Easily my favorite track of the (rather impressive) new Bobby Womack album, “Jubilee” mixes an old-school spiritual vocal format with an especially inorganic backing – Part of me thought, at first, that this was definitely one of the Damon Albarn-produced tracks, because of the clear “cheap drum machine” aesthetic in the backing, but as we get the synth cymbals at the end, I’m not so sure – to create something that feels timeless and universal, bringing generations together with some kind of hymn to self-belief and humanity. Even if the structure of this was not so compelling, though, Womack’s voice would still stop me in my tracks. The man sounds incredible; this song does, too.
366 Songs 191: The Real Thing
And here’s to reworking/detourning advertising jingles. DJ Shadow and Cut Chemist’s Product Placement is a really enjoyable album, fucking around with found material created to sell you things and turning it into something that’s as much commentary on that as it is music in its own right. From that, “The Real Thing” is likely my favorite track; it’s actually one of the more straightforward mash-ups on the album, just two different versions of “It’s The Real Thing,” the most famous one by the New Seekers and the genuinely amazing Ivor Raymonde Orchestra one from the early 1970s. For the most part, the Raymonde Orchestra version carries the whole thing, and you can understand why when you listen to the original:
Seriously, how great is that? Cheesy, yes, but just awesome. Listen to that drum break at 2:16!
For completeness, here’re the New Seekers:
That has a charm in itself, doesn’t it…? With those ingredients, how could any musical cake fail to be delicious? Much tastier than Coke, that’s for sure.
366 Songs 190: The Number Song
For some reason, I remember this being the soundtrack of the year of my Masters degree, or at the least the end thereof. I’m not sure if history actually agrees with me on that; I suspect it may have been released after that year of weirdness and discomfort was over, but I don’t want to ruin things with reality by checking. DJ Shadow’s Endtroducing… was a frustrating album for me, in large part because it didn’t have the ADD kineticism and intensity of this song all the way through – Although part of me wonders how listenable an album it would’ve been if it had – but this remains the one DJ Shadow track that will forever justify his entire career for me. I adore this track, with its single-minded purpose to make you want to shake your butt and the off-kilter way it goes around making sure that happens.
Also spectacular: Cut Chemist’s remix, which adds more old-school R&B (especially those horns):
366 Songs 189: Once Around The Block
There’s something so appealing about the way that this song sounds so dated in every way aside from the lead vocal: The multi-tracked guitars sound like something from the 1970s, and the backing vocals sound like a Swingle Singers recording that never got released, but they work so well together it’s all forgiven. Add Damon Gough’s warm, lackadaisical vocal over the top, and what you have left is a sweet, somewhat sloppy, song that sounds like something you can’t quite remember, which is pretty much its best selling point.
366 Songs 187/188: I Was Wrong/You Were Right
These are, officially, two songs despite the fact that they’re obviously meant to be listened to together (Note that the first line of “You Were Right” starts “And you…” as the continuation of the last sentence from “I Was Wrong”). Damon Gough’s musical career has been filled with more than enough missteps and wrong turns than most, and the album that these songs come from (Have You Fed The Fish?) feels like it was the start of that tendency; even in these two songs – specifically “You Were Right,” which is the more substantial of the two – there’s a meandering quality and aimlessness to everything here, underneath the lush strings and excitement of the performance. The song is the musical equivalent of someone telling a story, adding “And then!” after every event, giving the thing a breathlessness and monotony that it doesn’t really deserve. Despite that, though, there’s a nice goodwill to this song, as with most Badly Drawn Boy songs. You want to like it, because it’s nice and you get the idea that Gough is a good guy, under everything.
(Worth pointing out: Gough lifted lines from this song and spun them out into a completely different song on the same album, which is either genius or a sign of creative exhaustion. That other song, “Tickets to What You Need” is also a lot of fun, another of the good songs from Have You Fed The Fish?:
How genuine, I wonder, were the repeated “What’s wrong with me?”s in this song, at the time…?)
