Monthly Archives: May 2023

#1049: Super Furry Animals – Play It Cool

Leave a reply

Here’s another one by Welsh band Super Furry Animals and yet another one from their sophomore album Radiator, released back in 1997. I only wrote about the second track on that record the other day, so you can get a bit of background on my experience with it. Unlike ‘The Placid Casual’, I don’t recall ‘Play It Cool’ having much of an effect on me during that first listen through Radiator. I had a mission of listening through SFA’s whole discography in 2014 which had to come to a halt because of second year studies at university. I eventually got round to doing so in 2018 during work hours in my first job after those studies finished. It was a very lax workplace, so I could get away with listening to albums on Spotify for nearly the whole day. It’s all a bit hazy, but I want to say it was around then that ‘Play It Cool’ clicked and went on to become one of my favourite Furry songs.

Essentially the track is made up of little riffs, hooks and catchy scales, all delivered with an earwormy melody that when assembled altogether create such a fun three-minute pop-rock sensation. I mean, that’s essentially what all songs are. But in this case, ‘Play It Cool’ begins with its three-chord riff followed by that sweet ascending keyboard riff which arrives after the opening drum roll. The vocals announce themselves into the mix with a “Buh-bah-buh-baah-baah”, falling to harmonies on the last wordless syllable while an electric guitar plays a downward-scale string bending riff that cascades into Gruff Rhys lead vocal, which also mirrors the initial acoustic guitar riff at the very beginning. All done within the first 19 seconds. It’s a very inviting and warming way to start things off, just sounds nice to the ears in general. Quality and melody abound. All of which carries on for the next three minutes.

Someone please write in and tell me I’m wrong, I’m not the biggest SFA follower and don’t want to make any rash statements on how they would write their songs – but I think this track – a bit like my thoughts on ‘The Placid Casual’, really – was a result of the music and arrangements coming first, with the lyrics being written afterward to fit. And not that the lyrics are bad or are rushed. They truly aren’t. It’s just that the lyrics, particularly in the verses, don’t link to each in other in any type of cohesive narrative, nor do they tell a sort of story from one verse to the next. They are incredibly pleasant to sing along to though. Really, the main message comes in the choruses where Rhys tells the listener that whatever you want to do, do it now and reap the consequences later. And also to be cool instead of acting like a fool. Which to me, is pretty sound advice. I also have a preference to the original mix of the track that was released on the album (below) rather than the remix that was released as the single and used in the music video (above). The former pushes Rhys’s vocals into the back, while the single version does the opposite and adds a few new elements here and there. Which one floats your boat?

#1048: Meat Puppets – Plateau

Leave a reply

So, I wrote about Meat Puppets’ song ‘Lake of Fire’ a few years back. Mentioned how that song came to be a lot more well-known when it was covered by Nirvana in their ’93 MTV Unplugged in New York performance, and how people seem to prefer the cover much more than the original because of how Kurt Cobain sings it compared to original vocalist Curt Kirkwood. I also went on to assume that I possess the more contrarian take of preferring the original to that Nirvana performance. Well, I may as well copy and paste that whole post and switch a few words around, because the same applies here too.

I’ve heard that Nirvana performance many a time and can’t help but think that it was performed in a key that higher than Cobain’s capacity. He really strains on those choruses. Just don’t like the sound of his voice on it all that much to be quite frank. Don’t know what it is. Not to say that Kirkwood sings it all that much better. His voice also breaks on those “book about biiirds” lines, but the whole vocal performance has much less of a twang on it and sort of delivered with a softness that I take more of a liking to. I also appreciate that the bass guitar appears to be double-tracked and placed in the left and right speakers, with Kirkwood’s vocal, acoustic guitar and the drums placed in the center. Places a lot more emphasis on the rhythm, but you can hear that acoustic guitar work piercing through.

I’ve come to think of the song as one about the search for the meaning of life, with the plateau seemingly being this place where it can be found, but in the end there’s nothing there but a few mundane and unremarkable items. By the end of the track, people wonder where the next plateau can be found. Others say it lays right where they stand. Maybe that’s saying that life is what you make of it in the here and now, and not something that you have to tirelessly search for? Perhaps. The answer’s left unknown, and with that the track ends with a mesmerizing flange(?)-effected electric guitar outro, from out of nowhere, adding a hazy, mystical dimension to the soundscape. The whole song’s worth the listen just for that closing moment alone. Again, not to say that Nirvana’s cover isn’t great. But I’ll take the Meat Puppets over it any day.

