#1456: Beach House – Used to Be

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Only very recently have I found out, you’re able to gain access to your whole streaming history on Spotify, from the very first stream after you downloaded the service to the latest stream before you make the request for the data to be sent to you via email. It’s damn interesting. All the stuff I’ve been listening to since 2012, there in chronological order, even the songs I skipped or listened to in private mode. When it comes to Beach House’s Teen Dream, I went through the album first time ever from 1:17pm to 2:01pm on 31st January 2014. Never heard any Beach House before then. Puts me in a specific time and place, behind my laptop in my room during my freshers year at uni. I might have listened through Teen Dream but I don’t think I really listened through. I just needed more songs for the radio show I was hosting at the time. I also think I was using the “Best Ever Albums of 2010” list on besteveralbums.com as a guide, ’cause I apparently listened to Deerhunter’s Halcyon Digest not too long after. ‘Zebra’ and ‘Take Care’ were the ones that stood out initially, and it wasn’t until a real listen about a year later that I appreciated the album by a larger margin.

‘Used to Be’ was a track that jumped out as an immediately likable track on that second listen. The way the synth chords pulse on the offbeat, then Victoria Legrand comes in on the vocals with the keyboard mirroring the melody she sings. It’s all very light and reflective. Feels like a brisk bike ride in the park. Funny coming right after a track called ‘Walk in the Park’ on the album. There are subtle chord changes in the aforementioned rhythm synth pulses that drastically affect the song’s mood with each lyric Legrand sings, as she switches the melody up with each pass. And them when she sings the song’s title, the bass guitar comes in to add in a layer of warmth. She says the song title again, the rush comes in with the pressing cymbals which release after the chorus, and the music opens up as the rhythm breaks into its stride. It’s plain sailing from there. The track sees a narrator awaiting a person’s arrival from god-knows-where after being gone for what’s implied to be some time. The narrator wonders if this person is still the same as they were before they left, having gone through the experiences they must have encountered while away, and by the end, they’re just left waiting until that person comes back “any day now”. Sounds simple enough. But the whole thing’s wistful, melancholy, gets you into some nostalgic feelings. Beach House in a nutshell.

The version of ‘Used to Be’ you have on Teen Dream is a re-recorded take of the original that was released in 2008 as their first commercial single. The song goes some way back before 2010. I’ve known about this single version ever since I got into the track, but I just never got round to listening to it. That is, until leading up to writing this. Production sounds a little less streamlined, I guess? It is very nearly the same song, bar the fact that the ending section after the chorus’s last iteration arrives with a set of entirely different lyrics. Never thought that there may be people who swear by this original version and might not like how the Teen Dream take turned out. I feel like it would have been a bit of a gyp if they didn’t change the song in some way if it had been available for two years already. It’s definitely nice to have both available. I would say I do prefer the album version. That “coming home any day now” refrain. There’s obviously a lot less words to analyse, but there’s still so much you can unpack in the simple phrasing. A highlight for me from a very fine album.

#1455: Green Day – Uptight

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Have I talked about my Green Day obsession of 2005? I must have referred to it at some point. By that year, American Idiot had been out for a few months already. But it was seeing the music video for ‘Holiday’ one morning on MTV2 that got me properly interested in the band. I went to their website, watched all of their music videos that were available on there. Green Day became my new favourite musical group. Now that they were, I found myself researching anything and everything I could about them. This lead to me to various fansites, one in particular, GreenDayAuthority.com. Haven’t been on that site in years. It’s changed a lot. This is how I remember it. If you click on that link, you’ll see there’s a “Didja Know?” link on the left-hand side. That was my introduction starter pack. There’s a note about the band having ‘transitional songs’. I could guess what that meant ’cause I got American Idiot for my 10th birthday. They were songs that went into each other without interruption. The album introduced me to that concept. I thought it was cool. ‘Uptight’ was mentioned in that transitional songs list, going into ‘Last Ride In’. I needed to hear it somehow.

