#1452: They Might Be Giants – Unpronounceable

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In 2015, They Might Be Giants revived their Dial-A-Song service. Now, instead of calling the number on your phone and hearing a TMBG song on the other end, they were releasing a new song every week of the year and uploading it to their YouTube channel. It was an exciting time to be a They fan. I can sort of remember ‘Erase’ arriving in the first week of ’15. I tried to keep up with the releases as they came around, but I think I stopped about three weeks in when ‘Music Jail, Pt. 1 & 2’ popped up. Not because I didn’t like the song. I just had university stuff going on, and I didn’t have the mental room to take in new TMBG material. By the time that uni year finished, my second, there was so much music that I guess I thought it was too late to properly get into the schedule. ‘Unpronounceable’ was one of the tracks released during this time. I missed it. But I’d see that it was ranked highly on the This Might Be a Wiki Song Ratings list when I’d visit the website. It was considered to be a top-ten Giants song of all time for a brief moment. So I had to check what all the fuss was about.

The song has no introduction. John Linnell’s voice starts it all off with the band alongside him. With a spacey echo/delay effect applied to the vocal, he sets a scene where a narrator is speaking to someone that leaves them awestruck. So much so that time seemingly stands still in their presence. This enigmatic figure leaves, the narrator snaps back into reality. But they go on to realise that they’ve completely forgotten the name of the person they were talking to. Or at least heard it, but can’t seem to recall how to say it. A very universal situation. The person the narrator was fascinated by appears to be someone they liked or wanted to know a little better, and they’re left in a state of depression due to their inability to remember the person’s name. The narrator wishes they were able to relive and analyse the conversation via watching it through videotape, but know this is impossible. Even if they were able to, they’d be hypnotized by the figure’s face all over again. Someone out there had to write a song about forgetting a person’s name as soon as you’ve finished speaking to them. If anyone was going to do it, it had to be They Might Be Giants, especially John Linnell. He seems to be able to make a song out of the most commonplace circumstances, adding a little absurd twist in the process.

It may have been recency bias that the song was ranked so highly among TMBG fans near the time of its release. But it’s 11 years old now, and it still sounds just as great as it did in 2015. Think it has everything you want in a They song, which is a great melody and relatable subject matter with an unusual spin. I think the hidden genius behind ‘Unpronounceable’ is in its rhythm. It’s quite stop-starty, and the impact comes in the brief silences that occur throughout. They let the delay in Linnell’s vocals really fill the room in the verses. The rhythm’s also exhibited most prominently in the opening-closing gated track in the instrumental section, which was apparently a real focal area during production. John Flansburgh has a brief lead vocal moment too, which is nice. It’s always cool to hear both Johns on a track, even if it’s a case where it’s predominantly written by one of them. Yeah, not sure what else I could add here. Just another power-pop gem by the band, a genre that the band tend to lean into nowadays. I’m all for it. If you want to find ‘Unpronounceable’, it was released on Glean, the first of three albums released through 2015-16, made up of tracks that were released during the first four months of that Dial-A-Song revival. Not my favourite of the band’s, but good listening all the same.

#1451: Soundgarden – An Unkind

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I think it’s okay to get a little personal with you guys, lay down some serious stuff. I’m slowly coming out of a period in my life where I think I might have been going slowly insane. That period just happened to last for the majority of my 20s. My anxiety was through the roof. I felt unhealthy, very ugly too. I think it’s called, uh, depression. I’m still a little fragile, but I’m feeling a lot better these days. I listened to Soundgarden’s Down on the Upside right about when that period was in its early stages. 2018, out of university, working in my first job. It wasn’t the first time that I’d gone through the album. I think I initially downloaded it after Chris Cornell’s passing the previous year. But listening to it in the old office, over the speakers, the ideal setting was staged to focus my attention to the music and, to a lesser extent, the words. That’s just how I am, I’m sorry. Down on the Upside sort of became my album of the summer that year, which probably goes to show how I was feeling at the time. Dedicated a whole post about it, I was into it that much.

