Category Archives: Music

#726: The Maccabees – Lego

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‘Lego’ is the penultimate track on The Maccabees’ debut album Colour It In. From what I remember, I don’t think this song was very immediate to me upon first hearing the whole album. Around that time I mostly got albums just to listen to the singles, and ‘Colour It In’ had plenty of them that were shown on MTV2 back in those days. Funnily enough, I don’t listen to those singles that much anymore.

So when did ‘Lego’ really hit? I wish I could say. But I’ve been listening to it for a long time now so it’s safe to say I think it’s still good. There’s a frantic vibe I get from it straight from the beginning with its sudden fade-in and descending guitar riffs by brothers Hugo and Felix White. I’ve always liked that Colour It In is a proper band album. There aren’t many production tricks that are incorporated into a track’s mix; it’s always about the group’s performance – two guitars, bass, drums and Orlando Weeks’ vocals (with occasional guitar from him too). It’s about as raw as the band would get before exploring different avenues in their later releases, and I’m sure it wasn’t by chance that they chose ‘Lego’ as the final ‘band’ track on their debut. (Of course ‘Toothpaste Kisses’ really closes out the album but it doesn’t rock as much).

Until now, I’ve never thought too much about what the song could mean. Someone on Genius thinks it’s about suicide. I think it’s more of a goodbye to those little moments in childhood that one can stick out when one gets a bit sentimental, like remembering to look left and right before crossing the road and screaming ‘are we there yet?’ in the car when driving to a destination. Weeks’ then trademark wailing vocals provide a tone of vulnerability to the song, keeping to a lower register during the verses before raising it in the chorus and then reaching a climactic point during the outro. That and the two guitars are my highlights of the track. It has a standard verse-chorus-verse-chorus-bridge-finish structure to it; it feels like the track goes quite quickly. Still well worth a listen to me.

#725: Julian Casablancas – Left & Right in the Dark

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I want to say that I was the first person to get the lyrics for this song on the Internet back in 2009. If anyone remembers the website we7.com, I believe Phrazes for the Young was an exclusive on there before it was officially released a week or so later. Somehow the lyrics for every other song were up on sites already, but no one had taken the time to try and decipher ‘Left & Right in the Dark’. So I did. I listened to this song over and over again, pausing and restarting at various points in order to decipher exactly what Casablancas was singing. I think I did an alright job. I’m very sure that the lyrics I typed up (back a long time ago on letssingit.com) are the ones that are available all over the World Wide Web today. They may have been edited at some point though.

And it was through that somewhat tedious task that I got to know this track. While some may have become sick of the track if they were in my shoes, I found that Casablancas’ song was still bearable. The album was his first solo project outside of The Strokes; while that band is stemmed by 60s classic rock like The Velvet Underground, Phrazes signified an emphasis on glossy synthesizers and drum machines in debt to 80s new wave. ‘Left & Right in the Dark’ makes this apparent right out of the gate with an awesome keyboard riff that is echoed by Casablancas later on in the song.

The track sees Casablancas having almost something of an existential crisis. He reminisces on days when he was a child, when he may have wronged people, generally situations in the past where things were so real. Now they are just moments in time and Casablancas wants the listener to make the most of the time they have in the here and now. Like a lot of Stroke songs, the track is characterised by the songwriter’s classic croon, which seems to sound quite different to how it usually does in his band’s recordings. That might just be down to the mechanical sounding guitars and glossy drums that surround it though.

I listened to Phrazes for the Young fully for the first time a good decade after it initially came out. Wasn’t really for me. This is my highlight from it, still.

#724: Fleetwood Mac – The Ledge

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To cut the long story short, Lindsey Buckingham didn’t want to make a second Rumours – an album that was absolutely huge in 1977 and considered a classic in rock history. He cut his hair and went on to follow some unorthodox methods of making songs, recording his vocals in a push-up position and sometimes just playing all the instruments by himself at his home.

A lot of these home-studio recordings ended up on Fleetwood Mac’s double album Tusk, the record that eventually followed Rumours and took a few people by surprise just because of how strange it could get in places. ‘The Ledge’, written by Buckingham, features the guitarist taking on the percussion, bass, and vocals here – and is yet another that is surely directed at bandmate and ex Stevie Nicks, minus the gloss and production value that threaded throughout its predecessor.

