Author Archives: The Music in My Ears (by Jamie Kyei)

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About The Music in My Ears (by Jamie Kyei)

Just one man who's making his way through life one day at a time writing about the songs he has on his phone. And other things at some points.

#1254: Nine Black Alps – Southern Cross

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Nine Black Alps’ Everything Is is an album that I don’t think is known by a great number of people. But those of us who know recognise it’s really a very good one. Released in 2005 in the midst of the whole post-punk revival thing where bands like Bloc Party and The Futureheads were thriving, just to name a couple, the heaviness and angst Nine Black Alps presented in their music and throughout Everything Is immediately made critics mention Nirvana in their reviews. That might be an obvious comparison to some people. I’ve never really been able to see it. Maybe I’m just kidding myself. I’ve come to think the band were too different to the happening scene of the time, so the only way people would get prospective listeners to become interested would be to stick ‘Nirvana’ in their pieces and see where it went from there.

Whatever conclusions you draw for the album are all yours to keep. You can share them too, I wouldn’t mind. I’m pretty confident in my thoughts on it. On this site, you’ll see I’ve written about every other track from Everything Is. After this, there’s only one more left and that’s the full house. And again, people who know this album will know what song it is. But the focus today is on the album’s final track, ‘Southern Cross’. When I heard it the first time, I thought it wouldn’t have worked if it was anywhere else in the sequencing. I would have only been 12 years old at the time, but in the 12-year-old way I picked up on the sense of closure that’s brought about by the music and the lyrical sentiment. The song duration also mirrors that of album opener ‘Get Your Guns’, which is most likely a big coincidental happening, but I take interest in little things like that.

‘Southern Cross’ seems to be about the disappointment in being let down by “friends” and being taken advantage of. The struggle the song’s narrator feels in trying to take things on by themselves and ultimately failing leaves them in a state of helplessness, the song’s main refrain being a pained cry of “So what do I do?” A bit of a downer, sure. But it’s somewhat overridden by the emphatic guitars and general performance of the band, framed around the ascending/descending guitar riff that begins the song and also appears in between the first chorus and second verse. I dig how the bass guitar appears to be the loudest instrument you can hear during those riffy parts, cuts through the mix like a knife. And when you expect the melody to follow the route it has taken in the previous choruses, singer Sam Forrest raises it unexpectedly for the last one. With a firm crash, the song ends and the guitars ring out for a good 20 seconds, feeding back into a void of silence. It’s a great way to end a great album.

#1253: John Linnell – South Carolina

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I was listening to Prince’s Purple Rain a few months back. When the synthesizers and drums really got going in ‘Let’s Go Crazy’, I thought to myself, “South Carolina sounds a lot like this.” The ‘South Carolina’ I refer to is John Linnell’s song, the fourth one on his 1999 State Songs album. I wrote about another song from that just the other day. Before going through the record the first time, I was quick to judge ‘South Carolina’ before even hearing it after reading that it was meant to be the album’s accompanying single. Because it was too big to fit the vinyl, the record company chose ‘Montana’ instead. But then ‘South Carolina’ came around in the tracklist, and it became very obvious why it was considered single-worthy. I wouldn’t describe it as a banger, I’m getting to old for that sort of stuff. But I can at least say firmly that I have a very good time listening to this one.

Starts off these confident piano chords into these drum/horn stabs, which lead into Linnell’s introduction on the vocals. And from then on, it’s like he doesn’t stop singing until there’s a minute of the song left to go. It’s a very busy song, one in which Linnell sings about a person getting into a bicycle accident and successfully suing the offender. Linnell adopts a lower-pitched vocal to portray the various characters in the story, from the police officers to the neighbour who’s asked to take pictures of the wrecked bicycle for evidence. The song may or may not be influenced by the time John Linnell had his own bicycle accident some years before, which in turn led to the creation of They Might Be Giants’ Dial-A-Song project. The TMBG wiki says the song’s music was inspired by the Kinks’ song ‘Wonder Where My Baby Is Tonight’. And I can see that. I still think there’s a little of ‘Let’s Go Crazy’ in there, though. Maybe Linnell was looking at the Purple Rain cover with Prince on the motorbike and got to thinking. Big maybe though.

Although the State Songs album was released in 1999, John Linnell had given just a small glimpse of the project five years earlier on an EP that was exclusively released by a subscription-based record company called the Hello Recording Club. ‘South Carolina’ was the leading track on that collection, and it’s very much the same recording that ends up on the album. Just mixed a little differently. From what I can tell, there’s a bit more reverb on the older version, with the vocals more present in the mix and the deeper ends having a littles less “oomph” to them. As if anyone reading this cares about that sort of thing. I think it’s just interesting to think the guy had a song like this in the back pocket and ready to go for five years. This is the final state song you’ll get from me on here. Not the last time you’ll see something from John Linnell, though. Would like to give a nod to ‘Louisiana’. Would have been a shoe-in for a commentary, had it not been available only on vinyl for 22 years before only becoming recently available to stream four years ago.

#1252: Gorillaz – Sound Check (Gravity)

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‘Sound Check (Gravity)’ is another song from Gorillaz’s 2001 debut album. I say ‘another’ because it doesn’t feel so long ago that I was writing about the last one to appear on here. I’ll try my best not to repeat anything, but don’t hold it against me if I do. Just a coincidence that two of the songs I like on the LP begin with the letter ‘S’. Being the 16-track record Gorillaz is, with ‘Sound Check’ being the eighth on there, I think the song’s placement and general tone is meant to make it out as the epic closer of the album’s first half. Got these heavy dub-record scratch breakdowns and (synthesized) violins. Meant to really heighten the dramatic atmosphere of it all, even though the song isn’t arguably about anything much at all.

If you look at ‘Sound Check’ in a structural sense, which I guess I do sometimes on here, you can say it’s split into three different sections. You firstly get the “Graviteh-eh-eh-eh” verses, the instrumental breaks where the dubby bass guitar comes in with the record scratching, and the “ah don’t ‘pon me down” verses. Some websites list the latter part as the choruses. They seem like the least chorus-like parts of the song. Damon Albarn’s doing a thing that he does throughout the album, which is switching up his vocal style, really exploring parts of his voice that he never would with Blur and singing actual words mixed with a bit of gibberish which have some meaning and sort of don’t. There’s always a very fine melody associated with them all, though.

The main puzzle I’d always had with the track was regarding the sample that’s used during the instrumental breaks. Once I read that the person in that sample was saying “I’m gonna rock this rigging”. And it sounds like that, thought it was a pretty valid deduction, so I’ve been singing it that way for all this time. But before writing this, I just did a little check to see how the lyrics are noted on various websites. One of the first few results that came up was a Reddit post asking about that sample lyric, and someone straight up posted the actual source. You hear it about 27 seconds in. So it’s actually just “I’m gonna rock this pla-ace”. It’ll take me some time to get used to that. But that’s one question solved that I don’t have to think about anymore.

#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.