Well, this is it. The end of the road. The last time I’ll be talking about anything by Dananananaykroyd on here. Won’t have to count how many na’s are in the name when I’m typing the name. It’s all over. I have the honour of writing about a song of theirs in the first few weeks of this blog’s existence when it wasn’t even on WordPress but on Blogspot instead. This may have happened for another artist on here already, in terms of a solid “last ever post”. But I guess I’m making a bigger deal out of this because I hope more people listen to Dananananaykroyd, or are listening to them, maybe after they read my posts or whatever. I’m not sure I have that much of an influence on people’s tastes. But I like their music, and not a lot of people know about them. So spread the word. They made two – what I consider to be – banger albums and dipped. Their self-dubbed “fight pop” music was like nothing anyone else was making in their time.

‘Totally Bone’ is on the band’s first album, Hey Everyone!, released back in 2009. This was a song I really got to know when it came up on shuffle in my iTunes library, in the days when I could have my own personal soundtrack over whatever FIFA game I was playing at the same time. A third of the songs on Hey Everyone! have lyrics written by the band’s original singer and lyricist, Giles Bailey. ‘Totally Bone’ is of them. Bailey left the group a while before the album’s release. He was replaced by Calum Gunn and John Baillie Jnr, the former taking the lead vocal on all of Bailey’s songs when Hey Everyone! eventually came around. ‘Totally Bone’ was released as the band’s first ever single in 2006, though. If you’re wondering how Bailey sounded within the group, well, here he is singing the tune in that original release. In the context of Hey Everyone!, ‘Totally Bone’ follows the “radio friendly pop tune” of ‘Black Wax’, I think in a very calculated move. There’s something very celebratory and joyous sounding about ‘Black Wax’, while ‘Totally Bone’ sounds like someone at the breaking point of rage. It’s just the music that makes it sound that way.

I think ‘Totally Bone’ is about a thing that Gunn and Baillie Jnr cover in their own way with ‘Infinity Milk’. That thing being sex. Both songs look at the anxiety in the lead-up to it and the confidence found after discovering the act can be done, and not too badly either. But again, while the music behind Gunn and Baillie Jnr’s words in ‘Infinity…’ make the discovery sound like this epic, momentous occasion, I think Bailey’s rather graphic evocations of dismembering flesh and cutting off skins in ‘Totally Bone’ influenced the music to go in a different direction. Though it could have been vice-versa. A lot of guitar riffage going on throughout this tune. David Roy on the right with Duncan Robertson on the left, both guitarists playing licks interweaving with each other. That constant chord progression of D to E is a hook in itself. But my favourite parts are the intense instrumental breaks after the “We can totally bone” shouts. It’s those chords blasts alternating with the palm muted strums, small tension builds and quick releases that contain so much energy in their delivery. And Calum Gunn sounds like he has a mental breakdown that intensifies as the song goes on. “Intense” is how I would describe this entire track. Could be too much for some, but I enjoy it a bunch. Rather suitable that the ‘Kroyd’s first single is the last song I talk about. Rounds things up very nicely. Can’t find any good footage of them playing the song live.