Monthly Archives: June 2025

#1292: Portishead – Strangers

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The very first Portishead song to appear at any point during this long, long process. I know, I know. You might be surprised. Or maybe not, I don’t want to assume. I’d had Dummy in my iTunes library since, I think, at least 2014. That year was one where music journalism websites were publishing articles about “albums turning 20”. Dummy, being released in 1994, came under that category. And just by reading around I knew it was meant to be a good one. So I downloaded it. But it sort of just laid to rest in my old laptop’s drive. It wasn’t until 2018 when I was doing my own listen through artist’s discographies on Spotify “challenge” at work that I properly revisited the album and came to truly appreciate it and get an overall sense of why the trip-hop pioneers were so well-respected. Simply put, the music is very, very good. And they’ve only had to make three albums to show this.

Dummy is the trio’s debut album. Where it all began. Critics at the time bowed down to it, the style of music presented had never been exhibited so exquisitely before. I must admit, it has been a while since I’ve listened through it. But writing this makes me want to. I have my favourite numbers on there. ‘Strangers’, the album’s third song, is one of ’em. My enjoyment for it immediately begins with the thumping groove and vibrating bass line. With some good speakers, the walls will start shaking. For the opening verse, the song switches to a floatier atmosphere – a slick guitar delivers these jazzy chords as Beth Gibbons, sounding like a ghostly presence, asks whether we can see the light where the morn meets the dew and if they can, whether they realize that no one else can experience it the same way as you do. After three trailing beeps, the banging groove kicks in again and Gibbons fully takes control. I’m deeply into this rhythm, and the few pauses and moments of rest that occur in the track make it all the more emphatic when the bass line kicks into gear straight after them.

I’ve sort of said all I needed to, I think. I’ve already stated what’s literally sung in the song, at least in the opening and closing verses, which I believe provide the overlying meaning of the whole track. That being we all may be able to see a beautiful sight, one like no other, one like we’ve never seen before, but each of us have a distinct experience of that view. Someone might appreciate it. Another might not. Whatever your own experience of it is, it’s yours and yours alone. Of course, it might not even be that literal either. That’s just what I get from it. I’m a fan of the rhythm and production, as I’ve said, but I thoroughly enjoy Beth Gibbon’s vocal too, honest and vulnerable with a lot of feeling. There’s a jazzy feel I get when she sings “Done it warning, done it now, and it ain’t real” hook. The melody sounds like a trumpet passage in some old recording. That’s a little aside on my part. Overall, probably one of the coolest tracks I have the pleasure of knowing.

#1291: The Kinks – Strangers

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And it looks like this will be the last track you’ll be seeing from this album too. A shame, really, ’cause I quite like The Kinks’ Lola Versus Powerman and the Moneygoround, Part One. My personal second favourite by the group. If things had been different, you would have at least seen a post for ‘Apeman’ and ‘Denmark Street’ on here. My old laptop contains the original date that I downloaded the record, but the monitor doesn’t turn on and I have to plug an HDMI cable from it to the TV in order to see what I’m doing. I have a good feeling it was sometime in 2015, ’cause I have a good memory of listening to ‘Powerman’ while walking to the place I was working at the time. I’ll get back to you on this matter. It doesn’t seem right to leave things vague like this.*

Among the songs discussing an infatuation to a cross-dresser, moving to the jungle to get out of the smoggy city centre, and generally being screwed over in the music business – all of which are written by main songwriter Ray Davies – are two other numbers written and sung by his little brother and lead guitarist, Dave. ‘Rats’ is a raucous number, I think about a general distrust in people. But it’s ‘Strangers’, the second song on Lola…, that we’re all here for. After the punchy, optimistic opener of ‘The Contenders’, ‘Strangers’ slows things down a peg or two. Adding layers of elements to the proceedings as time goes on – Davies plays acoustic alongside John Gosling’s piano initially which are then followed by drums on the second verse, and bass guitar and organ on the third – the song gains a hymn-like quality towards its end. Very appropriate with the whole unity theme that the song is going for.

