#1373: Ween – Tick

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So, after being left gobsmacked in the wake of ‘You Fucked Up’ when I was listening to Ween’s debut GodWeenSatan album for the first time in September 2015 – Left such a mark I remember the exact month and year, you see. This was no Mollusk. – ‘Tick’ was the track that followed. “I feel a tick in my head and he’s sucking on my head / In the morning I’ll be dead if he doesn’t leave my head” are its opening lyrics. “Why can’t he go away / Why does he have to stay / Maybe he wants to play” it continues. There I was nodding along, but I was thinking, “Yeah, this is stupid. Ha-ha-ha.” They rhymed ‘head’ with itself three times. The simple, simple wordplay. I didn’t think it was going anywhere. But then it suddenly did. The intensity rose in the “Get you, burn you, crush you” pre-chorus, the wall-of-sound guitars came in for the chorus. I was sold there and then. I’m convinced the song’s start was written with the intention of tricking the listener to underestimate what they’re hearing. If that was the case, Ween succeeded when it came to me.

So, ‘Tick’. It’s about ticks, those external parasites that live by feeding on the blood of mammals, birds, and sometimes reptiles and amphibians, as said in Wikipedia. I always thought Gene Ween sung this on the album, he always does when the band do it live, but then I came across a demo tape of theirs where it was stated that Dean Ween sang it. So I don’t know. I’m more inclined to believe it’s Deaner nowadays. It could be both of them. Whether or not the track is based on a personal experience, I don’t think it’s ever be stated outright, but it’s a song about a narrator who one day feels the presence of a tick on their head. It annoys them. They swear to get their revenge on the thing. They unsuccessfully try to get rid of it and it grows back. The narrator stabs the tick and themselves in the process. The narrator will die soon. The tick wins. It goes on to annoy another person and so on and so forth.

This song, man… Really serves up the second punch after ‘You Fucked Up’ delivers the first. If ‘Tick’ is indeed sung by Dean Ween, then I think it’s cool that the album opens up with both bandmembers singing the respective two numbers. It’s not a very well-known fact that Dean Ween plays the drums almost entirely throughout too, so ‘Tick’ I feel is just a showcase of Deaner’s skills all over the spectrum. But if we’re going to focus on anything he does, it has to be his guitar playing. I don’t think I’ve said, he’s also the main guitar man in Ween. He switches between thrashing power chords and fiddly guitar lines in the chorus. He provides the itchy guitar riff underneath the verses. He blasts out those kind of jazzy chords in the instrumental break. He closes it all out with a solo. He’s all over this track. I think this really is Dean Ween’s song. ‘You Fucked Up’ got me interested in GodWeenSatan, ‘Tick’ solidified that it was indeed a good decision to start listening to it. And there was only… an hour and 12 minutes of the album left to go. Things could only get better.

#1372: They Might Be Giants – Thunderbird

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I’ve written about They Might Be Giants’ The Spine, or at least songs you can find on that album, many times at this point. Trying to think of a different way I could put a spin on my experiences with it, without referring to those older posts. I’m sure I’ve mentioned it’s the first physical TMBG album I owned, despite the kind of middling consensus about its quality. I may have said I got it just to hear the transition between ‘Au Contraire’ and ‘Damn Good Times’ without a gap of silence. I think I’ve said I like it a lot, may have called it “underrated” or something along those lines. It was the They Might Be Giants album the band were working on while I was finding out more about them in those early years of 2004, that might be a thing I haven’t said before. It wouldn’t be until 2009 that I got The Spine in my hands. While I don’t think ‘Thunderbird’ was a song on there I liked immediately, it wasn’t too long until it eventually burrowed itself into my head.

From what I can recall, when The Spine was the most recent or second-most recent TMBG release, ‘Thunderbird’ was one of the highest-ranked numbers from the album on the TMBG Wiki’s Song Ratings list. I think just from seeing that, it made me want to listen again and find out why fans liked it so much. I’m a guy from the UK, so when I hear ‘Thunderbird’ I think of that TV show with the puppets and Tracy Island. I did think the song was a sort of superhero theme song for a while. It sounds like one. It’s all upbeat and very driving. A power-pop tune with John Linnell providing a soaring vocal take. But then I found out that’s how the song catches you out, because the title refers to the alcoholic beverage and told from the point of view of a person who gets a huge sense of confidence after drinking it regularly. An alcoholic. I didn’t want to put ‘alcoholic beverage’ and ‘alcoholic’ in the same sentence. A happy-sounding song anchored by a not-so-happy situation. Got a Beach Boys reference in the slow breakdown and everything. As only They Might Be Giants could achieve so easily.

