A relatively recent discovery for me, but I love the echoes to traditional Christmas music this one has (The sleigh bells and backing vocals at 3:07 are my favorite, especially as the backing vocals lead into a joyless “fa la la”), even as the subject matter is far more depressing and dark than the stories of Santa and goodwill that you’d expect from this time of year.
366 Songs 336: Christmastime
“It’s Christmas again, December is here…” as Aimee Mann sings in this somewhat delicate, prettily melancholy song that marks the beginning of a musical Advent Calendar on this here blog. Yes, between now and Christmas Day, it’s all holiday music all the time because, my friends, I love this time of year. And so, instead of the usual 366 Songs ramblings, expect Christmas Songs with little-to-no commentary. Just enjoy the most wonderful time of the year, dammit.
(Worth noting: This song gets first go not simply because of the “December is here” line, but because of the line that follows: “Hasn’t it been a wonderful year?” There’s something about Mann’s performance of that line that makes me unconvinced that she means it, and that always appeals to me. This year especially; it’s really not been a wonderful year, has it…? 2012, you’ve been trying to kill me and those I love all too often, it seems.)
366 Songs 335: Lazy Line Painter Jane
In a strange way, this song reminds me of McAlmont & Butler’s “Yes” – It’s the jangly guitar and the fact that this song just builds, just grows into an epic that’s irresistible and so exuberant and filled with a particular joy. I love the way it becomes so repetitive, the organ becoming a spiral of riff until it falls into the final notes and everything ends. This is one of those songs that never fails to make me happy, and make me want to dance, as silly as that may sound. This is the sound of the best of Scotland in my head, in many ways; I was never a massive Belle & Sebastian fan, but I shall always, always love them for this.
366 Songs 334: Yes
The song that returned the concept of the Wall of Sound to pop music in Britain in the mid-90s, McAlmont and Butler’s “Yes” was a glorious rejection of the jangly-guitar, Smiths and Beatles-obsessed aesthetic at the core of Britpop right as the country was at the peak of its Oasis adoration. Unlike the Gallagher Bros’ output, this is a wonderfully camp, layered song that updates “I Will Survive” for a generation that wished that Phil Spector had produced Gloria Gaynor’s classic.
Bernard Butler’s over-the-top production aesthetic, honed on Suede’s Dog Man Star, went into overdrive with this song; listen to how his traditionally dominant guitar gets lost amongst the strings and the drums, and David McAlmont’s luscious voice, milking the song for everything that it’s worth (The outro, with repeated “I feel well enough to tell ya/What you can/Do/With what you got”s is just epic, an exhausting, rapturous thing to listen to as it keeps building and building). It’s a breathless song that sounded out of time upon its first appearance, more ornate and intentional and grandiose than what we’d become used to, but all the more magical for that. Even seventeen years later, it still has a spectacular majesty to it.
366 Songs 333: I Don’t Know What’s Happened To The Kids Today
Based on the lyrics alone, I feel like I should hate Labi Siffre’s “I Don’t Know What’s Happened To The Kids Today.” It is, after all, the rantings of a confused and angry old man who doesn’t get the kids today – He even calls them “the kids today”! – and says things like “Didn’t have none of this crazy music/Didn’t have none of these crazy clothes/We didn’t have guys gettin’ high on the doorstep/We didn’t have none of those/No, no, no.” But this is a majestic song, a deconstruction of that attitude in which the music – initially, just Siffre’s repetitive, gentle-yet-insistent acoustic guitar – both softens and ultimately overwhelms the complaints and the bitterness. By the time you reach the strings, Siffre’s narrator has gone from a figure of contempt to a clearly sad, heartbroken man dealing with rejection from his family and unable to deal with it, and as he repeats “I don’t know what’s happened to the kids today” over and over, the music answers him with the sudden appearance of drums and bass, then strings, then horns, building to something that’s just beautiful; the promise of a new beginning that’s bolder than the hate and small-mindedness that’s come before. Like Super Furry Animals’ “No Sympathy,” a song that would come years later but which I’d hear first, this is something that provides its own meta-textual critique, a song that offers a hateful outlook and then emphasizes how small and petty it is without needing to use words at all.
I love this song.
