Category Archives: Music

#1047: Gorillaz ft. Mick Jones & Paul Simonon – Plastic Beach

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Well, it was only a few days ago that I was writing about another song from Plastic Beach, so I won’t go ahead and give the whole spiel on thoughts and feelings on it. Might as well just redirect you to that very post though, only if you were grossly interested in this guy’s first encounter with the album. I want to say that the title track was one of my favourites from the very beginning. I clearly remember going on YouTube, finding ‘Plastic Beach’ – the song – online and pleading with people to see if they could hear the falsetto vocal that Damon Albarn carries on into the choruses after singing ‘It doesn’t know’. No one could come up with the answer I wanted, so whatever he is singing is still a mystery to me to this day. In fact, I think there are a lot of lyrics in here that lyrics sites don’t have down correctly, no matter how official or reliable they claim to be.

Without hearing any of the music and just looking at the tracklist, seeing the features, it was always going to be interesting to see how former Clash members Mick Jones and Paul Simonon would be involved on this specific track. They’d both taken lead vocals in the past on Clash songs. Very notable, famous ones too. But once that introduction starts, you can tell it’s Jones on that guitar and Simonon on the bass straight away. That whole introduction, so atmospheric and scene-building by the way, sounds like an instrumental Clash outtake, but with some synthesizers over the top. Very cool to see the two performing their take in the studio in the Plastic Beach documentary too. The introduction lasts for 40 seconds or so, giving way to the rest of the song is predominantly led by keyboards, synthesizers and the like, with an immediate groove and head-bopping rhythm, over which Albarn sings about about living on the plastic island depicted on the album’s ominous front cover. A picture that isn’t computer-generated, by the way. That’s an actual large-scale model that a crew took pictures of. Pretty cool to know.

If it wasn’t for that Jones/Simonon introduction, ‘Plastic Beach’ would follow a very simple structure I’ve come to realise. Without it is your standard track of a verse/chorus/verse/chorus/bridge/chorus/end, which you can find just about anywhere. Have a feeling Albarn wanted to spice things up a bit, and so recruited some help to make things a bit more interesting. But even then, the song hits the spot in so many ways. Albarn harmonises with himself, singing in quite the relaxed tone for the verses and too in the choruses, also changing the pitch of his vocals to achieve a harmonising effect. The high-pitched ‘Plastico, plastico’ vocals that come in before the final chorus I’ve come to not like as much. They feel a bit filler-y, just to add something in before things are rounded off. But they’re not enough to completely steer me away from the song. A shame that the lyrics aren’t completely valid wherever you look though. I actually uploaded these ones back around its release, taken from the iTunes lyrics that were on the Plastic Beach game on the band’s official website that was going on for a while. This is the closest I think you could get.

#1046: Stephen Malkmus and the Jicks – Planetary Motion

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January 2014 marked the arrival of Stephen Malkmus & the Jicks’ sixth album Wig Out at Jagbags, which itself was the first proper record of the band’s that I was patiently waiting for. Having listened to Pavement’s discography from front to back the previous year and also had a dip into Malkmus’ first solo album, I gotta say I was hooked to whatever he did and was also preparing to unleash on the masses. It was also three years on since the last Jicks album. That too I downloaded just to get a feel of more recent work. Jagbags eventually came. First impressions of it were that it was okay. Almost ten years on… that feeling remains the same. Feels to me like a slicker, slimmer part two of Mirror Traffic, but the songs just didn’t grab me as much. ‘Lariat’, the ‘single’ from the album is the band’s most popular song on Spotify though, so what would I know? In my opinion, the album possesses two highlights in the form of ‘Cinnamon and Lesbians’ (which woulda had its own post had the timing been right) and its opener and today’s song ‘Planetary Motion’.

The thing you’ll notice about ‘Planetary Motion’ is that *gasp* it’s not played in your regular 4/4 timing. Nope. To begin the proceedings is a track that switches between 6/4 and 5/4 during the verses, stays at 6/4 during the choruses and then plays at 7/4 during the instrumental/solo break. Now, usually when you get this sort of tampering with the rhythm, you’re left to wonder if this’ll be some prog rock thing where there’s just too much of everything going on. But this is Stephen Malkmus we’re talking about here, guys. Even with the unusual timings, the tune still rolls at an easygoing tempo. It does start of with quite the stomping rhythm, but once those choruses and that instrumental break kicks in, you’re back into that familiar laidback territory that only he can pull off so well. As to what the song’s about, well, I’d say that it’s about the wonder of the Earth and how it just keeps on turning, how the Sun keeps shining, how us humans just keep on living and how all those things will just keep on happening with no real end in sight. Sounds like the basis of a classic existential crisis/dread song, but Malkmus sounds to be at peace with it all, the song’s just that chill.

