#1376: Stephen Malkmus and the Jicks – Tigers

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Mirror Traffic, the fifth album by Stephen Malkmus and his sort of solo act The Jicks, turns 15 in August. I wasn’t aware of it, I’m sure I’ve said in a couple posts before, until a couple years later when the group’s next album was on the horizon in 2014. To the 18-year-old I was, it made sense to listen to the most recent work just to get a taste of what maybe was to come. The cool thing to find out about Mirror Traffic was that it was produced by none other than other singer-songwriter musician man Beck. I appreciate a Beck album or two. He and Malkmus had been mates since the ’90s. I never knew Beck to be a producer. I think he does a good job on …Traffic. It’s also the last album to feature Janet Weiss on drums before she went on to join Wild Flag and then reunite with Sleater-Kinney. People in certain circles know how the latter turned out. Weiss deserved way better. Digressing. I was in uni, it was time to hear Mirror Traffic. ‘Tigers’ starts it off.

Hull City A.F.C. is the name of a football (soccer, bleh) team in England, who are affectionately nicknamed ‘the Tigers’ because of the orange-and-black striped kit the team traditionally wears. Malkmus is a big fan. Their nickname inspired the song’s title, and that’s where the link between the two stays. Otherwise, the track is a kind of collection of evocative ideas and images that sound nice when put together. And really that’s Malkmus’s M.O. He sings about catching someone streaking in their Birkenstock shoes, he blares out the line “zits and toothpaste”, he rounds out the first chorus with “Change is all we need to improve.” A mixture of humour, near-absurdity and straight sincerity throughout, all wrapped up in under two-and-a-half minutes. I believe the whole track acts as an invitation to the listener to be one with the group. Not with the Jicks, but with the Tigers as the members call themselves in the bright choruses. Malkmus also wants you to know that you can put your trust in him, confide, he can be your energy boost. It’s all positive thinking on this tune.

The lyrics that close the song out have stumped music sites for years since its release. I’ve come to the conclusion the final “verse” is: “Hard believe I never had a spleen / Never had a spleen / Never had a dream / Ice cream with straw / Vagrant steel”. It doesn’t make any sense. Lyrics don’t have to. The ending of ‘Tigers’ really comes out of nowhere, a swift right turn from normal proceedings. But it’s great that way, keeps you on your toes. Mirror Traffic isn’t my go-to Malkmus/Jicks album. I’ve got an appreciation for it, just ’cause it’s by Malkmus and he’s straight up one of my favourite songwriters. But again, the tracks on the album that I’ve tried to succinctly write about on here are Malkmus highlights to me. I relistened through the album a couple years back after not doing so for a long, long time. ‘Brain Gallop’ jumped out in a way it hadn’t before. That was about it, though. That song would have a post if I were to do this all again. But that’s all from this album, it’s out of here. Expect more Malkmus, though.

#1375: Fall Out Boy – Tiffany Blews

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I got Fall Out Boy’s Folie à Deux for my 14th birthday back in 2009. Got the sent email in my old Hotmail account – or Outlook, to get with the times – of the gift list I sent to my cousin that backs this statement up. By that time, ‘I Don’t Care’ had been out as a single. I think ‘America’s Suitehearts’ had its video out for some time too. Because I already had Infinity on High, I guess I thought, “Why not”, and asked for From Under the Cork Tree too. And I got ’em. Now I had a copies of that holy trinity. But as I’ve said before, not too long ago either, Folie… is my favourite Fall Out Boy album. I can sort of remember listening through it the first time and having a feeling I was listening to something very good. I think because it’s made by Fall Out Boy, no one apart from Fall Out Boy fans and a rare member of society here and there wants to recognise its quality. That’s just the way life is sometimes.

‘Tiffany Blews’ is the tenth song on Folie…. If you hear it on its own, it feels like it starts very suddenly with the kick drum. That’s just ’cause, on the album, the preceding song transitions into it via a synthesizer chord. Man, the transitions on this album are great too. Makes for a fine listening experience. I can’t remember how I got into this track at all. It certainly wasn’t a first-time epiphany kind of deal. I once had a YouTube channel in 2008, and I uploaded the album in sections onto it before copyright was such a big thing on the site. I’m gonna put it down to that and becoming more familiar with the songs in the process. What you really need to know is ‘Tiffany Blews’ is one of my favourite songs on the album. May be one of my favourite Fall Out Boy songs full stop. And I think it has the best chorus the band’s ever done. That explosion in energy with the “Ohhh, baby, you’re a classic…” line. A moment of elation.

