#1387: The Smashing Pumpkins – Today

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When Smashing Pumpkins were in their prime, in the ’90s as the classic lineup of Corgan, Wretzky, Iha and Chamberlain, I was barely a human being. I’m thinking the first time I may have become aware of the band was through their guest appearance on The Simpsons, a show you couldn’t get me away from when I was a child, and that would have been a repeat airing years after its premiere. The first Pumpkins release I was around to experience the “hype” for was Zeitgeist in ’07. But in the years leading up to that, seeing a Smashing Pumpkins music video on any music television channel was a common occurrence. It’s how I came to know ‘Today.’ I got a grip of what the band’s singles were about. I properly went through their discography in about 2020. I’d heard Siamese Dream and Mellon Collie… before, but 2020 was the year where I could really absorb ’em. Hence this is the first time I’m covering a Smashing Pumpkins song of any kind on here. I do like a few more. They just begin with letters of the alphabet that come before ‘T.’

The track was released as the second single from Siamese Dream, the band’s second album, in 1993. I believe the story goes the band’s label pushed it to be the first, I think for very obvious reasons too, but the band felt ‘Cherub Rock’ was a better representation of where the band was at that point in time. Gotta respect it. But ‘Today’, man. Might be basic to say it’s a favourite Smashing Pumpkins song of mine, but there’s no point in denying it. The quieter parts of the song are where the choruses happen before they launch into the louder verses, putting a nice spin on the usual ‘quiet verse / loud chorus’ dynamic which was a keystone move in ’90s alternative rock. I appreciate that. That, and what I think is an obvious Beatles reference with the ‘I want to turn you on’ repeats near the finish. But I what I appreciate most is the great melody. I’m a sucker for a melody you can get lost in, and that’s all over ‘Today’. Whether Corgan takes on the breathy, airy tone or a gritter one for the louder parts, the melody at the centre of it is always strong. There’s also a guitar solo buried deep in the middle of the layered guitars during the introduction, which is actually one of my favourite parts of the entire thing. It seems insignificant, but for me it adds so much to it all.

Yeah, watching the music video for ‘Today’ was how I got to know the song. It’s a story that applies to a bunch of other songs on this blog. I think the video played on VH2. From what I can remember, the channel used a clip of the video for one of the various ident adverts it had. I became familiar with the track’s twinkling riff and the drop into the heavy intro. That’s how my association with it stayed for a while. One day the whole video played, and that was all I needed. There’s a reason it’s one of the band’s most well-known songs. It’s so damn catchy, even though it’s written at a time when Billy Corgan was at his lowest and contemplating suicide. In his words, he found it funny to write a song saying “today is the greatest day [he’s] ever known” because it couldn’t get any worse. And yet out of what must have been a shitty situation came this track that makes so many people happy. I most likely took the song’s main phrase at face value those first times hearing it. But even after knowing the song’s dark background for a while now, I hear that small, unassuming riff and the sudden switch into the sunny, distorted introduction and can’t help but smile and feel warm inside.

#1386: The Maccabees – Tissue Shoulders

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I mentioned The Maccabees’ Colour It In just a couple days ago. Only by sheer coincidence, I swear. Like I said in the previous post, the album was something I asked to get as a Christmas gift in 2007. There weren’t any other search results under ‘Colour It In’ apart from that Christmas list email, so it must have been under the tree. Videos for The Maccabees’ singles were appearing on MTV2 in that prime UK-indie-rock-everywhere phase of 2006-07. ‘Latchmere’ was the first Maccabees song I heard, followed by ‘First Love’, ‘About Your Dress’ and then ‘Precious Time’, the latter being the proper lead-up single before the album was released maybe a couple weeks later. I liked ’em all. Then NME made it available to listen to on their website on the media player they had back in the day as an exclusive. In low-quality, but obviously the company weren’t going to share a high-quality version for everyone to hear. And that was enough for me, really, hence the gift request later in the year.

Going into listening through the actual CD, now that I had it in my possession, I think I had my favourites sussed out already from that initial NME.com listen. The singles were a given, but then there were the deeper cuts like ‘Good Old Bill’, ‘O.A.V.I.P.’ and ‘Happy Faces’ that I got into right away. ‘Tissue Shoulders’, placed between the last two listed songs in the previous sentence, was not one of them. I never thought it was bad. But with the placement it had in the track list, sandwiched between two tracks I thought were great, it didn’t leave the biggest impression on me for a long time. This changed maybe only a few years ago too. Now, I was certain that I heard a small, small section of the song – the layered guitars during the ending – in an episode of The Inbetweeners I was re-watching, and just that part made me want to revisit the whole track. I searched ’tissue shoulders the inbetweeners’ on Google before writing this just to be sure, and I got no results. Could any Inbetweeners fan out there who knows each episode by heart, potentially reading this, confirm that I’m not going crazy?