Until its release, ‘Thunderbird’ had been in the works for a while in the TMBG camp. The band had actually subliminally released it, in a way, in the form of ‘On Earth My Nina’ on 1999’s Long Tall Weekend. Linnell reversed ‘Thunderbird’, wrote down the words he thought he could hear, and sang them using the resulting melody line out of the backwards music. It’s definitely a way of making a song. But the band did also make a full demo of the track, also recorded in 1999. Back then, it featured an additional verse. You might say it rocked a little harder too. They performed it live between ’99 and 2001. It could have been on Mink Car in 2001. The band were really saving it, thinking about when to unleash it. I’m glad all the versions of it that are out there exist. It’s cool to note the differences. Like that demo, it really stomps. It has its own flavour. I’ve seen some say it’s flat-out better than how it finally ended up. But I really like how it is on The Spine. I couldn’t compare. I won’t. I’ll take whatever they’ve got.

#1371: Enter Shikari – Thumper

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Enter Shikari had released their second album Common Dreads in 2009. ‘No Sleep Tonight’ was released as its second single in September of that year, and it turned out to be the last one from it. But it wasn’t too long after – in January 2010 – that the band announced Tribalism, a compilation of B-sides, remixes and live tracks made to – I guess – round out the Common Dreads era as a treat for the fans before the bandmembers went their separate ways and regrouped to make their next record after some touring. A week or so after its unveiling, the music video for the second song on the compy, ‘Thumper’, was released on Kerrang!’s website before officially being uploaded onto the band’s YouTube channel a few days later. I barely remember when I saw/heard the song for the first time. It must have been around that period. I’m going to put it down to me seeing the video on MTV2 and thinking “Hell yes.” I feel that’s the most likely origin story.

In fact, yeah, it was watching the music video that introduced me to the song because I’m sure I was tripped out by the whole rotoscoping effect happening throughout and how uncanny the drawings made the band look, getting more distorted and freakier as the song progressed. I liked the whole package. ‘Thumper’, to me, doesn’t sound to dissimilar to the songs that appeared in the track list for Common Dreads. Maybe in another universe, it’s slotted right in there somewhere. It certainly tackles what I think is a main subject approached throughout that album, that being a general frustration with our pacific society and a need to rise up and take action before it gets too late. That’s all over this song, and not in a way that it has to be spelled out for you to understand. “We can’t keep deferring action only surviving by the skin of our teeth.” “Tonight, the motionless must vacate so we can accelerate out of a stagnant society.” “It’s intrinsic that we rise to our feet.” Nothing else needed, really.

Apparently, the band haven’t played this live since what looks like a homecoming show in December 2010, their last of that year, before they resumed touring in March 2011. ‘Thumper’ really was a 2010 special. It’s the last Enter Shikari song you’ll see on this blog. It also happens to be the last Enter Shikari track I truly cared for, sad to say. Not due to anything on the band’s part. It would be 2012 when A Flash Flood of Colour was given to the public as the band’s third album, and in the three years between that and Common Dreads I’d began listening to The Beatles, Beatles solo stuff, The Who… I’d gone through They Might Be Giants’ discography. My music tastes had changed thoroughly. But damn, the Enter Shikari songs I like, that I’ve written about on here, I enjoy a lot. A lot. Actually, I haven’t listened to ‘Enter Shikari’, ‘Gap in the Fence’, or ‘Hectic’ in a long, long time. Even then, I at least wouldn’t hesitate putting on Common Dreads today and letting it go from start to finish, always thought that was a good one. Salute to Enter Shikari, thanks for all the music, keep on making more. That’s all.

#1370: Freddie Gibbs & Madlib – Thuggin’

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When Freddie Gibbs and Madlibs’ first collaborative album, Piñata, came around in 2014, I didn’t know either artist at any sort of depth. I’d only listened to Madvillainy the year before, which was the first time I’d heard of Madlib. But I liked that album so much that when he had this new album out with a guy called Freddie Gibbs, I thought I may as well check that out too. They knocked it out the park. This was a good album we had on our hands here. I didn’t realise until later that true, proper fans of both had been waiting for it for just under three years. In 2011, Madlib brought Gibbs out to a show and announced their first EP together, the Thuggin’ EP, on which today’s song was readily available. So while this man here was happy to hear this “new” song in 2014, ‘Thuggin” was old news to the people who were really following the duo. But a good song’s a good song, no matter the length of time you may have been listening to it for.

