Matthew Mayfield & the Blue Cut Robbery - Good Girls

Link.

Fav lyrics: God knows that I can't get you that castle or that ring, make you make believe that I am [laced] (?) with finer things.

Matthew Mayfield has a roughly cut, smoldering voice and it fits perfectly with the harder music in this song. But what's also great about him is that he's varied and sounds great with a softer sound, too, like in Open Road or Grow Old With You. There's some kind of intoxicating, old-fashioned charm in his music. In Good Girls, it's almost like he's singing in your ear, the band playing two feet in front of you, so loud and present you can feel the beat in your chest. It's the kind of music that sounds live even when you're sitting in your PJs listening to it.

Reminds us of: Pearl Jam mixed with Dave Matthews Band
Listen to: with a smirk
Glitter Pox rating: 85% contagious

Hope you catch it,
The Glitter Pox

The Dear Hunter - The Church and the Dime

(Not official video, but the link below is the official one - embedding was disabled.)

Link.

Favorite lyrics: All the anger from a lovers' lament
Force fed in the stomach of sin
Welcome to the world

This song leaves you with the echo of a drunken lullaby. It's slow and dizzy, spinning in your head and dropping you into a slumber that only craves more sound. It's quiet and loud in the best kind of way.

Reminds us of: Scary Kids Scaring Kids mixed with Faber Drive
Listen to: when you need to sit and breathe.
Glitter Pox rating: 88% contagious

Hope you catch it,
The Glitter Pox

Perfectly Perfect - Elizabeth and the Catapult

Link.

Favorite lyrics: And my dreams are ever so tempting, until they go pop pop pop.

The circus music in the background of this song is like a sugary coating over the lyrics, which makes sense when you consider what the song's about. It's upbeat, and you could totally oldschool dance to it in a polka-dot dress or a buttoned vest, but it's all about irony. It's basically pretending to be a happy, upbeat song, a facade to match the lyrics' assurance of how hopeless happiness is. Which is hypocritical, because there's no way you can't be happy listening to this song.

Reminds us of: Florence and the Machine & Ingrid Michaelson
Listen to: while dancing and making cookies theatrically. Singing into the mixing spoon is necessary.
Glitter Pox rating: 76% contagious

Hope you catch it,
The Glitter Pox

John Butler Trio - Take Me

Link.

Favorite lyrics: Twist me, turn me, throw me around
Drunk in this potion of loaded emotion
Beautiful beautiful beautiful lies lies lies all lies

The way the guitar rises and falls with the vocals is electric and addicting. The lyrics are commanding; they have the kind of dominance that fully takes you over, and the emotion they're sung with pours over the music. It's a song you can get lost in, like a vocalized maze. We like music that breaks boundaries and evolves sound, and this song definitely fits that. The layout of the song, rising and falling, twisting notes into feeling, almost tells a story itself. Near the end, the music slows to a heartbeat, the helplessness and pleading in the singer's voice fading away as the song ends. It's the kind of music that stops everything - talking, texting, and thinking - and forces you to listen.

Reminds us of: Tool
Listen to: with your eyes closed.
Glitter Pox rating: 97.5% contagious

Hope you catch it,
The Glitter Pox

New Politics - Dignity

Link.

Favorite lyrics: And you're buying bombs, and we pay the price. Eat your lies and we feed it to the children. Is this what you want? Is this what you need? You're gonna kill us all to bring peace.

New Politics is fresh, unique, and fiery, with a message that modern music needs to have more of. It's the kind of new rock that makes your mind hungry. The kind whose lyrics you shout, because you mean them. The kind that just makes you want to freaking dance. And more than that, it's the kind of rock that tells a story: a fight for beliefs. These are the kind of lyrics that you really listen to, instead of just hearing.

Reminds us of: Cage the Elephant
Listen to: when you're feeling a little rebellious.
Glitter Pox rating: 90% contagious

Hope you catch it,
The Glitter Pox

Agnes Obel - Riverside

Link.

Favorite lyrics: "I walk to the borders on my own / To fall in the water just like a stone / Chilled to the marrow in them bones"

Agnes Obel's voice paired with her beautiful piano playing and simple, stark lyrics create soft, gorgeous, and eerie songs. Her music is pretty flawless in all aspects, and manages to take the essence of sentiments and transform it into sound. It's quiet, peaceful, but also edgy and twisted. You can sit and listen to her entire "Philharmonics" album for hours and be absolutely content. The song we're featuring today is only a small taste of a much larger, stunning combination of sound and words.

Reminds us of: A Fine Frenzy
Listen to: while skipping stones.
Glitter Pox rating: 92% contagious

Hope you catch it,
The Glitter Pox

Tom McRae - My Vampire Heart

Link.

Favorite lyrics: If it don't end in Bloodshed dear
It's probably not love

I broke someone's heart again
Someone you know
You're looking at him my friend

Tom McRae takes his time singing these lyrics, like he has an eternity to whisper his story. It's full of passion and deep, deep tragedy: being in a dark place, and barely remembering what used to make it light. The way the song is sung, starting off slow but building and building until it fades, is respondent of the dark romance in the song itself. "And I wonder / While we count the cost / Which is sweeter / Love or it's loss " This song is a poem given a voice portraying true pain, loss, and longing; it could easily be overdone, but the subtlety behind the music is a perfect fit.

Reminds us of: Iron and Wine or a darker Bryan Adams.
Listen to: when you need to cry.
Glitter Pox rating: 88% contagious

Hope you catch it,
The Glitter Pox

Paper Route - Carousel

Link

Favorite lyrics: on and on and on we spin, to find an end to where we begin.

This song is one that you can imagine playing out into a movie: it paints a carnival canvas in your mind and puts a theme song behind it. Paper Route's "Carousel" tells a story with a deep-rooted sadness to it; the idea is repetitively sung that a relationship can be simultaneously playful and monotonous, like the carousel itself. It's a song full of irony and bitterness and love and tragedy, much like the music video.

Reminds us of: Mute Math
Listen to: while riding a carousel, obviously.
Glitter Pox rating: 73%

Hope you catch it,
The Glitter Pox