But this was 2005. Sure, file sharing places like Limewire and Soulseek were probably around. I didn’t know about them. So the only way I heard ‘Uptight’ was through a 30-second sample of it on a site called artistdirect.com, which I’m very sure has been dead for a good few years now. I believe it started right at the end of the song’s first verse and ended just before the chorus started. Fantastic. I liked what I heard, though. Billie Joe Armstrong’s vocal melody sounded nice. I’m sure that I heard the song in full not long after on another Green Day fansite, probably 2006. And yes, the sound of waves that are at the beginning of ‘Last Ride In’ do start in the very final seconds of ‘Uptight’. But it wasn’t until 2009 that I downloaded Nimrod. It was on a file sharing site – whose name I can’t remember – and I believe I downloaded the songs one-by-one. Years had passed. 21st Century Breakdown was now out, and I guess its release got me thinking about GreenDayAuthority.com and how a lot of trivia on that Didja Know page were in association with Nimrod. Seemed like an interesting album to dig into. I had Dookie, American Idiot, International Superhits! and 1,039/Smoothed Out Slappy Hours on CD. I was a year into having a YouTube channel where all I did was upload albums. Why not get a hold of another Green Day record, albeit in a considerably less legal way?

‘Uptight’ is the ninth song on Nimrod. Coming after the venomous ‘Platypus (I Hate You)’, the opening of ‘Uptight’ feels like such an alleviation in pressure. The tempo’s still quick, but it’s much less a barrage of sound. Then Billie Joe Armstrong starts singing, you hear what he’s saying, and you realise that even though the music’s nicer to the ears, the subject matter’s just as much a downer as what came before. You see, nothing’s going right for the narrator in ‘Uptight’, I don’t think the words need too much explaining, and they find themselves staying awake all night contemplating suicide. That’s the gist. How the song grabs you is by how catchy it is. The track is a very upbeat (musically) song about perhaps killing oneself, that’s for sure. It also has a very simple structure too. Two verses and the chorus that’s near repeated until the song’s end bar the instrumental break. Some people may not like that the last half of the track is essentially repetitions of the chorus. I don’t mind it at all. The melody gets stuck in your head that way. I can only think that ‘Last Ride In’ was purposefully placed afterwards to really bring a lift to the album’s proceedings, a sense of calm after the two negatively-minded tales that come before it. Album flow at its finest. Furthermore, they’ve never played the song live. It’s a shame. I imagine it’s ’cause of the depressing lyrics.

#1454: The Libertines – Up the Bracket

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So I’m sure I’ve mentioned in the past, I’m a Black man. It shouldn’t really matter all that much. But, you know, the type of music I share my thoughts on wouldn’t usually say “Black” to most people. Regardless, it’s the truth. Growing up and watching MTV2 UK in the mid-2000s, you’d wouldn’t see many, if any, Black faces on music videos. Kele Okereke of Bloc Party’s was probably the first one I saw via ‘Helicopter’. It was the only one for a while. But then the video for The Libertines’ ‘Up the Bracket’ showed up one day. It wasn’t the first of the band’s that I’d seen, but it was certainly the first I watched that featured all the members. Gary Powell was the first Black drummer I’d ever encountered. He didn’t look like he was playing the drums with much focus or precision in the video for ‘…Bracket’, and it got me wondering whether he was actually in the band or a stand-in for someone else. That’s quite messed up, I know, shows you how my 9- or 10-year old brain was conditioned. It wasn’t until I saw him again in the video for ‘Bang Bang You’re Dead’ by Dirty Pretty Things that I understood, this was an actual drummer who could actually play.

You can find that funny, you can find that truly insane. I’m somewhere in the middle thinking on it now. More towards ‘insane’, though. Despite the naive prejudice I gathered on the first viewing, it didn’t distract from the fact that the song itself sounded very nice. Doherty sings about meeting two dodgy men on Vallance Road, supposedly an allusion to the infamous Kray twins who used to live there, and telling them to fuck off by sticking two fingers up at them. Not the peace sign. And then the song focuses on two people for the choruses, a boy and a girl, who look like they’d be the perfect pair but are lost in their own little worlds. A slight change in theme, but it works somehow. The video added to the enjoyability. The band walk up an alleyway (Grove Passage in Bethnal Green, London – a mecca for Libertines fans), Pete Doherty and Carl Barât mime the words while doing so, and they all end up back at someone’s flat, performing the song in their iconic red jackets, in a party-like atmosphere while girls dance around them. Very easy watching. If there are two people who know how to mime lyrics and walk towards the camera, it’s Pete Doherty and Carl Barât. If you see videos by either of them, solo or with their other bands, that’s usually what happens.

