#1314: Blur – Sunday Sunday

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Blur’s ‘Sunday Sunday’ was released as the third and final single from the group’s second album, Modern Life Is Rubbish, in October 1993. It was the highest-placed out of three, peaking at an, I guess, respectable 26 in the charts. And yet, out of those three, the track is definitely the one that’s talked about the least. Not discussed in the pantheon of the great Blur singles. When I was growing up and looking at MTV2 or any alternative music video channel very much every day, if there was to be a Blur video playing, it was never the one for ‘Sunday Sunday’. Maybe once or twice, I think. And that amount of plays was never gonna make an impression. It wasn’t until the summer of 2013 when I went through Blur’s discography, listened through Modern Life Is Rubbish and found I enjoyed it almost immediately. Even made it one of the first songs I played on the Sunday morning radio show I began to host later that year in uni, I was hooked immediately.

A critic once stated that the track imitated ‘Lazy Sunday’ by Small Faces. Looking at the two, it’s very clear that that tune was a huge influence on this one. But while Steve Marriott and co mainly discuss annoying their neighbors with loud music, Damon Albarn and co bring the Sunday topic to the dinner table, to the family home. Albarn sings about the things people get up to, especially British people, on those Sunday afternoons and evenings when the parents and kids have their time together before school and work start again the next day. That includes the usual Sunday roasts, seeing on entertainment’s on the television, and obviously those good old naps that sometimes you don’t even plan. Where you’re sitting in front of the TV, you close your eyes and you open them up to then find out that a good hour-and-a-half has passed. Both ‘Lazy Sunday’ and ‘Sunday Sunday’ mention sleeping in their lyrics, just goes to show how important and treasured the act is during that last day of the week.

Leaning into the whole, “We’re a British band and we write about British things” theme the band started on this album and proceed to for their next two, the music on ‘Sunday Sunday’ is very East End of London. A Cockney kness-up music hall with a bit of a swing to it, with Damon Albarn exaggerated the Bri’ishness of in his vocal. Very suitable that a couple B-sides to the single were their covers of ‘Daisy Bell’ and ‘Let’s All Go Down the Strand’, both of which none of the bandmembers are particularly fond of. Dave Rowntree starts things off with a booming tom-tom pattern. The band joins in after, Graham Coxon performing a particularly spirited guitar intro, and Albarn comes in on the vocal not too long after. The song soon explodes for the chorus when the harmonies and an organ are brought into the production. There’s a nice little trumpet solo. Who doesn’t like a bit of brass? And things then get a bit frantic when the band go into double-time for the instrumental break. Coxon brings out a slide guitar, Albarn works his fingers out for a carousel organ solo, which all slows down emphatically to the song’s original tempo for the final chorus. I like how that final “sleep” at the end seems to go on forever after all the instruments stop playing. Very nice production trick. But I like the package as a whole. If you want to see it being made fun of, here’s a YouTube Poop that heavily features its video.

#1313: The Velvet Underground – Sunday Morning

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I guess the backstory of my experience with this tune is interesting enough. I was learning how to really appreciate albums in 2012 to 2013, to sit down and focus on every song on there rather than highlighting the singles I would have already known. And if I was to do so, I needed to find out what the classics were, the ones that were considered to be the best of all time. Luckily, I found a website called besteveralbums.com, a place I’ve definitely mentioned before on here a few times, which appropriately contained an a calculated overall ranking of what was to be the finest LPs through history. I made it a mission of mine to go through that list. I gave up after a while, but I’d got the gist. At the time I write this, The Velvet Underground & Nico is apparently the 10th best album ever. Around the time I discovered the site, it was the 13th. But I listened through, read its Wiki article, understood why it was meant to be so good. All the works.

And ‘Sunday Morning’ is the album’s opening track. If you were to listen through TVN&Nico, you might notice the sonic difference between the song and the 10 others that come after it. I want to say I did. ‘Sunday Morning’ seemed like this almost-primed-for-radio production while the others were much more rougher around the edges. The song was the last one to recorded for the album and the only one on there not to be produced by Andy Warhol, instead done so by Tom Wilson who requested its inclusion after feeling the album as it was a missing that one number. The whole thing would have started with ‘I’m Waiting for the Man’, which wouldn’t have been bad at all. But it just feels right to have ‘Sunday Morning’ leads things off. Sort of lulls you into that false sense of security before ‘I’m Waiting…’ kicks in and the album’s momentum truly gets going. Some fine track listing work right there.

