#1380: Supergrass – Time

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Ah, the last time I’ll be writing about a tune from I Should Coco on here. It’s been a good run. I’ve tried to be a champion of Supergrass whenever I cover something of theirs on this place, and I’m gonna keep on going. While you may be listening to Blur, or Pulp, or Oasis, you should all really be listening to Supergrass instead. I Should Coco usually gets recognised as the classic album of the band’s. It was released in the midst of Britpop and it has ‘Alright’ on there. But its overarching infectious energy, brilliant melodies and underlying humour has helped the record stand the test of time. When it comes to me, …Coco was the third Supergrass that I physically owned after getting it for my 13th birthday and having In It for the Money and the X-Ray album in my hands already. And I can remember that first listen and thinking at the time, “Yeah, this is just another good Supergrass album.” Those guys had done it again. And this was just their starting point. They only got better.

‘Time’ is the 11th song on …Coco. It was released alongside ‘Alright’ in a double A-side single format in 1995. The two songs got to number two in the charts, but ‘Alright’ got all the popularity. I don’t think I’d ever heard ‘Time’ before I got I Should Coco in 2008. At this point, I can’t remember the last time I willingly listened to ‘Alright’. ‘Time’, I could put on at anytime. It’s the band’s country, “Home on the Range” type song, anchored by a delightful guitar lick and a swinging rhythm. Got a big appreciation for the groove it possesses, punctuated by the bass line by Mick Quinn. There aren’t many words to analyse in this song. It leaves a lot to interpretation. What I’ve felt is it’s about a person acknowledging that it’s time to leave their loved one as they go away for a little while. If it’s based on personal experience, someone’s going on tour. But the narrator wants to know that the love they still have never leaves when they look their partner in the eyes: “I know what I see / Have it all, you” as it says in the chorus. It doesn’t sound right on paper, but the feeling’s there. Sounds much better with the music alongside the words.

I think what also makes the track so great is the way Gaz Coombes the thing. “The tiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiime’s on the way”. It’s those long-drawn out notes that ring out into the studio. Such an emphatic way to get things rolling. In fact, the vocals all the way through are probably my main highlight. Particularly how Quinn mirrors Coombes’s melody, but an octave higher. Adds that little layer on top of everything. So when they sing together during the choruses, it makes the song all the more catchy than how it initially started off. Cap it off with a simultaneous guitar and harmonica solo, you get some good listening returns. Coming after what’s probably the silliest song on …Coco, ‘Time’ lays down a real sense of warmth and endearing sincerity, providing a moment to “feel” as the album gets closer towards its end. Yeah, I’m a big fan of this one. It’s not the final statement on the album. But as a representative of it on this blog, it is. Couldn’t be more appropriate.

#1379: Pink Floyd – Time

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So I went and looked on the old family Windows Vista computer to see when I downloaded The Dark Side of the Moon onto it. Results showed that I did so on Christmas Eve 2009. I’ve always thought I’d heard it much earlier in that year. I’m still a bit sceptical, to be honest. But if I did hear it properly for the first time then, I think it was to listen to another album that was considered to be the greatest of all time among all the Beatles stuff I would have been getting into during that period. I apparently went on to download Abbey Road a few days later, so that shows where I was at in those days. A year later, I listened to Wish You Were Here. By then, I think I was into ‘Time’ quite a bit. I somehow figured out that parts of ‘Have a Cigar’ mixed quite well with ‘Time’, and I made a mashup of the two with ‘Helter Skelter’ by The Beatles. Why did I do that? Mash-ups were quite the thing in 2010. If I’m making things up and I wasn’t feeling ‘Time’ then, I certainly was at that point.

‘Time’ is the fourth song on The Dark Side of the Moon, the first one in the long-duration, meaty section that makes up the middle of the album’s sandwich-like structure. Bass guitarist Roger Waters wrote the lyrics. From what I can recall from an interview I watched, he was inspired to write it when he was about 28 or 29 and realised he need to stop waiting for something big to happen to say ‘Life is starting now’, because life was happening with each second that passed him by. If anything, ‘Time’ acts as a warning. It touches on the dangers of wasting time, procrastination, how time goes quickly, how death approaches with each tick of the clock. A read through of the song’s words isn’t likely to brighten anyone’s day. And then there’s the music. ‘Haunting’ is the word that gets thrown around on web comments to get upvotes and make things scarier than they are, but you can definitely see ‘Time’ being the soundtrack to a very bad trip, or at the very least a nightmare of some kind.

No one starts singing until two minutes and 30 seconds into the song, but even those chiming clocks, ringing alarms and that long, long introduction is essential to the proceedings. You’re waiting in anticipation as those long notes ring out and those muted bass guitar notes keep clicking on, and the emphatic drum fill by Nick Mason fulfills your wish. The notable feature for me is the contrast between David Gilmour’s raspier vocal, which you hear in the groovier verses, and keyboardist Richard Wright’s softer delivery in the spaced out choruses – accompanied by the ooh-aahs of the lady vocalists in the background. The two guys sing their melodies perfectly. And then there’s the damn ripping guitar solo in the middle. Man, this is a song of vast proportions. It comes to an end with a reprise of ‘Breathe’, and I’ve always thought of the “softly spoken magic spell” mentioned in the last line as referring to the vocals in ‘The Great Gig in the Sky’. Thinking about it, there’s nothing softly spoken about them. But there’s a kind of spell-like quality about them, if spells were something that existed in reality.

