#1400: Klaxons – Totem on the Timeline

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There I was pouring my heart out a couple days ago about the last ever post by a band on the blog, but had I known that the same thing would be happening for Klaxons right after, I probably wouldn’t have bothered. Yeah, it’s the last time you’ll see Klaxons on here too. But including today’s song, I only wrote about four of the group’s tracks. I don’t have as close a personal feeling towards them. But Klaxons were a big thing in their time. It’s something I must have said in the other Klaxons posts, but 2007, that was their year. They were the figureheads of the “new rave” scene that was happening. I remember NME being all over that, highlighting bands like Hadouken!, New Young Pony Club, CSS… and others. I wonder how they’re all doing. Klaxons’ debut Myths of the Near Future was the album everyone was waiting for, myself included, and before it was officially released, NME had the album as an exclusive on their website. I don’t think I ever said anything about that before, but the link is proof. Just have to select “Just albums” and click next, you’ll see ‘Klaxons’ eventually.

And that’s how I got to know ‘Totem on the Timeline’. By the time the album exclusive was up, I was well aware of tunes like ‘Atlantis to Interzone’, ‘Golden Skans’, and ‘Magick’. They’d all been singles in the months prior. Oh, ‘Gravity’s Rainbow’ too. The album begins with ‘Two Receivers’, which is all right, a nice start to everything. But ‘Totem…’ was the first album track that I really got into. The tune has a remarkably simple structure. The second verse is the same as the first, and otherwise it’s all chorus bar a bass guitar-driven instrumental section. Lyrically, it’s a bit of a surreal one. Apart from the refrains where the three vocalists sing about being in Club 18-30 and meeting a number of historical figures, whatever else they’re singing about is anyone’s guess. I don’t mind those kinds of songs. You know those ones that maybe go for more of a feel rather than relying on the substance. I can’t hate it. Maybe others would feel differently.

I guess what I like most about the song is it just sounds like all four members, raw, in a room playing it in one run-through. Maybe there’s a vocal overdub, probably that falsetto one, but I think that would be it. Probably the most straight-up rock tune on the first half of the album, with a little keyboard on top. I dig the ascending / descending guitar riff that the vocal melody almost follows too. Now, like I said earlier, because of the way ‘Totem…”s structured, once you’ve heard the first verse and chorus, you’ve more or less heard the rest of the track. To anyone who likes a little variety in their favourite songs, I’m just saying. But this is my blog. I can take a dense song from time to time. And other times, a repetitive number will do the trick. ‘Totem…’ ticks that box for me. So, thanks Klaxons. 2007 was definitely a time to be alive. Never did get round to listening to their second or third albums. I should get to them one of these days.

#1399: Dananananaykroyd – Totally Bone

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Well, this is it. The end of the road. The last time I’ll be talking about anything by Dananananaykroyd on here. Won’t have to count how many na’s are in the name when I’m typing the name. It’s all over. I have the honour of writing about a song of theirs in the first few weeks of this blog’s existence when it wasn’t even on WordPress but on Blogspot instead. This may have happened for another artist on here already, in terms of a solid “last ever post”. But I guess I’m making a bigger deal out of this because I hope more people listen to Dananananaykroyd, or are listening to them, maybe after they read my posts or whatever. I’m not sure I have that much of an influence on people’s tastes. But I like their music, and not a lot of people know about them. So spread the word. They made two – what I consider to be – banger albums and dipped. Their self-dubbed “fight pop” music was like nothing anyone else was making in their time.

‘Totally Bone’ is on the band’s first album, Hey Everyone!, released back in 2009. This was a song I really got to know when it came up on shuffle in my iTunes library, in the days when I could have my own personal soundtrack over whatever FIFA game I was playing at the same time. A third of the songs on Hey Everyone! have lyrics written by the band’s original singer and lyricist, Giles Bailey. ‘Totally Bone’ is of them. Bailey left the group a while before the album’s release. He was replaced by Calum Gunn and John Baillie Jnr, the former taking the lead vocal on all of Bailey’s songs when Hey Everyone! eventually came around. ‘Totally Bone’ was released as the band’s first ever single in 2006, though. If you’re wondering how Bailey sounded within the group, well, here he is singing the tune in that original release. In the context of Hey Everyone!, ‘Totally Bone’ follows the “radio friendly pop tune” of ‘Black Wax’, I think in a very calculated move. There’s something very celebratory and joyous sounding about ‘Black Wax’, while ‘Totally Bone’ sounds like someone at the breaking point of rage. It’s just the music that makes it sound that way.