‘An Unkind’ is the penultimate track on the album. You think of Soundgarden, you’ll usually turn to vocalist, guitarist and usual songwriter Cornell for the goods. But people will know that the band’s secret weapon comes in the form of bass guitarist Ben Shepherd. On Down on the Upside, there are five songs that he wrote the music for to which Chris Cornell wrote the words. ‘An Unkind’ is a 100% Shepherd composition. Like ‘Half’ on Superunknown, another song solely written by Shepherd, ‘An Unkind’ takes proceedings into a stranger detour before everything comes to an end with the final-statement Cornell song. It also… rips really hard. I remember hearing the song through the speakers in my office that time. The guitars were alternating between those two notes in the verses, what felt like for an endless period of time. They were rather repetitive, maybe even a little annoying. But then the chorus came in, “Ooon the stooorm, it’s tiiime to gooo”. Hell yes. It fell into the verses again, and my mind was made up, I really liked this song. I played it 36 times on Spotify in 2018. I don’t think that counts the private plays I may have done too. It’s only two minutes long, but it scratches that itch for me, don’t know what to tell you.

I honestly think the song’s about the Last Judgment/Judgment Day, and how if the saints were to come down from the heavens and determine whether we go to heaven or hell, we wouldn’t be able to look them in the eye because of the shame in the atrocities we’ve committed on this earth. And the “On the storm…” bit is basically signifying the end of the world. Is that a reach? Maybe. But it’s my interpretation. In any case, “The human race sucks” is the general message Shepherd provides in his lyrics. Cornell delivers them brilliantly, as he always did. You can hear him take a huge gasp of breath before he belts out that first chorus. Ben Shepherd plays the guitar on the track alongside lead guitarist Kim Thayil, apparently because there’s a need for the pinky finger to execute the verse riff, which Cornell couldn’t get down. Matt Cameron’s drumming is a thrill. You guys ever noticed how his pattern sort of reverses on itself during the verses after he strikes the open hi-hat? That’s some good musicality. Sometimes I think this might be my favourite Soundgarden song. It won’t be for many other people, and that’s fine. But like the band say in the link before, it’s driving, it’s fast, the lyrics are strange and cool at the same time, and it does everything it needs to in the length it lasts for. Any more than two minutes, it’d just be wrong. And it leaves you wanting more, which probably explains why I listen to it so much.

#1450: Red Hot Chili Peppers – Universally Speaking

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Not so long ago, I was writing about another Red Hot Chili Peppers song on here. That too also happened to be a single. The Peppers are a really good singles band. I don’t think people would disagree with me on that. Every song of the band’s that I’ve covered on here just happen to be one. ‘Under the Bridge’, that was a big single, I told you all about it already. ‘Universally Speaking’, not so much. It was the fourth and final single released from By the Way, in June 2003. That album had been out for almost a year by that point. But it was another successful one, and the record label were gonna take whatever monetary gain they could get. The song’s music video usually played on Kerrang! more than anywhere else from what I remember. It’s the sequel to the ‘By the Way’ video, seeing the crazed cab driver from that – played by Dave Sheridan (Doofy from Scary Movie) – attempting to return the magazine he took from Kiedis, by sneaking into Coachella 2003. He gets up to all sorts of nonsense and eventually succeeds in his mission. Nothing to do with the song, but it’s funny nonetheless.