#1378: They Might Be Giants – Till My Head Falls Off

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‘Till My Head Falls Off’ is the second song on They Might Be Giants’ 1996 album, Factory Showroom. That album’s most known for being the band’s last on major label Elektra Records before they left quite acrimoniously and went on to make their own record label to release their material on. I got ’round to listening to the album myself in late 2010 or so, when I decided to properly get into They Might Be Giants’ big, big discography. Back then, ‘Till My Head Falls Off’ was another TMBG song that was high in the song ratings list on the band’s Wiki website. I heard it probably the once and understood why. Album opener, ‘S-E-X-X-Y’, was the only track to be released as a single. And it’s not like a song’s designation as a single is meant to signify its greatness or anything, but ‘…Head Falls Off’ seems like the very obvious single choice if you were to compare the two. Though maybe the band knew this and went with the more unconventional option, anyway.

After ‘S-E-X-X-Y’ begins things on a funky, ’70s-spy sitcom kind of deal, ‘Till My Head Falls Off’ arrives as the faster power-pop number. Emphasis on the word ‘power’. The track’s essentially a live take, with the two Johns and the band behind them going at full blast, and what we got was the last recording of the band going the fastest they could until the recording equipment couldn’t stands no more. The track concerns a neurotic narrator who, in the first verse, has a bit of a freak-out about some missing Advil tablets, and then wonders about their misplaced notes in the second. Despite their tendency to succumb to anxiety at times, look at themselves in the mirror and think about what they see, they seem to take great pride in the person that they are. The person’s gonna keep on going until the day they die, or till [their] head falls off, as John Linnell sings in the massive choruses. A song of self-assurance for the worriers out there. Sometimes I think Linnell may be singing about himself subliminally on how he’ll be doing this songwriting stuff until he’s gone. If that’s the case, makes it all the more endearing.

I guess another notable thing about Factory Showroom is that it was the first album of They done where the band had a second guitarist in the group. Alongside John Flansburgh now (then) was Eric Schermerhorn, in the role of lead guitarist. Flansburgh provides the anchoring rhythm in the left channel, while Schermerhorn gets the freedom in the right to provide some guitar feedback, those string bends during the choruses and the frantic guitar solo during the break. Here was the new band configuration at its rawest, and they were giving the goods thick and fast. Being the John Linnell composition it is, there’s melody abound, very memorable, easy to get stuck into your head even if the words he fits in them are arriving at a mile a minute, all culminating in those wide-open choruses where – you’ll see in the live video – he practically opens his jaw at its widest to deliver the jubilant high notes. It’s just another good They Might Be Giants song, I don’t know what else to say. I think we’ve reached the end here.

#1377: Green Day – Tight Wad Hill

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Anyone remember the Green Day: Rock Band game? Came as a shock to me when it was initially announced in 2010. It was so close to the Beatles game that had been out for only over half a year at the time, and I like Green Day but I also felt there would have been so many more classic rock bands Harmonix could have dedicated a Rock Band game to. Like Led Zeppelin, or The Who or something. Green Day was a cool choice, though. I wasn’t complaining. I got the game. It was fun to play through the whole of American Idiot, Dookie, a large majority of 21st Century Breakdown and other well-known Green Day songs. Green Day was my favourite band for a while in 2005. By 2010, I’d had physical copies of Dookie, American Idiot, International Superhits… even 1,039/Smoothed Out Slappy Hours for years. But I think it was the release of this game that provided the impetus to dive deeper into the band’s discography as the year went on.

One day I came upon Insomniac, the band’s pissed-off, harder rocking follow-up to Dookie, the band’s big breakthrough album that had only been released a year before. It’s my favourite album of theirs because of the previously listed adjectives. I was well-acquainted with the singles from there, which I never fell out of love with, and the other songs on there were just more of the same. ‘Tight Wad Hill’ is the second-last number on Insomniac. I’ve been around Green Day forums and Reddit pages, and it looked to me that whenever there’s a ranking going on ‘Tight Wad…’ is the tune that’s always rated the worst or the least best. I remember liking it off the rip. Before then, I’d read about how it was almost the title track of the album before the bandmembers decided on ‘Insomniac’, so I reckoned it must have been considered a bit of an important song amongst the band during the album’s making.

Reasons I could think of, though. It follows the musical pattern of verse-chorus-verse-chorus-instrumental break-chorus that’s damn near on every other song on the album. The song details the depressing experiences of a drug addict, and that’s already covered with ‘Geek Stink Breath’, which also provides a more personal level of perspective. It’s also near the album’s end, so listeners are probably just waiting to see how the whole thing officially finishes. But it’s fast, it hits hard – Tré Cool’s pounding away on his drum set – it’s heavy, makes me wanna scrunch my face up. Billie Joe Armstrong’s sings an infectious melody with a snotty snarl, and Mike Dirnt’s playing some very cool lines on the bass guitar. And that’s Insomniac all over. ‘Tight Wad Hill’ does the job, it’s a great representative. Just a shame the band rarely play anything from this album. Insomniac appreciators out there, I’m with you.

#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.