Monthly Archives: December 2024

#1211: Beach House – Silver Soul

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Beach House’s Teen Dream probably goes down as the favourite of mine by the group. There are definitely bigger fans of the band than me, I can say that without exaggerating. But I’ll always find myself waiting for a new release if ever a new one is announced and on the horizon. Teen Dream was the first Beach House album I heard, during a period where I was finding critically-praised albums and finding out for myself whether they deserved the praise or not. It began with ‘Zebra’, and that track felt so familiar even though I’d never heard it before. And then ‘Silver Soul’ follows. While I can’t fully remember how I felt about it that first time, I tell you now, it’s up there in Beach House song preferences.

I think it’s been more than 10 years that I’ve known the track and listened through it. I couldn’t tell you what any of it means. Or at least I couldn’t give a solid interpretation. To me, it feels like one of those numbers where the music was laid out and the lyrics had to be done, so they were, and that’s what they are now. It all mainly revolves around “It’s happening again” lyrical refrain, which may or may not have been influenced by Twin Peaks. What I can say really matters to me is how Victoria Legrand sings throughout, her vocal’s just captivating. I don’t think Beach House usually go down as a “heavy” band, but I’ve always felt this track is incredibly so. The track starts off incredibly floaty, but when those crunching harmonising guitars come in around 20 seconds in, I can’t help but scrunch my face up and nod my head to the rhythm. A lot of times, I just hum the what-would-be bassline’s (left channel) melody throughout rather than the vocals themselves.

Other things you might want to know about this song… Hmm. Well, it was sampled in a Kendrick Lamar song. A very popular one by him, in fact. I’m very sure I heard the Lamar song before ‘Silver Soul’ too, but never made the connection. The sample was in a reversed state, so I feel I can forgive myself for that. During the closing moments while Legrand’s singing the refrain, guitarist Alex Scally starts singing other lyrics underneath. No one’s revealed what he is saying. I can make out, “If you want to stay inside…”, and “…and you will come and see, how could this be.” That’s about it from my side. It also seems that the music video contains the full proper version of the song. Whereas on the album the song slides right into the next one, the video has the last note of the song ringing out for almost a minute. It’s beautiful stuff.

#1210: Pavement – Silence Kit

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Now, hear me out. I know this song’s recognised to be officially called ‘Silence Kid‘. But for a long time, it was referred to as ‘Silence Kit’ because, on the original artwork, an accidental ink splodge caused the ‘d’ to look more like a ‘t’. I’ve seen that original artwork and, to me, it doesn’t even look like it was meant to resemble a ‘d’ in the first place. Even so, I’ve become so used to having ‘kit’ on my computer, phone, whatever for all this time, it doesn’t seem right to change it to what’s supposedly the correct title. And plus the band refer to it by the “wrong” title in their setlists sometimes. So when it comes down to it, I don’t think there’s any right way to refer to this tune. At least that’s what I’ll keep on telling myself.

The track is the opener on Pavement’s Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain, the band’s second album, released in 1994. One of my personal favourite LPs flat out, I gotta say. Everything about Pavement is right up there to me. Why do I like the album so much? I can’t really say in much depth. It’s simply one good song after another, all of them takes on genres of the past that frontman Stephen Malkmus wasn’t so fond of, like some country rock by the Eagles or general classic rock, while also paying homage to others. Listening through is always a good time and, as I said, it all begins with ‘Silence Kit’. I’ve come to think of this track as a tribute to the quiet people out there who are just trying to get through their days, doing their own thing and having big plans for the future. Ambitions and all. But then things take a detour in the outro, where a drummer is introduced into the fold, they take ecstasy and end up masturbating after the show. And then the song ends. An unexpected shift in tone, for sure. But you gotta like it. Could be done a lot worse.

What initially starts with the band messing around for the first 20 seconds really bursts into life after, with that fuzzy guitar blasting out the song’s main riff. I’ve noticed that ‘Silence Kit’ almost has a very monoaural mix to it. The main guitar, drums and bass guitar are all in the centre, alongside Malkmus’s vocal of course. Kinda gives that ’60s vibe where mono was the way to go in terms of album recordings. Gives the track that extra punch. But there’s also a guitar overdub on the left that balances things out. I want to say I want to hear another Malkmus vocal underneath it all. It’s buried in the mix, but comes in clearer during the “Talk about your family” verse. The melody Malkmus sings with is slightly lifted from Buddy Holly’s ‘Everyday’. Whether this was intentional, no one really knows. But I wouldn’t be surprised if there was at least a little influence. On an album that’s kinda spoofing the classic rock of America, it wouldn’t be amiss to make a nod to one of the pioneers of rock and roll in the ’50s. A fine, fine opener introducing the world to what was then a new Pavement with Steve ‘Westie’ West now on the drums.

#1209: Big Boi ft. Cutty – Shutterbugg

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I wish I could say I was there and witnessed all the hype leading up to the release of Big Boi’s Lucious Left Foot album. I would have been 15 at the time, I was a functioning person then and aware of my surroundings to an extent. But, being a teenager, I was a lot more excited by Eminem’s new LP that had been released a couple weeks before. Back in school, Eminem was everyone’s favourite rapper. The music gave us something to talk and rave about. Yeah, Recovery hasn’t aged all that well. I was personally going through a real Beatles phase too. So I mention all of this to say I missed out on the obvious excitement there must have been, leading up to the first solo release by either of the members of OutKast.

