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.

#1008: Radiohead – Palo Alto

Leave a reply

Well, would you look at that. It’s Radiohead, again. But for anyone out there who still couldn’t get their heads around why the band decided to make that drastic change in sound 23 years ago, today’s track should take you back to what I suppose you would label as the better times. ‘Palo Alto’ was initially released as a B-side on the ‘No Surprises’ single in the first few weeks of 1998. Sandwiched between the title track and fellow B-side ‘How I Made My Millions’, ‘Palo Alto’ works as the energetic pick-me-up to lighten the mood somewhat between the two sobering numbers. Though if you weren’t around at that time or simply too young to understand what was even going on, you’ll recognise it as being one of the numbers on the second disc of the OK Computer OKNOTOK reissue from 2017.

I came across it many years back through watching the Meeting People Is Easy documentary on YouTube. If you want to see a group of people feeling tired, irritable and jaded while promoting an album, that video is the one for you. There’s a section in there that showing Thom Yorke working on and generally vibing to ‘Palo Alto’ on a tour bus, but the full track plays over a montage of sped-up/reversed/slowed down footage of people on escalators and the band walking through Japan. It looks much better than how I’ve described, so I’d recommend you watch it. I’ll go ahead and embed that below, it’s the closest to an official music video you can get for it.

So as I alluded to earlier, this is the fat rocking number on the ‘No Surprises’ single to make the alleviate the sombre mood of the two other tracks. All’s quiet during the verses where Thom Yorke disconnectedly sings about living in the ‘city of the future’ where ‘everybody’s happy/made for life’, but then you get smacked in the face by a slamming wall of blasting guitars for the choruses. It’s a big freak out/cathartic moment for any of those people who have to get those twitchy moments out of their system. The track continues the ‘technology isn’t all it’s cracked up to be’ and personal detachment themes that OK Computer is known for and was actually lined up to be the album’s title track for a while until it underwent the name change. Unlike the tracks that made it on the final record, ‘Palo…’ is a little more on-the-nose with the subject, which is probably the only reason I could think of why it didn’t make it on there. But anyhow, it carries on the large legacy of great B-sides that Radiohead possess in their discography.

#1007: Radiohead – Packt Like Sardines in a Crushd Tin Box

Leave a reply

It’s P time. Everytime I start a new section of this, I’m always weary of the amount of typing that I’ve gotta go through. But it has to be done. I’ve had this voice in my head telling me to have this done by the time I’m 30. That gives me just over two years. Maybe that’s pushing it. There’s still so many songs to go. But it’s worth a try. So let’s get restarted.

‘Packt Like Sardines in a Crushd Tin Box’ is the opening track on Radiohead’s 2001 Amnesiac album, the second in the group’s iconic – for lack of a better word – left-turn experimental phase after Kid A preceded it a few months before. I want to say that it acted as a bit of a message on part of the band that if people who thought Kid A was strange, then they had no idea. No better way to start of an album with looping metallic chimes and electronic bleep-bloops to keep rock fans on their side. As I’ve come to know it though, that wait for some sort of melody or settled rhythm to kick in is well worth it once those (keys? synths?) come in at 36 seconds.

I’ll always remember where I was when I ‘listened’ to Amnesiac for the first time. ‘Listened’ being in quotation marks because I was asleep for the majority of it. It was a tiring day after A-Level preparation in year 13 days, I think I may have been feeling down at that point too, and Spotify had this free trial offer going on. Though I more or less missed the middle part of the record, I remember still being sort of awake during ‘Packt…’ and digging Thom Yorke’s pitch-corrected vocals and the overall glitchy vibe of the entire thing. Then my consciousness faded away gradually, but then suddenly perked up when ‘Life in a Glasshouse’ started. As a result, those two tracks were the ones from the album that I considered its highlights for some time. I’ve come to appreciate a couple more songs from it, but the record isn’t up there in my personal Radiohead album ranking, to be frank. Doesn’t have that good a flow, I feel.

But, ah, the song. What is ‘Packt…’ about? Well, if you’ve been a longtime reader here, you may have come across a few posts where I’ve flat out stated that I’m not much of a lyrics guy. Even when it comes to writing these, I usually see what other people have said and see whether I agree with it or not. In rare cases, there are some tracks where I’ve felt I got the meaning down, which makes sense to me. This isn’t one of those times. Knowing that during the making of Kid A/Amnesiac, Thom Yorke utilised a method of cutting up lyrics and randomly linking them together, there’s a good chance that there isn’t a truly deep meaning to pick up from these sets of lyrics at all. They do sound great together, though, which to me is really all that matters. Oh, actually the main message is Thom Yorke wants some peace – leave him alone. There we go.

Ten Years of This Blogging Thing

Leave a reply

Hey there, everyone.

The 22nd of February 2023 marks the tenth anniversary of this blog. Well, it started on Blogger under a terrible name which, if you’ve checked the ‘About’ page, you’ll know about. But yeah. Ten years. What initially was going to be random-thoughts-on-a-daily-basis blog then turned into a concrete thing that came from the idea of “I like music, and I’m sure I could write about it on a daily occurrence. I should write about the songs on my iPod Touch.” And so I did. I was writing posts on the same day as they were posted almost every day for a long, long time. That then turned into every other day. Now I’m writing posts two months in advance. It’s just so much more manageable.

