Monthly Archives: July 2023

#1079: Unknown Mortal Orchestra – Puzzles

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Well, it’s come to the time again where I have to write about an artist for the last time in this series. So long, Unknown Mortal Orchestra, I hardly knew ye. The tale of how I came about the band can be found in my post for ‘Like Acid Rain’, posted almost three years ago to this day. Three years, you know. It really goes by like that. I can’t say that I’m the hugest fan of UMO’s work overall. I actually made a bit of a point to myself to listen to their most recent record. I still haven’t and it’s been out for quite some time now. So, yeah. As I say, not the biggest fan. Or at least not the most committed of their listeners. But I do like ‘The Garden’ though. That’s a really nice song.

Out of the, I think, four UMO albums I’ve heard in full, I reckon Multi-Love is head-and-shoulders above the rest. And the album comes to a close with today’s featured track, ‘Puzzles’, a commentary about America’s racial issues and visa policies that sort of comes out of the blue. Up to that point, the album deals with frontman Ruban Nielson’s feelings on fame, various anxieties and love, all framed within the context of an polyamorous relationship he was indulging with two women. However, once you learn that the track is based on the experience of he and his wife having to leave the States because their tourist visas expired, it does make a lot more sense. The track does take a while to get going, starting with an ambient intro of a synthesizer repeating two chords amid the sound of what I think is something throwing stuff into a dumpster. Guitars don’t enter the frame until 56 seconds in, acoustic (bear in mind), playing the chord progression of the verses in a calming, slower manner before two strikes of an open hi-hat mark the entrance of the electric guitars, one of which sounds like it’s being strangled each time a chord rings from the fretboard.

Even from that first time I heard this track in 2017, I got the feeling that it was written to act as this sort of epic closer. It’s asking the “big” questions pertaining to America’s racial issues, which is all well and good. I mean, it’s not wrong to want to write about that sort of stuff. But it doesn’t go too deep into it, as the first verse is the same as the second and the choruses are repeated twice too. In fact, the singing part within this track probably take up the minority of its duration, as it’s bookended by the long intro and the two-and-a-half minute outro, which also fades out too. Sort of ends the album on this wandering note rather than a huge climactic finish, which I sometimes feel a bit let down by. But that feeling only really comes having listened to the album as a whole. Otherwise, I’m singing along to all of those guitar lines and notes that make up those instrumental passages, or moving my head to that skipping ascending guitar melody in the choruses among those overblown drums. Though I might have my own tiny gripes with it, I wish I had more hands so I could give it four thumbs-up.

#1078: They Might Be Giants – Put Your Hand Inside the Puppet Head

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Man, look at those fresh-faced Johns in that music video. I reckon I was about 12 years old when I saw the clip for TMBG’s ‘Put Your Hand Inside the Puppet Head’ for the first time and thus heard the song too. Would have been 2007, and YouTube was up and running at this point. Not the big deal it is today. Was a lot more humble and much more innocent back then. At 12, the Giants had been around in my life for probably three and a bit years at that point. And it was hard to find music videos by them online without really having to look for some websites. Now all of them were on this “new” site, and ‘Puppet Head’ was a well-liked song according to the band’s wiki. Became an instant hit in my book and another to add to that list of tunes I already knew that really made TMBG stand out compared to any other band/musician/artist I usually listened to.

I distinctly remember stopping and starting the video numerous times, just to keep replaying the image of the two Johns jumping in time to the track’s opening drum pattern. It’s quite hypnotizing in its own way. Plus, it’s quite the visual to start things off with. Once I realised that this was the duo’s first ever music video, it made sense that the first scene had to lure viewers in somehow. In fact there are many dance moves here (which were a signature in those early TMBG videos) that I kept on rewatching. Just made the two guys all the more endearing. But you want to know about the song, that’s why you’re here. Well, John Linnell originally wrote it – lyrics and music – but was unhappy with how his verses turned out. He gave it to bandmate John Flansburgh who “filled in all the blanks”, resulting in one of the best TMBG outcomes, a collaboration between the two band members in comparison to the usual where one or the other will write the entire song.

From what I can gather from the lyrics, I think it’s simply about a person who doesn’t like their job, wants more out of life. Maybe a little loving to help soothe the pain. And all of this could happen if someone would only put their hand inside the titular puppet head. The talk about zombies and this puppet head puts things into a bit of a surreal area, but I think that’s just a way of making the understanding a little harder to achieve. Well, I think they did that quite successfully. But like a lot of other TMBG songs, it’s a bunch of fun to sing along to. The track was released as the second song on the band’s first album from 1986, but with a different mix from that in the music video. The snare hits are drenched in reverb, someone suggested to make the song a little sharper in its key, and the tone overall is a little brighter. It does fit in alongside the other 18 tracks on that record. When I sing it out of the blue, my pitch usually goes to that of the video’s. But honestly, this is one of those rare occasions where I like two separate released mixes of a song at about the same level.

#1077: Feeder – Pushing the Senses

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Feeder, Feeder, Feeder. Don’t believe I’ve ever gone through a whole studio album by the band before. Not sure whether they have a worldwide-recognised bona-fide classic. But they always seem to hit a home run when it comes to their single releases. All the Feeder songs I’ve written about before on here were commercially released as representatives of their parent albums at some point or another. That also includes today’s song ‘Pushing the Senses’, the title track from the band’s 2005 album. Or, if you’re turned off by my subtle dismissal of their studio albums, you can find the track on the fantastic Singles compilation. In my honest opinion, if you want to get to know Feeder, this is the only release you’ll need.