The story you hear about the making of By the Way mainly revolves around how Flea was quite close to leaving the band because John Frusciante seemed to be rejecting every musical idea he had. But one idea brought in by Flea that was deemed worthy by Lord Frusciante was ‘Universally Speaking’. I’m being facetious. But it’s no joke, the song was something he brought to the group. And it’s placed in the second spot on the album, which I think kind of indicates some strong feelings for it in part of the bandmembers. So imagine, you’re going through By the Way the first time. The opener, the title track, gives that mix of exhilarating funk and melody that the Chilis are known for, loved for, adored for. Then ‘Universally…’ comes along. Slows things down a little, but still really impactful with the stomping rhythm established by drummer Chad Smith. Frusciante plays some steady guitar chords over the top. Flea rounds it off with a warming bass line that rings out underneath it all. It’s a solid introduction. The instrumentalists doing their thing to build anticipation. And then Anthony Kiedis starts singing. He sounds fine. He’s sort of singing in the lower part of his register, which I don’t think he did all that often up to that point. I think he’s got that recognisable tone in his singing voice he, displayed in places like ‘Otherside’, ‘Californication’, or even ‘By the Way’. It makes for a nice change up in this situation.

The meme goes that Kiedis’s lyrics are only about women, or the state of California, or women in California, and then he’ll put some nonsensical words for good measure. ‘Universally Speaking’ is very clearly about a woman of Anthony Kiedis’s desires. He sees her, he’s entranced, he’s got to get her and judging by the words in the chorus and those sections where the song’s title is said, he does. But there’s no nonsense here. He does have a style of putting words together so they can sound good to the music, I think even he’s said before. Like, “Silveretta, the chance of a lifetime”, doesn’t make much sense, but with the music alongside it, it somehow means a lot. ‘Specially the way it’s sung. And especially, especially when John Frusciante joins in with the harmony in the final chorus. That outro with Frusciante’s solo is quite special too, really puts the cherry on. I’d also like to shout out that key change that happens when Kiedis sings “Come on, baby, ’cause there’s no name for…” etc., again with Frusciantes harmonising “Ooh” alongside. Don’t think that sort of practice was ever put into place in an album of theirs before, which really puts into perspective that focus on melody that was the lynchpin behind the sessions for that album.

#1449: Blur – The Universal

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Readers from the UK, it is that song from the British Gas adverts. There will be people out there who would have been introduced to Blur’s ‘The Universal’ through its use on the company’s advertising campaign in the early-2010s. I wasn’t one of them. It was those instances where I’d catch its music video on the TV somewhere, about ’05/’06 time. When it came to ‘The Universal’, I found myself changing the channel, the song’s video would be playing, but it would almost be at its end. It seemed to be a pattern that I’d never catch the beginning of it. YouTube was just in its early stages of being a working company, I didn’t know about its existence. But I did watch the video online on a site that I can’t remember and is probably irrelevant now. It wasn’t like I was missing out on much. The opening just shows a microphone, its cord being pulled and a long pull-out shot of the band as they mean-mug the camera. All an imitation of A Clockwork Orange, if you didn’t know already.

I mean, it’s ‘The Universal’, innit? I think even fans who don’t regard The Great Escape as one of Blur’s finest moments – again, I’m not one of them – can still put their hands up and admit that the track’s one of the band’s best. You ever see the group play it live, it brings the people together. It’s that “really, really, really could happen” refrain, just grabs you. I don’t think I’ve ever been able to pin down what the track is about. It seems to be about everyone and everything. When I say “everyone”, I mean the people of Britain. That was Damon Albarn’s whole thing for a while back then. It’s about being under surveillance, it’s about nights out at the karaoke bar. I think the “Tomorrow’s your lucky day” and “Really, really could happen” stuff refers to the National Lottery, which was a relatively new thing in 1995. It’s a subject “discussed” in fellow album track ‘It Could Be You’ too. The track has a sort of ‘The Future Is Now’ theme going on, heightened by the musicality with the horns and choir sections, but undercut by the mundanity of society as observed by Albarn.