A few songs on Colour It In touch upon the universal subject of relationships. Everyone’s favourite subject. ‘Tissue Shoulders’ is one of them. In it, singer Orlando Weeks aims to give some guidance on what to do if you’re looking to get into a relationship. Find someone who knows what they want out of it. If they can give a shoulder to cry on, hence the ’tissue shoulders’ turn of phrase, that would be preferable too. But by the repetitions of “Don’t want to lie alone” and a view of looking to find “another with a shoestring love heart thong” near the song’s end, he’s probably giving this advice to himself. That’s a tragic element to the track that I never picked up on. But the energetic performance supplied by the rest of the band alongside the words does well to hide it. The song always goes back to the bass hook provided by Rupert Jarvis at the song’s start, with the band’s old drummer Robert Dylan Thomas breaking out some hectic rhythms. What I usually most enjoy about ‘Tissue…’ though, like a lot of songs on Colour It In is the guitar interplay between the White brothers, Hugo and Felix. The way they lock in with those stops and starts at the song’s final moments is probably my favourite part. Many layers to ‘Tissue Shoulders’. One of a number of reasons the album remains my Maccabees release of choice.

#1385: Weezer – Tired of Sex

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In my Hotmail/Outlook account, I have a sent email dated 5th December 2007 titled ‘christmas list’. Weezer’s Pinkerton was one of the things I asked for that year, among other items including The Simpsons Game on the PS2, Colour It In by The Maccabees and the Blink-182 Greatest Hits compilation. There are other requests, but I won’t waste writing space listing them all. Ah, to be 12 again. I have a big memory of discovering ‘El Scorcho’ one day, finding its video online, and it became a favourite song of mine instantly. Was insane how hooked on it I was. I’d had a physical copy of the Blue Album for a year by 2007. I loved it, then. Here was this “new” Weezer song in ‘El Scorcho’. I didn’t know where to download music without paying, didn’t know about Limewire and those things. So I guess I had to get this other Weezer album, just so I could listen to ‘El Scorcho’ whenever I wanted. Gotta thank my cousin for coming in clutch on the list. I did get nearly everything I asked for that year.

‘Tired of Sex’ is the first song on Pinkerton. I’m gonna be honest, I didn’t like the track when I heard it the first time. I didn’t like the opening keyboard / guitar riff. I didn’t like the bass line. I didn’t like the vocal melodies. I didn’t like Rivers Cuomo’s screaming. Everything sounded like a bunch of noise. I thought it was a weird subject to be writing a song about. At the age of 12, I couldn’t go around singing it out loud. It definitely wasn’t ‘My Name Is Jonas’. And that’s what I thought of Pinkerton, initially. Nine tracks of noise, only one of them I really liked, ending with a quiet-as-hell acoustic number, and it was nothing like the Blue Album. It wasn’t too long into 2008 that I was singing along to almost every song on Pinkerton. Almost. ‘Tired of Sex’ and ‘Across the Sea’, I could just not get into. There’s no post for ‘Across the Sea’ on here, so I guess in 2013, I still wasn’t into it. But I eventually grew to appreciate it. ‘Tired of Sex’ was the outlier. I think that first impression really left a mark on me. It might have been something like 2018 or ’19, when I heard it again, probably found myself singing it out of the blue at various times, and realized that if I was doing that, then it probably meant I finally liked the song now.

Rivers Cuomo was a desperate man. He just wanted some love. The real kind. He wasn’t getting any satisfaction from the numerous fleeting encounters he was having, which is usually made fun of ’cause he looked like this in the ’90s, but he was the frontman of a pretty big alternative rock band, so it probably wasn’t very difficult for him on that front. The manly men out there would maybe tell him to suck it up. Most likely wouldn’t care. But Cuomo was really feeling it, and ‘Tired of Sex’ lays the desperation flat-out for all to witness. The screaming, all the noise that I said I didn’t like earlier, it wasn’t for show. This was all made with intention. This was catharsis. Patrick Wilson is pummeling those drums. Matt Sharp rolls out that the thick bass line. Cuomo lets everything out, from his vocals to the shredding on the crazy guitar solo. ‘Tired of Sex’ is Pinkerton‘s opening salvo, and it’s probably the most important song on the album ’cause the rest that follow hinge on the issues raised in it. It’s a damn powerhouse.

#1384: The La’s – Timeless Melody

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When it comes to The La’s’ ‘Timeless Melody’, I don’t think it was a song I really appreciated until my fourth or fitth run-through of the band’s 1990 self-titled debut album, a record known for being their only album before they broke up, disappointed in the way it sounded upon its release. Knowing the track now, I don’t know what took so long because it’s certainly one of the most immediate and catchy tunes on the record. That fourth (or fifth) listen of the album, if I can recall, happened during a time in 2019 when I was more than unemployed and revisiting albums that were sitting dormant in my iTunes library on my previous laptop. The La’s had been in it since about 2014, and I thought I had my favourites from the album set in stone. ‘Son of a Gun’ rolled into ‘I Can’t Sleep’, they came under that favourite ‘category’. Back then I’d usually find myself cruising through, waiting for ‘There She Goes’ to come along. But something about ‘Timeless Melody’ struck me on that occasion, and it’s ranked as a highlight for me ever since.

