Tuesday 23 April 2013

Play To Z: Standing In The Way Of Control to Their Satanic Majesties Request

Random Observations

  I've always struggled with OutKast. I know they're great. I can listen to them and appreciate the skill of their arrangements, the way they flawlessly blend styles and genres, their incisive, creative lyrics. But it's always been an intellectual connection, rather than an emotional one. Listening to Stankonia, the singles stand out, as does "Bombs Over Baghdad", but everything else sort of blurs together.

  Hey, Solange's version of "Stillness Is The Move" is pretty much amazing, isn't it?



  Strange Mercy, St. Vincent's latest album, is a glorious thing, a crystalline construction that's both delicate and strong. It makes sense that Annie Clark and David Byrne ended up working together, because they have a similar talent for building whole worlds within one song. Also, she gets sounds out of a guitar that few other people can.

  It took me a while to get a grip on The Suburbs, Arcade Fire's third album. It was released in August 2010 and I excitedly purchased it, but on first listen, something didn't click. There were great songs, but the album as a whole didn't slot into place in the way previous ones did. I put it aside for a while, and came back to it in November, when it suddenly all made sense. I was walking through the city listening to it and I literally said out loud "Oh...it's a winter album" because it totally is. Something about it works so well with walking around in the darkness, pulling yourself close inside your coat.


  Perhaps the iconic record of my high school years, Take Off Your Pants And Jacket by Blink 182 still has a direct line to certain areas of my brain. I was a pretty sedate teenager, so songs like "Roller Coaster" and "Reckless Abandon" conjured images of a world of carefree adventure and freedom that was beyond my anxious, shy reach. Listening back to it now, it makes me nostalgic for a past I never had, an odd experience that probably doesn't do my maturity level any good, but who needs maturity when you have pop-punk guitars?

  I was late coming to The Mountain Goats, only discovering them about two years ago. My discography is scattered, with chunks from various albums and only Transcendental Youth as a complete record. At some point when I am less broke, I will trawl through Amazon completing my collection. Until then, I will console myself with the fact that my sporadic assortment includes "No Children". I know it's everyone's favourite Mountain Goats song, but there's a reason for that. It's a beautifully simple expression of a seldom recognised emotion with a nice line in iconic lyrics.


  I mentioned the doldrums I found myself in when listening to this particular patch of albums, and no section represents it better than listening to Temple Of The Dog's self-titled album followed by Pearl Jam's Ten. I would have been around at exactly the right time for grunge, had I listened to anything beyond local radio at that time, which wasn't known for it's "alternative" bent. Listening to these albums now, I'm glad they hold no nostalgic affection for me, because they're awful. Self-indulgent, monotonous and glum, there's no albums that have made me ask myself "Why do I own this?" more.

Rediscovered Gem

"Wires and Waves" by Rilo Kiley

Thursday 18 April 2013

Play To Z: Shut Up, You F*cking Baby to The Stage Names

Random Observations

"Signs" by Justin Timberlake, Snoop Dogg and Charlie Wilson is one of those perfect party songs. The opening is just spot on, Timberlake's falsetto sliding in before the playful drum beat begins and the horns start to bubble underneath. Plus listening to Snoop Dogg rhyme "Venus and Serena" with "Wimbledon arena" is just a juicy pop pleasure.

  Bloc Party's Silent Alarm and The Knife's Silent Shout make wonderful neighbours,with Bloc Party's spiky, angular, pulsing rock giving way effortlessly to The Knife's vocal-driven, otherworldly electronica. Listening to these two albums back-to-back was a dream.

  If you ever want a group of people of our generation (mid-Eighties to early-Nineties) to drunkenly sing along to something, you could do a lot worse than "Don't Speak" by No Doubt.


  People don't give The Buzzcocks enough love. They were huge influences on the British punk scene (and therefore the British indie scene) from the very beginning of the movement (if you haven't already, go watch 24 Hour Party People) and they produced iconic, masterful, insightful songs, most of which came in under the magic 4 minute mark.

  It's a shame I didn't manage to tackle both of Das Racist's mixtapes, Shut Up, Man and Sit Down, Dude, in one blogging session. I still haven't gotten around to their album, Relax, but frankly the two mixtapes are 37 tracks between them, longer than most full albums. The fact that they won't be making music together anymore is such a shame - there was so much truth and humour in their rhymes, and we need more of that, in music and in life.

  The Social Network soundtrack is a great, atmospheric piece. It matches the tone of the film so perfectly without resorting to any of the cliches of film scoring. There are no sweeping overtures, no hushed variations for emotional scenes. Instead, there are a series of intricate, well-constructed pieces that fit together like elaborate clockwork, a machine designed to build dread and tension.


