Song of the day: Quimby’s “The Ballad of Jerry”

My good old friend Daniel is in the top league inasmuch musical tastes are concerned (meaning, he’s got tastes similar to mine, of course, you shouldn’t think further than that, excellence is already guaranteed :-))- and that goes particularly for (Hungarian) classical or “underground” genres (pretty much the same, ain’t it? :-)), although he is doing a PhD in Harvard in another field than music :-). Inter alia, I got to first listen to ‘Anima Sound System’, live, at the Sziget 1999 festival, because of Daniel: and as I made it clear in an older post on this blog, I never regretted getting to know them. Quite recently (why only now?!- that makes me feel horribly ignorant…) he’s recommended to me this excellent underground Hungarian band, Quimby, and I testify that, after listening to all their pieces I could find online, I find this band awesome! Here’s the bit I found in English on their biography, informative enough for a start:

“Quimby is one of the most known underground music artists in Hungary. The group was born in 1991. In the beginning their music was mostly influenced by artists like Tom Waits. Later they made their own style, making their music more particular.”

Check out Quimby’s official website or another site with more information (unfortunately only in Hungarian, for now…). You can follow the link on their official website to a collection of representative videoclips, both from their early (Tom Waits- like) and from their most recent period (clips in .wmv format). Most these videoclips were also on YouTube at some point, but right now quite a few of them seem to have been removed due to copyright claims (the eternal and most annoying story about clips from YouTube!). Hence, I’ll place links to the .vmv files in what follows, but you can also check out some of the clips from YouTube here – certainly it goes faster with playing them in YouTube rather than downloading them via the site first.

Despite the fact that Tom Waits’s influence is omnipresent in their early work, I still like a lot some of those pieces, particularly several from the “Jerrycan Dance” album of 1995. I think that Quimby adds an original touch and several of those pieces are true masterpieces. One of my favourites and my choice as song of the day is “The Ballad of Jerry“ (lyrics here), which has a superb melodic line (you won’t find this clip at all on YouTube, unfortunately, so you do need to download the .vmv file if you want to listen to it); this song apparently used to be quite a hit among adolescents (and other ‘underground’ party lovers, of any age) in Hungary, back in the 90’s. Other pieces that I consider excellent (and, btw, all of them have very good videoclips- at some point I should make the new top of videoclips, after the one I’ve posted a while ago), in chronological order of the albums, are: “Finale“, “Party in my bones“, both also from the 1995 album, as the song of the day; “Rések” (sensational instrumental part!), from the 1996 “Majom-tangó” album; “Hol volt hol nem volt“, “Parafenomén“, both from the 1997 “Diligramm” album; “Androidő“, from the 1999 album “Ékszerelmére”; “Most múlik pontosan” (very interesting, both as song- with the reservation that I cannot fully follow the lyrics– and as videoclip; a 100% change from their previous work, I’d say, but a succesful change), “Autó egy szerpentinen” (also very interesting, a clear break with the earlier style, again excellent diversification, I’d say), both from their (most recent) 2005 album “Kilégzés”. In any case I shall definitely try to get hold of all Quimby’s albums. Enjoy!