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

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.

#1229: Röyksopp – So Easy

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When I was a young boy back in the 2000s, the British mobile network operator T-Mobile – now known to you and me as EE – used to run an advert on TV that was backed by a really cool piece of music. I didn’t know what the people were singing. To me, it sounded like “Ooh, ung, ooh/Haanay, hun, haanay/Ooh, ung, ooh/Da-da, day-da, doo”. I would sing it like that, anyway. I can’t remember exactly what age I would have been at the time. I’m sure it was under ten, though. And I just thought it was one of those songs where the people were singing gibberish on purpose. People do that in songs all the time, so it didn’t seem that strange to me. That melody would stick around in my head for a long while.

Fast forward to my second year in university, late 2014. I’d known about Röyksopp for a good five years by that time. ‘Happy Up Here’ was my song for a good few months in 2009. I was sat in front of my laptop, looking for some electronic music to listen to get me away from the guitar-oriented stuff for a change. The duo’s debut Melody A.M. appeared to have been well-received by critics around its release, according to the sources on Wikipedia. Maybe it would have made more sense to listen to the album ‘Happy Up Here’ was on. But Melody it was. So, I got to searching on Spotify. The first song on there was ‘So Easy’, and holy moly, this was the track that was in that advert all those years ago. Röyksopp made that tune. Well, this album was getting off to a fantastic start.

Searching up ‘So Easy’ on Google upon inadvertently finding answered the question I guess I had about the song for all of those years. Turned out, whatever vocals were on there weren’t gibberish at all and were in fact a sample of a song from the ’60s – one that very much had actual lyrics. “Blue on blue/Heartache on heartache/Blue on blue/Now that we are through” were the actual words. Swedish vocal group Gals & Pals sang them. And it’s these vocal samples taken from this performance that ‘So Easy’ is built around. Well, Röyksopp also lift the source material’s pizzicato string introduction, over which a funky little bassline is laid out. The song ends early, closing out with this little interlude that leads into the next song on the album, ‘Eple’. That’s one I would have written about, but things didn’t line up. But it’s not the last of Röyksopp on here.

#1228: Malachai – Snowflake

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December 2010, my uncle came round to the house from Australia to visit for the holidays. Was the first time I’d seen the dude since he moved in about 2005 or something. He was always into gadgets and technology, so when he visited he did the nice thing of getting my mum a new TV – a 3D one at that – a soundsystem that wasn’t really needed and a Playstation 3 for me with a few games. It was a bit much. I honestly would have been fine sticking with the PS2, even at that time. But a PS3 was now what I had, and FIFA 11 was one of those games that he stuck in there for good measure.

Now, you frequent readers know I’ve got a history with the FIFA series and a huge appreciation for its soundtracks. If you’re not playing a football match in-game, the other times you’ll be navigating the menus or, now on this “new” generation of console, in the practice area shooting the ball at the keeper or trying to figure out skill moves. The soundtrack was the backing to all of this. 11 had its fair share of bangers, including LCD Soundsystem, Gorillaz, Massive Attack… I could go on. A fine selection was made by the people of EA Sports yet again. But what ended up being my favourite of them all was a song by an artist/band I’d never heard of, which is usually how it went with those types of games, and was the one I would probably get the most excited about hearing if ever it popped up in the background.

Malachai are a two-piece band from Bristol, round here in the UK, of vocalist Gee Ealey and producer Scott Hendy. Ealey has quite the soulful but gritty tone his vocal, and it’s on show on the featured song for today, ‘Snowflake’. The more I listened to the song, the more clear it became that it was about being very horny. Lonely, but horny too. At least to me The track was censored on FIFA, which led me on to wondering what the muted part was. The lyric was “When all of a sudden I’ve needs from below”. The “from below” part was muted. And reading the rest of the words, making references to chewing over sweetness and being down “on bended knees and elbows”. Well, the deduction came ’round pretty quickly. But I really like it though. The production fixes everything into the centre channel, essentially making it a mono recording, but I feel it really works in the music’s favour. Everything sounds that little bit grimier as a result.

#1227: They Might Be Giants – Snowball in Hell

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They Might Be Giants’ ‘Snowball in Hell’ from Lincoln is a number that I remember liking almost immediately after listening through that album for the first time sometime in 2010. I had actually heard the track years before when I was an actual kid who had just got broadband in the house and was checking out this Internet radio station on a place called LAUNCH, owned by Yahoo!. Before YouTube existed, if you wanted to listen to music and watch music videos, that site was the place to go. It’s thanks to that site that I have any idea who They Might Be Giants are. ‘Snowball in Hell’ played on a station one day. Being the, I think, 8-year old I was, I promptly forgot about it. Short attention span.

But hearing it again all those years later, in context with the album and fully paying attention, it felt like a song I properly knew and had been listening to for years up to that point. There was a warmth and familiar feeling to it proceedings, it felt like a given that it would be one of my favourite songs on the album. The track revolves around this two-note doorbell “ding-dong” melody, over which John Flansburgh sings about being in a less than ideal situation spurred on financial troubles. He sings with much sincerity, backed by harmonies from John Linnell, incorporating wordplay and lyrical twists that result in a few of the band’s most memorable and devastating lyrics. “Money’s all broke and food’s going hungry”. That’s a good one. “If it wasn’t for disappointment, I wouldn’t have any appointments”. That’s a great one.