#1047: Gorillaz ft. Mick Jones & Paul Simonon – Plastic Beach

Leave a reply

Well, it was only a few days ago that I was writing about another song from Plastic Beach, so I won’t go ahead and give the whole spiel on thoughts and feelings on it. Might as well just redirect you to that very post though, only if you were grossly interested in this guy’s first encounter with the album. I want to say that the title track was one of my favourites from the very beginning. I clearly remember going on YouTube, finding ‘Plastic Beach’ – the song – online and pleading with people to see if they could hear the falsetto vocal that Damon Albarn carries on into the choruses after singing ‘It doesn’t know’. No one could come up with the answer I wanted, so whatever he is singing is still a mystery to me to this day. In fact, I think there are a lot of lyrics in here that lyrics sites don’t have down correctly, no matter how official or reliable they claim to be.

Without hearing any of the music and just looking at the tracklist, seeing the features, it was always going to be interesting to see how former Clash members Mick Jones and Paul Simonon would be involved on this specific track. They’d both taken lead vocals in the past on Clash songs. Very notable, famous ones too. But once that introduction starts, you can tell it’s Jones on that guitar and Simonon on the bass straight away. That whole introduction, so atmospheric and scene-building by the way, sounds like an instrumental Clash outtake, but with some synthesizers over the top. Very cool to see the two performing their take in the studio in the Plastic Beach documentary too. The introduction lasts for 40 seconds or so, giving way to the rest of the song is predominantly led by keyboards, synthesizers and the like, with an immediate groove and head-bopping rhythm, over which Albarn sings about about living on the plastic island depicted on the album’s ominous front cover. A picture that isn’t computer-generated, by the way. That’s an actual large-scale model that a crew took pictures of. Pretty cool to know.

If it wasn’t for that Jones/Simonon introduction, ‘Plastic Beach’ would follow a very simple structure I’ve come to realise. Without it is your standard track of a verse/chorus/verse/chorus/bridge/chorus/end, which you can find just about anywhere. Have a feeling Albarn wanted to spice things up a bit, and so recruited some help to make things a bit more interesting. But even then, the song hits the spot in so many ways. Albarn harmonises with himself, singing in quite the relaxed tone for the verses and too in the choruses, also changing the pitch of his vocals to achieve a harmonising effect. The high-pitched ‘Plastico, plastico’ vocals that come in before the final chorus I’ve come to not like as much. They feel a bit filler-y, just to add something in before things are rounded off. But they’re not enough to completely steer me away from the song. A shame that the lyrics aren’t completely valid wherever you look though. I actually uploaded these ones back around its release, taken from the iTunes lyrics that were on the Plastic Beach game on the band’s official website that was going on for a while. This is the closest I think you could get.

#1046: Stephen Malkmus and the Jicks – Planetary Motion

Leave a reply

January 2014 marked the arrival of Stephen Malkmus & the Jicks’ sixth album Wig Out at Jagbags, which itself was the first proper record of the band’s that I was patiently waiting for. Having listened to Pavement’s discography from front to back the previous year and also had a dip into Malkmus’ first solo album, I gotta say I was hooked to whatever he did and was also preparing to unleash on the masses. It was also three years on since the last Jicks album. That too I downloaded just to get a feel of more recent work. Jagbags eventually came. First impressions of it were that it was okay. Almost ten years on… that feeling remains the same. Feels to me like a slicker, slimmer part two of Mirror Traffic, but the songs just didn’t grab me as much. ‘Lariat’, the ‘single’ from the album is the band’s most popular song on Spotify though, so what would I know? In my opinion, the album possesses two highlights in the form of ‘Cinnamon and Lesbians’ (which woulda had its own post had the timing been right) and its opener and today’s song ‘Planetary Motion’.

