Monthly Archives: January 2025

#1227: They Might Be Giants – Snowball in Hell

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They Might Be Giants’ ‘Snowball in Hell’ from Lincoln is a number that I remember liking almost immediately after listening through that album for the first time sometime in 2010. I had actually heard the track years before when I was an actual kid who had just got broadband in the house and was checking out this Internet radio station on a place called LAUNCH, owned by Yahoo!. Before YouTube existed, if you wanted to listen to music and watch music videos, that site was the place to go. It’s thanks to that site that I have any idea who They Might Be Giants are. ‘Snowball in Hell’ played on a station one day. Being the, I think, 8-year old I was, I promptly forgot about it. Short attention span.

But hearing it again all those years later, in context with the album and fully paying attention, it felt like a song I properly knew and had been listening to for years up to that point. There was a warmth and familiar feeling to it proceedings, it felt like a given that it would be one of my favourite songs on the album. The track revolves around this two-note doorbell “ding-dong” melody, over which John Flansburgh sings about being in a less than ideal situation spurred on financial troubles. He sings with much sincerity, backed by harmonies from John Linnell, incorporating wordplay and lyrical twists that result in a few of the band’s most memorable and devastating lyrics. “Money’s all broke and food’s going hungry”. That’s a good one. “If it wasn’t for disappointment, I wouldn’t have any appointments”. That’s a great one.

The song is also notable for the breakdown, over which dialogue taken from a how-to-organize-yourself cassette plays. Given to him by album producer Bill Krauss for his 25th birthday, Flansburgh went on to find that the tape didn’t contain much in the way of advice. But he, Krauss and Linnell all found it interesting enough to let it have its own little snippet in ‘Snowball’. Permission wasn’t asked to use it. No one’s threatened to sue. And its inclusion goes down as one of many memorable moments in TMBG’s discography. Back in June, a cassette of rough mixes from the Lincoln sessions was found in the archives of a university in Canada, and a work-in-progress ‘Snowball in Hell’ was found on it. As you can tell, the mix is a bit different. The acoustic guitar is given more prominence, a different model drum machine is present and more snippets from the self-help cassette are used. It’s the same song in essence, but sometimes I prefer this rough mix to what ended up on the album. It’s certainly a different approach. All the more happy to know it exists.

#1226: Test Icicles – Snowball

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This song here’s the third and final one songwriter Rory Atwell conjured up to be included on For Screening Purposes Only, the only album made by dance-punk trio Test Icicles. As time goes on, there’s more chance of their name being forgotten. But it’s posts like mine that I hope will be found years from now for people to check them out. Short story from my POV, I didn’t think much of them when they around and I was younger. Then a few years passed, I rediscovered the album and found it was actually pretty good. ‘Snowball’ marks the start of a run in the LP that I consider to be solid, solid tunes.

I look at Spotify and, even though it’s not representative of all music listeners worldwide, I can’t look past that ‘Snowball’ is one of the least played songs on the album – only getting more plays than the interlude, closer ‘Party on Dudes’ and ‘What’s Michelle Like?’, which on original copies of the CD was a hidden track. I guess the song does take a while to get started. Atwell adopts an exaggerated vocal at points to sing his lyrics. Kinda like a bird squawking. It’s a thing he does in all his penned songs, but I’ve come to think of it as him portraying some sort of persona. And speaking of the lyrics, they’re not so much about anything but they conjure some good imagery. But it’s all of those reasons, plus the riffs and general energy that have always attracted me towards it.

I think it’s only taken me until writing this post to get to grips with the timing of the drum pattern and guitar that makes up the song’s introduction. The way those drums are played have never correlated with my sense of timing for the longest time. It does literally start on the first beat of the bar though, so as long as you count starting with ‘1’, then you’re good to go. The whole “band” drop in after a bit – band in quotes because the rhythm section is a processed one – and it’s then Atwell goes on to sing about a string of various situations and scenes, from a dog looking for a bone and a son of the East who can’t kill the Witch to the eventual snowball the song’s named after and a hurdy-gurdy that Atwell implores band member Sam Mehran to play before then telling him to turn it off in the choruses. It’s a strange song. I like it a lot.

#1225: They Might Be Giants – Snail Shell

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They Might Be Giants’ 1994 album John Henry was the first of the group’s to be performed by a full, rock ‘n’ rolling band, as opposed to the synthesized rhythm section and guitar and accordion performed and arranged by Johns Linnell and Flansburgh on the records that came before. I frequent the band’s subreddit from time to time. A common opinion among users on there is that John Henry is a definite favourite. I think it’s swell. In my mind, you can’t go wrong with any TMBG album, really. ‘Snail Shell’ is the second song on there and also had the great privilege of being its first single, the representative chosen to introduce the band’s new formation and sound.

Fans of They know that the two Johns aren’t your usual songwriters who explore the standard themes in their lyrics, and ‘Snail Shell’ is no exception. As I’ve come to see it, the song is told from the perspective of a narrator who becomes extremely grateful after being helped out of an uncomfortable situation by another person. They want to make it known to this saviour that their act of selflessness is appreciated, and they have a bit of an internal crisis in the process. If I were to describe a real-life situation, think if you did something as simple as open a door for someone and they then continued to thank you and ask if they could do something for you in return when all you want to do is walk on and get to where you need to be. This is the song written by that strangely grateful person.