I think ‘Totally Bone’ is about a thing that Gunn and Baillie Jnr cover in their own way with ‘Infinity Milk’. That thing being sex. Both songs look at the anxiety in the lead-up to it and the confidence found after discovering the act can be done, and not too badly either. But again, while the music behind Gunn and Baillie Jnr’s words in ‘Infinity…’ make the discovery sound like this epic, momentous occasion, I think Bailey’s rather graphic evocations of dismembering flesh and cutting off skins in ‘Totally Bone’ influenced the music to go in a different direction. Though it could have been vice-versa. A lot of guitar riffage going on throughout this tune. David Roy on the right with Duncan Robertson on the left, both guitarists playing licks interweaving with each other. That constant chord progression of D to E is a hook in itself. But my favourite parts are the intense instrumental breaks after the “We can totally bone” shouts. It’s those chords blasts alternating with the palm muted strums, small tension builds and quick releases that contain so much energy in their delivery. And Calum Gunn sounds like he has a mental breakdown that intensifies as the song goes on. “Intense” is how I would describe this entire track. Could be too much for some, but I enjoy it a bunch. Rather suitable that the ‘Kroyd’s first single is the last song I talk about. Rounds things up very nicely. Can’t find any good footage of them playing the song live.

#1398: Super Furry Animals – Torra Fy Ngwallt Yn Hir

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According to Spotify, Super Furry Animals’ ‘Torra Fy Ngwallt Yn Hir’ was my tenth most played song on the platform in 2018. That sounds about right. I wouldn’t know the numbers exactly, but I do remember listening to that one a lot that year, for sure. It was then that I was in my first job out of university. I was working in a music studio, in a position that didn’t require a lot of supervision, and a lot of time was spent listening to artists’ discographies in the large gaps between having actual tasks to do. I went through SFA’s over a week or something. Radiator, being the band’s second album, was the second in the list. Even though that particular record had been in my personal iTunes library since about 2014, it was during that relisten that my ears pricked up when ‘Torra…’ was playing out of the speakers. So there you go. Sometimes you leave an album alone, you come back to it years later, and a song on there you never thought twice about becomes one of your favourites.

Super Furry Animals are a band from Wales, a country part of the United Kingdom. The people of Wales do speak English, but they take pride in their native Welsh language too. This is a roundabout way of getting to the point that ‘Torra Fy Ngwallt Yn Hir’ is sung completely in Welsh, if you were confused when laying your eyes on the song’s title. Translated, it means ‘Cut My Hair Long’, and the entire track is a request by its narrator to a pair of magic scissors so their long hair covers their ears, eyelashes, goes “right down to [their] arse”, and is in a state to the point that people refuse to sit next to the narrator on the bus. Again, it’s not like I know all of this off the dome, this website helped. The song’s just under two minutes in length, but it gets the job done. And it’s a special one in a way. Before making their Welsh language-only record, Mwng, in 2000, ‘Torra…’ was the only track on the band’s first three albums to be sung entirely in their native tongue.

On Radiator, ‘Torra…’ follows another sub-two minute track in the form of ‘Chupacabras’, a punkier composition and a bit of freak-out compared to the poppier, melodic route that ‘Torra…’ goes down. It’s cool to have such a whiplash in moods provided by the two numbers. Even if I can’t properly sing along to ‘Torra…’, failing in getting the pronunciation down and so forth, it doesn’t stop me from at least trying. One thing I like a lot about the track is that it doesn’t appear to have a chorus of any kind. It’s three repeats of the verse structure, with some variations in the lyrics, until it eventually gets to the “Siswrn!” bridge where the melody changes. But even then, that repeats itself a few times before going back to the verse again. And then when that verse is done, the final line is hammered home before the song burns out in some ascending synth swoops. It’s a song where repetition is key. Gets into your head much easier that way.

#1397: Television – Torn Curtain

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I don’t know if I have much to say on the personal front when it comes to ‘Torn Curtain’. I listened through Marquee Moon the first time, sometime in 2012 when I was going through a “Classic Albums” discovery phase, and from what I can recall ‘See No Evil’ and today’s subject were the two songs on there that I latched on to from the jump. I liked them then and there. Years would gradually come and go, and on subsequent revisits I’d get into another song or two. At this point, it’s just ‘Friction’ and, in a most blasphemous case, the title track that remain the numbers on the album that I can’t get into. The former’s kind of rock and roll party vibe isn’t for me, and even though I appreciate ‘Marquee Moon’ the song, there’s never been a point where I’ve willingly wanted to listen to it outside of the LP. If I’m not into those two songs now, I think I’m at the point where I can accept I probably never will be. It’s just me, I don’t know what to tell you.