366 Songs 186: I Guess The Lord Must Be In New York City
If you’re thinking “This song sounds really familiar…” then that’s no accident; Harry Nilsson wrote and recorded it as something close to a rip-off of his cover version of Fred Neil’s “Everybody’s Talkin'”, pretty much. There was a particular reason why, of course: In the early ’70s, the makers of the movie Midnight Cowboy had, apparently, issued something resembling an open call for submissions for its theme song during its post-production phase to replace Nilsson’s version of “Everybody’s Talkin'” – used as musical stand-in during editing – for Academy Award purposes before final release. Hoping to land a lucrative deal with a song he’d actually written, Nilsson created this song to be an as-close-as-dammit contender. For whatever reason, it didn’t take – Also created for this reason, and also discarded, was Bob Dylan’s “Lay Lady Lay,” fact fans – and the moviemakers stuck with “Everybody’s Talkin'” for the final release. From my point of view, it was the wrong choice: I’ve always had this odd relationship with the song “Everybody’s Talkin'” – I’ve kind of liked it, but there’s always been something about it that never quite sat right with me. Thankfully, there’s this song to swoop in and save the day, providing everything I like about the Nilsson version but adding a melody and lyric that I appreciate more. I think it’s the wonderful fall during “Well, here I am Lord, knocking at your back door…” (I can’t hear that part without mentally singing along “bum bum bum BUM”).
366 Songs 185: Your Reverie
I suspect that the phrase “lo fi” would/should be used in connection with Kelley Stoltz’ music; there’s something charmingly simple and shambolic about it, retro – that riff, for some reason, feels like it could be something from a Beatles song before the days of Rubber Soul – but there’s also a touch of early Elvis Costello in there, especially with the organ in the mix. Originality isn’t the buzzword here; that seems to be “earworm,” like so many of Stoltz’ songs. He’s more of a magpie than a creator, but his thievery is done in such a way that it feels disarming and worthy, in some way.
366 Songs 184: Full Of It
This one turned out to be a grower; it’s from Netherfriends’ free EP of songs built around Harry Nilsson samples, which meant that I was almost guaranteed to dig it, but for some reason this one left me flat until the other night, when that riff just got stuck in my head, looped around and sounding wonderful. I love that it sounds simultaneously like a Nilsson song from the ’70s and something from this year, as if the distance between the two wasn’t over three decades.
366 Songs 183: Ode To The Big Sea
Normally, I am not a fan of jazz noodling and music that goes nowhere fast, but there’s something about the Cinematic Orchestra’s “Ode to The Big Sea” that wins me over, every single time. It’s the loneliness and searching of the central riff, which comes and goes throughout the song, I think. It’s something that’s classically “jazzy,” but when happening over that particular perpetually shuffling drumbeat, becomes something weirdly contemporized in my head. The original recorded version might explain what I mean, more, with the obviousness of the samples underscoring the “acid jazz”-ness of the whole thing, with the atonal riff feeling as if they’re as Sun-Ra inspired as anything else; it suddenly seems less trad fusion jazz, and more something that you could imagine coming from Mocean Worker.
It’s that tension between timeframes that fascinates me, I think.
366 Songs 182: My Mind’s Eye
One of my favorite things about this song is that it was apparently released despite the Small Faces’ wishes; the version that everyone knows was a demo that management put out as a single because they wanted a follow-up to the band’s previous single sooner than the band could come up with. That might explain why it’s really only half a song, with the other half being what’s essentially a rip off of “Ding Dong Merrily On High” with “In my mind’s eye” replacing “Hosannah in excelsis” (This was the band’s 1966 Christmas single, amusingly enough; clearly, someone had a sense of humor) And yet… This is a great little psych pop song, even in unfinished two-minute form, as much because of the energy in the performance and the spectacular organ that the Faces had going on back then. It makes you wonder what other greatness we’ve missed from the band because it never went past the demo stage, doesn’t it?
Strange but true, I first heard the song as a (far inferior) cover from Britpop wannabes, Northern Uproar:
They totally butcher it with their sub-Oasis clodstepping, don’t they? So much so that, when I first heard the Small Faces version later that year, I didn’t even make the connection that they were in fact the same song. Just imagine how much musical greatness we have lost because Oasis were so popular back in the 1990s…