Song Of The Day 6/29/2016: The Rain Parade - “No Easy Way Down”

With the dominance this week of the mixtape (durrrrrr, if you HAVE TO ASK, durrrrrr), the impending Hidden '70s (starting July 17) and a sorely needed few days off later this week, let's just dispose of the usual theme-i-ness and run out the clock for the rest of the week. Songs picked at random. No more plans. If I had an Oblique Strategies deck I'd just eat it for dinner. This week's theme? As The Suckers Occur To Me. And things are occurring to me less and less these days so pack a baguette.

Say, remember the Paisley Underground? Sure you do! That was the California-bred scene that cropped up post-punk, taking the more palpable elements of the psychedelic scene and wedding them to 1980's ideals born in local espresso shops in medium markets, so small that many people still called them expresso shops. The Rain Parade from Los Angeles were one of those bands that I heard about, and I loved their song "No Easy Way Down." I remembered it earlier tonight because I was thinking about the compilation album Enigma Variations, which I borrowed frequently from my friend Brian in high school. This is a nice, sustained piece of drone-wielding, back when "drones" were just sounds we made when we were too stoned to compose fuller melodies, not grocery-bearing mechanical birds that are going to pluck us into the sky in the third year of the Trump Administration. Enjoy.