The thing you’ll notice about ‘Planetary Motion’ is that *gasp* it’s not played in your regular 4/4 timing. Nope. To begin the proceedings is a track that switches between 6/4 and 5/4 during the verses, stays at 6/4 during the choruses and then plays at 7/4 during the instrumental/solo break. Now, usually when you get this sort of tampering with the rhythm, you’re left to wonder if this’ll be some prog rock thing where there’s just too much of everything going on. But this is Stephen Malkmus we’re talking about here, guys. Even with the unusual timings, the tune still rolls at an easygoing tempo. It does start of with quite the stomping rhythm, but once those choruses and that instrumental break kicks in, you’re back into that familiar laidback territory that only he can pull off so well. As to what the song’s about, well, I’d say that it’s about the wonder of the Earth and how it just keeps on turning, how the Sun keeps shining, how us humans just keep on living and how all those things will just keep on happening with no real end in sight. Sounds like the basis of a classic existential crisis/dread song, but Malkmus sounds to be at peace with it all, the song’s just that chill.

Doing some extra research on the track, it seems that there were live performances of it as early as 2011 – so either it was a possible outtake from the Mirror Traffic sessions or just a brand new track that was written straight away after the band finished making that album. You can also read this interview. The whole read is worth it, but there is a part where he talks about his annoyance with the ‘yellow odyssey’ lyric in this track and how he buried it with another vocal singing on top of it. People who like to think that Malkmus doesn’t care about his craft are sorely mistaken. Malkmus’ decision to bury the ‘yellow odyssey’ line appeared to have confused every lyrics site online who tried to find out what he was singing during those parts. A lot of them replace the line with a question mark before transcribing the next part of the song.

#1045: Radiohead – Planet Telex

Leave a reply

Was thinking about how I properly became aware of this song for a couple days before writing. I mean, that’s usually how it goes for the rest of the posts on here. But for this one, my mind had to wander for just a little bit. But then it all came flooding back. I got The Bends for, I think, my 12th birthday. Only really wanted it for ‘Just’ and ‘Street Spirit’ – if you’re wondering where ‘Just’ is in this series, it kinda lost its effect on me over time (sorry) – so I probably listened to it just once and never put the CD in my computer again. ‘Planet Telex’ starts the album off. But as I had forgotten how the song went, I had no idea who was singing in the sample used in the track ‘Letter from God to Man’ by British hip-hop duo Dan Le Sac vs Scroobius Pip, when the video for it was making the rounds on MTV2 back in the day. Maybe 2008 or so. Revisiting that track to remind myself how it went, I never realised, when I was a young lad, just how many elements of the original song it used. But then a couple years later I probably heard the track on iTunes when I was simultaneously playing FIFA and thinking, ‘Wow, this song’s… damn good.”

So, yeah. Radiohead’s album The Bends was released in March 1995, just three weeks before I arrived on this earth, if anyone wanted know. Being recognised as the ‘Creep’ band for the few years prior to its arrival, I can only imagine fans/critics’ reaction to the record when it dropped. Pablo Honey as a whole is pretty forgettable. Bit derivative of the American ’90s grunge/alt rock thing going on at the time. I don’t even like ‘Creep’ all that much. Then The Bends comes and it sounds like a completely different band. It just blew what came before it out of the water, from the production to the songwriting to the artwork. The whole package. It all begins with ‘Planet Telex’, firstly with this rolling wind-like sound effect that then gives way to a booming drum loop and piano drenched with tremolo/delay effects. The drums, bass and pianos drop out to introduce the guitars and the first appearance of Thom Yorke’s vocals on the album, before falling back in with a crash. Everything proceeds on from there. I really adore just the whole sound of this track. Don’t know how to describe it. Either like it’s from the future – it’s all spacey and sort of electronic, quite the difference from a lot of the other songs on the album, or just needs to be played really loudly from the highest rooftop. Really emphatic and so thrilling.

However… upbeat, for lack of a better word, it may sound, I again have only properly become aware of the track’s meaning. At least I want to say I have. Thom Yorke’s telling the listener all these things that you can do, but can’t bring to its full conclusion/potential. Then during the second, he provides options that you have the freedom to do whatever you want with. But in the end, “everything/everyone is broken”. Everything is pointless. Futile. The track seems to be a look at life from quite the depressive point of view. And with the lingering question of “Why can’t we forget?” as the last lyric, the track fades out with a fantastic guitar refrain courtesy of Ed O’Brien and a return of that spacey effect from the very beginning of the song. Couple random facts to close this out. Yorke sang the vocals while drunk and slumped in the corner of the studio. Still able to belt those notes out though. And with some power. And the track was originally called ‘Planet Xerox’ and was changed to ‘Telex’ so late in the process that producer John Leckie wasn’t aware of the name change until the album was released. At least… I really want to say I watched a video where he said that himself.