Category: 366 Songs

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366 Songs 276: Strange News From Another Star

Coming late into the Blur album that saw Damon Albarn et al abandon the Britpop sound for something more influenced by British music of the 1970s than that of the ’60s (People at the time pointed to an American Alternative Rock influence, but this is David Bowie through and through), “Strange News From Another Star” is a song that sounds as delicate as the lyrics suggest (“I don’t believe in me/I don’t believe in me/All I’ve ever done is tame/Will you love me all the same?/Will you love me though it’s always the same?”). The album version of the song is almost determinately oppressive and dehumanizing, with the synthetic noises broken with the acoustic guitar only occasionally, sounding like a retro-future where the good guys lost, but I have long preferred this live version, performed solo by Albarn:

It’s far, far more melancholy than the original, but also prettier; it feels more hopeful than defeated, as if the news is strange now, but not necessarily permanently, and not necessarily the end of everything. “I’m lost, I’m lost” Albarn sings, but there’s a feeling in this performance that he could be found before too long.

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366 Songs 275: Tomorrow

More Sean Lennon from Friendly Fire, and the song that I find reminds me most of Elliott Smith from the album, whether it’s the shuffling drums and slowly loping guitar (Both of which remind me very strongly of “Stupidity Tries,” from Figure 8, for some reason) or the slightly off-kilter arrangement that makes the whole thing sound a little like a space-age lounge act that is slowly evaporating while their singer croons his pain away into the ether. It lacks the soul-burning qualities of Smith’s best stuff – and even his worst, let’s be honest – but there’s something more easy to relate to with Lennon’s relationship misery. After all, who hasn’t wished that they could put a break-up on hold just for one night to feel a little less lonely…?

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366 Songs 274: Dead Meat

I could’ve sworn I’d written about this before, but apparently not. Sean Lennon’s Friendly Fire was the album that got me really paying attention to him after years of his showing up on other people’s albums (Handsome Boy Modeling School! Deltron 3030!) out of nowhere. It’s the album in which his arch, hipsterness gave way to something that was more similar in sound to Elliott Smith (whose music was, of course, heavily influenced by Lennon’s father), and the result is rather lovely in places. Like “Dead Meat,” for example, a song that sweetly threatens and cajoles, disguising its bile behind a toy melody and sweeping strings (That moment at 3:40, when the strings come in for one last flourish? Man, I love that), making “You get what you deserve” sound less mean and more… what? Pleasant, happy karma? Perhaps.

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366 Songs 273: A Little Less Conversation



Ignore the remixed version from a decade or so ago; the (two different, oddly) 1968 versions by the King are far more fun, far more exciting to listen to than anything that could be recreated after the fact by producers and DJs. Elvis’ own contributions to both versions are the least of what’s on offer, especially when you consider that spectacular drum intro and the call and response from the horns in both (They’re essentially the same, but slightly different). This is a weird Elvis track, informed by the music of the time – especially soul music, which is weirdly fitting in some way, considering Elvis is one of the most well-known white appropriators of black music – and yet somehow outside of it, leaving it timeless and somewhat contemporary decades later in a way that most Elvis songs just… aren’t.

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366 Songs 272: September Gurls

It’s Kate’s birthday today, and so she gets this love song from Big Star’s second album, Radio City, about women born during September.

I say “love song,” but it’s such a wonderfully… macho song, lyrically. “I was your butch/And you were touched,” Alex Chilton sings at one point, later going on to struggle with that whole feelings thing (“I don’t know why/How can I deny/What’s inside?”) and boast that, of course, it’s all about the sex really (“Ooh, when she makes love to me”). But the posturing of the lyrics is at odds with the performance, all jangly guitars and harmonies and something more… soft, perhaps? Something more inviting than bravado? There’s a tension there, and it’s that tension that brings me back to this song so often, just as much as the melody and ease in singing along.

Anyway. Happy birthday to my very own September girl. I love you, you know.

