There’s something in Robert Schneider’s vocals in every The Apples in Stereo song that feels as if it turns what could be a classic, sparkly and sparky pop song into something far sleepier. Listen to the rifftastic opening to “What’s The #?” and keep going until Schneider starts singing, and you can feel the energy in the song shift downwards. It’s a weird and wonderful gift; even when he starts screaming “‘Bout you and me!” at 1:28, there’s still something really laidback happening.
Robert Schneider, then: Power-pop’s most lethargic frontman.
There are songs you here, and just know that – no matter what else – you’ll always love their creators for. Such it was with “The Man Don’t Give A Fuck,” a song that should, by all rights have disappeared into limbo, but instead became the song that made Super Furry Animals’ reputation.
The song was originally meant to be a b-side to “If You Don’t Want Me To Destroy You,” the final single from the band’s first album, but was pulled at the last minute when Steely Dan refused to approve the sample that’s the basis for the song’s chorus (That “You know they don’t give a fuck about anybody else”? That’s from Steely Dan’s “Show Biz Kids”:
“Showbusiness kids/Making movies of themselves/You know they don’t give a fuck/About anybody else,” it goes, in a lovely 1970s accusation of a culture that’d really take root a decade later. Oh, friends, you were so far ahead of your time, and no-one really listened anyway). Weirdly, wonderfully, the band persisted in trying to get the sample cleared, eventually giving Dan’s Donald Fagan an impressive 95% of the songwriting royalties and releasing the track as their Christmas single for 1996, complete with a sticker telling listeners with sensitive ears “Warning! This track contains the word **** 50 times!”
It also contains doo-wop harmonies, sleigh bells and the first sign of the anger that would come to the fore in later releases: “Out of focus ideology/Keeps the masses from majority,” the second verse goes before it complains about “Experts, brainwashed, tumble-dried.” The result? A protest song that’s never entirely explicit about what it’s protesting, and so becomes a wonderfully versatile fuck-you to authority and oppression in general, an expression of anger as an energy that you can dance and shout to as much and as loudly as you want. Wonderfully, despite being entirely unsuited to radioplay – There were edited versions that either removed the numerous “fuck”s, or in one great instance, replaced them with someone saying “monkeys” – it made it to #22 in the top 40.
Never underestimate people’s desire to have a revolution they can dance to, apparently.
Worth pointing out: When this song was played live, at least for the period where I’d be seeing the band as often as possible, this would be the final song of the night, and would last somewhere in the region of 10 minutes or so at least, with the band leaving the stage after the song as it sounds here, but Cian Ciaran keeping the Steely Dan loop going and seeing where he could take the song from there. We’d dance for as long as we could.
I first heard this song as a bootleg, downloaded from some site ahead of the release of Phantom Power back in… what, 2002? 2003? And I remember thinking, at the time, that this really was the ultimate Super Furry Animals song – It’s got the trad band bit, with the harmonica and the electronic piano and the guitars and drums with Gruff singing sweetly over the top (Even if what he’s actually singing is somewhat less than sweet: “I see/Televisions/Pretty pictures/Of starvation,” he sings at one point, almost making it sound an attractive proposition. Also, “I see fractures/I see fragments” remains one of my favorite lines of anything, ever), as well as the techno breakdown and the 1970s retro moment and everything that the band does so well. As a song, it’s a wonderful journey, evolving from the sampled circus sounds at the start to the glamorous, Bond theme-esque strings at the end that fall apart, drip into nothingness. In many ways, it was all downhill for the band from here – Certainly, the next album, Love Kraft, was a disappointment when compared to Phantom Power – but, really, what an incredible way to go out.
There’s something about the guitar sound in “Ice Hockey Hair,” especially the opening noodling, that makes me think of songs from the 1970s, when guitarists weren’t afraid to attempt long-haired, looping beauty instead of riffs or distortion pedals or noise. I say that semi-jokingly, but there’s something appealing to me about the lack of self-consciousness in prog-rock that feels missing in the post-punk music that followed, and that indescribable something is one of the things I like so much about Super Furry Animals; a lack of embarrassment in following their musical bliss, perhaps, even if said bliss takes them into places like a seven-minute long song about table tennis and unfashionable haircuts filled with autotuned vocals (back in 1997, before they were everywhere!), Stooges-esque choruses and a wonderfully inviting schizophrenia when it comes to what decade the song belonged to. The answer, of course, was “the decade you’re living in right now.”
Now that you’re here, tell me you’re a non-believer, as the song says.
