8 Tracks: To Keep Delicious Men Warm And Motivated This Nuclear Winter By Blood Sport

Pauline Oliveros was for listening what John Berger was for seeing. Each recalibrated and focussed our respective senses to the causal effect of external stimuli on our understanding of the world around us. Distinct from hearing, listening is a state in which we as the listener establish our place in our environment – as a situated agent of perception. Her compositions often consisted of accordion drones, teased apart and devotionally presented as they reverberated throughout the spaces in which they were born. This approach necessitates a contemplative engagement from the listener; the subtleties of the performance cannot be discerned from just flicking through the track on a streaming website. For Oliveros, we must arm ourselves with faculties which allow for an often seemingly chaotic world to become tangible and understandable. Only then can we hope to attune ourselves to potentials for positive action in the face of unpredictable futures.

Nothing tends to the soul and sets the mood quite like the dulcet tones of the hunky Adam Levine. Scramble for the words – Payphone – you know it will satisfy. A few scrambled clicks later and the player’s red line crawls from left to right as you settle into four minutes of tender pop perfection. The drums kick into action, they’re faster than remembered but questioning thoughts quickly dissipate as Levine’s soaring vocals deliver the famous hook. You hold each other in blissful harmony, everything’s going to be OK. But the pitch keeps rising, you know this wasn’t here originally. An synth ascending appears thrusting your heart into your mouth, what is happening? We’re standing on a precipice with no verse in sight, we’re suddenly no longer welcome in this country we used to call our own. The first hit. A bassline so sudden you skip a breath. You struggle to catch it as the next clout hits you from the other side. This time the fraternal embrace you have been sharing is severed. The vocals loop mockingly, taunting you that nothing will ever be the same. You reach for those around you as they slip further away, no low end this heinous could permit such passive cuddling. You’re thrown about in amongst the recoiling shudders, is this the end? No. Levine’s reassuring vocals return with a brevity only equalled by the speed with which they disappeared. Now they’re different – morphed in pitch and character in what can only be explained as a liberating transformation. This time you vigorously embrace the new. The tinkling keys remind you that existing parameters can be broadened through sprinklings of piano house. You realise this is now how things will be. Turning to your brothers in arms, you nod in agreement that you must seize this moment with aplomb. And when the bass returns, together you bathe in its abominable oscillations, for now you are free.

Nick has had the picture of Boris Blank, looking disdainful on a painted blue background looking over most of his activities in several houses for several years. Yello’s greatest achievement is that completely earnest sheen of uncool. It is certainly a collective goal to match them in being both featured on a ‘Classic Driving Songs’ CD compilation in service stations and be one of Mark Fell’s favourite bands. The track in question is from the brilliant segue record ‘You Gotta Say Yes To Another Excess’, positioned between euro-weirdness of the early LPs and Ferris Beuller fame found later. There’s only a few lyrics here, but the rhythm is strong and you don’t really want to get too distracted in the bunker – ‘Sensation’, ‘The Gorilla is the One’ (see cover), ‘No More Words’. Fingers on the lips, fingers on the hips.

A straight-forward no-brainer here. Heard once in a Ford Transit and then again immediately after Trumps’ election as played by Nick’s co-presenter on her edition of Sheffield Live’s Two Foot Left. An alarmingly relevant outline of ‘America’s Hero’ written just after Reagan’s first election that descends into a smooth dreamy pulse through overt delay effects at in the final third. Listen to how the hi-hat gently ups volume one section at the time. Perfect pacing, slow build, harrowingly prescient. America’s new cowboy is not the pink plastic cowboy that Jackie yearned after, and who knows what he might do? Let’s all hope the horse throws him into the unforgiving sand.

In the film Under the Skin for which this song was composed, the track’s titular theme is eerily absent. No love exists in the gulfs between the emotionless wandering of the protagonist and the macabre sexual murders she performs on males, each falling victim to their own lecherous desire. Yet the mood of Mica’s track suggests a longing emotion below the surface. It’s impossible to comprehend the synth moans that compose the song’s framework in a clinical way. They form an extra-terrestrial language, yearning for meaningful interaction in a foreign world in which consolatory actions melt into the void (quite literally). It reminds us of the hopeless yet enduring desire to share common meaning with our fellow earth-dwellers at a time in which often all that can be heard is a collective groan.

Irresistibly sensual, silky, wrap-around neo-soul to keep any geo-politically anxious man warm and pre-occupied this (nuclear) winter. As food resources dwindle, as ash settles on the ground around you, lie back and allow delicate piano chords to land across your chest, allow your back to arc to the taught plucking of big-bodied guitars, allow ecstatic choral moans to rush through you as the image of D’Angelo’s shining, sweat-drenched torso gradually reveals itself to your ever-widening eyes. Feel the tension of straining contemporary East-West diplomatic relations dissipate as you’re drenched in the rush of D’Angelo’s virtuosic aural performance.

Tina’s anthem: “Every time I hear this song, my heart swells in my chest and I have the confidence to paint my nails and put on a dress. I really hope that Trent feels the same. Don’t knock it until you’ve tried it”.

Unrelentingly banging mash-up from the futurist, vogue-channelling mind of Jasmine Infiniti. Responsible for some of the most energising, give-a-fuck sass to come out of our speakers over the last year, her tunes are the weaponry with which delicious men need to arm themselves as the post-nuclear winter dawn emerges from the dark night. Her tunes slay. She owns the delicious men, and makes delicious men feel like they’re gonna own other delicious men, in this visceral, spanking, percussively hyper-active frenzy. Lucky enough to have her reworking some of our material for a remix out next year; she has glimpsed the other side and delicious men worldwide best stand up and listen.