But I did see the music video for ‘Shutterbugg’ one day around that time. Where it was, I couldn’t tell you. MTV Base, The Box. I want to say the latter channel. It might have actually been the day it premiered on Big Boi’s YouTube channel. Whatever it was, it was through the video that I heard the song for the first time, and the hyperbolic kid I was then thought, “Wow, we’re really living in the future now.” It was the start of the 2010s, it was an exciting time. The camera quality looked HD before HD was existing. Big Boi was looking clean. There’s a kaleidoscopic Cadillac in there at one point. In general, a wide variation of very cool imagery occurs in the video’s duration. It really holds up today. One of those prime examples where it somehow heightens the listening experience. And even without the video, ‘Shutterbugg’ has always been a hit. Not in the mainstream, commercial way (although if it wasn’t that, it shoulda been), but in the way that it immediately caught my attention ’cause of the musical elements and all.

The track’s an ode to the good times had by the ladies and gentlemen of the nightclubs, with Big Boi calling out to all them to get to dancing, “throw [their] deuces” (make peace signs) for the titular “shutterbuggs” (paparazzi). Big Boi delivers two great verses, the first in which he tells us how he’s the coolest person you know, with the second taking place from his point of view while in the club. Not sure if Cutty ever did anything after this song, but he has a nice little feature for the bridge. But what I always thought was the real highlight of the whole thing was the predominant use of the talkbox. In the 2000s, I don’t think anyone was using the talkbox anywhere in any kind of music. But suddenly here it was and used to great effect. The whole track is a sort of throwback in terms of the instruments used, and yet has always continued to sound so, so fresh.

#1208: Foxygen – Shuggie

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Been a long while since I listened to We Are the 21st Century Ambassadors of Peace & Magic. That’s the third album by indie rock duo Foxygen. It’s now more than 10 years since it’s been available for listening and heard it for the first time myself. 18-year-old me was all for it. I thought, “This could be a band that I’ll be listening to for years to come.” It didn’t really work out that way, more my own fault than theirs. This is all a story I’ve told once before. I should properly go through the discography one of these days. There’s still time.

‘Shuggie’ is the sixth track on Peace & Magic. Obviously I would have heard it when going through the album initially all that time ago. But it wasn’t maybe until around 2018 when I heard it again and truly came round to appreciating it. I was in my first job out of uni, working in a little music studio in London. My colleague was on the reception desk handling payments and all the good stuff. She had Spotify on, which was playing through the speakers, and was on a playlist of some kind when ‘Shuggie’ came on. I knew it was a Foxygen song, but by that point it really had probably been five years since I last heard it. Hearing it at a suitable volume for an indoor waiting room environment and listening to its various tempo and mood changes, it got me thinking the song should have been a favourite of mine for that time.

Lyrically, the song’s a short tale about unrequited love. But though these feelings between the narrator and the person they fall for are unreciprocated, the song takes a more optimistic note and makes a point to realize the person within yourself and be happy with who you are in order to overcome adversity. Or something like that. Or maybe it’s all some sort of defence mechanism to distract the narrator from how they really feel. Whatever the message, I’m all for it. Sam France’s aloof vocals are a treat. But what I think is the highlight of the entire thing is the movement of the music from one section to the next. It’s all very ’70s chamber-pop inspired, before changing up the energy for almost-soulful choruses, then switching back and slowing down into the contemplative verses. There’s a little groovy interlude that comes to an abrupt end, which then suddenly shifts to the swinging, upbeat “ba-da-da-da” outro then fades on out. It’s a little rollercoaster of a song, all in a radio-friendly 3-and-a-half minutes. One of the duo’s most popular numbers for a reason.

#1207: The Sea and Cake – Showboat Angel

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Let’s all go back to the year 2017. If only, eh? Was an all right time for me. Specifically for today’s post’s context, I had finished my last uni exam but was still living in the accommodation. A lot of free time was on my hands, a lot of fun time was had. In that period, I remembered that ‘Jacking the Ball’ by The Sea and Cake existed after initially a year or two prior through Spotify’s Discover Weekly playlist. It became my favourite song for a moment there. After playing it a multitude of times, it got me wondering whether the rest of the album the track was on sounded much like it. The album being the band’s ’94 debut. In a roundabout way it did. You can tell all of the tracks on there probably originated from jamming sessions between the members with the lyrics probably coming as an afterthought. But then there also weren’t a lot of songs on the LP that were as immediate in the ‘poppy’ kind of way like ‘Jacking the Ball’ was.

The big exception though was, the album’s eighth song, ‘Showboat Angel’. For a lack of a better word, the whole track is certainly a vibe. Images that come to my head when listening to it usually centre around a cozy barbecue in the backyard with friends on a sunny afternoon, with this song playing on a stereo in the background. It’s a very specific thing when it comes to me. But I hear those guitars and that light keyboard on the left, and that situation is all I can think of. Thos guitars come in, singer Sam Prekop vocally riffs over the top for a moment which falls into the “Ooh, yeah, aw” chorus which, simple as it may be, hits a very sweet spot. There are times throughout where it sounds like Prekop isn’t even singing proper words, but in the parts where he is it seems to me that this ‘showboat angel’ character is most likely a girlfriend or something who generally makes the narrator’s life better amidst the unhappiness that lingers on both the east side and the west side. A good-time song for good-time moments.

I was intrigued enough by the album that when I was going through a phase of listening to full discographies by various people, The Sea and Cake were a band that I thought would be an interesting one to go through. I can’t remember which one I made it to. But I’m quite sure that I didn’t fall quite heavily for the albums that followed compared to the first one. I seem to remember the tracks on the other albums being less riff/jam driven, putting more focus on the vocal melodies that Prekop was delivering. And I don’t know, I just didn’t fall for them as much. But then again, that was quite a few years back. Maybe if I were to listen with these older, kind of wiser ears, things could be likely to change. Though that’s something for me to figure out. Anyone reading who hasn’t heard of the band, I’d say give them a go. They’ve got quite a few albums to their name, it could just be worth the time.