Month: June 2012

Posted on

366 Songs 140: Beautiful Ones

By some Suede-y contrast, here’s the second single for Coming Up, their comeback album from… what, maybe two or three years after Dog Man Star, the last album with Bernard Butler…? Something like that. The band had two new members, Neil Codling and Richard Oakes – I can’t believe I can remember their names without looking it up, and feel suitably embarrassed about that, to be honest – who’d both taken on some co-writing duties with singer Brett Anderson, and Suede was re-created as a much shinier, less threatening thing to take advantage of the Britpop scene that was already beginning to decline. “Beautiful Ones” was the second single off the album and… it’s catchy, and it’s fine, but it lacks the presence of something like “Killing of A Flash Boy.” It’s lightweight and disposable, and for all the sly comedy of the lyrics (“Shaking their meat/To the beat/Yeah” and “Shaking their bits/To the hits/Oh” indeed), it’s also slightly embarrassing; a parody of the sexual ambiguity and danger of the band they used to be.

More depressingly, this was by far the best of the singles from the album, and probably the best of the tracks at all, with the possible exception of the (equally arch, equally camp) “She”:

Posted on

366 Songs 139: Killing of A Flash Boy

There’s something funny to me about the fact that my favorite Suede song wasn’t actually written as a song, as such. “Killing of A Flash Boy,” according to Bernard Butler – credited as co-writer, with Brett Anderson, and released as the b-side to “We Are The Pigs” just after Butler had left the band – is actually made up on chunks of unfinished music he’d been playing with, sewn-together Frankenstein-style after the fact. And, when you know that, you can actually hear it: Listen to the abrupt change of the instrumentation at 0:43, or 2:08, for example; without the vocals to soften it, you’d wonder if someone had changed the song you were listening to, the edit is so abrupt.

And yet, the end result works. The tension between the glam strut of the opening (Those drums, clearing the way for the foreboding guitar riff!) and the chorus, which feels extravagant in contrast, indulgent in a way that makes sense for such a violent song – it’s showing off, in its way – before falling back to the riff and menace of the verse again; the urban psychedelia of the bridge (Anderson’s voice, flanged-to-shit: “So think of the sea, my baby/Think of the sea as you murder me…”). And also, maybe most of all, possibly my favorite Suede lyrics of all. There’s something appropriately lyrical and mean about an opening like “All the white kids shuffle/To the heavy metal stutter/And go/Shaking on the scene/Like a killing machine,” as well as the threat of “That shitter with a pout/Won’t be putting it about no more.” It’s one of the few times, for me, that Anderson managed to inhabit a character that felt real and not overly idealized, but still worked with a kind of poetry.

Posted on

366 Songs 138: Morpha Too

There’s something about the final two songs on Radio City, the just-plain-amazing second album by Big Star, that feels both weirdly out of place and oddly prescient of what would end up happening on the never-officially-released, awkward Third/Sister Lovers; the rock and roll swagger of songs like “She’s A Mover” and “Daisy Glaze” (“You’re gonna die! Yes, you’re gonna die! Right now!”) gives way to the far more vulnerable, kind of wasted acoustic play of “I’m In Love With A Girl” and this one, “Morpha Too.” It’s such a charmingly simple song, arrangement-wise, with lyrics that are both sweet and somewhat disturbing (“I might call/Might call/I might need some help”). I’ve never quite known what to make of this song, beyond liking it… It makes me concerned, but in that sense, it’s the perfect bridge to the quiet horror of Third, I guess.

Posted on

366 Songs 137: Magic In The Air

A song that feels like summer, to me. Specifically, the summer Kate and I started emailing each other for the first time. The album that “Magic In The Air” comes from, “The Hour of The Bewilderbeast” had just been released and I would listen to it over and over again, with the sun streaming in the windows and writing long, nervous emails to send halfway across the world, wanting to believe in Damon Gough when he sang “Love is contagious/When it’s alright/Love is contagious…”

Posted on

366 Songs 136: 80s Life

There’s a lovely wistfulness in “80s Life,” in large part from the vocals (especially the swooping “ooooooh”s that start at 1:25) and the yawning melancholy in lines like “I don’t wanna live a war/That’s got no end in our time” and “Oh, Lord, can a stone/Be ballast for an aching soul?” But the arrangement behind the voices is wonderfully sweet, not ’80s in sound at all – something older, almost doo-woppy – and sparse, tentative and makes the song into the beautifully fragile thing that is ultimately is… especially as the song slowly climbs the stair towards the sleep of its end. I really, really appreciate the mixed emotions this song brings out of me, protectiveness, happiness and caution all at once.

Posted on

366 Songs 135: Memento Mori

There are many, many people who don’t like The Streets for one reason or another, but I admit more than a sneaking love for Mike Skinner and his laidback, lazy and occasionally shitty rapping. There’re parts of “Memento Mori” that are just horrible – The verse starting at 1:31 just doesn’t work – but the singalong chorus, wonderfully conversational opening and minimal backing are enough to make this a favorite of all of the Streets tracks I’ve heard.

It’s been that kind of week that “What was the question? Oh, yeah, memento mori” feels like an especially fitting phrase. Looooooong week.

Posted on

“The Name is WARHAWK, Mutants”

This may have been the first back issue I ever bought as a back issue, as opposed to something old that just happened to be available and I didn’t know any better. I was maybe ten years old, perhaps eleven, and just getting into the X-Men as a concept, and this cover looked absolutely awesome.