#1465: Manic Street Preachers – Virginia State Epileptic Colony

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In early 2014, the only song I had in my iTunes library from Manic Street Preachers’ 2009 album, Journal for Plague Lovers, was ‘Jackie Collins Existential Question Time’. There was no official single from the LP, but that song was chosen as the main promotional cut from it, getting its own music video and stuff. I was in my first year of uni. I was hosting a radio station. Needed more songs to fill out a playlist. ‘Jackie Collins…’ was sitting there, all alone in my personal library, so I thought there’d be no harm in downloading the other album tracks. I knew the context around it, being made up of songs with lyrics by original bandmember Richey Edwards before his disappearance in ’95. It had a 7.8 rating on Pitchfork when it wasn’t all Condé Nast-ed. It felt like it had the potential to be a very interesting listen. I went through the album from front to back on 12th February 2014. Out of the other 12 tracks I got to know through hearing it, it was the second-last one, ‘Virginia State Epileptic Colony’, that became a favourite of mine I think almost instantly. I repeated it a lot that year.

I do remember wondering if it was actually James Dean Bradfield singing on it. Of course it was, ’cause who else would it be? But when it got to the choruses where he elongates “Piggyyyy” and “VSECeeee”, I thought there was a grit on his vocal that otherwise hadn’t been on the rest of the album. Sounded like it was recorded in a totally different place. Once I realised that I liked the whole album and found the “Making of” documentary, I was bummed to see that every respective song contained footage of the band working on it in the studio except ‘Virginia State…’ which was put in place as the credits music. With that being the case, I’ve got in my head canon that the track was probably the last one recorded for the album and maybe very quickly too. Whatever the circumstances, this is one Manic Street Preachers song that I could honestly leave on repeat for about half an hour without getting tired of it. The song goes by so briskly, its structure very easy to follow, with so many melodic components included. The guitar riff that alternates between the open chords and the rising/descending guitar scale in the introduction, very catchy. James Dean Bradfield’s vocals, again, very melodic and memorable from start to finish. The only nitpick I would have is how he really tries to rhyme “half-circled light” with “potassium percolate”. It’s quite awkward. But those are the lyrics he had to work with. Sean Moore’s drumming is solid as a rock. Nicky Wire on bass guitar follows the root note, mainly. But he does provide the skipping piano line during the instrumental break, and that’s probably the most delightful part of the entire track.

The song’s title isn’t a phrase Richey Edwards invented. It’s in fact based on the Virginia State Colony for Epileptics and Feebleminded, a state-run institution holding patients with severe mental impairment and others who were considered to be “feeble-minded.” An outdated term. There’s a whole Wikipedia article on it. At some point, Edwards did his own research on the institution, got some lyrics down and passed them on to his friends/bandmembers before he was never to be seen again. The lyrics detail the “choices” on offer to the inhabitants within the institution, but then, it’s like they don’t have much choice considering their mental states. Whatever they’re handed is really their only option. All very sarcastic, which Edwards could very much be in his lyricism. I mean, if you want to hear an official statement on the song’s meaning/background from the band, there’s no better video than the track-by-track analysis they did for NME. That is a video that’s come in handy for all the …Plague Lovers songs I’ve written about on the blog. How many songs by Manic Street Preachers are on here, ten or something? There are so much more by the band I like now. I always had respect for them ’cause they made The Holy Bible and Everything Must Go. But in June, I went through the entirety of their discography, inspired by the What Is Music? podcast. It was time well spent. I’d recommend anyone do the same.

#1464: Coldplay – Violet Hill

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Eighteen years can go by just like that, apparently. It was 2008 that Coldplay released Viva la Vida or Death and All His Friends. I was 13, a full functioning human being. A naïve one, but existing nonetheless. I was aware of my surroundings and knew my right from wrong. And I remember, very clearly, ‘Violet Hill’ being the new video, the new single by the band as if it were a couple weeks ago. When I saw/heard the tune, I was into it from the jump. The song, I think, is still the coolest one the band have ever done. If there was a contest for coolest Coldplay song, ‘Violet Hill’ should win it hands down. I was pretty conscious for the X&Y era. ‘Speed of Sound’, ‘Fix You’, ‘The Hardest Part’, although I have no kind of beef with those tunes, you could say they’re very stereotypically Coldplay. No one but Coldplay could have written and performed those songs. What struck me about ‘Violet Hill’ those first times hearing it was how un-Coldplay it sounded. Even today, it can sometimes surprise me that it’s Coldplay I’m listening to when ‘Violet Hill’ gets to playing in the shuffled playlist. It’s almost experimental by their standards. It was the first Coldplay song that got me excited for an upcoming release of theirs.

