Monthly Archives: March 2025

#1251: Enter Shikari – Sorry, You’re Not a Winner

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Back in the mid-2000s, MTV2 had this show called “Text, Drugs and Rock ‘n’ Roll” where viewers could request what they wanted to see on the channel via their phones and have some banter with the MTV employee/moderator person who went by the name of ‘Moo’, it might have just been ‘Cow’ actually, and had an avatar of the animal next to their messages, all of which appeared on the TV screen. The video for ‘Sorry, You’re Not a Winner’ was showing up on the channel for what felt like every day when it was really popping off, but the chyron that displayed the song name and who it was by was never appearing. Cow admitted one day that the people of MTV2 offices didn’t know what the song was called. So 11-year-old me, with my little cheap mobile, texted in, “It’s called Sorry You’re Not a Winner”. I can’t remember how I even knew that. Must have shown on Kerrang! or something, where they knew the business. Cow said thanks, and I swear from that moment on whenever the video was up, “ENTER SHIKARI – SORRY YOU’RE NOT A WINNER” was popping up on the screen, exactly like in the embedded video above. So you’re welcome, former employees of MTV2.

‘Sorry…’ was the first Enter Shikari track I heard, and I think from the backstory provided in the previous paragraph you can gather that it was because of the music video. The band play in a small, small room amongst a crowd of rabid fans. The energy bounces off band to crowd, the energy’s reciprocated and mayhem breaks loose. It’s quite the classic. The more times the video showed, the more I got into the song. A bit of a Stockholm syndrome thing going on, I guess. But I actually did come to really appreciate it for the great track it was and is. And as 2006 turned into 2007 and more Enter Shikari singles kept on appearing on the TV, it was like “Well, I like all of these.” So I was glad to get that copy of Take to the Skies whenever I did. Probably a birthday or something.

In the almost 20 years I’ve been listening to this song, I’ve never even stopped to think what it could be about. Is that so bad? Guess to some it would be. Just from reading online, some interpretations say it’s a track about gambling addiction. That could very well be the case. But while people are thinking about what the lyrics mean, I’ll be out here headbanging to the riffs and air-drumming. A lot of great moments happen in the track that always scratch the auditory itch. Like the three claps that come in before the verses. The sudden changes between the screams and singing that Rou Reynolds pulls off throughout. The harmonies by bass guitarist Chris Batten, and the back-and-forths between the two vocalists. There’s a reason why it is Enter Shikari’s signature tune. And unlike a lot of similar songs from that era, it’s aged incredibly well.

#1250: Ween – Sorry Charlie

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When you take on the task of listening to Ween’s The Pod, you’ll come across the first demented moment out of many on the album via its third track ‘Frank’. On it, with a sassy vocal, Gene Ween asks the titular character to supply him with a pork roll egg and cheese with some gravy fries on a couple of occasions. The sludgy guitar riff that closes it out gets louder and louder, becoming more distorted and incomprehensible before it completely cutting off abruptly and giving way to fourth track ‘Sorry Charlie’ – a much more subdued and quieter track in comparison. You might not even realize another track begins because of how low the audio levels are.

This Ween song right here is sung by Dean Ween. It’s always nice to hear a Dean Ween vocal. Gene Ween masters the ones he does with his versatility and range, that when Deaner takes over for once it’s nice to appreciate the kind of everyman, guy-at-the-bar vibe he brings to the table. A lot of Ween songs are based on real experiences lived out by the two, so I’ve always assumed ‘Sorry Charlie’ was the same. The track is Deaner’s observations of a guy named Charlie, someone he probably once knew in the past who shows up unexpectedly at his workplace one day. Deaner sings of the disappointment he feels for Charlie, who apparently has amounted to nothing since the last time he saw him. Charlie’s a man who left college but has a girlfriend in high school and sells pot to make ends meet. Dean wishes he could help him with whatever he needs, but regrettably has to decline ’cause he’s got his own shit to sort out. A very relatable situation.

A lot of the charm in The Pod comes in how its essentially an album of demos that were originally going to be properly recorded before the producer told the duo that what they had was sufficient. People might mistake it as a sign of not taking their craft seriously or trying to be funny just for the hell of it. I know I can’t help but laugh when I hear those programmed crash cymbals during ‘Sorry Charlie’, just because of how fake they sound in the context, or when Dean Ween yells out that faux-rockstar “Ow!” before busting out the plinky guitar solo. But one thing’s for sure, Gene and Dean Ween were always serious when it came to their compositions. They just weren’t all melodramatic about it. A lot of their songs are formed from an enormous fountain of sincerity. ‘Sorry Charlie’ fits neatly into that group. So take the time and dig the lo-fi production. And if you’re not into it, try out a live performance like the one below. Maybe that’ll reveal something.

#1249: John Linnell – The Songs of the 50 States

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Well, I guess there’ll be thousands of people out there who will have no idea what Grooveshark was. Grooveshark was a website existing for a while where people could just straight up upload music online for anyone to listen to. It was Soundcloud and Spotify all kind of mixed into one. Then I guess record labels caught onto it and realized it was kind of an illegal/copyrighting issue going on, so it got abruptly taken down after a few years. Looks like it’s back up again under a new address, but I don’t think it’s really the same. But I say all this to say that it was on Grooveshark that I got to listen to John Linnell’s State Songs album back around 2012, and its second song, ‘The Songs of the 50 States’ was one out of the few I got into immediately.