The track has this country do-si-do twang to it aided by its 2/4 time signature and the dry timbre of the guitars and drums. While all this make the song an upbeat composition to dance to, one can’t dismiss the bitterness of Buckingham’s lyrics that tease a former lover, telling her that she’ll never find anyone as good as him. There were obviously a lot of strong feelings that carried over from their previous project. Even so, as the second track on Tusk, it acted as a clear statement that this wasn’t going to be a typical Fleetwood Mac album if you hadn’t already guessed by the wealth of material that was on it.

#723: Razorlight – Leave Me Alone

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There was one day when I was going through my iTunes library when I realised I didn’t really like a lot of Razorlight songs as much as I used to. I’ve written about them many times in the past. Bar ‘Before I Fall to Pieces’ and ‘America’, two of the band’s songs which I still enjoy now, a lot from debut album Up All Night I took off my iPod/Phone years ago. ‘Golden Touch’, ‘Fall, Fall, Fall’, and ‘Dalston’ all get a resounding meh from me now. They just haven’t dated very well, I think. I could go back and delete the posts I wrote when I did like those songs. But I won’t. It’s good to see a younger me in time when I actually thought those songs were worth listening to.

Saying that, I still really like Up All Night‘s opener ‘Leave Me Alone’. It’s basically made from two chords saving some moments in the song’s chorus and a short instrumental bridge, and I’m very sure that the band couldn’t make a true ending for the track so they just faded it out and put some organ and ‘aah-aah’ vocals over it. There’s something about it that makes it sound unfinished. But it’s still undeniably catchy. Frontman Johnny Borrell has this sing-talking thing going through the verses which changes to a more melodic tone during the choruses. The band’s original drummer Christian Smith-Pancorvo plays a good rhythm, switching it up when he goes into double-time at various points… In fact, I think Smith really carries the band performance in this one. Good drums roll that you can slap your knees too.

Razorlight fell off by the wayside quite hard. They released Slipway Fires in 2009 and just disappeared. And the thing was no one really cared that they had gone. The band is together still, but are merely a husk of what they used to be.

#722: Arctic Monkeys – Leave Before the Lights Come On

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I don’t think there wasn’t a time in 2006 when Arctic Monkeys weren’t on everyone’s lips. The band released Whatever People Say I Am, That’s What I’m Not in January of that year after months of online hype, remarkable live performances and two #1 singles to their name. It became the fastest selling debut album in UK chart history. Everyone loved them. They released an EP a few months later which didn’t chart but included some songs that they had recorded in the meantime. Then their original bassist Andy Nicholson left and was replaced by Nick O’Malley who still plays with them today.

Their first single with O’Malley on board was ‘Leave Before the Lights Come On’, a track recorded way after the band’s debut album was done but one that Alex Turner stated could have been on the record because it followed similar themes that many of the album tracks had. I was eleven years old when this track was released. 2006 was one of the greatest times of my life. World Cup ’06, last year of primary school, it was a good summer. I remember ‘Leave Before the Lights” video making its rounds on MTV2 UK on the daily. That’s how I got to know the song. A woman gets a man’s attention by looking like she’s about to jump off a building. The man ‘saves’ her, she gets a bit too attached to him, he gets angry at her, and then she runs back to the building where she sees drummer Matt Helders walking past. The cycle continues. It’s more a little film accompanying the music than your standard band performance.

Very similar to the songs on Whatever People Say, particularly ‘From Ritz to the Rubble’, ‘Leave Before the Lights’ is the song that exploring the mix of feelings that may arise the morning after a one night stand. “How did I get here?” “She didn’t look like that last night…” “I should probably get out of here quickly.” Among others. It’s classic Alex Turner observational lyricism that he was especially good at in that early era of the band. I also feel it’s one of the group’s best musical performances from that time too. Both Turner and Jamie Cook’s guitars interlock with one another, Turner will play some guitar fills while Cook plays rhythm and vice versa, Matt Helders keeps a strong hold on the drums and O’Malley fits into the group dynamic like a glove straight away. The song’s ending instrumental breakdown is one of the best musical moments by the band in their discography, I think.

It was the first single of theirs that didn’t get to #1 in the UK charts. It peaked at #4. And for a song that doesn’t appear on an album of theirs, I think it still holds up very well today.