It’s no secret that Ray and Dave Davies don’t get along all that well. And it’s been an long-standing, ongoing interpretation that ‘Strangers’ was about the relationship between the two. They might not get along, but at the end of the day, they are brothers. ‘Strangers’ was the sign that Dave at least cared. But really, the songs’s about a close friend of Dave’s who died of an overdose, and something of a list of the things Dave wished he could have done with them, had they not passed away so suddenly. It might not be the interpretation people want, but the sentiment is still oh-so sincere. Davies’s vocal performance here is a powerful one. When he blurts out a line like “All the things I own, I will share with you,” the way he does, just tugs at your heart strings a little. The organ and bass guitar introduced for the final verse add an emphatic sense of warmth to the production. And I like how the recording levels are raised for the pounding tom-tom pattern that closes the track out. It’s beautiful stuff. Seems right it’s the last Lola… song I cover on here.

*The folder containing the album says it was created on 8th July 2015, 15:55. So, there you go.

#1290: Madvillain – Strange Ways

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When writing about the previous Madvillain song beginning with the letter ‘S’ sometime last year, I made a point that I couldn’t quite recall how I felt when hearing it the first time among the other tracks when I was going through Madvillainy in 2013. Also for the first time. But I can’t say the same for ‘Strange Ways’. Out of the 22 tracks that make up that album, ‘Strange Ways’ was the one that my brain matter latched on to. Not so much due to MF DOOM’s signature internal rhyming scheme usage, but because of the sampled loop incorporated by Madlib. It’s common knowledge that the instrumental is taken from the song ‘Funny Ways’ by progressive rock band Gentle Giant. I didn’t know that back then. But the way those strings were rising and that “myy waays are strange” vocal kept on repeating over and over, alongside those added percussive thumps by Madlib, all came together… the song had the melodic hook, it had the beat. It was already a win.

The production was all well and good. It still is. And through repeated listens, I came to focus on DOOM’s words gradually. Now I could go to Genius, paraphrase whatever’s said there. I tend to not trust that place just ’cause it’s fan-run like any other place, except for those times when artists actually go on there and explain/give context on their lyrics. From what I can tell, ‘Strange Ways’ is a moment of social commentary on Madvillainy, firstly addressing the parallels in life between a drug dealer and a police officer in the opening verse and then providing an overall pitch on war and the pointlessness of it all. Unfair in how we’re chosen to fight while the rich people in the offices sit back and watch what happens. And anyone reading this may comment how there’s much, much more to the track than just that. And that might be the case. But you can go to Genius for that. Me, I’m just into how DOOM delivers his words over Madlib’s beat. And some classic lines in here too. “When the smoke clear, you can see the sky again/There will be the chopped off heads of Leviathan”, is a personal favourite.

The last 30 seconds of the track, as it is on the album anyway, are filled by an interlude taken from a ’50s animated short film in which a man finds out that a lady he’s into is seeing someone else. It leads perfectly into the following song on the album, and isn’t related to the lyrical ‘Strange Ways’ in any way. It’s good for the album flow, though, is the only reason I can think of it being tacked on for. That’s all I’ve got, gotta say. And with that, we’ve reached the end of the Madvillainy representatives in this series. No more DOOM either. A little more Madlib to come, however. I made a vow in about 2021 to stop adding songs onto my iTunes library so there could actually be an end to this thing. But I’ve got my Spotify ‘Liked Songs’ collections. There’s more DOOM on there. More DOOM that, had it been another time, I would have dedicated some time to. But I hope the writing I’ve done regarding his tracks are worth the read. The guy was too great at what he did, such a shame he’s no longer with us.

#1289: Pavement – Stop Breathin’

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After this track here, there’ll be only one more left to write about from Pavement’s Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain, the band’s second album, released in 1994. Feels like I’ve been covering a lot of Stephen Malkmus-associated material in this section of this series lately, but I can’t complain. I’m a big, big admirer of the guy’s work. Regarding the tracks from Crooked Rain…, the first I shared my thoughts on was the “hit” single ‘Cut Your Hair’ in 2014. And a few other nunbers have popped up on here along the way. Just have to click on that ‘crooked rain crooked rain’ tag below to see them. Now we’re at the album’s third track, ‘Stop Breathin’. The chorus in this one got to me on that first listen, so much so that I remember singing it loudly on my out of my student flat and to a seminar in my first year of university. The whole track was an instant thumbs-up.

