Sometimes, I give myself more work to do than is strictly necessary when writing these posts, and this week is no exception. In the run-up to Valentine’s Day, I asked my friends for suggestions for “filthy” songs, and nearly got buried in an avalanche of over 300 suggestions.

But that many suggestions needed more than ten songs to be used, and my wife came up with a great idea: why not a worksafe and a non-worksafe /Tuesday Ten? So this week’s is in two parts, for perhaps the first time: a Safe for Work version, and a Not Safe For Work version (click through for the other below). Read one, the other, or both!

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/amodelofcontrol.com now has a Patreon page, at this stage purely as a potential way of helping to cover the running costs of the site. There is absolutely no compulsion to do so: if you feel you can chuck a small amount to the site each month, that would be appreciated.

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Thanks, as always, to everyone who suggested songs. It took days to get through them all, and make a final selection…

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A quick explanation for new readers (hi there!): my Tuesday Ten series has been running since March 2007, and each month features at least ten new songs you should hear – and in between those monthly posts, I feature songs on a variety of subjects, with some of the songs featured coming from suggestion threads on Facebook.

Feel free to get involved with these – the more the merrier, and the breadth of suggestions that I get continues to astound me. Otherwise, as usual, if you’ve got something you want me to hear, something I should be writing about, or even a gig I should be attending, e-mail me or drop me a line on Facebook (details below).

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/SFW – /NSFW

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/Halestorm
/Do Not Disturb
/Vicious

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While the subtext of this song is absolutely clear, this is technically safe for work. Even though it suggests having no-strings sex in various places, hints at threesomes being better, hidden tattoos, but as there is no swearing and it isn’t particularly explicit…

I’m not enormously familiar with Halestorm – a few bangers like Mayhem aside – but this slower-paced track is a lot of fun, particularly coupled with the video, which is riffing on both Hammer Horror and the Rocky Horror Picture Show, with Lizzy Hale in particular having a ball in it.

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/Queens of the Stone Age
/Go With The Flow
/Songs for the Deaf

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Queens of the Stone Age are the band of recent times that stuck closest to the age-old rock mantra of “Sex, Drugs and Rock’n’roll”. Many of their greatest songs are about sex or drugs, or both, and they’ve long rocked harder than any of their peers. So naturally, them featuring this week was a given, and this song is a more subtle one than some of the others featured, for sure.

Go With The Flow isn’t, at first glance, a particularly filthy song: a song about post-relationship breakdown and self-destruction, but Josh Homme’s plaintive delivery, the dirty rhythm that inspires something in pretty much everyone, oh, and the less-than-subtle video by London collective Shynola, that uses a red, white and black palette and as many sexual metaphors and imagery that they can cram in within three or so minutes.

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/Missy Elliot
/Work It
/Under Construction

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Missy and Timbaland working together at their peak were basically untouchable: with killer single after killer single, and a distinct sense of fun and playfulness flows through that era of singles either side of the millennium. One of the best, and cheekiest, is the marvellous, old-school flow of Work It, which manages to sound both futuristic and retro at the same time.

The song itself is Missy making a sexually suggestive song, proving that this doesn’t just need to be the preserve of male rappers, but makes hilarious use of innuendo (those elephant noises!) and slang to keep things safe for work – while leaving you in no doubt what she’s talking about. Did hip-hop ever sound so fun?

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/Depeche Mode
/Sea of Sin (Tonal Mix)
/Violator (Deluxe)

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A sign of the riches Depeche Mode found themselves with on their megahit Violator, is that the B-sides and odds and ends that were collected on the 2006 reissue of the album were, for the most part, easily good enough to have been on the album. One such track is the pulsating, sultry Sea of Sin, a song which is drenched in want, and Dave Gahan perhaps never sounded sexier than he did here, a voice wracked with desire.

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/Deftones
/You’ve Seen The Butcher
/Diamond Eyes

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I suspect my wife is far from alone in finding Chino Moreno’s vocal delivery on many of his songs to be filthy and sexy in equal measure, and there were arguably a number of songs that I could have included this week. You’ve Seen The Butcher growls and shakes with lust, a tale of an after-dark tryst where little seems to be said, as it doesn’t need to be. Chino’s voice soars and breaks, while the music crashes like waves and it sounds hot as hell.

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/FKA Twigs
/Striptease
/EUSEXUA

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Suggested by a couple of people this time around, the minimalist electronics of FKA Twigs very much has the feel of after-dark music – or in other words, the kind of music to soundtrack sex. As far as I can tell, Striptease is hardly the only song by FKA Twigs about sex and the act of sex, but there’s definitely something filthy about this song, as elements of striptease are used as apparent metaphors for intense, no-holds barred sex. The video is less obvious, and at points downright surreal…

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/Micah P. Henson
/Take Off That Dress For Me
/Micah P. Hinson and the Pioneer Saboteurs

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This Alt-folk artist appears to have had a turbulent life, at least before he immersed himself in making music, but this song just oozes sensuality, some feat when it’s just a man and a guitar. A plea for love and affection, even if just for one night, where a night of passion and release can make all the other troubles melt away, just for a short time. Probably the slightest song featured this week, but it certainly earned its place.

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/My Bloody Valentine
/Soft As Snow (But Warm Inside)
/Isn’t Anything

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There was always something sensual about My Bloody Valentine amid the noisy chaos – particularly on the glorious Loveless – but on the earlier, rawer material, things are a bit more explicit and easier to gauge. The opening track to their debut album is a perfect case in point: a song that is obviously about sex, and the act thereof, but broadly exists in metaphors and the guitars drone and sweep across the mix, and the drums tap out a harsh, unforgiving rhythm.

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/Rammstein
/Dicke Titten
/Zeit

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Not as filthy a song as it first appears: as is so often the way with R+ songs, it helps to be able to understand German, and particularly the nuance of the lyrics. If you just know the title, you might think the wurst (sorry). But the song is actually kinda sweet: from the point of view of an older man, past his prime and destined to live out his last years lonely, and the song is about what he’d really like: a larger breasted woman with which to live out his years.

The video is an absolute hoot: playing into the unexpected oompah-band sound that the song incorporates, it takes us into the mountains, complete with lederhosen, busty barmaids and alpine horns…

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/Pulp
/Live Bed Show
/Different Class

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We close off this week with one of the unsung songs on Different Class, that picks up the seedy edge that Jarvis Cocker was always so go at. This gentle, almost sixties-orchestral pop song is from the point of view of a bed, that once upon a time got a whole lot action on it (“the headboard banging in the night“), but nowadays sees little action at all. Indeed it switches from those bawdy descriptions of the past, to an examination of depression and loneliness that when you listen a bit closer, is desperately sad.

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/SFW – /NSFW

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