The song is also notable for the breakdown, over which dialogue taken from a how-to-organize-yourself cassette plays. Given to him by album producer Bill Krauss for his 25th birthday, Flansburgh went on to find that the tape didn’t contain much in the way of advice. But he, Krauss and Linnell all found it interesting enough to let it have its own little snippet in ‘Snowball’. Permission wasn’t asked to use it. No one’s threatened to sue. And its inclusion goes down as one of many memorable moments in TMBG’s discography. Back in June, a cassette of rough mixes from the Lincoln sessions was found in the archives of a university in Canada, and a work-in-progress ‘Snowball in Hell’ was found on it. As you can tell, the mix is a bit different. The acoustic guitar is given more prominence, a different model drum machine is present and more snippets from the self-help cassette are used. It’s the same song in essence, but sometimes I prefer this rough mix to what ended up on the album. It’s certainly a different approach. All the more happy to know it exists.

#1226: Test Icicles – Snowball

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This song here’s the third and final one songwriter Rory Atwell conjured up to be included on For Screening Purposes Only, the only album made by dance-punk trio Test Icicles. As time goes on, there’s more chance of their name being forgotten. But it’s posts like mine that I hope will be found years from now for people to check them out. Short story from my POV, I didn’t think much of them when they around and I was younger. Then a few years passed, I rediscovered the album and found it was actually pretty good. ‘Snowball’ marks the start of a run in the LP that I consider to be solid, solid tunes.

I look at Spotify and, even though it’s not representative of all music listeners worldwide, I can’t look past that ‘Snowball’ is one of the least played songs on the album – only getting more plays than the interlude, closer ‘Party on Dudes’ and ‘What’s Michelle Like?’, which on original copies of the CD was a hidden track. I guess the song does take a while to get started. Atwell adopts an exaggerated vocal at points to sing his lyrics. Kinda like a bird squawking. It’s a thing he does in all his penned songs, but I’ve come to think of it as him portraying some sort of persona. And speaking of the lyrics, they’re not so much about anything but they conjure some good imagery. But it’s all of those reasons, plus the riffs and general energy that have always attracted me towards it.

I think it’s only taken me until writing this post to get to grips with the timing of the drum pattern and guitar that makes up the song’s introduction. The way those drums are played have never correlated with my sense of timing for the longest time. It does literally start on the first beat of the bar though, so as long as you count starting with ‘1’, then you’re good to go. The whole “band” drop in after a bit – band in quotes because the rhythm section is a processed one – and it’s then Atwell goes on to sing about a string of various situations and scenes, from a dog looking for a bone and a son of the East who can’t kill the Witch to the eventual snowball the song’s named after and a hurdy-gurdy that Atwell implores band member Sam Mehran to play before then telling him to turn it off in the choruses. It’s a strange song. I like it a lot.

#1225: They Might Be Giants – Snail Shell

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They Might Be Giants’ 1994 album John Henry was the first of the group’s to be performed by a full, rock ‘n’ rolling band, as opposed to the synthesized rhythm section and guitar and accordion performed and arranged by Johns Linnell and Flansburgh on the records that came before. I frequent the band’s subreddit from time to time. A common opinion among users on there is that John Henry is a definite favourite. I think it’s swell. In my mind, you can’t go wrong with any TMBG album, really. ‘Snail Shell’ is the second song on there and also had the great privilege of being its first single, the representative chosen to introduce the band’s new formation and sound.

Fans of They know that the two Johns aren’t your usual songwriters who explore the standard themes in their lyrics, and ‘Snail Shell’ is no exception. As I’ve come to see it, the song is told from the perspective of a narrator who becomes extremely grateful after being helped out of an uncomfortable situation by another person. They want to make it known to this saviour that their act of selflessness is appreciated, and they have a bit of an internal crisis in the process. If I were to describe a real-life situation, think if you did something as simple as open a door for someone and they then continued to thank you and ask if they could do something for you in return when all you want to do is walk on and get to where you need to be. This is the song written by that strangely grateful person.

According to the band’s drummer at the time, there was a lot of hope that the song would match the success of ‘Birdhouse in Your Soul’. That tune’s known to be one of the band’s signature numbers. ‘Snail Shell’ not so much. Though I’m a fan of it myself, Linnell’s vocal has this sort of phasing effect that I dig, Flansburgh’s guitar has a scratchy tone to it which makes the sound all the more better when he pulls of those crazy fills and runs, I do have to admit there’s a bit of an creepy feel to it. Think it’s the minor key that’s the catalyst behind it. The music video reinforces it. It doesn’t give much of a ‘first single’ vibe like I’d say ‘Destination Moon’ does for example, or ‘No One Knows My Plan’. Flansburgh had ‘Sleeping in the Flowers’. Probably more suitable choices. The track maybe didn’t bring the commercial success they wanted, but I’ll always be singing along to it. And that’s what this whole thing is all about.