‘Up the Bracket’ is the title track on the band’s debut album. It opens the second side, if you were to buy the record on vinyl. As much as I like ‘Up the Bracket’ as a whole, it’s the small, little details that make it an engaging listen. There’s the yell by Doherty right at the beginning, one of frustration, recorded during a moment of chaos in the studio. Barât joins in on the lower harmonies on the “See these two cold fingers” lines, those sound cool. He also plays the descending guitar line in the choruses, he for sure plays the lead guitarist role in the song. There’s that moment during the second chorus when a scratchier vocal track comes into frame, revealed to be inserted from another take of the song in the 2022 anniversary edition. The aforementioned yell is also in that same take. I didn’t know that before writing the sentence, but I’m keeping this all in. I think the oddity that puts the cap on everything is the audible ‘fuck off’ that’s said near the end of the guitar solo. That ‘fuck off’ went uncensored for years on TV. When it was about 2012 or something and I saw the video on what had turned into ‘MTV Rocks’, probably the last time I saw the video on the channel, it appeared that someone at the MTV offices had figured out there was a clear curse word in the song and censored it. I was falling out of love with MTV2/Rocks around that time, the music on rotation there just didn’t seem to as interesting as it used to be. Just that small censorship move showed me that things had really changed on that channel. Couldn’t tune into it the same way anymore.

#1453: Nine Black Alps – Unsatisfied

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I remember when the video for Nine Black Alps’ ‘Unsatisfied’ was the band’s new video playing regularly on MTV2. I didn’t want to watch it, because singer/guitarist Sam Forrest’s glum face would appear on the screen, the first thing you see, and I would be bummed out almost immediately. I would have been 10 years old, and I didn’t want to see someone looking so unhappy. So I would switch channels and see what other things were on. I think the track might have been the first one that made me aware of the band’s existence. But I wasn’t sticking around if a gap of silence and a sad mug was my introduction to their music. My opinion on Nine Black Alps as a whole changed when the advert for the band’s album Everything Is started showing in places. ‘Not Everyone’ sounded cool in it. My opinion on ‘Unsatisfied’ was officially made for the better, funnily enough, ’cause of its inclusion in a pivotal scene in One Tree Hill. Why was I watching that show? Two words: Older sister. The song sounded very cool in that scene, though. Made me think, “That’s what ‘Unsatisfied’ sounds like?” Clearly, not watching its music video meant I had missed out a little.

But then I got Everything Is as a present, and I could listen to the song whenever I wanted. ‘Unsatisfied’ is the fourth song on there. The intro builds, layer-by-layer. Guitarist David Jones opens with the higher guitar riff, Sam Forrest joins in with the lower one, and then Martin Cohen and James Galley come in together on bass and drums. The classic brick-by-brick opening technique. Then Sam Forrest sings about trying to get something out of the world as much as possible, but always ending up empty-handed. He’s unsatisfied. Sick and tired of all he’s tried. And that’s really all the song comes down to. Being disappointed with what this world has on offer and having a feeling that things would be better in another lifetime. A downer in the subject theme, yes. But it’s still all so melodic despite what may be going on in the words. And the riffage and power behind the performance? Very emphatic. That rundown during the “Sick and tired…” part of the chorus, one of my favourite parts of the entire song. And then there’s that sudden key change for the “Should look where you’re going” bridge. A bit unexpected. But it’s the surprise that makes it that much better.

