“Bee of the Bird of the Moth” is a track from They Might Be Giants’ twelfth album “The Else” released in 2007. I didn’t listen to it until very recently, only because I wasn’t sure whether I wanted to listen to the album or not. It was released during the period when the band had developed their children’s music albums, with “Here Come the ABCs” preceding it, and the two other “Here Comes…” coming afterward, so I had my doubts on whether the sound of the ‘adult’ album would appeal to me.
I was wrong to doubt. “This Might Be a Wiki”, the information centre dedicated to the band allows its members to rate their songs out of 10, and out of 84 ratings it has an average of 8.83/10 which isn’t band considering it’s above songs like “You Probably Get That a Lot” and “Weep Day” which are just examples of two other songs that I like. I’m thinking that that’s the actual reason why I listened to the song in the first place. It has a high rating in the TMBW song list. That sounds quite bad 😦
I don’t regret it though. If I hadn’t done that, then there’s the possibility that I may not have given “The Else” a chance. “The Else” is a great album. I’m biased though ’cause They Might Be Giants are one of my favourite artists, but it’s proudly in my iTunes library where I can listen to the songs everyday.
In John Linnell’s words: “This is a song about a hummingbird moth, which imitates another creature, which imitates yet another creature. It’s completely fucked up and can only be explained in song!”
How’s the new look? Do you like it? The whole blue and white thing was alright. But the ‘simple’ template was much more better than the ‘dynamic’ one. I hope you think it’s cool. Now you can see the posts I’ve done before, all in the two or three clicks with a mouse.
Sorry I didn’t do a post yesterday. I’ve done that about three times now. I’m on holiday, as you may or may not know. Finished exams and all that stuff. Yesterday I just went out bowling and chilled out at my friend’s house for a while. It was nice. I realised I suck at bowling without the barriers on the side to stop the ball from going into the gutter. Yesterday was the first time I’d actually done ten-pin bowling without those barriers. I came last in one game. But I did come third in the final one we did. It was all fine in the end.
OK. So, this is the first post for today. Another one will come up, this counts as yesterday’s one.
2009 was an alright year. I was in Year 9, and so really I still didn’t have any important things going on academic wise. That was the final year of Key Stage 3 before GCSE work started the next year. 2009 was also the year Eminem came back into our lives after a four year absence. Sure, he featured on “Smack That” by Akon and released the compilation album “The Re-Up” in 2006, but of course that didn’t count. That was more of a collaboration album with artists on Shady Records. The last we really heard from Eminem was in 2005, when he released “When I’m Gone” in a period when I remember that a lot of people thought he was retiring, and that was his “goodbye” song.
That all changed when he finally returned, firstly with “Crack a Bottle” and then ‘officially’ (you could say) with the single “We Made You” – the single which received the most airplay from “Relapse”, and in typical fashion he was here with his wacky Slim Shady persona, making fun out of Lindsay Lohan, Ellen DeGeneres, Amy Winehouse, and all with funny accents too.
I will tell you another tale of my friends about my friends and I from school. If you read my last post you may get this. These are different friends this time, but me and two of my friends really liked Eminem and we were really happy when “Relapse” came out. Now, most people think that Relapse isn’t that great of an album. Eminem describes it himself as “Ehhhh”. But then, it was Eminem, it was Marshall, it was Slim Shady, it was a big deal. No one would have dared to say that it was bad.
It was one of those two friends who told me about “Beautiful”. I hadn’t heard the song. “Relapse” hadn’t been released yet. But somehow my friend went on all these music websites where the latest R&B and hip-hop music was uploaded. He went on about how ‘sick’ it was, and how I should listen to it and memorise the first verse with the sample so we could sing it when we weren’t paying attention in class. “Sick” is another way of saying amazing, if you don’t slang.
So I went home. Listened to it. And it was sick. It is really serious stuff. “Relapse” isn’t a very serious album at all, with lines such as “I was born with a dick in my brain, yeah fucked in the head” and “Bodies laying all over the floor, I don’t remember how they got there but I guess I must have killed ’em”. But “Beautiful” is a very introspective Eminem song. It’s quite depressing. It’s got a good message though, basically saying “Fuck whoever says you’re not worth shit. Just be yourself.” It was released as a single, as you can see the music video is above. The actual song is about 6:30 minutes, but the video cuts out a few sections for some reason.
I don’t have “Relapse”. I don’t really want it. “Beautiful” is good enough.
“The Bears Are Coming” is a song by the band Late of the Pier, a dance-punky quartet who have only released one album to this day called “Fantasy Black Channel”. They haven’t been around for quite some time, and in this duration their fans have yearned and pined for new material.
