Monthly Archives: December 2024

1201: Hot Club de Paris – Shipwreck

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It’s been a long, long time since I’ve written anything about Hot Club de Paris around here. The last time I did, I was a bit of an arse about them. Very dismissive. You know how it is when you’re 18, you think you’re smart ’cause you’re an adult on paper and you think everyone wants to know your real opinion about something. It’s a time of my life I don’t miss. What I’ll say now about the band is that, even if I haven’t listened to any of their albums in full, the three songs I got to know by them whenever their videos showed up MTV2 got stuck in the brain usually at an instant. Those videos may have played only a few times, and that was almost, almost 20 years ago. The third song will get its own post soon.

But for now, here’s the second, and it’s the song that opens the trio’s debut album. It’s the second on the linked video, but that somehow includes the pregap track that was hidden on the CD copies. ‘Shipwreck’ was released as the second single from Drop It ’til It Pops in about early 2007 or so. Saw the video on the TV in the morning one day, saw that it was by the band who made another song I liked a few months earlier, the third song I was talking about earlier, and was into it right away. Compared to their previous video that had a stop-motion thing going on, this one showed the band actually performing, and as an 11-year-old kid in grammar school who wasn’t going to gigs anytime soon, it was quite exciting to see.

All the time I’ve known the track, I’ve never stopped to think what it was about. I’ve always been a more “music first-lyrics later’ kinda guy, I can’t help it. But looking at the words briefly, I think it’s about a group of lads – maybe referring to the band themselves, who knows – being rowdy on a night out at a club, but it’s all told with the inclusion of nautical/pirate-themed lyrics and imagery to cleverly make things that little more difficult to gauge. Paul Rafferty, the bassist, and guitarist Matthew Smith both take lead vocals on the tune, as demonstrated in the music video, usually amidst rollicking “woo” and “yo-ho-ho” chants in the back, with both pulling off melodic licks that drive the track along. Sections of the song are also played in 7/8 time, kind of a math rock thing going on but not really. It all sounds good to me. Wouldn’t hurt to actually listen through their discography one of these days.

#1200: Ol’ Dirty Bastard – Shimmy Shimmy Ya

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All the years seem to blend into one when I think about the time spent getting into Wu-Tang Clan in university. Want to say it took a couple years to fully understand. I have a clear vision of being in my first-year room and listening to 36 Chambers and GZA’s Liquid Swords. Only Built 4 Cuban Linx… may have shown up around the time too. But I think it was the earlier part of my second year where I became somewhat enthralled by their whole thing, and on my part was watching interviews, documentary clips and the like. You know what, it was around the time when they announced that they were about to release their new album – their first in a long, long time. A Better Tomorrow, I think it was. That record wasn’t all that great. But the hype building up to it got me all invested in the group, making me seek out the rest of the members’ own solo discographies.

Having covered GZA and Raekwon already, I think their albums had shown up somewhere in the ‘Best Ever Albums’ list on besteveralbums.com – the only reason why I got to listening to them, it was my decision to hear the album by the Wu member who always entertained me the most, be it in both the music and video. This led me to Return to the 36 Chambers: The Dirty Version, the 1995 debut by the group’s beloved drunken master, the Ol’ Dirty Bastard. Always seemed to remain in the pocket while also possessing the most exaggerated and eccentric delivery out of the Wu’s nine members. He wasn’t afraid to occasionally break out into song during his verses too. Wanted you to know he had soul in him. His presence was a usual highlight throughout 36 Chambers, so what could be better than a whole hour of the guy on his own solo project?

It’s been a while since I’ve properly gone through The Dirty Version. Have to go back to it one of these days. But what I do know is that after its almost-five minute intro, one of the most hilarious and entertaining in any hip-hop album, comes ‘Shimmy Shimmy Ya’, one of if not the signature tune by ODB. It’s a track where he declares that he’s out to take the world by storm in the name of the Wu-Tang and basically goes on to tell us why he’s the best at what he does. There are so many hooks to latch on to, “Ooh, baby, I like it raaaaw, HUH”, “Shimmy shimmy ya, shimmy yam, shimmy yay”, “Jump on stage a-den-a-den deeeeen”. The two-note piano lick that starts it off. So simple yet so effective. And the whole track relies on a second-verse-same-as-the-first-thing going on, so you can’t go wrong once you’ve got the words memorised. That is, at least how it goes on the album version (below). You can tell the second verse was probably overdubbed at a different stage than the first. The extended version, used for the music video, features the original second verse that sounds like it was improvised on the spot. The video also features a snippet of fellow album track, ‘Baby C’mon’, which I’m also very into. Can’t write a post about it now. But that’s another highlight of mine.

#1199: Pink Floyd – Sheep

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Looks like this’ll be the last song from Pink Floyd’s Animals that’ll be on here. But it also happens to be my favourite track on there. I’ve come to think of the record as the band’s almost, sort of reaction to punk at the time. Those gospel backing choirs and saxophones the group used on Dark Side and Wish You Were Here were done away with. The Floyd took a DIY approach to the making of Animals through building their own studio to record it in after leaving their usual work area of Abbey Road Studios. As a result, it’s truly an effort created and curated by the four members, even if Roger Waters will take credit for it all. And plus, there’s a lot of frustration and anger behind it all, which we can all do with sometimes. A lot of people are into ‘Dogs’. A lot of people are into ‘Pigs (Three Different Ones)’. And I swear, for a while, from what I saw, ‘Sheep’ was usually considered to be the weakest out of the three mammoth tracks that make up the meaty part of the album. Something that I couldn’t really understand. Because, in regards to listening to the entire LP, ‘Sheep’ is the track that the entire album has been building up towards.