  Someone To Drive You Home by The Long Blondes is one of those albums that can take over your life. I discovered it at a point in my life when I was particularly open to that kind of infectious worldview and for two or three months, that album owned me. Like a sermon, like a manifesto, it constructs a perspective on life and romance that you can't help but pour yourself into. The characters in the songs are so well drawn, so true to life that you connect with them as well as you might with any protagonist from a novel or hero in a film. Kate Jackson's voice is a siren song, pulling you into the cynical, wearied waters of her world. From that place, all romance is a power game, a maneuvering of players where the men are selfish predators and the women are cruel and tragic. It's a dangerous world, filled with the allure of old films and danger of illicit liaisons. If you let it, it will take you over, and never let you go.

  Eels' Souljacker, like Shootenanny after it, bridges the gap between Daisies of the Galaxy's optimism and Blinking Lights and Other Revelations' ambitious melancholy with a harder, rougher sound. Where earlier records were like an open wound, this is the scab - toughened skin that tells a tale of an earlier injury. Mark Everett steps outside his own head a little, with tales of circus freaks and ghosts, but the evidence of his heartbreak is still there, in the anger of "Bus Stop Boxer" and the bruised vulnerability of "That's Not Really Funny". The ramshackle production matches the tone of the songs perfectly, and like all Eels albums it creates a wonderfully complete package.


  I know I'm meant to be sticking to the whole "each song gets one listen" rule, but I may have cheated a little when it comes to "All My Friends" by LCD Soundsystem. You know why? Because it's the best song this millennium has produced so far. Because it's a perfect cocktail of triumph and loss. Because it makes me want to run from door to door, pulling people out on to the street to scream into the sky. Because it makes me want to see all my friends tonight.

  The Stage Names was one of those albums I mentioned rediscovering in my last post. If you'd have asked me before this listen through what I could remember from it, I would have been able to talk about the spot on homage/sampling of The Beach Boys "Sloop John B" in "John Allyn Smith Sails" and nothing much beyond that. Now, I could talk about the building wail of "Our Life Is Not A Movie Or Maybe", the pulsing thrum of the guitar hook on "Unless It's Kicks" and the oh-so-clever workplay of "Plus Ones" that manages to add, rather than detract, from the song.


  It was about this time in proceedings that I was gifted a selection of music by my friend Georgie, mostly new stuff that I hadn't got my hands on yet. Chief among the pleasures were Haim's Forever EP and Holy Fire, the new album from Foals. Forever is like a delicious slice of cake; sweet, tantalizing and leaves you aching for more. Holy Fire is filled with leap-out-of-speakers energy and brings together so much of Foals' earlier sounds into one cohesive whole.

Rediscovered Gem

"In The Mouth A Desert" by Pavement


Play To Z: Hitting The Wall

Two months is a long time between posts; long in normal time and even longer in Internet Time. Whole memes have been born, bloomed, withered and died in that time. The blog has rested, untouched while Margaret Thatcher jokes pinged back and forth across Twitter and people on Facebook spoiled Game of Thrones twists for their less up-to-date friends.

  So why so long without a post? Well, because now, as I near the end of the project (less than 1000 songs to go at current count), I hit the wall. Like a marathon runner in the final third of the race, I suddenly slacked, and listening to music became an effort. So many great albums lay behind me, now unlistenable until I had reached my finish line. So many new releases floated out there on Spotify and YouTube, tempting me. And worse of all, I hit a fallow patch in my album collection, with long stretches of albums that I had little passion for, with those that I did serving as only brief oases in a desert of mediocrity.

What This Is Happening looks like after 200 songs worth of "eh"

  It is, of course, my own fault. If I kept my music collection trimmed of any fat, this project would have been absent these sort of patches and noticeably shorter. I'd probably even be done by now. But I can't beat myself up too much - every album I own is a window into a period of my life, even the bad ones. It could be a band I once loved who I have now turned sour on, an album I bought out of curiousity and never listened to again, or something lent to me by a friend on the promise that I would love it that I now keep only as evidence that, yes I have listened to it.

  The whole point of this project was to both reconnect with these albums that had fallen to the wayside and to challenge the memories I had of them. In pushing through the wall, I've discovered some albums that I had cast aside prematurely. Coming back to listen to them, I've found new depths to their sound, new meaning in their lyrics. Certain songs have popped in ways they never did before. It's a nice way to measure myself as a person, knowing that I can come to the same song I merely tolerated two or three years ago and now find deeper purpose to it.

  All that said, there's a hell of a lot of material to cover here - over a thousand songs, more than three days of music. I'm going to parcel the random observations out between a few posts in the next couple of days, sometimes going into more depth where something merits a closer look.