Category: 366 Songs

When I started this, I was just going to embed a Spotify playlist in this post, but for some reason, WordPress and Spotify don’t want to play nice together right now, so instead, I’ll just link the playlist here, and instead just list the tracks.

My idea was, simply, to offer an introduction to Super Furry Animals, one of my favorite bands and one that — as I’ve recently written — acts as an unexpected key to the way my brain works. They were active from the early 1990s through about a decade ago, although their core period was probably from the release of their first album Fuzzy Logic in 1996 through 2003’s Phantom Power; this playlist goes all the way up to their last full album, just because I’m that nerd. I’ve nonetheless tried to keep it reasonably contained — it’s just 24 songs, and runs a little over 90 minutes, because pop music.

1. Hometown Unicorn
   2. Fuzzy Birds
   3. Something for the Weekend

All three of the above were from that debut album, Fuzzy Logic, and you can hear a band that is simultaneously unsure about who they are, and confident enough to push at the edges of the dominant Britpop sound of the moment. (“Hometown Unicorn”‘s prog-inspired guitar solo! “Fuzzy Birds” ending with a folk flourish!)

4. The Man Don’t Give A Fuck

A b-side that was excised from the single it was intended for because of rights issues — it’s based around a sample of “Showbiz Kids” by Steely Dan, who initially didn’t give clearance quickly enough, as the story goes — it subsequently became a single in its own right, and an anthem that let would be fans know exactly who the band was at that moment in time.

5. The International Language of Screaming
6. Hermann Loves Pauline
7. Demons

Three songs from Radiator from 1997. By this point, not only was the band settling into its particular musical groove — taking influences from all over the place, predominantly outside of the Britpop norm while remaining firmly pop music — but my fandom was firmly in place. I’d seen them live just ahead of the release of this album, and “Demons” was introduced by lead singer Gruff Rhys asking the crowd if they could applaud after he’d sung the first line even though we didn’t know the song. “I want to feel like Frank Sinatra singing ‘New York, New York,'” he explained. (We obliged, of course.)

8. Ice Hockey Hair

The lead track of an EP released between Radiator and the next album, Guerrilla, and a song that I remember drove my then-best friend away from his own fandom of the band, purely because a vocoder was used for the verses. It’s strange what things we will, and won’t, accept from bands sometimes.

9. Citizen’s Band
10. Night Vision
11. The Teacher
12. Fire in My Heart

All four songs from Guerrilla, which came out in 1999. It’s a weird, messy third album, as third albums tend to be — bands are struggling to prove themselves on the first, confident to varying degrees and filled with the need to find their voice on the second, and then the third is the one where they go, “Wait, do I do more of this or something different now?” Guerrilla is uneven and disunified, but there’s some great songs on there — including “Citizen’s Band,” one of my favorite SFA tracks overall, which was originally hidden as the secret bonus track you could only find if you tried to rewind from the first track on the CD. Technology!

13. Sidewalk Serfer Girl
14. (Drawing) Rings Around the World
15. It’s Not The End of the World?

2001’s Rings Around the World might be the band’s most complete, most coherent album; it came out around the time I was traveling back and forth to the US for the first few times, and I have really clear memories about listening to it a lot on my Discman — oh yes — while walking the streets of San Francisco. Both “Sidewalk Serfer Girl” and “(Drawing) Rings Around the World” were most definitely personal soundtrack songs for a long time, while “It’s Not The End of the World?” feels oddly fitting given that I was listening to this a lot in the aftermath of 9/11 and everything that possessed the world around that time.

16. Slow Life
17. Golden Retriever
18. Liberty Belle

By the time we get to 2003’s Phantom Power, things are beginning to fracture; it feels at once like the second half of Rings Around the World and somehow a lesser album, as if the band themselves are starting to get tired and in the need to do other things. That said, “Slow Life” is perhaps the song they’d been trying to make for years. The closer to the album, it might as well have acted as a final statement on something greater.

19. Zoom!
20. Lazer Beam
21. Psyclone!

I still remember how excited I was for 2005’s Love Kraft, where all three of these songs come from; I was working at the call center in San Francisco, and I had the CD in my bag waiting for me to listen for the first time on the way home. I was so disappointed that it didn’t give me the same excitement that all of the earlier SFA albums had, although I still love these three songs very, very much. One of the fun things about the recent “deluxe” reissues of those earlier albums are the unreleased and demo tracks included on them, which reveal that “Lazer Beam” had been something that had been in the works for almost a decade by the time this album came out, as an incomplete jam called “John Spex.” (Versions of it show up on the deluxe versions of both Guerilla and Rings Around the World.)

