“Funeral Song”
from the single Funeral Song
2010
iTunes
You name your latest track “Funeral Song,” it cheers on the end of summertime, and it features a bass line straight off a Cure record. Pretty miserable right? Turns out to be the opposite, actually. Bouncy and buoyant, the latest from Captured Tracks band Minks reminds us that quite a bit of even gloomy, gray-raincoat post-punk also had a spring in its step and a shake in its hips.
Minks capture that dynamic nicely on “Funeral Song,” painting a small-scale drama that acts as a sort of riposte to the glut of sun-soaked, blissed-out indie pop that has dominated certain corners of underground music the past year or so. (The melodramatic side of the song is visualized nicely by its video, which uses images from Anne Baxter’s rags-to-third-wheel film Carnival Story.) So never mind that its central lyric isn’t timely in this hemisphere — the farewell here is to creating nostalgic 1980s pop out of nothing but texture and drift.