I’m glad I did start it. Gives me something to think about for the length of time I take to write each post. My writing back in those early was very melodramatic, exaggerated. I really wanted to get that feeling across that I very much cared for these songs. There are a lot of exclamation marks, smiley faces… uppercase letters. Very teenage. I don’t go back to those usually. Thank goodness, I’ve reeled it in a bit. There was a hiatus for a large period from 2015-2017 as I worked for a year and completed my final year of uni, and there was a lot of growing that happened in that time. Since then, I’m much more happier with the posts I’ve done on here, and even then I feel like I could add more to what I write.

So if you want to witness a naive, awkward 17-year-old slowly transition into a much-less-awkward-but-still-always-sort-of-there 27-year-old, here’s the very first post I made on that day. So innocent. I’d much rather be my age than 17 again.

#1006: The Vines – Outtathaway!

Leave a reply

My relationship with The Vines doesn’t go into much depth. I’ve never dug very deep into their discography, and have lived life being content only knowing the songs they made music videos for. The last song of the band’s that I had sort of an interest to check out was ‘He’s a Rocker’, and that was released almost 15 years ago. The videos that would be in regular rotation, at least whenever I was watching various music video channels on the TV, included ‘Get Free’, ‘Gross Out’ and ‘Anysound’. ‘Ride’, I’m very sure was used in advert that was endlessly repeated, but I don’t think I saw the video for that until years later. Out of those though, the one that ended up being my favourite was today’s track, ‘Outtathaway!’, the third single from debut Highly Evolved.

Song starts off with a stompin’ beat, nicely accentuated with the visual of a guy slapping himself in the face with a shoe in the music video, Craig Nicholls comes in with the guitar riff before letting out an indecipherable howl of an opening lyric – one that I still don’t think anyone really knows despite what any lyric website may say. The lyrics throughout aren’t very important, nothing to dwell upon, what really counts is the way they’re delivered, with Nicholls singing a phrase and bassist Patrick Matthews echoing in response. If I was to guess what the track was about, I would say it’s a general ‘fuck you’ type of song addressed to people who Nicholls doesn’t have a particular liking for. Who those types of people are aren’t disclosed in the track, but he doesn’t have the time for them, so this track is just a way of asking them to leave him alone.

But yeah, this track’s a rowdy one. Patrick Matthews provides a melodic bassline during the verses to counteract with the yelling both he and Nicholls do on the vocals, but then the wall of guitars slam into the mix for the choruses to fire the huge rush into the track. I assume what would be everyone’s highlight from this song is the tension building instrumental break which, after a repetition of ‘Come on’s among ‘aah-aah-aah’ backing vocals, the track reaches its freakout climax where Craig Nicholls just goes mad and screams as the guitars rise in intensity. Like Nicholls does in the music video, this song is one to let loose and maybe throw yourself into a wall to. And with that the O’s are over now. Didn’t we all have a good time? Probably won’t post here again before the year’s out, so wishing you all happy holidays. I’ll be back next year with the P’s. Maybe even the Q’s. R’s might be pushing it. But we’ll see how it goes.

#1005: Adrianne Lenker – out of your mind

Leave a reply

2019. Was a new year, and I had recently been laid off from my first job out of uni. To pass the time, while mind-numbingly scanning through applications, I listened to a bunch of albums that the Indieheads subreddit page had listed as ‘Album of the Year’ for 2018. There were 30 of them. There was only one I properly liked. It was abysskiss by Adrianne Lenker. You see the Wikipedia page I just linked to? I created it. I couldn’t take that a page hadn’t been made for it. Last year November I created a Wikipedia account just to make the thing. Listening to that album began a whole domino effect. I sought out Big Thief, listened to Capacity and Masterpiece. Kinda dug them both. But then ‘UFOF’, the single, came out, followed by ‘Cattails’, ‘Century’ and then U.F.O.F. the album, and just like that, Adrianne Lenker became a new favourite songwriter of mine.

‘out of your mind’ arrives as a bit of an odd one when going through abysskiss. After the four mainly acoustic folky, synth-tinged numbers that come before it, ‘…mind’ opens with a grungy electric guitar. Sprightly acoustic guitars take up the rest of the soundscape in both channels, but what I think the track is based around is Lenker singing the vocal while playing that electric guitar in one take. I’m not much of a lyrics guy, but what I gather is that there is a relationship involved. The whole time you’ll think Lenker’s singing about the person she’s seeing, but it’s when she uses her ‘Annie’ nickname in the last chorus that it becomes clear she’s actually taking on the perspective of her significant other. In that way, she’s reflecting on the way she acts as a person and how her partner may perceive her. It’s certainly a different way of approaching a narrative, particularly in a song.

This track is one of most recent I’ve heard when I had a sort of “eureka/a-ha!” moment. For a long while, I was having some major rhythm displacement with it. Every time I was singing along to it, I always found that the “Is it aaaannyyyy…” line for the chorus came in a beat too late. Everything was all 4/4 until that last bar before the chorus. Turned out I was missing the count-in completely. It sounded to me like the downbeat came on the very first strum of the electric guitar that starts the song. It actually starts on the second. So instead of 1-2-3-4, it’s “and, 1-2-3-4”. It would be a lot handier to visually explain it. But once I realised it, it was like ten lightbulbs going off in my head. I liked the song even with my off-timing, but with it all coming together, it truly secured itself as a favourite.