Monthly Archives: April 2013

My iPod #41: The Beatles – Another Girl

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Alright. So, if you read my post yesterday, you know that I am 18 years old! Woot woot.

I still feel the same though. Does everyone else wake up when it’s their birthday and just think, ‘well, what now?’ I thought that by turning eighteen I would feel some sense of freedom or intellectual gain, that hasn’t happened so far. Meh. Life goes on.

Yeah yeah, The Beatles were great blah blah blah.

‘Another Girl’ is a bright and peppy song of the band’s album ‘Help!’. Paul McCartney takes the lead on this, also filling the role as the lead guitarist. He’s the one doing all the random licks during the verses and chorus.

The band also play along with the song in a kind of music video, this can be seen in their movie also named ‘Help!’. It’s all fun and games with the Fab Four. The guys are in the Bahamas fooling around, John starts playing the drums and Ringo tries to the play the guitar, George starts throwing rocks at the other members, Paul almost touches a girl’s noob whilst ‘strumming’ her like a bass. It’s all good times in 1965.

‘Help!’ won’t be that album that The Beatles are most known for, but it’s still got some good tunes. This is a highlight.

Happy birthday to me and Pharrell Williams.

RIP Kurt Cobain and Layne Staley.

Until next time.

Jamie.

My iPod #40: The Rutles – Another Day

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Hi everyone.

It’s my birthday tomorrow. Yaaaaaaaaaaay. I am getting older. I will no longer be seventeen in a few hours.

How will I celebrate this day? Probably revising. I will do something with friends though, that’s a guarantee. I’m not socially awkward or anything.

Where does the time go? I remember turning seventeen like it was two days ago. Oh well, here’s to another healthy year on this earth, and may good tidings come my way in the future.

Back to the music.

Lately when I watched a Rutles video on YouTube, some idiot posted ‘Oh my god, these guys are trying to hard to be The Beatles. They make the same kind of music and everything’, or something along those lines.

Well no shit, Sherlock.

The Rutles are a parody of the band, created by Eric Idle of Monty Python fame, and Neil Innes of the Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band. The band was originally part of a sketch in the show ‘Rutland Weekend Television’, however the ‘Pre-Fab Four’ gained fame in the television film, ‘All You Need Is Cash‘. A must-watch, it’s very funny. John Lennon and George Harrison liked it, so…. you know. Witness it.

‘Another Day’ isn’t featured in the film, but can be found on the soundtrack album. It’s an obvious parody on ‘Martha My Dear’ from The White Album, with ‘Dirk McQuickly’ on lead vocals. Really it’s sung by Ollie Halsall, a left-handed guitar player who provided lead vocals on all the ‘Paul’ songs of the album. If you want to find out more about him there won’t be anything recent, he passed away in 1992.

I’ve pretty much summed it up right there. Neil Innes wrote all the songs for The Rutles, and his songs sounded so much like The Beatles that, apparently, he was taken to court by owners of The Beatles’ catalogue. The song ‘Cheese and Onions’ even appeared on a John Lennon bootleg because it sounded so much like him.

Innes’ lyrics are very clever too. I didn’t even know the word ‘pusillanimous’ existed until I heard this song.

Until next time.

Jamie.

My iPod #39: Green Day – Android

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One for the hardcore Green Days fans out there.
Those fans who see the album artwork and think “Ooh, what’s this?’ Well, it’s a song from Green Day’s second album, Kerplunk.
“Kerplunk? That sounds stupid, I don’t want to listen.”
Yes, I felt the same way. American Idiot was my first Green Day album, I really liked ‘Holiday’ when I was younger, I thought it was one of the best songs around. And Dookie, well that’s breakthrough album isn’t it? The major label debut, the dogs in the planes and the monkey with the poop in its hand thinking ‘Throw?’, Basket Case.
“Exactly! What makes Kerplunk so good, or even… 39/Smooth?’
I can’t really answer that. They were recorded when the band were on the independent label ‘Lookout! Records.’ Nobody knew who they were at the scale that they are recognised now, but people still ‘knew’ about them, you know? Like, people heard they were good stuff so they wanted to find out more about them.
“…. OK. I’ll have a listen.”
Away from that scenario, Kerplunk was one of the last Green Day albums I downloaded. Only for the reason that Green Day: Rock Band came out, and I thought I should download all their stuff for the hell of it. I got 1039/Smoothed Out Slappy Hours’ in 2004/05 but after getting it I realised that I had no clue about the songs on the compilation.
Kerplunk has grown on me as time has gone by, and this song is one of the reasons why. It’s just a really punk, four chord sequence song with great playing by all three members.

