Mother Nature is giving us one last nasty grudge fuck before she hopefully provides some relief with the warmth and hope of spring. And when I say nasty, I mean
nasty, as in cold rain coming down in impossibly relentless sheets for hours and hours on end. The rains make me feel irritable and on edge. This is not what I signed up for when I decided to plant my roots here in sunny Southern California. It’s been a strange winter. We’ve had weeks of spectacular weather, followed by the most horrible monsoon-type rains you could imagine, followed by the good stuff. Back and forth in violent gyrations. For the first time, I’m starting to feel the tangible effects of climate change. The weather patterns here are not supposed to be this erratic. LA weather is supposed to be smooth, subtle and relatively consistent. It’s reasonable to expect the occasional bad storm, but nothing like the violent yin-yang roller coaster ride we've had to endure during the winters over the past few years. Which brings me, strangely, elliptically, to Les Fleur De Lys and their balls-out cover of Pete Townshend’s Circles, a song I’m digging at the moment because its force matches the massive pounding of the rain against my living room window. Opinions are varied, but my view is not only that the cover version pisses all over the Who’s original, but also that it captures the amphetamine fueled spirit of mid-60s
Mod London as well as any freakbeat song I’ve ever heard. Along with folk rock, power pop and glam, freakbeat is a style I never get tired of. Mid-60s London was clearly one of the places where human civilization reached its absolute zenith. The Mod sound of the period tended to be a heavy-duty bit of business, but if tonight’s song sounds particularly heavy it might be because the single was produced by Jimmy Page. (I’m telling you, the guy shows up everywhere.) My favorite part of the song is when the last verse climbs up a semitone, a technique you hear fairly often in country music and ballads, less so in heavy rock, but which in this case – and in the Who’s original – elevates the sonic energy of the music into the realm of the sublime...
Mother Nature is giving us one last nasty grudge fuck before she hopefully provides some relief with the warmth and hope of spring. And when I say nasty, I mean nasty, as in cold rain coming down in impossibly relentless sheets for hours and hours on end. The rains make me feel irritable and on edge. This is not what I signed up for when I decided to plant my roots here in sunny Southern California. It’s been a strange winter. We’ve had weeks of spectacular weather, followed by the most horrible monsoon-type rains you could imagine, followed by the good stuff. Back and forth in violent gyrations. For the first time, I’m starting to feel the tangible effects of climate change. The weather patterns here are not supposed to be this erratic. LA weather is supposed to be smooth, subtle and relatively consistent. It’s reasonable to expect the occasional bad storm, but nothing like the violent yin-yang roller coaster ride we've had to endure during the winters over the past few years. Which brings me, strangely, elliptically, to Les Fleur De Lys and their balls-out cover of Pete Townshend’s Circles, a song I’m digging at the moment because its force matches the massive pounding of the rain against my living room window. Opinions are varied, but my view is not only that the cover version pisses all over the Who’s original, but also that it captures the amphetamine fueled spirit of mid-60s 
Mod London as well as any freakbeat song I’ve ever heard. Along with folk rock, power pop and glam, freakbeat is a style I never get tired of. Mid-60s London was clearly one of the places where human civilization reached its absolute zenith. The Mod sound of the period tended to be a heavy-duty bit of business, but if tonight’s song sounds particularly heavy it might be because the single was produced by Jimmy Page. (I’m telling you, the guy shows up everywhere.) My favorite part of the song is when the last verse climbs up a semitone, a technique you hear fairly often in country music and ballads, less so in heavy rock, but which in this case – and in the Who’s original – elevates the sonic energy of the music into the realm of the sublime...
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