Doing some extra research on the track, it seems that there were live performances of it as early as 2011 – so either it was a possible outtake from the Mirror Traffic sessions or just a brand new track that was written straight away after the band finished making that album. You can also read this interview. The whole read is worth it, but there is a part where he talks about his annoyance with the ‘yellow odyssey’ lyric in this track and how he buried it with another vocal singing on top of it. People who like to think that Malkmus doesn’t care about his craft are sorely mistaken. Malkmus’ decision to bury the ‘yellow odyssey’ line appeared to have confused every lyrics site online who tried to find out what he was singing during those parts. A lot of them replace the line with a question mark before transcribing the next part of the song.

#1045: Radiohead – Planet Telex

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Was thinking about how I properly became aware of this song for a couple days before writing. I mean, that’s usually how it goes for the rest of the posts on here. But for this one, my mind had to wander for just a little bit. But then it all came flooding back. I got The Bends for, I think, my 12th birthday. Only really wanted it for ‘Just’ and ‘Street Spirit’ – if you’re wondering where ‘Just’ is in this series, it kinda lost its effect on me over time (sorry) – so I probably listened to it just once and never put the CD in my computer again. ‘Planet Telex’ starts the album off. But as I had forgotten how the song went, I had no idea who was singing in the sample used in the track ‘Letter from God to Man’ by British hip-hop duo Dan Le Sac vs Scroobius Pip, when the video for it was making the rounds on MTV2 back in the day. Maybe 2008 or so. Revisiting that track to remind myself how it went, I never realised, when I was a young lad, just how many elements of the original song it used. But then a couple years later I probably heard the track on iTunes when I was simultaneously playing FIFA and thinking, ‘Wow, this song’s… damn good.”

So, yeah. Radiohead’s album The Bends was released in March 1995, just three weeks before I arrived on this earth, if anyone wanted know. Being recognised as the ‘Creep’ band for the few years prior to its arrival, I can only imagine fans/critics’ reaction to the record when it dropped. Pablo Honey as a whole is pretty forgettable. Bit derivative of the American ’90s grunge/alt rock thing going on at the time. I don’t even like ‘Creep’ all that much. Then The Bends comes and it sounds like a completely different band. It just blew what came before it out of the water, from the production to the songwriting to the artwork. The whole package. It all begins with ‘Planet Telex’, firstly with this rolling wind-like sound effect that then gives way to a booming drum loop and piano drenched with tremolo/delay effects. The drums, bass and pianos drop out to introduce the guitars and the first appearance of Thom Yorke’s vocals on the album, before falling back in with a crash. Everything proceeds on from there. I really adore just the whole sound of this track. Don’t know how to describe it. Either like it’s from the future – it’s all spacey and sort of electronic, quite the difference from a lot of the other songs on the album, or just needs to be played really loudly from the highest rooftop. Really emphatic and so thrilling.

However… upbeat, for lack of a better word, it may sound, I again have only properly become aware of the track’s meaning. At least I want to say I have. Thom Yorke’s telling the listener all these things that you can do, but can’t bring to its full conclusion/potential. Then during the second, he provides options that you have the freedom to do whatever you want with. But in the end, “everything/everyone is broken”. Everything is pointless. Futile. The track seems to be a look at life from quite the depressive point of view. And with the lingering question of “Why can’t we forget?” as the last lyric, the track fades out with a fantastic guitar refrain courtesy of Ed O’Brien and a return of that spacey effect from the very beginning of the song. Couple random facts to close this out. Yorke sang the vocals while drunk and slumped in the corner of the studio. Still able to belt those notes out though. And with some power. And the track was originally called ‘Planet Xerox’ and was changed to ‘Telex’ so late in the process that producer John Leckie wasn’t aware of the name change until the album was released. At least… I really want to say I watched a video where he said that himself.