‘Sheep’ had its origins from before the band even started work on Wish You Were Here a few years prior, as it was usually performed live under the name ‘Raving and Drooling’. Then Roger Waters was inspired by George Orwell’s Animal Farm and the lyrical content morphed into something completely different and now described a dire situation in which people were blindly following an ideology without thinking for themselves or willing to fight against it. Proceedings begin with the sound of sheep braying in a field, smooth chords on the Rhodes piano by Richard Wright and a bass riff that lingers on one note for the longest time. The three together make for a very ominous intro, made all the more so when the bass guitar finally slides down to a different key. Something big is about to go down. And it does, with the whole band entering and Roger Waters delivering a forceful vocal that seamlessly transitions into wild, freaky, spaced out note on the synthesizers. It’s a production trick that blew my mind when that happened the first time. Some genius stuff.

Once the band come in all together for that first verse, the whole track’s a juggernaut from that point forward. Roger Waters howling away on the vocals, while also taking on a rhythm guitar role (buried in the mix), with David Gilmour thrashing out these wild guitar chords. Nick Mason throws out these emphatic fills on the drumkit and Richard Wright fills the sound out with blaring Hammond organ chords. This is a band that’s locked in. It’s difficult for me to not just go through the song minute-by-minute and explain what happens here and there, that’s how quite strongly I feel about this track. This post may be one of my longest in a while. Sometimes you just have to leave it for someone to hear for themselves. But what I will say though, is that the outro to this song is quite possibly one of the greatest of all time. Like one comment on YouTube says, it’s the climax of the entire album. The way the whole track seems to rise in decibels when the cymbals crash and Gilmour’s monstrous descending guitar riff brings everything to a rapturous close as it eventually fades out. If there were musical definition for the words ‘glory’ or ‘freedom’, the two minutes of this song’s outro would be a fine contender.

#1198: Supergrass – She’s So Loose

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Looking back on the previous two songs I’ve written about from I Should Coco, I make a note on how I got the album for a birthday and how initially I thought it was stellar on the first listen, but as time’s gone on there are a few moments are there which are a bit of its time. In a way, I’ve done the same again here. But I guess that means I’ve just run out of different things to say about the album. I think it’s many people’s favourite by Supergrass, released in the midst of Britpop and giving us the summer jam of ‘Alright’. I wouldn’t say it’s mine, but that’s not to say ’cause it’s bad. You won’t go wrong with any Supergrass record you choose to listen to. Usually I think they were the best Britpop band all this time.

‘She’s So Loose’ is the ninth song on Coco. Very, very sure I liked this one on that first run-through on the album however many years ago. The track consists of mainly choruses, three in total, respectively preceded by two short verses and the final instrumental break. Those choruses appear to describe a sexual encounter between two people, in ways that you don’t really have to thoroughly examine to understand, but also not in a way that’s graphic or distasteful. More like a, “this happened, then this, overall, a good time was had” kind of way. Very matter-of-fact. And the activity is celebrated via the rousing melody the track’s title is sung with as the chorus’s last line.

I’ve always thought of this as an example of a perfect three-minute pop number, you know. There’s nothing too complicated to get your head around, though the guitar chord choices in here aren’t the usual G-D-E (or whatever) types of progressions. The changes throughout add a little mystique to the whole affair. And I’m very much a fan of Gaz Coombes’s vocals on there too. Delivered with a youthful exuberance that you can only when you’re in your teens and feeling good making an album. And that little reverb production trick that lingers after the “awaaaaay” in the verses is a minor thing that I appreciate. All in all, the song’s a short introduction, a little verse, a bigger chorus, repeat, and throw a breakdown in there for good measure. Easy to singalong to and very memorable as a result. I don’t have much else to say about it, to be honest. I’ve never found much reason to dislike it.

#1197: Mac DeMarco – She’s Really All I Need

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Rock and Roll Night Club. That’s a bit of a strange one to me. I’m a big Mac DeMarco fan, and I may have said that quite a few times in the previous posts I’ve written before. But I think I’ve only listened to that particular (mini)-album just the one time. It was DeMarco’s very first release, before 2 even came out, but it was the last one I got round to listening to. I remember the recording quality sounding pretty murky, while DeMarco’s vocals sounded much, much lower than usual. A much different vibe from the usual Mac stuff I was used to. But the one song on there that stood out by not being so different is the one I continue to listen to to this day.

‘She’s Really All I Need’ appeared in my Discover Weekly playlist on Spotify one day at work back in 2018, and initially I was confused. That slinky Mac guitar tone was all there, and the standard calming vocal delivery was present. It was obviously a Mac DeMarco song, but why hadn’t I heard it before? Was this a new song? Then I saw it was from Rock and Roll Night Club, and that answered the question. But because I liked the tune so much from the jump, think I downloaded it to my laptop when I got home, it gave me the motivation to actually go ahead and listen to the whole album. From the first paragraph, you may have sussed that it’s not one of my favourite DeMarco records. But ‘…All I Need’ is definitely one of my favourite songs of his. And so I write to you in the hope that you might enjoy it too.

The track is one of the many, many love/relationship songs that DeMarco has in his catalogue. May even be safe to assume that it’s another written about his longtime girlfriend. Though if you want to get into more depth, it sees DeMarco write about his anxieties. He’s waking up in the middle of the night with shivers. He’s bummed out by these people waving their degrees in front of his face, reminding him of his own inadequacies. But in the end, none of that really matters because he’s got his lady to calm him down and get him on the right track. All very endearing stuff, with a bunch of relatable, humorous lines and a general laid-backness to the proceedings. Also notable in that there’s an actual bridge in the track that DeMarco solos over, which I don’t think he’s done ever since.