22. Suckers!
23. Neo Consumer
24. Crazy Naked Girls

And so we come to the somewhat slow decline of the band, with tracks from their last two official albums, 2007’s Hey Venus! and 2009’s Dark Days/Light Years. (“Suckers!” and “Neo Consumer” come from the former, “Crazy Naked Girls” from the latter.) Both albums, to me, sound like a band that’s going through the motions and want to be elsewhere, bereft of the playfulness that marked their best work; to be fair, by this point, they all had other bands or solo projects they were working on, so it’s very possible that they did want to be elsewhere.

The band came back for a reunion single in 2016, “Bing Bong,” which is… fine…? Otherwise, I’m happy to let them go off and follow their individual muses as they see fit. What they came up with for that decade-and-a-bit together is more than enough for me. And now you get to see if it’s enough for you, too.

Beyond the new Blur album, much of my walking about out in the real world recently has been soundtracked by the first three albums by Super Furry Animals, a firm 1990s favorite that I’ve been revisiting with no small sense of wonderment.

This was a band who, after a fun but uneven first album — 1996’s Fuzzy Logic, at turns fueled by Prog Rock, folk, and the confused directionless Britpop zeitgeist of the time — immediately reinvented itself with a single made from a discarded B-side and quickly became part of my musical and spiritual identity for a good five or six years afterwards. Listening back to all this stuff now is a weirdly, strongly nostalgic experience where specific lines or guitar licks feel like sense memories is the strangest of ways.

The discarded B-side was “The Man Don’t Give A Fuck,” built around a looped sample of a single line from Steely Dan’s “Showbiz Kids” — “You know they don’t give a fuck about anybody else” — that is repurposed as an anthem against cultural and societal oppressors that feels relentless and undeniable. It fed into the next album, Radiator, released a year or so after Fuzzy Logic but sounding like almost an entirely different band: one more comfortable in their own skins and happier being more esoteric and angry even as the hooks and the catchiness in every track only increased.

There are lines throughout Radiator that I can tell now pushed my head in certain directions at an impressionable time, listening back now: the nervy contrarian attitude of things like “Why do you do/What they tell you?” sure, but also the humor and silliness of “Marie Curie was Polish born, but French bred/Ha! French bread!” in the same song. That’s also the song that says, entirely seriously, “I live my life in a quest for information,” which to this day feels like a key to everything in my head.

All of this against music that reached outside my traditional musical interests of the era and retired my head to some degree: there are echoes and influences of dance music, of Can, and Arthur Lee and Love, and Sun-Ra and mariachi music and all of it felt like a puzzle to track down and work out at the time. Radiator came out in the same year as Primal Scream’s similarly restless, inspirational Vanishing Point, and the two together were endlessly important in pushing me out of my comfort zone.

What’s been so rewarding about revisiting this stuff (and their third album, Guerilla, which is sonically even more diverse) is that, thankfully, it still sounds as fresh, as catchy, and wonderfully, as fun as it did when I first heard it, a quarter century or so ago. It’s not the same as stepping back into my own history, but it’s at least a sign that not everything I was thinking back then was the product of an eager, impressionable, and naive mind that should’ve known better.

Still thinking about the new Blur album; I read a review that quoted an interview with Damon Albarn where he said, bluntly, that it was a sad album because he’s a sad 55-year-old, and that you don’t get to 55 years old without being sad unless you’re very lucky. That stuck with me for days after seeing it for the first time, playing on my mind as I listened obsessively over and over to an album that is, very clearly, about loss and missing people.

Those feelings are both something that I am all too familiar with; I’m not 55 yet, but close enough, perhaps — I’ll be 49 later this year — and also Scottish, which I feel is a shortcut to saying that I have a particularly melancholy disposition. That’s been especially true over the past year or so for reasons I’m not going to share publicly, but it does explain why I found myself nearly in tears while listening to “The Swan,” one of the tracks off the so-called “Deluxe” version of the album, the other day.

As self-conscious as I felt by the near-outburst — I was walking to the library in the middle of the day, which really doesn’t feel like the most appropriate time or place to just start crying, although perhaps that’s my age and upbringing showing, who knows? — there was something almost comforting about the whole thing, too: I felt so moved because there was some innate sense of recognition with the lyrics of the song, even if I couldn’t map my own life onto the them directly.