I don’t know if I would call myself a fan of the band. If I am, it would be embarrassing to compare myself to others who actually keep up with whatever the members of the band do, whether it is “Late of the Pier” or side projects and stuff. But I like the album. It never has the same sound throughout each song. It’s diverse, it’s eclectic, it’s whatever synonym there is that means “wide range in differences”.
I remember talking to two of my friends about the music they listened to when I was in Year 8 or something. I had only vaguely heard something about the band, I think my sister liked them. Ben (one of them) talked about “Late of the Pier” and how he thought the name “Does It Offend You, Yeah?” was a cool name for a band. He also started singing “Space and the Woods” which was quite funny. Normally he just reads books all the time, and I never knew then that he listened to music very much.
“The Bears Are Coming” played for about ten seconds on a Virgin Media Music Videos preview on my TV. Virgin Media allows you to watch a large number of music videos for free as part of their “On Demand” option. The first line and part of the second were the only parts of the video that played, and I thought it sounded good.
I didn’t watch the video though. It sounds odd that I didn’t. It’s pretty weird that I didn’t if it was available for free. I don’t think I actually listened to the full song until late last year.
It’s a good song. It was released as a single too. Late of the Pier’s singles are very good. If you haven’t listened to it yet, watch the video above.
You might be confused by it. It’s much less confusing than the video for “Focker” though. That video is something else.
I’ve known this song for a long time, and it has never bored me once.
Billy Talent is one of my favourite bands ever. From the day when I first saw “River Below” on TV when I was eight, I needed to find more about them. I did. I never looked back.
“Beach Balls” is a song that was originally released on the “Try Honesty EP” in 2001 – I’m thinking this was the time when the band was looking for a label to sign to. It can also be found as a bonus track on some releases of “Billy Talent II” from 2006.
So when I became interested in Billy Talent in 2004, I wanted to find the lyrics to their songs so I could sing along to them. Letssingit was the first site to come up as a result on Google, and it was there that the lyrics to all their songs from the first album were listed. Furthermore, it was there that the lyrics for “Beach Balls” were listed; it wasn’t on the album, and I didn’t know Wikipedia existed at the time so I had no idea what this song was or how to find it. It could have been a song wrongly associated to the band for all I knew.
That was until I found a download link for the song on one of the many Billy Talent fansites that were around. As soon as the song started I knew that there was something different about the sound. Billy Talent’s first album is very angry, there’s a lot of screaming and hard rocking instrumentation. On “Beach Balls”, the sound is much more peppy. You have a Spanish-sounding guitar riff that plays and carries on during the verses. There’s no screaming on this song at all, which is something I really like the band for, but it’s still a really cool track to listen to.
Then it only struck me recently how the structure of the song is very similar those found on the album “Watoosh!” when the band were called Pezz. (Which is a brilliant album, they should play those songs live some time). For those who haven’t listened to songs on that album, the structure is basically:
Intro – Verse – Chorus – Verse – Chorus – Break – Sound of the song you’ve been listening to for the first half completely changes – One or two lines are sung which are then repeated until the song ends
So I can only assume that this song was performed when the band were still Pezz, but was released when the band changed their name.
The song is great though. Even if it’s not Billy Talent, it still is. If you know what I mean.
I am, admittedly, a Kings of Leon fan who prefers their music prior to “Only by the Night”. Sure, “Sex on Fire” and “Use Somebody” were major successes for them – and that’s great. I just like it when they weren’t aiming for this big, stadium filling sound that they seem to have been going for since the album’s release in 2008. Ever since they cut their hair, which I first noticed in the video for “Charmer”, things just started going downhill for me. I’m just saying. Don’t hate me.
“Be Somebody” is the highlight from the album for me. That’s only because the two songs I’ve mentioned above are repeated endlessly on the TV or radio. I can’t get no satisfaction when I hearing them sung by contestants on the X Factor, or Britain’s Got Talent, or other inane Saturday night ITV programmes that are on.
It sounds like a song that could have been on “Because of the Times”, I don’t get a sense of “Ooh, look at us we’re this huge band now and you should listen to us” vibe that I get from other songs on the album. It’s a haunting song, emphasised by the descending riff in the verses and the shrieking guitar in the breaks between the verses until you are suddenly lifted by an uplifting sounding chorus, where Caleb reaches the top of his lungs singing how he’s going to be somebody.
To summarise, for me it’s the only good song on the album. I’ll stick to their tunes from when their hair was long.
Until tomorrow.
Jamie.
P.S. Congratulations to Andy Murray, who became the first Briton to win Wimbledon in 77 years. He’s still Scottish.
The Music in My Ears 