Following the one-two punch of ‘Silence Kit/d’ and ‘Elevate Me Later’, whose combination set an immediately catchy tone to the record’s opening moments, ‘Stop Breathin’ then arrives as the sobering, meditative, contemplative number to slow things down a peg. Set to a 6/8 waltz time with wonky-sounding arpeggiated chords created by an unusual guitar tuning, Malkmus depicts the scene of a tennis match and blends it with warlike imagery. At least that’s how it goes in the first verse. The second I’ve never been able to pin down quite as well. Overall, I’ve come to think the song is told from the point-of-view of this tennis player who’s really going through it on the court and wishes that the crowd stop breathing, as if that’ll help them perform any better. The narrator loses, left a broken mess, conceding to his father that the pressure was too much. Though I could also be completely wrong. That’s a sort of the surface level way to look at it. But it’s my way of understanding. It’s definitely a very alluring characteristic of the song, the fact that what it’s about isn’t so cut and dried.

The other notable detail is how the lyrical part of the track actually finishes two minutes into the duration, after which the song turns into an instrumental jam – directly influenced by ‘Sing Swan Song’ by seminal German experimental rock band Can. There’s an interview out there I swear I’ve read where Malkmus says this straight up, but I can’t find it after trying so hard to(o). I remember being determined to memorise the chord changes that occur during this breakdown, exactly when and where they happened. I think I watched a few live performances to get it down, and it felt great once I did. Was like an accomplishment. I think this jam is pretty much performed by Malkmus, bass guitarist Mark Ibold and Steve West on the drums. Genius gives a nice little description of what goes down in it. I do find it funny that it does sounds like Malkmus just sort of stops playing the guitar when the drums come in again in that final finish, disregarding any sense of timing, leaving Ibold to properly ramp things off with the bass.

#1288: They Might Be Giants – Stone Cold Coup d’État

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On 26th February 2013, I wrote a blog about They Might Be Giants’ song ‘Absolutely Bill’s Mood’. A busy little number, that one. That post was the third one I ever wrote on here. Coincidentally, that was the day that the band’s album Nanobots was made available to stream in its entirety on Rolling Stone, a week before its official release on 5th March (or 4th if you were in the UK like me). You can see me going crazy about it all on that same post. As the big TMBG fan I was at 17, I was excited for sure. As the big 30-year-old TMBG fan I am now, Nanobots is one of the group’s that I don’t return to all that much. It’s not bad. It’s not boring. I’ve always thought the majority of it was okay, with a few jewels shining in the tracklist. And ‘Stone Cold Coup d’État’ was one of those jewels that I think I liked immediately when I heard it on that available stream all those years ago.

A coup d’état is ‘an unexpected or sudden measure of state often involving force or threat of force’, as defined by Merriam-Webster. It’s a term usually associated with the overthrowing of a government by some organization. Though a government isn’t described or depicted in the lyrics of ‘Stone Cold…’, there’s definitely a lot of overthrowing going on. In the track, John Linnell sings of instances where the natural order is flipped, and what we would consider to be the servants in the hierarchy are now in charge. The stars have banded together to take out the sun and the moon. The worker bees have jumped the queen and taken over. An orchestra conductor is killed off, and a single viola takes their place. All greatly exaggerated scenes. Things get real though, when Linnell implies that a son and daughter murder their parents during a pleasant family dinner. Nevertheless, all of these actions are celebrated with a harmonised “Oh, yeah!” Linnell remarks they have “a certain je ne sais quoi”. He asks what the certain je ne sais quoi is. To which the answer is the song’s title. A tasteful use of the French language, I must say.

John Linnell has usually had a knack for writing strong power pop songs. The first one I can think of where it started would probably be ‘Experimental Film’? Though anyone can disagree. But the 2010s seemed to mark the time where he seemed to write one great power pop song after another. Kinda lacking the weirdness and eccentricity that would be found in the band’s earlier work, which some may feel “sad” about. But still enriched in the melody and memorability that makes the great in the first place. ‘Stone Cold…’ is one of ’em. A notable feature about the track is the accompaniment of John Flansburgh’s wife Robin Goldwasser on vocals. She provides the second harmonised ‘Stone Cold Coup d’État’ in the chorus after Linnell sings it first, and then Flansburgh follows after with the higher harmony. I like how he stays on that note after the other two stop singing at the end too. Really belting it out. This is a big high from Nanobots in my view, so I reckon it stands it ground as being the last representative from the album that I write about on here.