Flesh Wounds Heal, Broken Bones Mend

There’s something about “I Never Want To See You Again” (the song above) that sums up everything I love about Quasi: the classic(al) influences, the fact that it sounds like three different songs awkwardly thrown together at the last moment, the awesome organ (by Sam Coomes), and the way that it seems like someone’s taken a great pop song and kind of… fucked it up a bit.

I first heard the song on one of those free compilation CDs that the NME used to give out, back in the day, and as was my wont at the time, went out and got the wrong album to investigate further. I mean that in the sense of “the album that didn’t have that song on it”; Field Studies, the album I got instead, is more polished and more… poppy, maybe? than Featuring “Birds”, the home album of the song that’d caught my attention, but it was the one I needed to hear to end up fully smitten. I’ve always been a fan of songs that sounded like they could be in what used to be called the Hit Parade, except that they’d fallen over somewhere along the way and couldn’t quite sort themselves out afterwards (See also: Death In Vegas’ cover of Gene Clark’s “So You Say You Lost Your Baby” and all of The Free Association’s stuff), and at least half of Field Studies – and Quasi’s entire catalog, let’s be honest – fits that description perfectly.

I am, much to my sadness, depressingly unmusical. But if I had a band, I’m fairly convinced it’d sound like Quasi as much anything else in the world.

(I admit it: I just wish I could do what Janet Weiss can do.)