Why did it happen that time? Well, I think I simply paid attention to the song, focused in on songwriter Lee Mavers’s vocal and realised that he was singing very nicely, indeed. The melodies he showcases throughout, particularly those in the choruses, aren’t anything complicated, but they’re definitely memorable. I’ll find myself spontaneously blurting the song out when I’m doing some idle activity, like washing the dishes or having a shower. Anyone could sing along to it, which I think was Mavers’s aim calling it ‘Timeless Melody’ and everything. It’s one for the ages. In the track, Mavers relays to you his songwriting process, the joy in it and his inhibitions. The melody always finds him first, breaking that initial lock when thinking of creating a composition, but it’s the words that come to him a little less successfully. As he states, he never says what he wants to say. But if the world’s willing to listen to him, he’ll say everything he’ll need to. He implores you to ‘open your mind’ because there’s probably a song in the recesses of it waiting to be written. But the message could be generally applied to any creative-type person out there. And I really like the song for that reason too.

I’m thinking with its title and the fact that it clocks in at almost three minutes on the dot, maybe just one second over, ‘Timeless Melody’ was written to be that archetypal single meant to raid the airwaves. It was a single, released a month before the album release, but it didn’t hit all that much. Then ‘There She Goes’ was reissued. That ended up being the one. But you can hear ‘Timeless Melody’ and recognise it has everything ‘single’ about it. Again, not that any of the commercial angles need to matter. Musically, the song’s got it all. What draws me into the track is how the drums kind of have this skipping pattern that stays the same all the way throughout, bar a few moments here and there, while the rhythm guitars maintain this sturdy stop-start motion underneath. Makes it sound like the song has a quick tempo while also dragging at the same time, weirdly groovy in a way. Lee Mavers’s voice, well, it doesn’t take long to figure out what’s good about it once you listen to it. But those who know realise that the real power of The La’s is the vocal dynamic between he and bass guitarist John Power, who joins in on harmonies and backing countermelodies from the first chorus onwards. So many layers in this relatively small track. It’s great, you gotta hear it, man.

#1383: The Who – Time Is Passing

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So I got to know The Who’s ‘Time Is Passing’ via the band’s Odds & Sods compilation. I think I listened to that before I got round to hearing Who’s Next and other studio albums by the band. I know it was definitely before Tommy. But I can’t remember why. A possible reason I can think of, is that I saw it once got a perfect 10/10 score on Pitchfork – in a review you won’t see on the site now – and was convinced enough just by that to check it out. When Odds & Sods was originally released in 1974, it contained 11 tracks and ran for a solid vinyl-record length of 40 minutes and 23 seconds. But when it was reissued in 1998, with CDs being the norm and allowing more available storage, a fine decision was made to double the amount of songs on the compilation, ramping the running time up to a grand 77 minutes. This was the version that was digitally available back in 2011, which was when I first went through the album, though on a now-defunct website called we7.com that was sort of a precursor to all the streaming services that exist now.

‘Time Is Passing’ was one of the tracks added to that ’98 reissue. It was originally written for the Lifehouse rock opera Pete Townshend had envisioned to be The Who’s big follow-up to Tommy. But because no one could understand what the story was after countless explanations, Townshend had a breakdown. It was decided the opera be trimmed down to its highlights, resulting in Who’s Next. But man, with the amount of good music Townshend was writing and The Who were making at the time, Lifehouse could have been the greatest rock album ever. ‘Time Is Passing’ would have been on it, in the opera’s first act, establishing the country lifestyle the protagonist follows and introducing the “music has the potential save us all” theme that anchors the entire plot. Roger Daltrey sings about playing [his] guitar while [his] sister bangs a jar and walking by the sea and other natural/homely things, all the while he yearns to hear a piece of music he feels will set him free (which ties into ‘Pure and Easy’, but that’s opening a whole other can of worms that needn’t be). And for a Who song, it’s performed pretty straight. Just Daltrey singing over the musicianship of Townshend, Entwistle and Moon with that growl of his. It’s strong, strong stuff.

I liked ‘Time Is Passing’ almost immediately. Thought it was very full-sounding to the ears, So much so that I didn’t realise that what I was listening to was a mono mix, made from the right channel of the original stereo which was then forced into the centre. When the track was found for the 1998 reissue, the left channel of the stereo mix was apparently in such a bad condition that it was discarded. I’m sure I read this somewhere, think it was on thewho.net before that site went through changes that made it worse. A person on YouTube used a bootleg and the official release to make an approximation of how the entire soundscape initially was. It turned out there was a keyboard and steel guitar adding a whole other dimension that everyone was missing out on. An official Who-certified stereo mix wasn’t available for the public to hear until 2023 when the Super Deluxe Who’s Next:Life House Super Deluxe edition release was released. Now that’s around, it’s pretty much replaced the Odds & Sods version in my eyes, as much as I do appreciate it for being the initial one I heard. Nothing beats a good stereo mix, though.