Category: 366 Songs

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366 Songs 181: Accelerator

I still love this song from Primal Scream’s “seminal” XTMNTR album from 2000, which does all the MC5 posturing that you’d want but doesn’t forget to try to be awesome in the process.

The guitar solo alone is worth the mental price of admission, but really: the whole thing is pretty spectacular, no matter where or when you slice it. It’s entirely retro, but feels contemporary even twelve years later, purely through force of will and some wonderfully intense performances (There’s something enjoyable about the fact there are actually harmony vocals on the “Come on! Come on!” parts, as if shouty agit-rock needed a Supremes influence in there). The production is suitably grimy – Can you imagine a version of this with a grunge-esque mix or without the feedback, which is a large part of the architecture of the song? – and, really, the only slip-up anywhere is the fade at the end. If ever a song needed to go until it just… broke down, then this is that song. “Into the future! Into the future!” indeed.

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366 Songs 180: Zoom!

This is a spectacularly overblown song that should, by all rights, collapse under its own weight – especially as the choir(s) come in at 3:58, and the whole thing starts sounding like a stoned take on a Bond theme from Bizarro World – but somehow the momentum keeps it going even as things start falling apart (I’d say around 5:11 is where it really starts shedding pieces, and feeling like a rocket that’s trying to achieve orbit). But what this song has always been about for me, is the electric piano. Seriously, by the time you reach 6:24 and there’s just the awesome jamming/collapsing piano solo, I’m gone, man. I love that so, so much. More songs should be ready to give you the full breakfast that this one does.

(Somewhat randomly, but worth pointing out: This is the lead track from Super Furry Animals’ Love Kraft album, and it definitely puts you in the mood to expect something epic. If you are listening to the album for the first time as a result of this song, I have a word of advice for you: Stop after this song. Everything else on the album is a terrible letdown after this.)

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366 Songs 179: Suckers

There’s something to be said for a good song that builds before your ears, adding instruments and depth as if unfolding before you. Super Furry Animals’ “Suckers” is a fine example of this, adding a particularly plaintive vocal from Gruff Rhys and the occasional aural joke as it grows into full bloom by its end (The showy guitar effect at 2:41 after the lyric about “power ballad songs”), but underneath it all, a simple little heartbroken song about the end of a love affair. “It’s over/And we’d just begun,” Rhys sings somewhere between tongue-in-cheek showmanship and sincerity, “Oh, we’d just begun.”

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366 Songs 177: I Saw Her Again (Last Night)

If any musical act did any more to promote having four singers in the band than the Mamas and the Papas, I’d like to find out more about them. “I Saw Her Again (Last Night)” has this great complexity in its vocals that goes beyond simple harmonizing, or even call-and-response, although both are in there. There’s an architectural quality to the way they’re used, with voices building voices, adding up to this amazing thing, this cathedral of sounds.

It’s helped by a string arrangement that’s just the right side of syruppy; listen to the slide they start at 1:46 as the vocals do their “And it makes me feel.” There’s something in the way everything goes together than just works, even though it likely shouldn’t.

Everytime I listen to the Mamas and the Papas, I always feel like I should listen to them more, and I never ever get around to doing that properly. There’s always so much other stuff to take care of, instead. One day, one day…

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366 Songs 176: People Are Strange

What’s strange – appropriately, considering the song – about the Doors is the obsessive quality that fans of the band have, the idea that there’s something special and unique about the band. They’re talking about Jim Morrison, of course, because as “People Are Strange” demonstrates, the music that accompanied him is close to the kinds of things that bands like the Loving Spoonful, the Zombies and even the Monkees were putting out at the same time.

I don’t mean that as an insult; I love that kind of music, and actually find more interest in it than in Morrison’s louche vocals. But it’s funny that Doors devotees are the kinds of people who’d make a case for the band being different from their contemporaries when they’re so amazingly similar. Listen to the plinky-plonk piano here, or the guitar solo at 0:58 that could’ve easily come from John Sebastian or someone similar; there’s a genericism in American rock and pop from this time, a similarity in form and sound, and the Doors don’t come anywhere close to escaping that in this song.

Of course, the Doors’ version is still superior to the Echo and the Bunnymen version that came from the soundtrack to The Lost Boys, which takes the original and somehow makes it sound like the Stray Cats have had their way with it, even with the hilarious instrumental break that tries to insert the psych break that the Doors were so beloved for:

This may have been the version of the song I first heard at age 12, but still. Could do better, Mr. Echo.

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366 Songs 175: That’s The Way God Planned It

I’m not the most religious person – Is it agnostic, to believe in something, but not necessarily have any love for the organized religions as such? If so, then, yeah; that’s me – but this has long been one of my favorite songs, and it’s all because of the performance. Billy Preston was, for awhile, not just a spectacular keyboard player (Seriously, just listen to him here) but an amazing vocalist and one working in a style that put him somewhere in the middle of an imaginary spectrum between the Beatles and Sly and The Family Stone… which is to say, pretty much my ideal kind of music. The That’s The Way God Planned It and Encouraging Words albums that he released through Apple, both produced by (and featuring guitar from) George Harrison, are two of my favorite albums of all time, and “That’s The Way God Planned It” shows why. There’s something so effortless about the way this song sounds, but so insistent and irresistible, with Preston sounding so… happy, I guess?

There’s joy in Preston’s music; the joy of performance, the joy of life, the joy of God, maybe…? But it’s contagious. There may be bands and performers who are closer to my heart than Billy Preston, but I’m not sure that there are any who make me happier.

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366 Songs 174: Are You Blue Or Are You Blind

There’s something so amazingly “Britpop”-py to the sound of this song, the particular sound of the jangly guitars and the barely present bassline (Poor Paul McCartney, whose bass was so present in the Beatles’ music and so ignored when it came to the 1990s movement so inspired by that band) and the somewhat whiny vocal. But despite all of that, it’s one of those songs that gets damned with faint praise; it’s a “agreeable” and “nice enough” song, you know?

That was always a problem for the Bluetones, in a way; their charms were gentle and you had to be open to them. They were never a band who would force themselves into your heart, but if you were in the right mood and willing to fall for a new old sound, they’d be there with reliable if unspectacular music that felt cosy and comfortable. Listen; this song even has a “ba ba ba ba” bit that anyone can sing along to.

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366 Songs 173: Apple Carts

Still tired, still ready to disappear for the weekend and enjoy my invisibility from the Internet and work for a couple of days (Not that there aren’t songs lying ahead for your enjoyment tomorrow and Sunday, because there are; I really am trying to catch up, I swear), but I thought that this song made for both a nice contrast to “The Puritan” earlier and also an aural description of my state of mind after this weird week of work. Damon Albarn, you’ve definitely had an odd and varied year in terms of releases…

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366 Songs 172: The Puritan

No time to write today, because I’ve made the (selfish?) promise to myself that I’d rather wrap up work in as timely a manner as possible and there’s still a bunch of work left to do. But this song has been going around in my head with increasing regularity over the week, like a slow burn earworm, and so I thought I’d share it with you so it can burrow inside your brains, as well:

“Are we institutionalized by the demands of today?/In our regalia, are we okay?” feels curiously like something John Lydon would have written, decades ago, if he were more humanistic and less angry, don’t you think?