Nonetheless, there was something in the crack of Albarn’s voice as he sings, “Know that I will always be here for you/Even when I’m gone, gone from this world… What do you really want/What do you really need…?” that I understood deep inside my heart and my bones; a feeling of such intense recognition that it honestly, effortlessly, almost brought me to tears. There’s something to be said for the feeling that you’re not as alone in your feelings as you might think, sometimes.

A side effect of getting older as a lover of pop music is, I think, coming to accept that The Kinks were one of the greatest bands of the ’60s. Oh, sure; everyone knows their hits — “You Really Got Me,” “All Day and All of The Night,” even “Lola” — but the older I get, the more I just kind of step back and think, holy shit, they just kept putting out shockingly great music for fucking years, didn’t they?

I’m not entirely sure what it is about the band that prevents them from being up there with the Beatles and the Stones, the two iconic bands of the era; listen to songs like “Stop Your Sobbing,” and it’s got the arrangement (vocal and instrumental) of an early Beatles song, while “I’m Not Like Everybody Else” has all the sneering posture of the Stones at their anxious, nervous angry best. (Something like “Nothin’ In The World Can Stop Me Worryin’ ‘Bout That Girl” has the blues riffs and rip-offs of the Stones’ early days, too, but paired with a vulnerability that Mick could never.)

There’s so much more the Kinks are capable of, though, at least for that first decade of their existence: songs like “Days” and “Shangri-La,” or the so-famous-you-forget-how-good-it-actually-is “Waterloo Sunset” have a wistfulness and longing and sadness all their own, while “The Village Green Preservation Society” and “All of My Friends Were There” are informed by the British Music Hall tradition in a way that other bands only claimed to be, outside of things like “Your Mother Should Know” or brief intros to more raucous songs. (Hi, bands like The Move and The Creation.)

Maybe that’s what I missed before, and am only coming around to now — a recognition and appreciation of how vast and varied the Kinks’ output was at their height, and how restless a band they were during that period. It’s not just that they could do it all, it’s that they did, for a time there… and that’s something that I find myself thinking about more and more often, as I age.

Maybe I’m just jealous, at the heart of it.

I’ve been listening to a lot of 1970s David Bowie lately; the Ziggy-era stuff, when his teeth were bad, but his music was good and Mick Ronson was there with a crunchy guitar to make everything better. It’s the result of The Algorithm, or at least, it was at first — Spotify thought to serve me up “Oh, You Pretty Things” on the same day that YouTube suggested a live version of “Queen Bitch,” and it felt as if the world was trying to tell me something, so I went with it.

The more I listen to this period of Bowie — my favorite period of his by some distance, I admit — the more two particular thoughts come to mind. Firstly, oh my God, you don’t get this music without his obsessive love of the Velvet Underground, and more importantly, what must it have been like to hear this when it was new?

I think this about the Beatles, too. Both were part of the establishment by the time I was really listening to music, with their songs both well accepted and widely shared, sewn into the fabric of pop culture and pop music alike. The influence of both had been soaked up and recycled to the point where some of the sounds and the ideas they’d introduced were watered down and robbed of their undiluted strength, and yet, I still wonder: what was it like to hear “Paperback Writer” and those chiming guitars for the very first time? What was it like to hear, “Gotta make way for the homo superior,” coming from someone who looked like Bowie?

A lot of this is rooted in how afraid and small pop culture was before these sounds, of course — how fragile everything seemed to the point where the Sex Pistols were seen as an existential threat, as opposed to a shit band with a fun attitude. But still: just imagine living in that small world and discovering these things for the very first time, and thinking, this is what the world could be like.

As chance — and the Spotify algorithm — would have it, I found myself listening to a bunch of Ocean Colour Scene the other day. (I blame the fact that I had been listening to no shortage of 1990s Paul Weller just before that; Spotify probably thought, “Oh, you’re in a Dadrock mood,” somewhat justifiably.)

In the mid-90s, it felt as if OCS, as their fans called them — likely out of a quiet acceptance that “Ocean Colour Scene” is objectively a terrible name for anything, especially a band — were, if not the butt of a particular joke that was difficult to explain to anyone who didn’t immediately, instinctively get it, then at least a band that was on the periphery of not only Britpop, but the wider and more existential concept of “cool.” Imagine the British music scene of the time as an explosion of joy and melody and, yes, even cool; Ocean Colour Scene would be some distance away from the epicenter, with onlookers and scientists arguing over their relative merits, entirely unconvinced.

