#1416: Blur – Trimm Trabb

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‘Tender’, ‘Trailerpark’, ‘Trimm Trabb’. That’s a strong set of songs beginning with ‘T’. All of them on Blur’s 13. Again, it wasn’t too long ago I wrote about a song from that album, so I’m trusting you can all remember how I feel about it. But for any new readers, it’s my favourite Blur record, I’ll leave it at that. A small number of songs from 13 would have dedicated posts on the blog in another universe. But in this one, like I usually say, the stars didn’t align, the timing wasn’t right. Other sayings along those lines. I didn’t get into a bulk of the album until 2015, by which time the ‘H’ section was the latest in this series. I didn’t even get into ‘B.L.U.R.E.M.I.’ until 2023. But considering this whole thing is covering songs I had on my iPhone between 2013 and 2021, the potential 13 posts would have gone to ‘Battle’, ‘Bugman’, ‘Caramel’, and if you want to make an allowance for the 2012 Special Edition, ‘All We Want’. Those are the ones for me.

13 is the musical encapsulation of Damon Albarn going slightly insane after the ending of a longtime relationship with Elastica front-lady Justine Frischmann. Drugs may or may not be involved. General mulling over heartbreak takes place. And ‘Trimm Trabb’ is the climax of it all. At least, that’s how I’ve come to see it. Here, the feeling sets in. Albarn is single for the first time in a very long while, and he can’t stand it. His fashion sense is in the pits, he lacks a general sense of urgency. He finds himself nodding off most of the time. He’s out in the town, sees drunken idiots around him, notices he’s wearing the same Adidas Trimm Trab trainers as the showy, stuck-up assholes in his vicinity. He’s become one of them. He has no one beside him when he sleeps at night. He has officially reached his breaking point, and it’s suitably symbolized by the screaming that occurs for the last minute-and-a-half of the music. By the end, he’s left a broken man as the dust rises from the chaos, leading directly into ‘No Distance Left to Run’ as the tearjerking comedown.

The thing I have with ‘Trimm Trabb’ is how uneasy it is from the get-go. The odd echoing keyboard, the distortion on Albarn’s voice as he recites the address of a hotel the band must have stayed amidst other indecipherable utterances and vocalizations. Underneath Graham Coxon’s jumping acoustic guitar chords and the head-bopping rhythm, there’s an underlying tension, no matter how smoothly Albarn delivers the melody over the top. The tension only gets tighter when the demented electric guitars come in after the spacey break, tighter and tighter it gets as Albarn repeats ‘I sleep alone’ until the cathartic screaming and awesome riffage marks its release. I tell you, after the twist, turns, interludes and experimental moments, it’s those screams – which you can hear looping over and over again in the middle of the madness – that capture the frustration expressed throughout the whole album. It’s not the last song on 13. It very well could have been. But it’s the last time a representative of the record will be talked about on this blog. Another to add to the list of albums out of here.

#1415: Pavement – Trigger Cut/Wounded-Kite at :17

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Ween-Pavement-Ween-Pavement. How the past few days have been going. Don’t fret, there’s no Ween song coming straight after this one. It will be by Blur again. Today’s Pavement song comes from the band’s Slanted and Enchanted album, their debut from 1992. Haven’t written about a lot of songs from that one. My experience with Slanted.. is I heard the album years ago and didn’t like how it sounded compared to Crooked Rain… and the other following albums. As time went on, I’d watch the band performing songs of the album live through videos on YouTube, which then made me appreciate the studio recordings a lot more when I’d revisit them. That happened with ‘Perfume-V’. It happened with ‘Summer Babe’. The same thing happened with ‘Trigger Cut’ too. Looks like that would be the trick in getting me to appreciate the album as a whole. Whether or not I will, you’ll never find out, ’cause Slanted… won’t appear on the blog after this. But I’m inclined to like anything Pavement-wise, so we’ll say that I eventually will.

Back in 2018, Stephen Malkmus was gearing up to release Sparkle Hard with the Jicks. A lot of promo and social media activity was going on in that lead-up. At that point, I probably didn’t think all that much of ‘Trigger Cut’. Slanted… was the one Pavement album I never really went back to then. But during that time, and I’m pretty sure it was the video down below, Pitchfork uploaded a Stephen Malkmus acoustic set to their channel. He played ‘Trigger Cut’ as the last number, and that performance there was really all I needed to be swayed. There’s Malkmus with a 12-string guitar, just his voice with the notes ringing out. The melody popped out a whole lot more. It was like hearing the song for the first time again. I think it might as well have been, I probably hadn’t heard the original for a while up to then. So I saw the light, went back to the original, took it for what it was and found myself having another Pavement track to enjoy whenever need be.