The late, late ’90s was a time when They Might Be Giants heads John Flansburgh and John Linnell went on their little separate ways to do their own projects. Flansburgh did his thing with Mono Puff. Linnell made the State Songs album, bringing to fruition a concept he initially started working on some years prior. Fifteen of the 16 songs on the album are named after US states, and ‘The Songs of the 50 States’ acts as the record’s theme song. Linnell tells us to get ready for the songs that are coming up, and that even he can’t help but get the good shakes when thinking about the tracks he has lined up. Funnily enough, he sings about the songs of the 50 states, but only wrote numbers for 15 of them. Actually, 16 including the B-side, ‘Louisiana’. TMBG fans hold onto hope that one day a State Songs II will just appear one day. Or at least be announced.

After the album’s introduction of ‘Illinois’, an instrumental played out by a carousel organ, ‘…50 States’ brings things into more familiar sonic territory by being more of a band-centric performance. TMBG fans will know what I mean when I refer to ‘the Band of Dans’. Dan Miller (guitar), Danny Weinkauf (bass guitar), and Dan Hickey (drums) for those who don’t. They’re the backing musicians present on the track, and a bunch of guys Linnell was familiar with anyway having been playing with the two Johns for a couple years up to that point. It’s a great performance by all involved. An upbeat, optimistic tune that builds that anticipation for the songs that follow.

#1248: Queens of the Stone Age – A Song for the Deaf

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So, I didn’t realise this until getting ready to type this out, but depending on whatever copy of Songs for the Deaf you have, this song’s either listed as ‘Song for the Deaf’ or ‘A Song for the Deaf’ on the tracklist. Same going for the ‘Dead’ song too. Just think that’s mildly interesting. All this time, I’ve been used to listing both with ‘A’ at the beginning in the various music libraries and stuff, and so I thought Spotify were just being lazy. They’re both correct. But being set in my ways, I’m not changing the title for anything, so the ‘A’ is staying. The big climactic finish to Songs for the Deaf, the almost title-track takes the listener through the final leg of the trip through the California desert, which the whole radio concept of the record is built around. It’s not necessarily a happy end. Things take a very dark and gloomy turn here. Does the driver even make it to the end of the journey? I think it’s up in the air.

The song’s a twisted waltz, its tempo set out by the menacing bass riff that’s then continued on by Josh Homme’s guitars. Written by both Homme and Mark Lanegan, the song’s a showcase of the contrast between two’s vocal styles – the smoother tones of the former mixed with the deeper, gravelly sounds of the latter – and I think it’s very suitable that the last big vocal contributions we hear from Nick Oliveri before he was fired from the band are the manic and hysterical screams that pan from side to side in the bridge before the final chorus. It may have the least plays out of all the songs on the album, at least on Spotify – and by quite a large margin too, I don’t understand – but I think the track exhibits one of the best performances by the band on the entire LP. There’s a reason why people think of the Homme – Oliveri – Lanegan – Grohl line-up of Queens as the golden era of the group, and this song is just of one many of them.

First time I heard Songs for the Deaf in full, I was in primary school and a friend of my sister’s loaned the album to her. The tracks were playing out of the loudspeaker in the living room. It wasn’t very active listening on my part, but I think I was about 10 so cut me some slack. But the very vivid memory I have of the experience was hearing the guitars at the end of ‘A Song of the Deaf’ all kind of feeding back in that wall of noise before it sounds like their souls are taken from them with a ghostly echo. Me and my sister looked at each other, both sort of stunned, and all she said was “Whoa.” We hadn’t heard anything like it before. Since then I’ve always thought of this track as the one with the spooky ending.

#1247: Bloc Party – Song for Clay (Disappear Here)

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Been a long while since I listened through Bloc Party’s A Weekend in the City in full. I’ve got a physical copy of it sitting on the shelf upstairs in my room, the special edition that included ‘Flux’ after that song was released as a single way after the album’s original copies that excluded it. And back in those days, that’s really all I got albums for. Just so I could have easy access to the singles. ‘Song for Clay (Disappear Here)’ wasn’t released as one of those. After knowing all these years, I’ve thought it had the potential to be one. Instead it has the important role of being the album opener, introducing the themes that are to be explored throughout the rest of the record.

Kele Okereke’s voice is the very first thing you hear when that CD/record starts spinning, and I think it’s meant to be a bit of a symbolic choice. Weekend marked a change in Okereke’s vocal style where he wasn’t melodically yelping like he did on Silent Alarm, but properly singing from the diaphragm and stuff. It sort of began with ‘Two More Years’. But it’s on full show throughout the album. Maybe he got some vocal lessons in between the two album cycles. And even though he goes a little sharp on the second “I am tryiiiiing” and the falsetto he introduces is a little shaky, the delivery gets much more confident and in the bag when the rest of the band eventually enter the frame.

Bloc Party had a new, heavier sound to them, aided by the production of Jacknife Lee who makes the guitars of Okereke and Russell Lissack sound like industrial machines, which is a perfect match for the ominous “times of today” lyrical content. The narrator of the song is a person living in the East London of 2007, getting their fair share of action on the weekend, and not really enjoying anything of what they see and experience before them. Talk of ordering foie gras and eating it with complete disdain. Trying to look cool on a dancefloor by showing no emotion whatsoever. These are things that get the narrator down. And the drama of the lyrics are heightened by sinister backing vocals from Gordon Moakes and the overarching minor key-ness of the music. The song comes to a close, a loud ringing leads into the next song and the album continues. I’ll go back to A Weekend… one of these days. It’s easy to fall into the “Silent Alarm was the best and everything else was never as good” crowd. And the statement may even be true. But I at least need to check again.