Lou Reed wrote it after having the suggestion to write a song about paranoia forwarded to him by Warhol. And you can sense that paranoia in the lyrics, “There’s always someone around you who will call” / “It’s just the wasted years so close behind”… for example. It’s also sort of about feeling like death during a hangover. But what brings you in, at least I know it did for me, is how the track has this lullaby-like feel, with Reed sing-sighing in your ears and bandmember John Cale providing the music-box like dynamic with his performance on the celesta. This truly is a song for those mornings when you don’t want to get out of bed. It’s like Reed’s telling you to stay put in an abstract kinda way. The Velvet Underground had performed the song live with singer Nico before the album, but when it came to recording Lou Reed took the lead vocal duty instead. Probably for the best. The thick German accent maybe would have worked against the subtly. You can hear Nico in the background during the song’s final moments, though. A small move that caps the track off as they both repeat the song’s title into the fade out and silence.

#1312: Nick Drake – Sunday

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I think I first heard Nick Drake’s Bryter Layter during my second year in university. I have a memory of being in the new shared house, in my room on the top floor listening through the LP. Although that may be a memory of another time of listening to it, having maybe done so at some point previously. My times are muddled. I’d have to check my old laptop to be sure. Saying all this, I think Bryter Layter is a fine album. It’s not the one out of Drake’s three studio albums I go back to frequently, that would go to the one that starts with ‘P’ and ends with ‘ink Moon’. But I can appreciate it a bunch, just ’cause it is a Nick Drake album and the guy was really good at what he did during the short time he did it for. It’s the last one in which Drake played alongside hired musicians, and I’ve come to think of ‘Sunday’ as the coda, final statement, whatever, that brings that era of his style to a close.

The track is the last song on Bryter Layter, coming after the LP’s most well-known track of ‘Northern Sky’ and ending the whole package as an instrumental, switching between minor and major keys. I think it’s minor for the most part, but ends on an unexpected major chord leaves things on a small, bright note. Nick Drake strums and plucks away on his acoustic guitar in the left channel, but very much gets buried by the other instruments, particularly the strings that are eventually brought into the mix. Maybe it was this production choice, that does sort of happen throughout the whole album, that eventually led Drake to go against having backing musicians and go with the absolute bare minimum on Pink Moon. And I’m sure Drake’s playing some interesting chord shapes on that guitar of his on this track. Someone should do something like a Pink Moon‘d version of all the songs on Bryter or even Five Leaves Left. It would certainly show both records in a new light, I feel.

The melodic anchor of the whole track relies on the work of Australian flautist Ray Warleigh. Unfortunately, he passed away in 2015, but a small, small part of his contribution to the art of music lives on in this track. I guess you could split the track into a group of sections, each with their own theme going on. There’s the first minute and three seconds, which set the tone, 1:04 – 1:18, another minor-key transitional piece that leads into a major-key section from 1:19 – 1:49, followed by 1:50 – 2:28, which sounds quite a jazzy tone to me, I’m not quite sure. And then comes an optimistic, springtime morning-sounding passage from 2:29, which might just be the happiest sounding piece of music associated to Nick Drake’s name. Like a sun coming out from the clouds. The jazzy interlude returns at 3:00 before the track returns to its first section to finish it off from 3:21 onwards. If only I knew my music theory, it would help a lot. I know that I definitely feel something throughout this whole track, its changes within certainly take me on a journey. And I think that passes a test of some kind. If you’re listening to music and you’re emotionally affected by it, feel like you’re transported to another plane, then the song is most likely a very, very good one.

#1311: Supergrass – Sun Hits the Sky

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“I know a place where the suuun hits the skkyyy!” A great, great opening line to a song, the song in question being Supergrass’s ‘Sun Hits the Sky’ from their second album, In It for the Money, released in 1997. I’ve made it known in many a post before that this is my favourite Supergrass album, and I want to stress again that while you all may get your Britpop fill from Oasis or Blur, Pulp or Suede, all very respectable choices, please, please don’t leave Supergrass out in the cold. You should all be listening to Supergrass. Not one dud exists in the band’s six-album discography. I’m sad that it’s more or less confirmed that they won’t make another one, even though they are kind of together at the moment to celebrate the 30th anniversary. In another way, sometimes it’s best to just let things be. I can understand that. So I’ll leave it at that too.