To be even more honest, I don’t have a great emotional investment in this track as I do for a lot of other tracks in this long, long list. That’s to say it’s not a song that I’m usually seeking out to listen to on a regular basis. Nor was there a key moment in my life that I can recall where it played a significant part. In fact, I’m very sure that it was used in a car advert a few years back, wanna say it was one for Mitsubishi for some reason, and that reminded me that the song existed and thus made me revisit it. I’d be singing along to it whenever it came on the TV though. Partly because it used to air a numerous amount of times. But mostly because the car company’s use of the chorus was a smart move. Very melodic. Very memorable.

The usual conclusion to come to when listening to this track is that in some way it’s probably about the band’s former drummer Jon Lee, also a good friend of guitarist/songwriter Grant Nicholas, who committed suicide in January 2002. Many tracks on the albums following on from that year contain lyrics alluding to Nicholas’s feelings on Lee’s passing, but it was Pushing the Senses and 2002’s Comfort in Sound that really captured them in the midst of that sad time. I’ve come to see the track as one that’s about a relationship, one in which the narrator wants to fix things with the significant other just by talking things out when things get tough. Then again, you could take that to be Nicholas wanting to talk to Lee about his own feelings and to try and find some resolve. We could go round in circles here. What matters really is the music, and the gist is that it’s a very driving, forward-looking power pop tune. Gets a thumbs up from me.

#1076: They Might Be Giants – Purple Toupee

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Here’s a little thing I’m not sure I’ve actually shared on here. My dissertation for my final year of university was based on ‘Modality and point of view in the lyrics of They Might Be Giants.’ That’s right. You know how I like this band so much? Well, I do so much that I wrote 10,000 words about them in an academic study. I used the lyrics of the first verse of ‘Purple Toupee’ under the ‘Methodology’ chapter, where I had to describe the tools I used in order to carry out the study, just to give an example of what kind of narrative voice John Linnell may have been conveying in the song. Actually really enjoyed working on that final paper now I think of it. If anyone wants to read it, don’t be afraid to comment – I’m willing to share.

But of course I was a big fan of the song way before it came to writing that dissertation in 2017. I got to listening to TMBG’s sophomore album Lincoln, on which ‘Toupee’ is the fourth track, about seven years prior to that. The track was a clear highlight from that point. But even from visiting This Might Be a Wiki since I was about nine, I knew that the song was highly regarded among TMBG fans because it was consistently in the higher numbers of the song ratings list that’s on that website. The song was chosen to be a single in ’89, and was meant to be released alongside three other B-sides, but that release fell through and it was instead released as a sole promotional single instead.

So with my whole spiel about narrators in the first paragraph, I might have left you asking why I chose lyrics from this track in particular. Well, it’s because the track is sung from the point of view of a character living in the ’80s who has a bit of warped/hazy recollection of momentous political events that happened in the ’60s. From one line to the next, he’s throwing references to “Selma and some Blacks”, “the book depository where they crowned the king of Cuba” and “Martin X”. But this narrator is completely confident in recalling these events, even though we know they’re completely wrong. Then the chorus comes in referring to the titular phrase, influenced by a combo of Prince’s ‘Purple Rain’ and ‘Raspberry Beret’. So all in all, the track’s meant to serve as an ’80s reaching out to the ’60s type track, but being all tongue-in-cheek about it. The song’s a whole lot of fun, and takes a bit of an unexpected turn for its ending. Always a good time when it comes on.

#1075: The Who – Pure and Easy

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Look at that. Another Who song. So, the consensual opinion is that Who’s Next is their best album, right? I mean, I’d agree it’s an outstanding piece of work. I think Quadrophenia‘s better, but we’ve been through all of this already. But did you know that Who’s Next started off as a completely different monster altogether? There’s a whole Wikipedia section dedicated to the Lifehouse project, envisioned by Pete Townshend to be another rock opera, following on from Tommy, this time with a more science-fiction take to it and accompanied with this thought-out live show performance experience. At least I think it was something along those lines. But because no one apart from him could understand the opera’s plot line, and so the whole thing was laid to the wayside except for eight of the nine songs that became the album we know today.

‘Pure and Easy’ was one of the tracks recorded during the Lifehouse/Who’s Next sessions. As part of the Lifehouse story, it was meant to act as something of the theme song for the opera’s protagonist and also introduced the concept of music/rock and roll being able to save the world – or something along that effect – that the opera’s plot was based on. Townshend has gone on record to state his great disappointment that the song wasn’t included on the final cut. It did however make a small appearance on there, with Daltrey singing a different take of the song’s first lines during the ending of ‘The Song Is Over’. Two versions of ‘Pure’ have been commercially released. There’s the take of the track that appeared on a Who’s Next reissue. It’s faster, and a lot of people like it for that reason alone. But the version that trumps that by many a mile in my eyes is the one that appeared in the band’s Odds & Sods compilation. It’s the one you can see up there. It’s slower, but the performance sounds massive in comparison.

Think it’s saying something about Townshend’s writing at the time that the band decided to leave this song in storage for so long. ‘Cause a track like this could be any other band’s greatest ever achievement. Lyrics aren’t my thing usually, but even here when I hear the words and read them, there’s a definite beauty and poetic feeling to them. “I listened and I heard music in a word/And words when you played your guitar/The noise that I was hearing was a million people cheering/And a child flew past me riding in a star”. I mean, that’s a pretty cool set of lines, I think. And Daltrey sings ’em really nicely too. Track’s filled with these uplifting key changes and guitar hooks, there’s a massive change to a minor for the bridge, before switching back and finishing off with a rocking finale as Pete Townshend takes over the microphone, telling the listener to listen out for the note. Poorly typed out words can only do this one so much justice. Would suggest taking the time to hear it, really.