Take Me From Crayons to Perfume

I've been spoilt with swoon-worthy female voices recently - such as Rita Calypso, Cristina Georgina, Bathing Beauty, Bel Divioleta and other chanteuses of the Siesta stable. But this morning I was reminded of how much I love Tim Yehezkely of The Postmarks' voice. Where she sang "don't worry about a thing, cause every little thing's gonna be alright" in "Three Little Birds" it really made me lighten up. Their album from last year was one of my favourites and now they are soon back with a new cd, called By the Numbers. It's a series of 12 covers of songs that have their respective number in the title. Eg track six is The Cure's "Six Different Ways". The brilliant idea of doing a Wedding Present (releasing one song every month of the year) but for free turned out be nothing but a silly ploy however. It would cost considerably more to subscribe to eMusic for the twelve months than to buy the cd which now compiles all twelve tracks! And people who were already subscribers have been rubbish at passing the mp3s on to us normal people...

Anyway, the cd is very interesting even though most of the versions aren't nearly as good as their own first class material. Mainly because you get to hear them trying out things they would never do otherwise. Cause apart from the more or less expected bits of samba, musical and soundtrack there are surprises like the Ride and Jesus & Mary Chain covers. And a few up-tempo songs! Arguably, Yehezkely's voice really comes into its own on the slow, atmospheric numbers, but just to hear her sing something like Blondie's "11:59" scores higher than The Pearly Gatecrashers on the Cute Scale! They land very close to Saturday Looks Good to Me on this song and my favourite on the album: "7-11". I'd never heard The Ramones' orignal as I only bothered to buy the first two lps back in the day (meaning when I was 14, and not in 1976!), so I had to track it down now. I have to say The Postmarks' version is roughly 6.3 times better. Try your multiplication on this.

CLOUD 74 The Postmarks - 7-11