The song got to number 30 in the UK Singles chart in its time. Makes me think what happened. The charts used to have such a variety. I don’t know what goes on in them anymore. And if you may or may not have noticed, me writing about ‘Unsatisfied’ means that I’ve written about every song from Everything Is on here. A clean sweep, royal flush. I think this may be the first time that’s ever happened on the blog, writing about all the songs on one album. I think Everything Is is great, it hasn’t aged a bit. A ten outta ten in my book. The band always got compared to Nirvana back in the day, which I think critics always used to bring them down a little. This was in the middle of the whole post-punk revival era. Franz Ferdinand, Bloc Party, Maximo Park, they were the bands that got people talking. I never got the Nirvana comparison, but I guess an American-sounding band from the UK wasn’t what was the masses wanted, even if they were doing what they did very well. But it Nine Black Alps apart, for sure. ‘Cause of that, I don’t think “This is England in the mid-2000s” when I’m listening to Everything Is. I just hear some good, fast and heavy melodic rock, with a couple acoustic numbers in there for mellowing’s sake. So it’s my recommendation that anyone reading this, if you’re into that sort of stuff, go and hear it. I’ve written about it on 12 different occasions, for goodness sake, it’s worth it.

#1452: They Might Be Giants – Unpronounceable

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In 2015, They Might Be Giants revived their Dial-A-Song service. Now, instead of calling the number on your phone and hearing a TMBG song on the other end, they were releasing a new song every week of the year and uploading it to their YouTube channel. It was an exciting time to be a They fan. I can sort of remember ‘Erase’ arriving in the first week of ’15. I tried to keep up with the releases as they came around, but I think I stopped about three weeks in when ‘Music Jail, Pt. 1 & 2’ popped up. Not because I didn’t like the song. I just had university stuff going on, and I didn’t have the mental room to take in new TMBG material. By the time that uni year finished, my second, there was so much music that I guess I thought it was too late to properly get into the schedule. ‘Unpronounceable’ was one of the tracks released during this time. I missed it. But I’d see that it was ranked highly on the This Might Be a Wiki Song Ratings list when I’d visit the website. It was considered to be a top-ten Giants song of all time for a brief moment. So I had to check what all the fuss was about.

The song has no introduction. John Linnell’s voice starts it all off with the band alongside him. With a spacey echo/delay effect applied to the vocal, he sets a scene where a narrator is speaking to someone that leaves them awestruck. So much so that time seemingly stands still in their presence. This enigmatic figure leaves, the narrator snaps back into reality. But they go on to realise that they’ve completely forgotten the name of the person they were talking to. Or at least heard it, but can’t seem to recall how to say it. A very universal situation. The person the narrator was fascinated by appears to be someone they liked or wanted to know a little better, and they’re left in a state of depression due to their inability to remember the person’s name. The narrator wishes they were able to relive and analyse the conversation via watching it through videotape, but know this is impossible. Even if they were able to, they’d be hypnotized by the figure’s face all over again. Someone out there had to write a song about forgetting a person’s name as soon as you’ve finished speaking to them. If anyone was going to do it, it had to be They Might Be Giants, especially John Linnell. He seems to be able to make a song out of the most commonplace circumstances, adding a little absurd twist in the process.

It may have been recency bias that the song was ranked so highly among TMBG fans near the time of its release. But it’s 11 years old now, and it still sounds just as great as it did in 2015. Think it has everything you want in a They song, which is a great melody and relatable subject matter with an unusual spin. I think the hidden genius behind ‘Unpronounceable’ is in its rhythm. It’s quite stop-starty, and the impact comes in the brief silences that occur throughout. They let the delay in Linnell’s vocals really fill the room in the verses. The rhythm’s also exhibited most prominently in the opening-closing gated track in the instrumental section, which was apparently a real focal area during production. John Flansburgh has a brief lead vocal moment too, which is nice. It’s always cool to hear both Johns on a track, even if it’s a case where it’s predominantly written by one of them. Yeah, not sure what else I could add here. Just another power-pop gem by the band, a genre that the band tend to lean into nowadays. I’m all for it. If you want to find ‘Unpronounceable’, it was released on Glean, the first of three albums released through 2015-16, made up of tracks that were released during the first four months of that Dial-A-Song revival. Not my favourite of the band’s, but good listening all the same.