Welcome to “On The Flippity-Flop,” where your Idolators spotlight unjustly ignored B-sides, bonus tracks, compilation contributions, and EP cuts. Send your suggestions to tips@idolator.com.
ARTIST: Solex
SONG: “Shady Lane”
FIRST APPEARANCE: Everything Is Ending Here: A Tribute To Pavement, 2003
WHY IT SHOULD HAVE BEEN AN A-SIDE: The Dutch electro-experimentalist Elisabeth Esselink was last seen scoring Who’s Afraid Of Virginia Woolf? in Amsterdam, but her catalog has established her as one of the best loop-twisters in the game. Solex’s high-mania cover of Pavement’s “Shady Lane” gives the song a huge shot of adrenaline, turning it into a roller-coaster ride that travels right through the peaks of ’90s indie rock:
Solex - Shady Lane [MP3, link expired]
Solex [MySpace]
Oh Solex, how I miss thee.
My dad has a Solex (French moped) he bought in 1973, and it has always played a part in family folklore [along with my brothers drunkenly breaking the deck off the back of the house and the Parkers' divorce], so I have always approached the idea of this act with a sense of weird friendly familiarity, from when I first read of it in, when, 1998?
And yet, to this track, I say thee “meh!”
Weird how that works.