“Mr. Zebra” almost always, without fail, takes me to “Music Box,” for some reason. The quirky female singer-songwriter with a piano connection, maybe? Or perhaps that this song feels as short and as playful – or more playful – as the previous Tori Amos one, with Regina Spektor just playing around, throwing her vocals around (The lyric becoming vomit noise towards the end) and telling the musical equivalent of a shaggy dog story. It’s hard not to be charmed by this, at least for me.
It’s wonderfully short; at less than two minutes (Closer to 1:30), it certainly leaves you wanting more.
There’s something about that “Figure it out” line, with the piano forcing it down, turning it into four plateaus (“Fig Ure It Out”) that then hits bottom and bounces back with the “She’s-” that immediately follows, the bounce underscored by the brass.
The brass arrangement! I love brass when it’s well done, and here it’s especially well done, subtle yet firmly present, offering an unusual sound in pop music but also a comforting nostalgia.
Without a doubt, my favorite Tori Amos song… Not that that’s an admittedly long list, I admit, but still.
I was prepared to like this song for its epic title as much as anything else, when I discovered it; there’s something wonderfully funny and romantic about the pessimistic take on optimism it offers up, after all. But thankfully, the song itself lived up to its name; it’s a love song to pop music, a hyperactive, ever-changing thing that moves through sounds and arrangements as it tries to assure that it’ll be there to try and please no matter what, cynically and wide-eyed at the same time. “If you wanna sing/Tell me what you wanna sing/And I’ll play/Yeah, I’ll play,” the singer explains, “Speed it up/Or slow it down/If you want/We’ll change the sound,” explaining the shifts in the song as meta-commentary on the lyrics, which are themselves meta-comments on the need for bands to twist and turn in order to sell as much as they are pleas for the lovelorn to win their objects of affection.
All this, plus a tribute/rip-off of the speeded-up piano break from the Beatles’ “In My Life” at 1:27. Winning my heart was much easier for this song than landing men on the moon.
Another melancholy song of love and loss; I’m not sure why I’m in the mood for this kind of music today, but it doesn’t reflect any deeper emotional trauma as far as I know. What appeals to me about “Hate It Here” is likely a cultural thing that wasn’t intended. It sounds, for want of a better way to put it, like a AOR song that belongs in the 1970s, what with the electric piano and the guitar lines, and that – just like “If We Were Words,” for that matter – makes the lyrics seem more out of place, until you get to the chorus, when the song shifts gears like a bizarro “I Want You (She’s So Heavy)” and starts grinding in what feels to me like comedic self-flagellation.
The mundane details of what’s “missing” throughout the song appeal, as well; not just because it’s true, that the absence of a lover makes itself known in the small things as much as (moreso?) than the bigger ones, but also because it allows for some fun detourning of blues song construction. Lines like “I check the phone/I check the mail/I check the phone again and I call your mom” have the taste of honesty as well as just being funny. Cheap holidays in other people’s misery, indeed, but at least this time we’re all invited.
There need to be more songs like this, I think; hopelessly romantic, but songs for non-lovers for whatever reason. The way the song sounds is gentle and stereotypically “love song”-ish, with Rhys’ warm voice and the simple arrangement that sounds old-fashioned (That falling piano!), but the lyrics are more… hurt, more guarded and that appeals to me. “I will always wonder/How life would be if we never had met/Things would be easier/But dull, I suspect,” he sings, in a line that always makes my heart break – Anyone who’s never felt like that, you’re lucky – before returning to the refrain for thwarted lovers in the chorus: “I never claimed you were mine/But if we were words, we would rhyme.”
It’s a wonderfully sweet song, but one that’s also staggeringly sad. Like I said, the world needs more songs like this, I think.
This is one of those songs that nostalgia overwhelms any critical judgment for me; it was the first song played at Suede’s first gig to promote Head Music, something I’d been bussed down to London from Aberdeen to be present for because… Actually, I can’t even really remember, now. Was I supposed to be designing their tour program at that point, or was I just going down with friends, one of whom I had an entirely doomed crush on? Either way, I remember the song sounding great live – Very different from this version, although I’ve always liked the fact that scissors are used for percussion in the recorded version – and, after the gig, people still singing their versions of the opening lyrics, half-remembered and entirely wrong. This song will always be about that weird period in my life when I spent a lot of time in London, feeling both like I was “making it” (even though I didn’t know what that meant), and losing it (knowing all too well what that meant); just hearing it now reminds me of bus rides and plane trips and sleeping on a lot of friends’ floors.