#1044: Super Furry Animals – The Placid Casual

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I once took on a personal task to go through Super Furry Animals’ discography in 2014. Reading around on the net and seeing comments made by the public, I got the sense that out of the British rock movement going on in the ’90s – not necessarily Britpop, but the entire scene including Radiohead, Manic Street Preachers and those sort of outside bands who didn’t fit in with that specific – SFA had one of the most solid catalogues of records out of them. Guerrilla was an album of theirs that was already well-acquainted with. But I started with the ’96 debut Fuzzy Logic, makes sense. And followed up by listening to Radiator, the band’s sophomore effort that came out a year later. It begins with a minute-and-a-half instrumental, ‘Furryvision’, a proper scene-setter, like the opening music in a TV show that plays over an opening shot of the sun rising over a sleepy town. But then ‘The Placid Casual’ follows and the floodgates fully open.

After a slick drum roll, the track and the band introduce themselves with ringing guitar notes and noticeably high-in-the-mix crash cymbals. With the incredibly trebly atmosphere going on, that whole introduction is like a wall of sirens and general chaos, probably to really announce that this was where the album was really starting, as the first track representing a full band performance. ‘Pawprint marks leave a telltale sign/There’s a furry friend loose and committing a crime’ are the song’s opening lyrics, a personal favourite couplet of mine in any song, and inspirational enough that I want to say it provided the design idea for Radiator‘s album cover. What ‘the placid casual’ is or are is never defined in the song, but taking them together results in a close enough description of a person that is calm, relaxed and unconcerned. There’s a reference to the seizing of power in Sierra Leone by Valentine Strasser in the second verse for no specific reason. Really, what I think the song comes down to is announcing that the band were back with this new album. Singer Gruff Rhys takes the perspective of the listeners, who ask what to do now that they have been freed and led into salvation by the band’s return.

What ‘the placid casual’ is/are isn’t defined in the track. Looking up the two words though, they appear to describe something/someone that is ‘calm and peaceful, and relaxed and unconcerned’. Seemed that the phrase itself had a ring to it in the SFA camp, as the band chose it to be the name of their self set-up record label. After the final iteration of the chorus, the crash cymbals slam away amidst some freaky synthesizer work and the ascending keyboard bass line, coming to a sudden stop and giving way to the following track’s introduction. Just keeps the train rolling on with barely a moment’s peace. If anyone’s wondering how the rest of my discography quest went with Super Furry Animals, I didn’t actually complete it until 2018, when I went ahead and started again from scratch. My own verdict: whole albums weren’t really for me, but the individual tracks I thought were great were faaantastic. ‘Placid Casual’ stood clear as a personal highlight.

#1043: Nick Drake – Place to Be

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Well, well, it’s Nick Drake again. Though this won’t be the last time I write about him on this website, it’ll be the last time you’ll see a track of his in this particular section. Who knew that basically a quarter of the songs on Pink Moon began with the letter ‘P’? Never would have thought about it without this, would you? Not like it’s very useful information anyway. Representing the last of the Ps from Pink Moon today is the album’s second track, ‘Place to Be’. With the preceding title track providing a more surreal, symbolic take on Drake’s outlook on life, ‘Place to Be’ is where he lays the facts down straight.

I believe this track is the last one on the album on which he uses a plectrum to play his acoustic guitar, with the rest all consisting of his intricate fingerpicking. And as a result, just like the ‘Pink Moon’ track, ‘Place to Be’ has a very driving momentum to it with Drake playing the guitar with an air of confidence and striding force. The strings ring out with a rich tone to them, and the music overall lures you in with its warmth. But on top, Drake tells the listener how he is as the man who sings to you compared to the days of yesteryear, and he’s not doing too well. The lyrics are plain to understand. When he was younger, he was ignorant to the cold, hard truth. But now he has himself hardened as a person and can see things for what they are. He used to be vibrant and bright, but now has become darker in his moods. He asks to be given a place to be, and by that I assume he means a place to just exist without any troubles. Maybe somewhere to belong. It’s left up in the air, but it taps into a feeling I’m sure is felt universally.

The third and final verse contains the most telling and hard-hitting revelation out of those listed in the previous two. Referencing his ‘Day Is Done’ track, which bear in mind was only released three years prior, he tells the listener that compared to then he was now the weakest he’s ever felt. So weak in a need for something or someone that isn’t fully disclosed. They’re just referred to as ‘you’. Maybe you is the ‘place to be’ itself. Maybe it’s a loved one. I’ve seen interpretations that suggest that ‘you’ is death. Any way you look at it though, it’s a sad affair. But instead of making it too melodramatic, he transferred his energy into an beautiful earnest acoustic performance. It does make you wonder how things changed so much for the worse for him in that relatively short amount of time.