I’m trying to think if there’s another song of Coldplay’s that I consider better than ‘Violet Hill’, and I’ve gotta say, I don’t think there is a song by them that I personally enjoy more. I kind of like everything about it. Except for that “My nerves are poles that unfroze” lyric. The phrasing always felt a little strange to me. Is ‘unfroze’ a word used on a regular basis? I don’t know. Other than that, I think Chris Martin’s never sounded better vocal-wise. Just the tone of it. Maybe it’s the microphone he was using, the production, the studio he was in. Whatever it was, it helped. The “ba-dam ba-dam” guitar riff that happens during the verses are very cool. “Jagged” is the word used on Wikipedia under the song’s composition section. A very suitable adjective. It applies to the solo too. A bit repetitive, sure. But again, it’s the tone. Jon Buckland plays his guitar very differently to his usual style in the song. There are those wild guitar string bends going on in the back when Martin sings the “When the future’s architectured… / “Bury me in armour” parts of the verses. All adds to the drama. I think Guy Berryman’s bass line throughout is quite underrated too. He’s right in the pocket, and he does these little fills here and there which hit the spot. Then all the commotion’s swiped away to leave Martin singing the last section on his own with his piano. It’s all good, good stuff. And this album is where some people say Coldplay changed for the worse. Couldn’t be more wrong. The next album, though, we could have a conversation about.

So what’s it about? What’s it about? Well, obviously there’s a relationship situation going on within the song. “If you love me, won’t you let me know?” The chorus line sung in unison by the entire band with Martin’s going into falsetto for a brief moment in the centre. It’s great how he sings quite low in the verses that it feels like a climactic moment when he goes to a higher register for those choruses. And then, with the talk about ‘a carnival of idiots on show’, not wanting to be a soldier and a fox becoming God, well, that’s all a metaphor for the USA in the mid-2000s. George Bush Jr. in charge, no one taking him all that seriously. Where does a fox come into it? The fox is meant to be a reference to FOX News. So there you go. It’s anti-war, and it’s about looking at America, making a commentary on their society at the time and thinking, “What the hell is going on over there?” Some things never change. You don’t feel as if there’s a lot of hope left by the end of the song. It’s hearing it within the context of the album that I think elevates it that little more, ’cause ‘Strawberry Swing’ follows, arriving as the most optimistic song on there. That last leg of Viva… from the title track onwards, that’s a strong, strong run. So you may be able to guess, this won’t be the last song of the LP to be covered here.

#1463: Blur – Villa Rosie

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It seems 2016 was the year that I came to properly understood Blur’s Modern Life Is Rubbish. On the 3rd April that year, two days before I turned 21, I spent a couple hours in the afternoon going through its 2012 Special Edition issue. I already had this in my iTunes library, but the files all had a volume normalisation thing going on, so all the songs sounded equally quiet with a lot of loss in the dynamics. Must have initially downloaded it from the wrong kinds of places. But with that normalisation turned off on Spotify, a big difference was noticeable. Before that “new” listen, I was only into a few songs like ‘Chemical World’, ‘Star Shaped’… ‘Sunday Sunday’. But in this new light, ‘Pressure on Julian’ sounded brilliant – and it’s a great song you naysayers, the production of ‘Miss America’ felt like a huge pillow I could sink into, ‘Oily Water’ was cosmic, mind-warping. Each deep cut could get their own re-evaluation. But the one song that grew highest in my estimation was the 11th track, ‘Villa Rosie’. What I used to flimsily disregard as a passing song that was near the album’s end became one that, in my eyes, probably could have been a single in its time. The track was repeated on several separate occasions throughout 2016, it was my new favourite song for a while.