366 Songs 332: We Are The Pigs
Another song that has emotional sense memories that threaten to overwhelm the actual music, “We Are The Pigs” has two lives for me; the song itself, with Bond theme-esque spider guitar and horns (Not to mention one of my favorite instrumental breaks in pop music – Listen to the way that Bernard Butler manages to up the drama with the rising guitar line from 2:10 through 2:16, and then BAM, it’s as if the lead guitar gets gently brought down again by the acoustic and rhythm guitars working together; I love that) and Brett Anderson being ridiculously camp and threatening (“As the smack cracks at your window/You wake up with a gun in your mouth” indeed, Brett), and the place the song has in specific friendships and the life I had at the time Dog Man Star came out.
I can’t hear this song without remembering Andy Barnett’s flat as he’d listen to the album before we went out on Monday nights to dance our cares away and pretend that we were more glamorous and attractive than we really were at the time (Well, me, anyway; Andy was always pretty fucking glamorous and attractive; suave and elegant, even). My initiation into Suede, and Britpop as a whole, perhaps, happened on those nights and nights like them. It feels like a lifetime ago, these days.
366 Songs 331: Selfless, Cold and Composed
“Selfless, Cold and Composed” is full of meaning for me; it’s one of the first times that Ben Folds Five sailed boldly towards the jazzy horizon in both a good (Those drums!) and bad (That piano solo at 3:17, before the strings come in to give it some structure, albeit one that we’ve already heard in an earlier break!) way, for one thing, and it’s a song where the chorus and verse play off each other in a way that doesn’t necessarily fit together well, which… may be intentional (“It’s easy to be” is so 1970s MOR in terms of melody that it sticks out like a sore thumb, but that’s possibly the point, considering that the line mocks the behavior of the person in question)?
Really, though, it’s a song that reminds me of the aftermath of the relationship I was in when Whatever And Ever Amen, the album this track comes from, was released. I remember listening to this with that early-20s sense of “Yeah, why aren’t you clearly upset about me like you should be?” that you get when you’re heartbroken and hurt and confused and don’t understand that whole dumping thing properly. That ridiculously strong emotional sense memory comes on every time I hear the song, and each time that happens, I fight the urge to track down the ex-girlfriend in question and apologize to her for being an idiot. Because, really; I was an idiot, in those days, and especially about her.
366 Songs 330: Sandy
Continuing my accidental trend of updated 1960s sounds, Caribou’s “Sandy” takes the beginnings of psychedelia and drone rock and matches them to a better beat to create something that crosses genres and decades; a mix of the ’60s, ’70s and ’80s that manages to sound like all of them at once, in its own way. There’s a similarity to the Chemical Brothers’ dalliances with psych pop here (especially something like “Let Forever Be,” which may be the most pop thing they ever did), especially with the drum samples, but it’s even more lively and fanciful, especially with the flute and the ephemeral vocal (Especially when it gets to that “I can’t believe what we found” interlude, which sounds as if it’s been lifted entirely from some fop pop from the mid ’60s when frilly shirts and velvet jackets were all the rage). That some power pop band didn’t hear this and immediately beg Daniel Snaith (AKA Caribou) to produce their latest album confounds me. Just imagine what could have been…!
366 Songs 329: Tonite It Shows
I have often referred to this as a Walt Disney song gone awry, because it has some instrumental touches that remind me of things from movies like Cinderella and similar classic Disney animated movies (especially the twinkling piano at the very end of the song); there’s also an epic sweep to the orchestral touches that go beyond the traditional pop use of full orchestras towards something more similar to movie soundtracks, these days. This is a melancholy song, a fragile song, that was the soundtrack to my life when I first heard it for reasons I can’t quite explain; I didn’t even really have anything in my life that it tracked to, at the time, but I found myself playing this on repeat over and over. I think it was desire more than true echo; I wanted my life to be filled with the passion and longing that’s present in “Tonite It Shows,” the possibility of magic peeking around the corner at every moment. Mercury Rev have never sounded better, to me.
366 Songs 328: The Generator
There’s something very Vince Guaraldi about the piano in “The Generator,” something that reminds me of “Linus and Lucy” or another of his track from the Peanuts holiday specials – A playfulness, perhaps, but also a wonderful looseness in the way it swings despite the taught, tense guitar it’s set against. The vocals in this song are somewhere in the middle, with Beach Boys-esque harmonies that emphasize the 1960s appeal of this period of Lilys’ history. The album this came from, The 3 Way, and the album that preceded it, Better Can’t Make Your Life Better, are two wonderful attempts to channel 1960s Britpop and modrock into something more timeless and also a little more weird; you get a sense of that with this song, and the nonsense lyrics that are hidden in amongst the pitch-perfect aural atmospherics of the whole thing. For a short while, Lilys understood the spirit of 1960s pop in a way that few ever manage.