Crush!

It’s that time of year again. Here’s hoping that you have a special someone, or someones, to spend it with.*

And what better music to soundtrack simple, uncomplicated crushes than bright, sugary, twee ’90s indie pop?

We can save all that heavy, dark, ambiguous stuff for the inevitable later.

Up top – Stephin Merritt is typically excellent on 1994’s “Strange Powers”; ticking music-box melodies, precision rhyme schemes, and hilariously odd-yet-perfect imagery – is there a greater opening verse than this song?

On a Ferris wheel, looking out on Coney Island
Under more stars than there are prostitutes in Thailand
Our hair in the air, our lips blue with cotton candy
When we kiss it feels like a flying saucer landing

Now THAT’S songwriting.

Though this track manages to tell a little short story of its own:

Here’s a rush of giddy, headlong infatuation, from DC’s Unrest:

Keep repeating, keep repeating.

Something befittingly a little more mature from a later Mark Robinson/Bridget Cross project. Whatever you kids are using to send song mixes to your crushes these days (I assume there’s an app that laserbeams the tracks straight into their Google Glasses or something), I recommend including this gorgeous, dreamy duet, especially if you want to see your crush’s pants on your floor anytime soon:

(is it me, or is that chorus kind of a dreampop “Silly Love Songs”?)

Or, maybe you and your squeeze have been together a while, and you need to recapture some heat:

This riff is twisty, but the lusty sentiments are direct. Like a bucket of stars dumped into the universe, like birds singing:

God that’s beautiful; that it also commands me to dance like a fool ’round my office is just a bonus.

* And if you don’t? The hell with ’em, you’re better off without ’em anyway.