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366 Songs 271: Overload

The first time I saw this song was on MTV at a friend’s house, before its release; the captioning was missed, so I didn’t know who it was or what the song was called, but just the guitar solo at 2:34 and bridge at 2:49 made me weirdly convinced that I had to find out who and what I’d just listened to. The truth turned out to be a girl band so manufactured that the members of the band these days contain none of these original members, and everything I liked in this song came from Massive Attack producer Nellie Hooper. That, in many ways, feels like the true pop experience.

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366 Songs 270: The King Is Half-Undressed

The album this song came from – Bellybutton – came out in… 1991, perhaps? And it was the soundtrack to my last year of high school, discovered via a tape-cassette given to me by a friend. This was my introduction to power-pop, I think, and this song was my introduction to Jellyfish. It’s got everything that I would end up loving about the band, from the humor in the lyrics (“She dots her ‘I’s with a smiley face/A work of art, in all but taste”) to the four-part harmonies and the jangly guitars, and I remember that I was hooked within seconds of hearing it for the first time. Maybe I heard it on the radio at first? I heard it and wanted to listen again, immediately, and then again and again and again. To this day, I want to be able to sing like the band sounds like in this song. I want to be able to make music like this all the time.

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366 Songs 269: Too Tough To Die

There are days when everything gets on top of you, and you find yourself feeling that worrying sense of vertigo, even as you know that you’re standing upright and theoretically perfectly fine. On those days, dear friends, Martina Topley-Bird has this song for you, a simple one in which she reminds you that – like herself, of course – you should consider yourself too tough to die. If you don’t find yourself wanting to sing along to the chorus of this one, I suspect you need a whole lot more self-belief.

(I love the lyrics of this song; “The strange fruit swing” is a wonderful euphemism that plays off the Billie Holliday song, and yet brings a really strange sense of bleak humor to it. The swing? Really?)

And if Martina’s version isn’t enough for you, maybe you need this spectacular cover from Neneh Cherry and the Thing, from earlier this year:

Holy moley. More songs should sound like the sound of a messy, violent fight inside your head.

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366 Songs 268: Bring The Light

The law of diminishing returns – Not to mention pop music logic – would suggest that the first single by Beady Eye (Essentially, Oasis except without Noel Gallagher, who left in a strop one night) would be terrible. After all, the band had been on a slow downward spiral for years, and Gallagher was always the musical heart of the band and the lead songwriter. How could anything from Beady Eye sound like anything more than an okay performance of shitty music?

To be fair, that’s a pretty apt description of everything off their first album with the exception of that first single, “Bring The Light.” Because, while it’s not pretty, “Bring The Light” is a song that I find myself weirdly adoring. Maybe it’s the unexpectedness – Here’s a song that’s driven by an unstoppable piano, female backing vocals and handclaps, three things that seem amazingly anti-Oasis. They’re definitely the hooks for what is otherwise a fairly ugly, misshapen song (Really, it just doesn’t work, structurally), but what hooks. They driving the song forward and pull you (me) along with it, even though part of you (me) is still thinking “Wait, is there actually a song here at all?”

Everytime I listen to this, I end up thinking that the backing vocalists and pianist should go off and form their own band, and be more interesting elsewhere. It’s a better fate.

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366 Songs 267: Darklands

One of those occasions where a cover version is so amazingly superior to the original where it’s almost embarrassing, Primal Scream’s mellow, backwards-adoration version of the Jesus and Mary Chain’s “Darklands” is a triumph of performance and, far moreso, production over original source material. Almost everything that makes the dark, sleepy and just-a-little unsettling Scream take on the material so compelling despite its apathy is original to their version, and when you listen to the original afterwards – as I did; I didn’t even know there was a Jesus and Mary Chain song of this name at all until the Scream’s cover – it just sounds kind of weak and shy in comparison.

The Primal Scream version was from the Vanishing Point/XTRMNTR period where the band could do no wrong, and you can tell. It’s just a beautiful take on what is, let’s be honest, not an especially wonderful original. Do do do, do do do.