But why? “Why?” You’re asking. Damn, I don’t want to do a whole step-by-step of each section of the song. But I like the climbing build-up of the intro that falls into the slamming chords and incessant thrashing of cymbals, which then transitions into one of Graham Coxon’s most unique guitar riffs.. A “perverso riff”, in his own words. You watch that clip I’ve just linked and see how his fingers move over the fretboard to gets those licks off and carry out the chord progressions. It looks almost unnatural. The riff shouldn’t work, but it does in context of the song, and very well too, I should add. The “OOH-HOO” vocals that the riff then climaxes with, they’re a little funny, a little obnoxious even, but I like ’em, I think those are the feelings they’re going for, anyway. While Damon Albarn’s singing the verses, you can hear what seems to be a vocal overdub of him whispering the lyrics over the top. Sometimes it’s all I can focus on. I guess it’s meant to add a sense of mystique or something. And the verses then lead into what might be one of Blur’s most under-the-radar singalong choruses that they’ve ever put to tape, with harmonies all over the shop. There’s that little “ding-dong” that occurs after each “Ooh-hoo” in the short break following the second chorus. Coxon’s guitar solo brings everything home. The way the track ends with the sudden stop and the slow picking of the last chord… Man, this is such a tune. And you won’t find any footage of a young Blur playing it live, because they never did until they started to in 2023, the weirdos.

If you want to know what the song’s about, look no further than this link. Might have to scroll your way down or ‘Ctrl + F ‘Villa Rosie’, depending on how you like to surf the net. But if you’re feeling lazy, ‘Villa Rosie’ is about a fictional ‘watering hole / drinking den’ of the same name where the lads – not the members of Blur, just in general – go to shoot the shit after work. Don’t even really think I have to analyse the lyrics all that much, you get the idea of what’s going on. I think the most telling line in the whole song is ‘All losers come to Villa Rosie every night’, because up to that point I get the feeling that Villa Rosie is the place to be by the way Albarn implores listeners to ‘form a queue’ there, saying how it promises ‘a sweeter life’ – which for the longest time I thought was ‘a sweet delight’, I kind of like that better. So really, it’s a bit of a commentary on the types of people who go to those types of people who go to those kinds of gentlemen’s clubs who Albarn apparently holds a little disdain for. Nevertheless, it’s a lot of fun to be had while listening to the song. Just the general upbeat nature of it and all those little musical nuggets in between for the ears to latch on to. Modern Life…, it’s my favourite of the three “Life” albums by Blur in that Britpop era, and ‘Villa Rosie’ is one of the biggest reasons for that preference.

#1462: Arctic Monkeys – The View from the Afternoon

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You might not be able to believe that this will be the first time I’ve covered a song from Arctic Monkeys’ debut album. I’ve written about ‘Fake Tales of San Francisco’ and ‘From the Ritz to the Rubble’ in the past, but those were both concerning the versions on the Five Minutes with Arctic Monkeys EP. Not saying that I’m an OG fan who was downloading songs from MySpace back in the day, but I did hear those Beneath the Boardwalk demos before Whatever People… was released in January 2006. And when the album arrived, a lot of the songs, to me, were just sanitised versions of them. The edge that was once there had now been taken out. A roundabout way of saying I liked the demos more. I’ve always liked the live take they did for the ‘I Bet You Look Good on the Dancefloor’ music video more than how the studio take came out too. It somehow felt too produced, which is funny ’cause the album’s obviously the least produced out of all the work they’ve done.

‘The View from the Afternoon’ wasn’t on that collection of demos, though. I heard the song first via its music video, which was on repeat on MTV2 in 2006 because it was the new one by the Arctic Monkeys. The track was originally going to be the third single from Whatever People…, but the band had announced the Who the Fuck Are Arctic Monkeys? EP just two months after the album’s release. ‘The View…’ was to be included as the leading track on that EP, so the video was made to prepare the people for that rather than what would be an A-side and maybe a couple B-sides. In the video, a young man plays the drums to the song in the middle of a council estate from what looks like morning to night, his hands bleeding in the process, until he’s eventually knocked out by a guy with a baseball bat. We don’t see the impact, but you can see that’s what’s about to happen. This video made me really want to get into playing the drums. Because I also saw the visual first, I didn’t know how the song properly ended until my sister borrowed a copy of Whatever People… from a school friend of hers, ’cause the song cuts out just as the baseball bat’s about to hit the kid’s head. It’s a very nice chord the song ends on, gotta say.