According to the band’s drummer at the time, there was a lot of hope that the song would match the success of ‘Birdhouse in Your Soul’. That tune’s known to be one of the band’s signature numbers. ‘Snail Shell’ not so much. Though I’m a fan of it myself, Linnell’s vocal has this sort of phasing effect that I dig, Flansburgh’s guitar has a scratchy tone to it which makes the sound all the more better when he pulls of those crazy fills and runs, I do have to admit there’s a bit of an creepy feel to it. Think it’s the minor key that’s the catalyst behind it. The music video reinforces it. It doesn’t give much of a ‘first single’ vibe like I’d say ‘Destination Moon’ does for example, or ‘No One Knows My Plan’. Flansburgh had ‘Sleeping in the Flowers’. Probably more suitable choices. The track maybe didn’t bring the commercial success they wanted, but I’ll always be singing along to it. And that’s what this whole thing is all about.

#1224: Paul & Linda McCartney – Smile Away

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Well, I’ve got no qualm in saying that I think Ram is my favourite out of all the Paul McCartney solo albums he’s ever done. Quite funny too because it’s technically not even a solo album, being credited to him and wife-at-the-time Linda and everything. The LP was burned at the stake back when it was released, mainly by critics who hadn’t got over the Beatles breakup and blamed McCartney for it. As the years rolled on, more and more people recognized its quality. I’ve come to think of it as a response to anyone who may have thought his first album was underbaked and lacking of substance. People wanted a bigger-sounding record, so this is what they got, with fuller band arrangements and wilder vocal performances.

‘Smile Away’ is a number on Ram, one which I don’t think people take much notice of. I would guess that’s because of the somewhat inconsequential subject matter. McCartney reminisces about a time when he was walking down the street and a friend of his came up to him and said ‘I could smell your breath/feet/teeth a mile away’. The song’s title is sung in response. And that’s pretty much the whole song. Now, you could take it at face value. But I read an interpretation that said it was about the times when McCartney would just be out in public and people would make fun of him or take slights at him ’cause of the whole Beatles breakup thing and, being the clean-cut, PR man he is, McCartney would just grin and bear it instead of taking things to a physical level. I don’t know if that’s true. But I’ve always thought about the song in a different way since.

Though the song seems silly, the McCartneys and the backing musicians ham things up to make the track one of the most enjoyable to listen to from the album. Paul McCartney puts on his American soul voice, hollering and whooping and laying things on thick throughout right up to the song’s ending where he’s straight up hooting like a monkey. Linda McCartney’s supporting vocals change from “Don’t know how to do that” to “Learning how to do that”, which I think is pretty cool. I initially thought she was just singing wordless phrases. The fuzz on the bass guitar is immense, cutting through the mix and coming in with a vengeance particularly around two minutes and 50 seconds in. The whole affair’s delivered to be this big one-night-only showtime kind of song, which is hilarious considering what the McCartneys are singing about, but it works somehow.

#1223: Kings of Leon – Slow Night, So Long

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It was during the Aha Shake Heartbreak era of Kings of Leon that I properly go into the band, due mainly to the three singles that popped up around those youthful times of 2004/05. But I didn’t get my hands on a physical copy of it until 2008, when I got it as a gift for Christmas. I don’t know what it was about that year that made me request it. By that time, Only by the Night was the band’s latest album which hoisted the group into household names thanks to ‘Sex on Fire’ and ‘Use Somebody’ which were now worldwide hits. I’m going to guess that, even at the age of 13 that I was that year, I was one of those people who thought, “Man… Kings of Leon have changed,” and wanted one of their old albums to remind me of the good times. But that is just a guess, I feel like I might be making that up completely.

‘Slow Night, So Long’ opens the album up, and I’ll straight up say it doesn’t really hold a lot of sentimental value. It was one of those songs where I heard it that first time and knew that it was a keeper, and so it’s been in the library ever since. Unlike the opener on the album before, which got things started quite swiftly, ‘Slow Night…’ builds itself up layer by layer, letting the anticipation set in before the whole band eventually kick into gear. Gotta appreciate that bass guitar hook by Jared Followill in that introduction, it’s the melody of that which Caleb Followill almost mirrors with his vocals and the riff that I think really ties the whole song together. I didn’t know this before typing out, so it’s a surprise to me as much as it might be for you, but the song concerns Caleb Followill’s feelings about a girl younger brother Jared was seeing at the time. He kind of liked her, the feelings weren’t reciprocated. It was a weird thing going on there. And Followill at the end of the song asks where the ‘leading ladies’ can be found, in the search for an emotionally stable relationship. KOL songs in those days were usually about women in some way, but would never have guessed any of that myself.

But as the people who enjoy this song will know, this track has a little surprise for you. The band come to a big finish, but there’s still about a minute and a bit remaining until time runs out. And after a bit of suspense, with Nathan Followill’s last chord still sort of ringing nearing silence, Caleb Followill’s guitar comes in on the right-hand side introducing a completely unrelated chord progression and segueing into the smooth coda to which you wanna grab your partner and slow dance to. Even got a little güiro going on low in the mix there. During this part, Caleb asks the “gold digger mothers” out there if “they’re too good to tango with the poor boys”, which I think could mean anything whilst also being very obvious. And with a nice touch of piano, the whole song comes to its actual close. But not really because ‘King of the Rodeo’ picks up right where the next bar would begin. No time to rest before kicking things up again.