Listening back to them recently, I went for the songs I remembered liking the most — “The Day We Caught The Train,” “You’ve Got It Bad,” “Hundred Mile High City,” “July” — and I realized that, well, maybe I’d been looking at them all wrong all along. That’s not to say that the songs were any catchier or lyrically any better (Ocean Colour Scene’s lyrics were, often, awkward in such a way that you’d wonder if English was their second language), but that, maybe it’s a mistake to think of them as a band, per se.

This sounds like a joke, but in each of the songs that I liked — or, again, liked the most to be more precise — the thing that was most interesting was always that the center of the whole thing wasn’t the song, per se, not the melody or the lyrics, but a particular sound, or the feel of the whole thing. At their most interesting, Ocean Colour Scene’s music is like tone poems from so far out of left field that they go all the way back to being square again: hymns to a the vibe, except the vibe in question has all the inspiration of a house band covering the Beatles lazily in 1973.

Oddly, this realization made me like them far, far more. Maybe I should go back and revisit all of those Britpop alsoran bands, and see what they sound like today. Is the world really ready for that Cast revival? (Hopefully not.)

I never really listened to The Jam when I was younger; there was something about them that didn’t really work for me. A harshness, perhaps, an anger and attitude that felt at odds with the Britpop kid I was at the time, the one who preferred the rounded edges instead of the sharp, who still felt as if The Beatles was a weaker album than Rubber Soul or whatever. (No offense to those of you who prefer the Folk Beatles, of course.)

That Paul Weller was still around and making music at the time, and such a force in the scene still with albums like Wild Wood and Stanley Road, didn’t help; it felt oddly too retro to listen to The Jam in those circumstances, as if “retro” wasn’t at the very heart of the Britpop project as a whole. What can I say? I was young and stupid, as opposed to now, when I’m old and… well, still stupid.

All of this is to say that I’ve started listening to The Jam in the last week or so, inspired in part by Spotify making the suggestion, but moreso by the fact that I’d already been listening to a lot of Billy Bragg and The Specials, so it felt oddly period appropriate.

It’s an experience I would liken to discovering The Who or Harry Nilsson for the first time, in both cases things that happened long after the fact; I hear things that are at once New Favorite Songs or music that has always been in my life in one way or another, in large part because, indirectly, it has; I know the echoes of it from the bands I’ve been a fan of for years, who were influenced by all of this and ripped it off in several different ways.

Beyond simply enjoying the music for the sake of the music, there’s also the additional fun/reminder that music is a continuum, each song a part of a conversation that we’re only partly privy to. It’s humbling and surprisingly welcome to realize that we’re all dwarfed by history in ways like that, I find.

Spotify told me these were the songs I listened to the most last year. I’m not entirely sure that’s true, despite the algorithm at play — I know that Open Mike Eagle’s “CD Bonus Track” was in pretty much constant rotation for the last couple months of the year, but the mix was published in early December — but, nonetheless: this is a good snapshot of the sound of the past 12 months or so.

An entirely random memory, brought on by listening to a song from Graham Coxon’s 1998 album The Sky is Too High for the first time in… well, pretty much 23 years:

It was during the period, post-graduation, that I was working in Aberdeen without having a permanent place to live; instead, I was spending a lot of time on couches and floors of understanding friends, as well as the occasional night in a bed-and-breakfast or something similar when I couldn’t rely on the kindness of friends that particular evening. In this particular case, I was staying with a friend who was still a student in the art school where I was now teaching, which was very much a strange and awkward experience for both of us — not that I was staying with him, but that I was now technically a peer of teachers that he very much didn’t like or respect. (For, it should be said, good reason; they didn’t understand what he was doing, so pretty much dismissed everything that he did without asking other peoples’ opinions.)

The memory in question is of me in the morning, getting ready to go to work, and playing Coxon’s just-released album in the background. For those unfamiliar with it, it’s mostly acoustic and somewhat drone-y and deary, in the way that a lot of post-Britpop acoustic music was at the time before melodies were rediscovered; that it was both acoustic and dreary was what caught the attention of the friend I was staying with, and he somewhat tongue-in-cheekily called me out on those facts, with my defensive reaction being a variation on, basically, you shut up this is good and you just don’t get it.

I was, for the record, only half-right — it’s an okay record, but as an album, it’s actually overlong and far too same-y for its own good.

As we discussed how quiet and afraid the music sounded, the penultimate track on the album came on. It sounds like this:

Both of us stopped talking for the entire duration of the song. When it was finished, the friend looked at me for a second, and then said, matter-of-factly, “See? That’s more like it.”