‘Trigger Cut’ is the second track on Slanted…, the two-punch after the ‘one’ provided by opener ‘Summer Babe’. A very fine way to start your album off with two lo-fi indie power pop classics. Will admit, I don’t know what the song’s about. Haven’t built that close connection with it like I have with other Pavement songs. I could look on Genius, but even then I think a lot of ‘contributors’ on that place are usually reaching. All I know for certain is it’s all so catchy. So, so, catchy. Malkmus sings really nicely over the instrumentation. Eccentric drummer Gary Young keeps the rhythm pretty straight for the verses before bringing in the fills and thrashing crash cymbals in the chorus. The call-response vocal structure between Malkmus and Spiral Stairs in those choruses are a hoot, and Malkmus’s “Sha-la-la / Ooh-ooh” vocalizations during the break are arguably the best part of the entire thing. The instrumental ‘Wounded Kite…’ section at the song’s end is a slice of the Slanted… outtake ‘Nothing Ever Happens’. Did it need to be there? Probably not. But the three minutes would feel incomplete without it somehow.

#1414: Ween – Tried and True

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Just when Quebec was starting to get some love over here, it comes to a swift end. No more Quebec songs are to appear after this one. There is one on the album that begins with ‘Z’. I like it, but not to the extent that I do all the other tracks I’ve written about. So that’s how it is. Literally wrote about ‘Transdermal Celebration’ the other day, so I’ll spare the whole spiel about my feelings on the LP and its context. On that post, I did say there were five numbers on Quebec that would have had their own posts had the time been right. May as well list them out: ‘Among His Tribe’, ‘Happy Colored Marbles’, ‘Hey There Fancypants’, ‘Chocolate Town’ and ‘The Argus’. Always had a great time with those songs in particular. But as I feel I implied in the last post concerning Quebec, the album as a whole is very special. So we say farewell to it, and its last representative comes in the form of its sixth track, ‘Tried and True’.

At the time of writing this, ‘Tried and True’ is the most-played Quebec song on Spotify with 25+ million streams. A good 11 million more than the next. Not quite sure why that happened. Possibly through various playlist inclusions. I really like ‘Tried and True’ myself, but I wouldn’t say it’s the best song Quebec has to offer. But what I think it provides the people is some very easy listening. You just sit back in your most comfortable chair and let yourself sink into it while this song rides out. It’s helped by the fact that, and I’m pretty sure it’s the case, the band recorded it at a faster speed in its original key of C, before slowing it down to how it is on the album. Why would the band do that, you might ask. It just gives the track a certain character, I think. Makes the track sound a bit more spaced out. Hits some certain frequencies that wouldn’t be possible without the production tricks. And plus, it seems that whenever the band worked with producer Andrew Weiss, speed manipulation was the way to go a lot of the time.

In the live performance below, Gene Ween precedes the song by saying it’s one ‘about space and time’. I can’t really argue with that. I would put forward, there’s definitely something sexual about ‘Tried and True’ too. Is that fair to say? There’s certainly some double entendres that support that theory. “I woke, I was alone… rising”. “Rising” could refer to the physical act of getting out of bed or a classic case of morning wood. Then I’d say the song is about waking up with very strong blood flow and feeling untouchable, with a heavily cosmic spin put on it via the lyrics, reinforced by the electric sitar, the pulsating keyboards and floaty background vocals that come in nearing the song’s end. But I may also be completely wrong on that front. It also contains the cheekiest play on words with the “Could you smell my whole… life?” lyric. I tell you, I sung that out loud in front of my sister one time. She looked at me for a second during that pause between “whole” and “life” before I completed the lyric myself. And that was when I should maybe only reserve audible singing for times when there’s no one else in the room.

#1413: Pavement – Transport Is Arranged

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I sort of remember hearing Pavement’s ‘Transport Is Arranged’ the first time. Think it was sometime in early to mid-2013. Makes me either 17 or 18 years of age. I thought it was a weird one initially. In fact, I’m not entirely sure I liked it all that much. The track’s the third to start playing on the band’s Brighten the Corners album from 1997. The one-two punch of ‘Stereo’ and ‘Shady Lane’ was something I was already very familiar with by 2013. The two numbers were the third and second Pavement songs I’d ever heard respectively, having seen their videos on MTV2 in the mid-2000s. So fast-forward, I’m going through Brighten the Corners. The ‘J vs. S’ instrumental section of ‘Shady Lane’ finishes. Now I’m officially in unfamiliar territory. I was not in Kansas anymore. And ‘Transport…’ begins with Malkmus and his guitar alongside… a Mellotron? It wasn’t what I was expecting, that’s for sure.

