Monthly Archives: August 2020

#760: Small Faces – Long Agos and Worlds Apart

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‘Long Agos and Worlds Apart’ is the third track from Small Faces’ 1968 album Ogdens’ Nut Gone Flake. For anyone who’s a fan of that album and regularly visits it, this track may not seem as important or substantial as the other tracks that appear alongside it on the record’s first half. Maybe seen as merely a link between predecessor ‘Afterglow of Your Love’ and following track ‘Rene’. It’s always stuck out to me as a highlight though. The track has a swinging rhythm, I get nothing but good feelings when it comes on, and it was written by keyboardist Ian McLagan who, on top of singing, also plays rhythm guitar and bass guitar here.

‘Long Agos’ is a track to do with time and relationships. McLagan sings that he doesn’t want to know about the distant past where this person wasn’t in his life, but if he had all the time in the world then he wouldn’t want to spend it with anyone else. It seems to me like a very earnest and sincere track, very optimistic from its perspective. In the final verse, McLagan then looks to the future where he’s certain that this person will still be in his life and they’ll be able to reminisce about the good old days when they were younger. And on that note, the drums come in and the band members join in with a chant of ‘hip-hip’ and ‘doowaddy-waddy’. There’s a lengthy fade-out to the track followed by a gradual surprise fade-in – which seemed to be a standard production trick in the 60s – where Steve Marriott closes out the track with a guitar solo and McLagan keeps things rolling with a chugging bassline. Sure, the main vocals in the track are finished about halfway through the track but a long instrumental outro is always good to have once in a while.

Unfortunately, this will be the last time I write about Small Faces on here. I have no other songs after this one to write about. If the times were aligned correctly, there would have been two more posts about ‘Afterglow’ and ‘The Hungry Intruder’. Do listen to the group though, they were one of the best of their kind in the 60s. Sadly, three of the members of their classic lineup have passed away. But their music goes on.

#759: Beck – Lonesome Tears

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In my first and second year of university, I ‘worked’ as a host on the uni’s radio station. Had my own show, two hours long, put a lot of effort into what my playlist would be. You can find them here. They’re under a lot of names: Sunday Morning Show, Tuesdays with Jamie K, Saturday Rocks… it’s all me. The reason I tell you this is because for those years I spent a lot of time downloading albums to my iTunes library to increase the variety of music I played on my slot. Beck’s Sea Change was one of them. From the small amount of ‘research’ I did back then I saw that it was considered to be the man’s second best album after Odelay on besteveralbums.com, so it was probably worth the amount of space on my laptop. I listened to it once, but didn’t really take it in. My shows were the main focus at the time.

I revisited the album earlier last year and came to the conclusion that it was really good. Definitely didn’t get the ‘delete from computer’ selection that a lot of other albums did. There’s a lot of acoustics and a warmth to its sound throughout that was probably further aided by the production tricks of Nigel Godrich. The mood of the album was a lot more sincere and introspective compared to his usual cryptic and offbeat material, influenced by Beck’s state of mind after a the break-up of a nine-year relationship. ‘The Golden Age’ and ‘Already Dead’ got instant likes from me. ‘Lonesome Tears’ did too. The lyrics are very relatable, and the music – very intense.

Beck sings about the tears he’s been crying, presumably since his relationship ended, and aims to put an end to these crying bouts because there’s no point in doing so if the person you care for doesn’t reciprocate those feelings. That doesn’t stop him from wondering why he could have been done so wrong during choruses though. His vocal is really dry, very intimate, and sounds like he’s really close to the microphone when singing. This is juxtaposed with the expansive string arrangement (arranged by Beck’s dad) that take up the soundscape, and pretty much drown out Beck when those choruses hit. Those strings are most definitely the highlight of the track, truly capturing the emotional distress that’s conveyed in the lyrics before the climactic ending where they climb and climb endlessly before coming to an abrupt end. I had to add the song to the phone just for those parts.