In this track-by-track commentary on the album, Pete Wentz doesn’t go into much detail on ‘Tiffany Blews’. He says it may be a single, it wasn’t, it’s got weird verses and straighter choruses, which I can understand – I’d say the verses are funkier more than anything – and that it features Lil Wayne, which I think must have scared some people when that was revealed, but he actually sounds cooler in the bridge than he does in any of those rock features/albums he wasn’t into around that time. I’m one of those who think Wayne did better than Stump’s initial version. The song’s title doesn’t give anything away in terms of its meaning. One of those reference that only Pete Wentz would understand. And I think it’s to throw you off from the fact that it’s a song about himself – even when he writes “Baby, you’re a classic / Like a little black dress / You’re a faded moon” and so on. It’s all self-examination. At least, that’s what I believe. Look out for those upward scales in the choruses, those are little hooks in themselves.

#1374: The Beatles – Ticket to Ride

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Just a very small memory I have when it comes to The Beatles’ ‘Ticket to Ride’ is my sister asking me whether it was a song that our mum liked or sung from time-to-time. I replied “No,” and we carried on with our day. I think the song was playing in a very out-of-time ringtone advert which was exclusively based on The Beatles, ’cause it was around that time that the remastered catalogue was being reissued and The Beatles: Rock Band game was hot on the scene. But I’m sure that situation wasn’t the first time I’d heard the song myself. I think its dedicated segment in the Help! film was one of the few Beatles music videos that played on VH1 when there was a Beatlesmania programme on the channel, again because of the Beatles hype in September 2009. I may have also just come across it through watching Help! on Dailymotion or something. It’s all a blur now, it’s been in the psyche so long. I didn’t know it once. I’ve known it for a while now. That’s what this entire blog comes down to.

So, ‘Ticket to Ride’. It was the first single from the band’s fifth album, Help!, released four months in advance of the LP’s arrival. It was also recorded and finished in one day, believe it or not, on 15th February 1965 – worked on in the first recording session the band undertook since releasing their Beatles for Sale album a mere four months earlier. They also started working on ‘I Need You’ and ‘Another Girl’, which would both end up on Help! too. Something must have been in the air in EMI Studios that day. John Lennon primarily wrote ‘Ticket…’. Paul McCartney helped. The song’s known for that kind of herky-jerky drum part Ringo Starr has going on. It’s very effective. Apparently, McCartney told him how to play it. It sort of straightens itself out as the song progresses. Main highlight for me is John Lennon’s vocal, and I guess McCartney’s harmony too. Mainly the melody line, though. I like the way Lennon sounds in a lot of songs he does the lead vocal on. But he sounds very clear on this track, like he’s using all the air in his lungs to deliver the words. He sounds very confident. He kind of flubs the lines at about 1:26 and 2:15, which makes it all the more charming.

No one really knows what this song’s about. Only Lennon and McCartney would, but they both had differing answers regarding the influence. It’s all up in the air. One interesting take, easily viewable on Wikipedia, is that it’s about a girl who leaves a relationship to become a prostitute and have sex whenever she wants. A ticket to ‘ride’. Thinking about the humour shared between the two songwriters, that could very well be the case. My take, the narrator’s sad a relationship’s over and the girl’s free from the shackles of it all. It’s a ticket to freedom. To ‘ride’ is to ‘be free’ in the broadest sense. Sounds a bit melodramatic. It’s a happy-sounding song about a not-so-happy situation. That’s how I think of it, but only when I stop to think about it, if you know what I mean. Otherwise I’m just enjoying the tune in the musical aspect. You’ve got the two main writers singing with each other, George Harrison plays a continuous A-flat note in the verses, the aforementioned drum part, and the surprise double-time ending with Lennon singing “My baby don’t care” until the track fades to silence. It obviously hit the number-one spot in many, many places. Well deserved too.

#1373: Ween – Tick

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So, after being left gobsmacked in the wake of ‘You Fucked Up’ when I was listening to Ween’s debut GodWeenSatan album for the first time in September 2015 – Left such a mark I remember the exact month and year, you see. This was no Mollusk. – ‘Tick’ was the track that followed. “I feel a tick in my head and he’s sucking on my head / In the morning I’ll be dead if he doesn’t leave my head” are its opening lyrics. “Why can’t he go away / Why does he have to stay / Maybe he wants to play” it continues. There I was nodding along, but I was thinking, “Yeah, this is stupid. Ha-ha-ha.” They rhymed ‘head’ with itself three times. The simple, simple wordplay. I didn’t think it was going anywhere. But then it suddenly did. The intensity rose in the “Get you, burn you, crush you” pre-chorus, the wall-of-sound guitars came in for the chorus. I was sold there and then. I’m convinced the song’s start was written with the intention of tricking the listener to underestimate what they’re hearing. If that was the case, Ween succeeded when it came to me.