Another song by them about time and ageing, Billie Joe asks the questions that we all want to know about our lives:“Will I grow that old, will I still be around?

The world will carry on, I’ll end up six feet underground.
Waste away.”

The song carries on at this fast pace for the first few verses and choruses, then it all slows down (with a weird sample placed in, I don’t know where it’s from), everything starts to sound quite sad and introspective especially when Billie Joe is backed up with the child-like sounding vocal during the bridge:“It seems so frightening, time passes by like lightning.
Before you know it you’re struck down.”

But then the music picks up again, and you’re head banging to the instruments again.It’s pretty much a sad lyrics but confident music song, and it’s executed brilliantly.

So check out the first two albums by GD, and I don’t mean Dookie and Insomniac.

Until next time.

Jamie.

My iPod #38: The Beatles – And Your Bird Can Sing

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1966 was a good year for England. The football team won the World Cup, Tony Adams was born, and The Beatles unveiled their seventh album to the world. Except for the USA, who wouldn’t hear the album in its original form until the remastered CD in 1987.

Revolver. My favourite album by The Beatles. One of my favourite albums by any band.

Where can I start? I think that everything I would say about it has been said by almost every reviewer there is. I’ll leave it to you lot to find out what they say.

Upon seeing the Beatles light in 2009, I went on any site where I could download their whole discography. ‘Revolver’ was one of their first albums I downloaded, and then I didn’t know what to think of it. I’ve said many times that it takes a few listens to appreciate each song individually, resulting in an accumulated appreciation for the album as a whole. This was another of those times.

I think the fact that the songs were so short was something that made the album seem really quick to me. I would be listening to a song, and then it would finish and it was onto the next one. It was hard to get into something when the last chord faded out before your ears.

‘And Your Bird Can Sing’ was one example. Barely over two minutes, it’s one of the shortest songs.

Listening to it again and again though, I finally understood why the song was so sick. Sick is good. Now, it’s come to a point that when I see the cover, I either think of the fake countdown at the beginning of ‘Taxman’ or the introduction of this song.

It’s actually one of the more ‘basic?’ pieces of the album. A straight-forward rocker written by Lennon, with dual-guitar solos by both George Harrison AND Paul McCartney, Ringo doing his stuff on the drums. It;s just a really cheerful song, with hubris at its finest in the lyrics:

‘You tell me that you’ve heard every sound there is
And your bird can swing, but you can’t hear me
You can’t hear- MEEEEEEE.’

It’s just a huge ‘You suck. I’m great’ message. It’s brilliant. It’s everything you want musically and lyrically, and it’s only done in a short amount of time.

Then ‘For No One’ starts. Then you need to get the tissues. For drying your eyes.

It was clear that the band was a world away from their mop-top mania stage and had already embraced their dive into the unknown. That’s why they’re so great you know? They changed their sound on every album and they still sounded good! JESUS.

Revolver forever.

Until next time.

Jamie.

My iPod #37: Beastie Boys – And Me

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2012 was a sad year for all Beastie Boys fans. Adam ‘MCA’ Yauch passed away with salivary gland cancer, since then the hip-hop trio have gone on hiatus but it is hard to imagine that Ad-Rock and Mike D could perform under the ‘Beastie Boys’ moniker without that trademark low and raspy vocal.

I liked Beastie Boys, but I had never listened to any of their albums. It sounds bad that I only decided to after MCA’s death, and as I type I do feel quite shitty for not listening to one earlier.

Upon release the album received mostly positive reviews. The majority of them mentioning how the trio were branching out with their sound, gaining influence from an eclectic range of genres and successfully stepping forward in progress from previous releases. This is understandable, compare this album with their debut ‘Licensed to Ill’ for example.

‘And Me’ was one of the songs that caught my attention upon my first listen. To my knowledge, it was the first time that Beastie Boys had ever had such a calm and mellow vibe in a song. No one raps, it’s just Ad-Rock (though I am not sure) singing accompanied by synthesizers and a steady drum beat. I had never heard something like that by them before.

Sure the song is a bit repetitive, the melody is the same for every verse. Maybe it’s because they’re better at rapping, but I don’t know. It’s a very under rated song, so listen to it and see what you think about it.

Until next time.

Jamie.