Once I found the video online and heard the whole song in full, it was pretty much a given that ‘The Universal’ was gonna be a tune I’d return to for years. By 2006, or whenever it was, that had already been the case for millions of other people. But it goes to show how strongly the song held up even 11 years from its initial release. Let’s take away Albarn’s vocal, which he provides so effortlessly across the board, from the coolness in the verses to the rousing delivery in the choruses. Graham Coxon provides two guitar parts, the stabs in the left ear and the pretty, fluttering pattern in the right. Alex James alternates between ‘silky’ and ‘busy’ in terms for settings for his bass guitar work. And I’ve got no complaints about Dave Rowntree’s drums, he gets the job done. It’s a tight band performance. But the strings, the horns, the “Just let them go”s from the harmonizing lady vocalists. Those are what takes the song to another level. Imagine the song’s triumphant almost-instrumental last-minute ending without those three components. The section would end up sounding very empty. But the mix of the band and the outside performers altogether, that’s what gets the people tearing up at their shows. It’s right in the center of The Great Escape. I have no problems with ‘Yuko & Hiro’ as the whole closer. But I’ve seen a complaint saying ‘The Universal’ should have been, and I see it. It at least closes out the first half.

#1448: OutKast – Unhappy

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Guys, I swear, I do like songs by OutKast that aren’t on Speakerboxxx/The Love Below. Not that it should matter whether I do or not. But you click on the ‘outkast’ tag at the bottom of this post and see that the only songs by the group on here are from the double album, you might think it a little strange. I was eight years old during that era of OutKast. ‘Hey Ya!’ and ‘Roses’ were everywhere. ‘The Way You Move’ to a lesser extent, but that was in the UK. I liked ‘Hey Ya!’ just like everyone else. I wanted the single. My aunt got me the double album. And so, that was from where I got the OutKast songs to put on my iPod, iPhone, whatever, up to 2021, which was when I decided I needed to stop adding songs and eventually bring an end to this entire series. Any additional tracks of theirs are in my Liked Songs playlist on Spotify. But in this space, it’s the double album all the way. There are much worse options out there.

I don’t know about you, but I’ve come to prefer Speakerboxxx over The Love Below. The latter has the big, big hits, it was the first big artistic statement of André 3000. But I find myself returning to Big Boi’s half more often. There are more posts on the blog from Speakerboxxx than from The Love Below, so my feelings on the two were always kind of present. One of the songs on Speakerboxxx that I’ve been going back to for a while now is its third song on there, ‘Unhappy’. I didn’t really get around to this one until about 2010 or something. Think it came up on an iTunes library shuffle session when I was playing a FIFA game at the same time. Or maybe I just decided to listen to the whole double album one day… Either way, I got to know the song a lot better. I feel like ‘Unhappy’ could have been a single. But maybe it’s the pessimistic overtone of the lyrics that prevented it from being so. “Might as well have fun ’cause your happiness is done, and your goose is cooked” is the hook. Sung with a real warmth with all the vocals alongside the upbeat production, there’s that melody that sounds like a ringtone in the right channel chirping for most of the track. The “flip that smile upside down now” phrase, first sung by Big Boi (I’m sure) and then later by Debra Killings, are almost childlike in their respective deliveries. But I think it’s all a trick to distract you from what’s relayed in the words.

Scattered in between the hooks come Big Boi’s three verses in which he provides some life lessons and gives the listener a look into his own experiences. Just a couple of those lessons as detailed in the first verse include staying out of harm’s way and to prevent people from taking advantage of you. He tells us that happiness can’t be bought and ties that in with how his mum and dad would earn enough money to get by and keep up appearances, only to end up in debt by the start of the new year. He reminisces on a time in 1979 when things weren’t particularly great within the household. But then he grounds himself in present-day 2003, where he’s confident with who he is as a man and proud to have achieved the success he has. So there’s a little light there by the end. I once read an interpretation in a comment somewhere that the finished happiness as referred to in the chorus is that of the true kind you had when you were a child. Less inhibitions, the innocence and all of that. So the hook is telling us have as much as we can in this life, ’cause we’ll never truly be happy as were when we were young. And the way the hook repeats with a fade-out to silence, makes it feel like a very unresolved type of situation. Had to bring the mood down a little after ‘Ghetto Musick’ somehow, I guess.