So, ‘Tick’. It’s about ticks, those external parasites that live by feeding on the blood of mammals, birds, and sometimes reptiles and amphibians, as said in Wikipedia. I always thought Gene Ween sung this on the album, he always does when the band do it live, but then I came across a demo tape of theirs where it was stated that Dean Ween sang it. So I don’t know. I’m more inclined to believe it’s Deaner nowadays. It could be both of them. Whether or not the track is based on a personal experience, I don’t think it’s ever be stated outright, but it’s a song about a narrator who one day feels the presence of a tick on their head. It annoys them. They swear to get their revenge on the thing. They unsuccessfully try to get rid of it and it grows back. The narrator stabs the tick and themselves in the process. The narrator will die soon. The tick wins. It goes on to annoy another person and so on and so forth.

This song, man… Really serves up the second punch after ‘You Fucked Up’ delivers the first. If ‘Tick’ is indeed sung by Dean Ween, then I think it’s cool that the album opens up with both bandmembers singing the respective two numbers. It’s not a very well-known fact that Dean Ween plays the drums almost entirely throughout too, so ‘Tick’ I feel is just a showcase of Deaner’s skills all over the spectrum. But if we’re going to focus on anything he does, it has to be his guitar playing. I don’t think I’ve said, he’s also the main guitar man in Ween. He switches between thrashing power chords and fiddly guitar lines in the chorus. He provides the itchy guitar riff underneath the verses. He blasts out those kind of jazzy chords in the instrumental break. He closes it all out with a solo. He’s all over this track. I think this really is Dean Ween’s song. ‘You Fucked Up’ got me interested in GodWeenSatan, ‘Tick’ solidified that it was indeed a good decision to start listening to it. And there was only… an hour and 12 minutes of the album left to go. Things could only get better.

#1372: They Might Be Giants – Thunderbird

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I’ve written about They Might Be Giants’ The Spine, or at least songs you can find on that album, many times at this point. Trying to think of a different way I could put a spin on my experiences with it, without referring to those older posts. I’m sure I’ve mentioned it’s the first physical TMBG album I owned, despite the kind of middling consensus about its quality. I may have said I got it just to hear the transition between ‘Au Contraire’ and ‘Damn Good Times’ without a gap of silence. I think I’ve said I like it a lot, may have called it “underrated” or something along those lines. It was the They Might Be Giants album the band were working on while I was finding out more about them in those early years of 2004, that might be a thing I haven’t said before. It wouldn’t be until 2009 that I got The Spine in my hands. While I don’t think ‘Thunderbird’ was a song on there I liked immediately, it wasn’t too long until it eventually burrowed itself into my head.

From what I can recall, when The Spine was the most recent or second-most recent TMBG release, ‘Thunderbird’ was one of the highest-ranked numbers from the album on the TMBG Wiki’s Song Ratings list. I think just from seeing that, it made me want to listen again and find out why fans liked it so much. I’m a guy from the UK, so when I hear ‘Thunderbird’ I think of that TV show with the puppets and Tracy Island. I did think the song was a sort of superhero theme song for a while. It sounds like one. It’s all upbeat and very driving. A power-pop tune with John Linnell providing a soaring vocal take. But then I found out that’s how the song catches you out, because the title refers to the alcoholic beverage and told from the point of view of a person who gets a huge sense of confidence after drinking it regularly. An alcoholic. I didn’t want to put ‘alcoholic beverage’ and ‘alcoholic’ in the same sentence. A happy-sounding song anchored by a not-so-happy situation. Got a Beach Boys reference in the slow breakdown and everything. As only They Might Be Giants could achieve so easily.

Until its release, ‘Thunderbird’ had been in the works for a while in the TMBG camp. The band had actually subliminally released it, in a way, in the form of ‘On Earth My Nina’ on 1999’s Long Tall Weekend. Linnell reversed ‘Thunderbird’, wrote down the words he thought he could hear, and sang them using the resulting melody line out of the backwards music. It’s definitely a way of making a song. But the band did also make a full demo of the track, also recorded in 1999. Back then, it featured an additional verse. You might say it rocked a little harder too. They performed it live between ’99 and 2001. It could have been on Mink Car in 2001. The band were really saving it, thinking about when to unleash it. I’m glad all the versions of it that are out there exist. It’s cool to note the differences. Like that demo, it really stomps. It has its own flavour. I’ve seen some say it’s flat-out better than how it finally ended up. But I really like how it is on The Spine. I couldn’t compare. I won’t. I’ll take whatever they’ve got.