When I wrote about Dananananaykroyd’s ‘Black Wax’ in the bright days of 2013, I mention that I had seen another song by the band via its music video on MTV2 before going onto YouTube and finding ‘Black Wax’ as a result. ‘Some Dresses’ was that ‘another’ song. It was the first ‘Kroyd track I’d ever heard. I want to say I’d read the band’s name on an advert for MTV2 before and probably made fun of it when reciting it to myself a few times. But through the ‘Some Dresses’ video, I now had an image and a song that I could now associate with the name. The clip, showing the band messing about in the woods with some quirky blue screen effects thrown in there, made an impression. An endearing one. It wasn’t too long after that I went ahead and downloaded the band’s debut Hey Everyone! It would be the first of only two albums the group would release.

I only found out relatively recently that a quarter of the tracks from the album contain lyrics that were written by former singer Giles Bailey, who left the band prior its release. ‘Some Dresses’ is one of those Bailey-written numbers. Calum Gunn and John Bailie Jnr joined after Bailey’s departure and contributed their words for seven other songs, with Gunn being the main singer on the majority. The writing styles between the two factions are quite similar though, at least I think. Unless you had a physical copy that told you otherwise, it wouldn’t be harmful to assume that the person singing on the album was the one who wrote the lyrics. It’s not the case. The band did record ‘Some Dresses’ when Bailey was in the band and released it as a single in 2006. I’ll go ahead and embed that not-as-well-known version down below.

The song’s lyrics are told from the perspective of someone waiting for a dress to be fitted on them. There’s nothing much to work out if you read the words. They just tell a head-to-toe look of the different parts of the fabric and the work that’s being done by the tailors and fitters to make sure everything’s good and comfortable. Quite the mundane subject, but certainly unique, made all the more better by the riffs of guitarists David Roy and Duncan Robertson and vocal delivery by Gunn. There’s no reason why a song about putting a dress on should be this punchy and exhilarating. But it just is. The track is comprised of two parts, separated by a breakdown where the band sound like they’ve lost control of all their limbs. The first being more concerned with the dress, while the second takes the making of the dress and turns it into a metaphor of writing a song? At least that’s how I’ve come to think of it. Like this one quite a bit.