To me, ‘Torn Curtain’ feels like it was written to be the big, emotional album closer. Just want to look out the window and see it’s raining while listening to this one, you know? A very minor-key composition, songwriter Tom Verlaine sings about the titular object. The ‘torn curtain’ is meant to symbolise something. What that thing is eludes me to this day. I bought the 33 1/3 book written around Marquee Moon in 2018, wanting to know more about the songs on there and their respective backgrounds and inspirations. I remember there being many more words written about the CBGB punk scene and the context of the album than the actual music and the songs themselves. Felt a bit gypped, to be honest. I can’t seem to find anything online showing Verlaine’s thoughts on it. The one note stated across the board on lyric sites is how the song shares a name with a 1966 Alfred Hitchcock film. Basically, what the song’s about is anyone’s guess, and because Verlaine’s no longer with us, no one will really ever know for sure.

But what we can’t find regarding the lyrical matter is certainly made up for in the musicality of it all. Never really paid attention to the sort of skipping pattern the drums take on during the verses before. They sound like a ticking clock to me, maybe symbolizing this second-by-second suffering Verlaine experiences with this torn-curtain symbol. But that may be a reach in itself. I like how the sparse, empty-feeling verses contrast with the bursting melancholy of the choruses – heightened by a twinkling piano and a call-and-response dynamic between the backing vocals and Verlaine’s lead vocal. I like how there isn’t just one guitar solo but two, both performed by Verlaine, the latter of which seems him climb further and further up the neck before sliding back down and working his way up, before alternating on two notes until the song eventually fades to silence, signifying the album’s end. Such a dramatic way to finish it up, a complete 180 from the confident beginnings of ‘See No Evil’, I couldn’t imagine a more perfect conclusion.

#1396: The Maccabees – Toothpaste Kisses

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I’m still out here using Spotify as my main streaming service. How you feel about that, I can’t change. But I look on there, search up The Maccabees, and ‘Toothpaste Kisses’ is the band’s most popular song on there by a country mile. Well over 100 million plays amassed. I think it was used in a film or something. But like the other Maccabees track I covered the other day, I heard ‘Toothpaste…’ alongside the rest of Colour It In, when it was available as an exclusive on NME.com. This story I’ve told already. The song was eventually released as the final single from the album, in the form of a newer version that added another verse during the original instrumental outro. And I want to say it was quickly re-released, that time with a new video featuring people eating each other’s faces for almost the song’s duration. I’m all for kissing, I liked the first video much more.

‘Toothpaste…’ wraps a nice little bow on Colour It In, finishing it off very similarly to how it starts, as a gently-delivered number led by a mini, child-size acoustic guitar. Throughout the album, there are songs concerning love and the things that come with it, whether it’s real or fake, whether it will ever be experienced again after losing it. They’re usually performed with hectic rhythms and yelping vocals courtesy of singer Orlando Weeks. But it’s on ‘Toothpaste Kisses’ where Weeks envisions a perfect kind of love. One where the two involved lay together, give each other pecks on the lips with toothpaste in their mouths and do the things that lovers do. Not necessarily in that order. He sings just two verses on the track, and once he says the album’s final word “divine”, the White brothers (Hugo and Felix) join in on their guitars for the outro that feels like a carousel ride to the moon. It’s very sweet stuff.

If you want to hear more about the song, I may as well link this little interview with the two brothers concerning it. Just found it before writing this. Would have never known it was a last-minute addition where Orlando Weeks did his vocal in a cupboard and Felix White recorded his guitar with a toy amp. A little regret I have is missing a live performance of the song the band did on Freshly Squeezed, when that was a programme shown in the mornings on Channel 4. I had it on the TV in my room, but I had to comb my hair and use a mirror – which was in the bathroom – and by the time I came back the performance was over. Annoyingly, this video is labelled as the band playing ‘Toothpaste Kisses’ on the show. They’re playing ‘About Your Dress’. I believe it was just Orlando Weeks and Felix White playing the song on the steps near a beach somewhere. Would be nice if that appeared on YouTube one of these days, maybe we can all will it into existence.