To the 17/18-year-old me, ‘Transport…’ was the song where I thought Malkmus was really trying to actually sing, but he was failing. He was bad. That was my snobby attitude toward his vocals. Particularly, how he sang ‘Set me up with your nIeEce’, but generally how he was just pitchy all over the place. It put me off. But there were still little moments that stuck in my head, the line “I know, you’re my lady” did for some reason, just the melody of it. And after a few more listens over a period of time, I put the snobbery to the side, enjoyed the track for what it was and got to the point where I was humming it to myself on the train. At this point in time, it seems so silly I was uptight about those kinds of things back in those days ’cause it’s really Malkmus’s vocals that are usually the most endearing parts of any Pavement song. ‘Transport…’ is still a weirder one, though. ‘Least on the musical side. It’s made up of three verses, two of which end with an utterance of the song title, and no chorus, separated by ascending / descending guitar runs with a wandering instrumental jam falling into a hard-rock breakdown in the middle. It’s like a little trip, a little journey. Which I think ties into what the song’s about, from the little I can personally make out from the lyrics, anyway.

Well, let’s first begin with the title. ‘Transport Is Arranged’. Well, I guess transport is usually arranged for musicians who need to travel around various countries to get to the venues they’re playing in, the accommodation where they’re staying for a night, etc. And I think the song is another of those “life on the road” songs that Malkmus sometimes does, but there’s the added angle of trying to build and maintain a relationship while also living the life of a touring musician. The narrator’s good at his craft. But when it comes to romance, there’s something lacking. “A voice coach taught me to sing / He couldn’t teach me to love”. The first two verses appear to tackle the situation. But by the third verse, it seems that the narrator’s comfortable in the solitary state they’re in, navigating their way through life effortlessly, sometimes with the assistance of a tour bus or other provided transportation. Maybe I’m just looking into it too much, and it’s all just a word exercise. You never really know when it comes to Stephen Malkmus, and I think that’s what gets me wanting more whenever a Malkmus things comes around.

#1412: Ween – Transdermal Celebration

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Only the second song from Ween’s Quebec I’ll be writing about on here. I tell you, in another time, there’d be many more Ween songs covered on this blog in general. But when it comes to Quebec, there are about five others on that album that would have definitely had their own posts, had I been aware of the album’s existence before 2013. The band’s eighth album, released in August 2003, is my favourite of the band’s. For a while, it was firmly The Mollusk, which I think is a common feeling among the people. But as I’ve got older and had my moments of sadness and reflection, settling into the person I am, Quebec is at that point where it resonates with me a lot more than it initially did. The album deals with issues, so much so that the album was jokingly referred to as “Aaron Freeman’s Issues” during its making. One of those issues covered on the album is that of drugs, and that is all over its third track, ‘Transdermal Celebration’.

After the Motorhead-esque opener in ‘It’s Gonna Be a Long Night’ and elevator muzak take of ‘Zoloft’, ‘Transdermal…’ comes in as the big “alt-rock” number to push the album along further. I did think it was a rip on Foo Fighters in the first few months of knowing it. It probably isn’t. But I still think Gene Ween’s vocals sound like Dave Grohl’s in ‘Learn to Fly’. All that’s neither here nor there. Webster’s definition of ‘transdermal’ is as follows: “relating to, being, or supplying a medication in a form for absorption through the skin into the bloodstream”. A lot of other things, not so much ‘medication’, can be taken in the same way. But we’ll say it’s about medication just for this, with the verses depicting the various visions and metaphorical effects on the body the narrator experiences while on it. The storming verses then come down into the swaying, calmer choruses, which change the perspective, looking on at the narrator who lies comatose on their lawn while all these hallucinations are happening in their head. Not to reduce the song to “It’s just about drugs, man”, but knowing Ween… it’s very likely that it is.

I think people who know ‘Transdermal…’ all have an aligned understanding that it’s pretty much amazing. If it is about drug visions and out-of-this-world hallucinations that sound great on the surface, I also appreciate the depiction of the scary point-of-no-return moment in the final line of the last verse, “But where is the mutation that once told me it was safe? / I can’t find him” – which also sounds like “Fucking find him”, and I don’t think that’s unintentional. While on the front acting as a celebration, there’s a warning inside too, which goes hand-in-hand with the “Everything’s okay on the outside, but inside there’s insecurity” theme (or something better-worded but along those lines) that shows up throughout the album. There’s a great story about how the fantastic guitar solo was recorded. It involves Dean Ween and the gear and equipment of the legendary guitarist Carlos Santana. It’s better to read it from Dean Ween’s point of view. And here’s Santana playing live the morning after.