wikipedia calls them a “6-piece band,” but it looks like there are only five of them. Whatever. They’ve been around since the late 2000’s, with a couple of EP’s and LP’s. This track is off their 2010 album Tangalooma, their first issued on the Dew Process label (home of Dropkick Murphys and Mumford & Sons, among others). From their Facebook page, it appears they’re on the verge of releasing another album pretty soon.
(Side note: I’m listening through Tangalooma right now, and so far, none of the other tracks sounds anything like Robyn Hitchcock. Slightly disappointed about that, but I’m enjoying the album anyway.)
Fortunately, by the time you found out that the world was in desperate need of a laser playing Still Alive while etching the Aperture Science logo into a stainless steel plate, such a thing already existed.
As much as I enjoyed Johnny Depp’s performance in the remake, there is no question in my mind that Gene Wilder is the One True Wonka, and this remix makes him even more awesome.