I saw a Madlib set at Manchester’s Parklife Festival in 2015. Had a great time that weekend, I made a whole post about it when I returned to my uni house when it was all over. I have a vague memory of powerwalking to get to the stage where he was and hearing the beat for ‘Thuggin” blaring out of the speakers as I got closer and closer. Piñata was out for a year then, and I remember being more a fan of tracks like ‘Shitsville’ and ‘High’. I don’t think I really appreciated ‘Thuggin” until I gave it another listen or two, and once I did there was no going back. I can’t pretend I can relate to the gangsta lifestyle Gibbs describes so effortlessly throughout, but I can’t lie that he makes it sound cool to participate in even though I probably wouldn’t last a day in it. There’s no kind of hidden meaning in any of the words Gibbs relays to you. He wants you to know that being a thug is for life, he’s been that way for the longest and will continue to be until his last days. ‘Cause it feels so good. And it feels so right.

Madlib does it again, in terms of the production, making a beat out of samples so obscure that even whosampled.com can’t tell you where they came from. My favourite part of the whole track is probably when the rhythm picks up during the choruses. Always gets a good double-shoulder rotation out of me. I don’t know what people thought when “MadGibbs” was revealed, but I feel there must have been some people who thought another Madlib-[rapper here] collaboration after Madvillainy would at least be interesting, but wouldn’t reach the same calibre or contain the same chemistry. But Piñata to this day holds its own. Some would maybe say it’s… underrated. At least in the wider scheme of things. Hip-hop heads know how good the album is. It’s nice we actually got a second collaboration from the two some years after. ‘Thuggin” to me is probably the quintessential Freddie Gibbs/Madlib song, showing the respective strengths of the duo. With the former’s evocative language and rapid delivery combined with the raw, looping, unconventional production of the latter, ya get a force to be reckoned with.

#1369: Kanye West – Through the Wire

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I remember ‘Through the Wire’ being a single when it first came around in those halcyon days of 2003. Its music video was playing somewhere, and little notifications popped up covering how Kanye West was in a car accident where he almost died, but didn’t, and had to have his jaw wired shut. Whoever was running those notes made it very clear that he hadn’t passed away, he was very much alive. But eight-year-old me didn’t get the picture. Aaliyah had died a couple years earlier, and the video for ‘More Than a Woman’ came out posthumously. I don’t think I’d got over that and was convinced that ‘Through the Wire’ was that type of deal. But then 2004 came around, videos from The College Dropout were dropping for ‘All Falls Down’, ‘The New Workout Plan’ and others. I slowly but surely became convinced that Kanye West might not have actually died after all. My sister got The College Dropout, either as a gift or by her own actions, and there’s many a memory I have of hearing its music around the house during those days.

So, ‘Through the Wire’. What could I say about it that isn’t covered in its Wikipedia page, really? It was Kanye West’s debut single, properly introducing the world to the man if they hadn’t paid attention to the production credits he’d racked up to that point. It’s the song he initially recorded vocals for with his jaw wired shut while he was recovering from the near-fatal crash he experienced when he had fallen asleep at the wheel of his car. When the song first came around, I didn’t think his voice didn’t sound all that bad considering his situation. It turned out he had just re-recorded the vocal when his jaws were free again. The original recording shows how much he could really only mumble in the state his face was in. So, as he says, he was very much delivering his message through the wires. Plus, it heavily samples Chaka Khan’s ‘Through the Fire’, with Khan’s vocals pitched-up to the maximum, a standard in the “chipmunk soul” West brought to the mainstream during that period. Chaka Khan says she didn’t like what West did to her voice. She also performed her song live alongside him at the VMAs. Who knows how she feels? All I can tell you for certain is that I like it, if it wasn’t clear.

I listened to this song again yesterday, just to gear myself up and gain some thoughts on what I wanted to write. I only just realised that at about 1:40 in the song, whoever’s playing the bass guitar plays a bum note before carrying on. It’s hard not to notice it now. But that miniscule detail can’t detract from the overall result. ‘Through the Wire’ is a classic tale of the phoenix rising from the ashes, with West humorously recounting his experiences of the crash, the aftermath and his experience in the hospital. “The doctor said I had blood clots / But I ain’t Jamaican, man”. I’ve always liked that lyric. It’s simple, but it does the job. I could go through the track line-by-line, but there’s no fun in that. And there are websites available for that purpose anyway. Generally, it’s a track like this that makes me miss how Kanye West used to be. He poked fun at that kind of sentiment in 2016. But in these times, it rings truer than ever. The Life of Pablo was his last album, though, wasn’t it? Can’t remember him releasing anything else afterwards.