The whole theme of the album is a night out in Sheffield, from perspectives of the people involved to the outsiders looking in at all the chaos. ‘The View from the Afternoon’ is exactly what it’s about in the title. It’s about the people looking forward to the night out, thinking about the endless possibilities a few hours before everything kicks off. The track opens with the line “Anticipation has a habit to set you up for disappointment,” which everyone comments on how clever it is that Alex Turner’s also referencing the hype around the ban. That isn’t the entire lyric, though, so is he really? He probably is. I sometimes thought people were reading too much into it. But yeah, Turner writes from the point of view of someone listing the things they want to see while out on the town. Girls in fancy dress, gambling in the fruit machine, the works. A particular action that’s focused upon in the lyrics is drunk texting a girl you’re interested in, which the band urge the narrator to bear in mind. We have a strong album opener on our hands. The four bandmembers are firing on all cylinders. Maybe there’s a reason why the music video places a focus on the drumming, because Matt Helders is going crazy on ’em. Lot of sixteenths on the hi-hats and frenetic drum fills. Turner and Jamie Cook play very quickly on their guitars, their highlight probably being the part where the song dies down and the two of them play alternating chords that switch from left to right and back again in the headphones. Former bass guitarist Andy Nicholson follows the chord progression of the rhythm guitar, but he does it very well, rounds off that low end. So maybe Whatever People… isn’t my favourite Arctic Monkeys album, but I can’t say it doesn’t get off to a good start.

#1461: The Velvet Underground – Venus in Furs

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According to my Spotify data, I listened to The Velvet Underground & Nico, first time ever, on 20th October 2012. That was near the beginning of a period in time when I was really trying to check out what was considered to be history’s classic albums, using besteveralbums.com as a guide. Rate Your Music must have been around. I’m not sure Album of the Year was a thing. Best Ever Albums came to me in a Google search, and it’s been serving me well since then. TVU&N was pretty highly ranked in that best ever albums chart at the time, from what I can remember. And again from the data, it seemed I liked the album a lot, because I went through it once more in December 2012, listened to it in patches through 2013 and ’14 too. I gained my favourite tracks from the record through those listens. I’ve previously written about ‘Sunday Morning’ and ‘There She Goes Again’, but ‘Femme Fatale’ and ‘All Tomorrow’s Parties’ gets double thumbs from me too. Gained more of an appreciation for those two along the way. But to round off the TVU&N coverage and The Velvet Underground as a band on the blog is the album’s fourth track – today’s subject – ‘Venus in Furs’, which I’m sure I got into on the second listen at most.

Every song on TVU&N had a Wikipedia article back in those days. They still do now. And I like to do my research about any music I end up listening to. So I clicked on the link for ‘Venus in Furs’. The page mentioned how the lyrics contain themes concerning BDSM, and lo and behold, while going through the song, I found that to be very true. Lou Reed sings about the dark mistress figure dressed in “shiny, shiny leather” who tends to their subject’s sadistic pleasures with their whip and belt. And I’m thinking, in 1967, surely no one else had even dared to write a song like it. That was the year which saw the Summer of Love. But with TVU&N, The Velvet Underground showed the dark, seedy side of society that was still lurking in the shadows while everyone was caught up in peace and free love. ‘Venus in Furs’, to me, sounded like a bit of a statement in that regard. I’ve always had a scene in my mind of the sadist crawling through a desert towards the mistress described in the song, who just happens to be giant in size. A bit like the lady in the ‘Go with the Flow’ video by Queens of the Stone Age. It’s all in slow motion too. I don’t know. To me, this song has always sounded like dry heat. I see someone sweating, looking for water when I hear this song. And I guess here, the sadist is very thirsty in their own unique way.

“Boom, chk, boom boom, chk, boom boom, chk,” and so on and so forth. That was meant to be an onomatopoeic rendition of the song’s rhythm. I like it. Very simplistic and tribal-like, very appropriate for the song’s subject matter. Makes the scene described within sound like a ritual of some kind. With Lou Reed on guitar, other guitarist Sterling Morrison handles the bass and plays following Mo Tucker’s simple drum pattern. Puts an emphasis on those bass drum strikes. Reed’s guitar has strings that are all tuned to one note, a style of tuning known as ‘Ostrich tuning’. Reed came up with the name. It sounds cool, for sure. I think the instrument in the song that steals the show is the electric viola, played throughout, by John Cale. The loudest instrument in the mix, it drones during the verses, occasionally swooping upwards sharply – Is that a glissando? I don’t know my theory. Cale will play a little solo of some sorts in the small instrumental breaks that occur. The viola feels really effective though, when the song changes key when it gets to the choruses. The viola’s droning on that one note during the verses, which are slowgoing enough as it is, that when Cale shifts to another note for the first time a minute-and-a-half in, it feels like a massive shift has happened in the song’s proceedings. It’s awesome. There should be more Velvet Underground songs on this site. What are there, six? Too little. In another universe, it’s much different.