#758: The Clash – London Calling

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Try as I might I could never get into The Clash’s London Calling. The double album of theirs that was released in 1979 that is, and not its title track which is the subject of this post. I think the song is one of the greatest album openers you could have. Though I understand why it’s held in such acclaim. For their previous two albums the band had been delivering meat and potatoes three chord social observation punk rock. With London Calling the band decided they could make any type of music they wanted to: reggae, ska, pop, lounge jazz – it’s all on there. The album has its classics: ‘Lost in the Supermarket’, ‘The Guns of Brixton’, ‘Clampdown’. All signatures tunes from there. But as a whole, I could never vibe with it. It really doesn’t matter in the great scheme of things.

I’ve always enjoyed the title track though. Its stomping introduction with its minor key and thick bass give off this sense of some impending doom, and this is only further emphasised by singer and guitarist Joe Strummer’s vocal about police brutality, casual drug usage, and the city of London drowning because of a flood in the River Thames. Closer listening to this track has always brought out new things in the mix that I never noticed before. Like how much guitar feedback there is throughout. Or the panning of Mick Jone’s yelp just before the strange reverse double guitar solo. And the Morse code that spells out ‘S-O-S’ in the fade out. There’s plenty of small audio tricks and snippets in the production that make the song that more engaging to hear each time you listen.

This song’s been one that’s always just been there for me. I definitely came to know the song through its music video which shows the band performing the track on a boat on the Thames in the rain with huge floodlights shining on them. Made an impression on me as a younger person, however old I was when I first encountered it.

#757: Window Seats – Local Superhero

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Many times on here I’ve made a reference as to how MTV2 was the first place I would hear/see a song and its video and come to like it for years to come. Today’s song is another one of those. ‘Local Superhero’ by Window Seats played on the channel back in 2012 or so. At that point, MTV2 was now known as ‘MTV Rocks’. This is probably one of the last tracks I came to know from watching music television. It just wasn’t like it used to be. It wasn’t the case that MTV2 wasn’t showing music anymore; it was that the channel was showing the same bands and artists almost every day, none of which I cared for at all. It’s probably been about eight years since I last watched it.

I wouldn’t blame you for not knowing who Window Seats are. If you hadn’t heard this song before, you probably know that the band existed. They released the Frozen Bones EP, where this song can be found, in 2011 and a following non-album single in 2015. To this day they remain unsigned by any label, but they could clearly write a banging tune as exemplified by ‘Local Superhero’. It’s a track about helping someone when they’re feeling low and I suppose this sentiment was what inspired the song’s title. The video which makes for a great watch-along takes this further, taking place in a comic book shop where there are a plenty of references to Marvel and Ghostbusters too.

If this post and song urges you to seek out more material by Window Seats then I’m glad. This is the only song of the band’s that I could properly get into, though that definitely shouldn’t be the case for everyone else out there.

#756: Billy Talent – Living in the Shadows

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It never occurred to me how many songs from the first Billy Talent album begin with the letter ‘L’. It feels like I wrote the last one to do so only a few days ago. It’s been three weeks! There are only three songs on that record that begin with that letter, but that still makes up a quarter of the tracklist. This is the last one from those that I’ll cover. It’s ‘Living in the Shadows’, and it’s the second song on the album.

This track just carries on the anger and ferocity that is established on album opener ‘This Is How It Goes’ and threaded throughout the 41 minutes the album lasts for. There’s a theme of seeing through artifice and lies that also runs through the album – and a lot of the band’s discography, thinking about it – and it’s definitely the predominant subject in this song too. Ben Kowalewicz’s sings/screams about those who hop on trends and put on a front to try and look cool but are ultimately lying to themselves because it isn’t truly how they are. All of this is summed up in a chorus which blasts these people for trying to change other people when they don’t even know themselves and are ‘living in the shadows’.

I think this song’s just great. Everything about it is so furious. How Kowalewicz’s can switch from singing to screaming in a split-second during the choruses is beyond me. And the song’s ending where he repeats the chorus among the barrage of guitars, snare hits and cymbals makes it a classic to me. I see it like a sister song to ‘This Is How It Goes’; they’re both sort of similar musically and even use the stop-starting guitar break in their respective instrumental bridges. Both those tracks are just so negatively charged in their outlook of the world… but they both work as a great one-two punch to begin the album.