Anyway, ‘Sun Hits the Sky’ is the sixth song on In It for the Money, closing out the album’s first half if you were to listen to it on vinyl. I have a strong, strong feeling that I heard the song in an advert for a UK holiday resort of some kind. Maybe Butlin’s. Maybe Center Parcs. If any member of Supergrass happens to read this, could you possibly confirm whether this was the case? I would have been a small child when those “commercials” were going around. But come 2005/06 when I was a little older, and by that, I’m talking the age of 10, Supergrass videos were usually playing on the television – a whole lot of fun they’d be too – and the video for ‘Sun Hits the Sky’ showed up one day on one of those video channels. The song was immediately recognisable, but the main thing I got was that it was Supergrass who had made the song – I want to say I had gained a fair knowledge of the band by then – and that this thing called In It for the Money was something to get, because song that was shown on the TV from it was I enjoyed a heck of a lot.

So where is this place where the sun hits the sky? Well, we all know that the sky isn’t this kind of border that the sun reaches up to. It’s all really limitless. I know it’s not meant to be taken literally. In fact, I think this track is about wanting to get really, really high – more in a haze of marijuana smoke rather than a darker deal with heroin – a bit like Paul McCartney’s ode to pot with ‘Got to Get You into My Life’. When you’re in your 20s and in a band, you’re gonna be smoking joints at some point. Gaz Coombes about knowing a place where the sun hits the sky and things get all distorted and strange, and in the choruses he sings about being someone’s doctor and being on the way to prevent someone from coming down. I guess like how it’s a dealer’s job to deliver the goods to their clients. I think I’ve got this song down. Just can’t help but feel good when listening to this one, got such a driving momentum. Very, very hard not to sing along to once you’ve got the words down, and notable highlights are the keyboard solo by Rob Coombes and the psychedelic ending where tablas and bongos enter the mix and the song eventually fades out with Mick Quinn laying down some licks on the bass guitar. A big “Yes” from me for this tune.

#1310: Animal Collective – Summertime Clothes

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When I first heard Animal Collective’s Merriweather Post Pavilion in 2012/13, I really didn’t know what to make of it. It was an album unlike any other I’d heard before. At that time, I was firmly into standard band outfit, guitar, drums, bass guitar, rock music. There was none of that on the LP. And then I’d see MPP-era live performances on YouTube where members Avey Tare, Panda Bear and Geologist were onstage with these massive desks covered in wires and pads and other electronics. To the people who knew the band, it probably wasn’t so unusual. But from having no idea who the band was to then listening to the LP as a gateway, there was something overwhelming about it all. But I gave it another try when I was in my first year of uni, and I got my head around it then and there. It’s considered basic to say the album’s your favourite by the group. Personally, mine is Strawberry Jam. But MPP is a damn good album. Sounds like it was made in some outer Avatar-type universe rather than a studio somewhere in Mississippi.

‘Summertime Clothes’ is the fourth song on there, a very obvious single choice even if ‘My Girls’ was chosen to be the first one released from the album. In 12/8, or 4/4 time with a swing feel, the track has an infectious bounce reinforced by the kick drum and pulsing bass synthesizer. Avey Tare sings it, detailing a scene where the narrator’s twisting and turning in their bed at night, unable to sleep because it’s too darn hot in the room. They’ve gotta get out of the place. And so the narrators calls up a friend or partner, I guess you can assume the latter. Luckily, they pick up the phone and they agree to go walk around in the cool of the outside, grab a bite to eat and indulge in other activities you’d do when going out. Basically the track conveys a huge sense of happiness and comfort of being in the company of someone whose presence is very much appreciated. And, you know, that’s pretty wholesome stuff. A very simple topic to write about, but the production and delivery makes it sound a lot more glorious than it should.

Merriweather… marked a moment where vocal duties between Avey Tare and Panda Bear were somewhat equally split between the two. While predecessor Strawberry Jam was a mostly Tare-led record with Panda Bear contributing two songs and providing backing vocals here and there, MPP provided a larger Panda Bear presence throughout, with an abundance of harmonies and countermelodies to boot. And there are those aplenty just in this song alone. Yeah, Avey Tare starts the song off by himself, with a subtle warbly effect going on with his vocal, but then Panda Bear comes in on a harmony here and there, before the chorus kicks in and the two of them sing together. Always nice when the two sing in unison. During the rushing “When the sun goes down, we’ll go out again” bridge, there are some “Oh-oh” backing vocals by Panda that are buried in the mix and pan all over the place. I thought that was a cool little feature. And I also like the lone ‘paarp’ that occurs after Avey Tare sings “Don’t cool off”. It doesn’t need to be there, but it’s also a nice extra touch. There’s small odd moments like that sprinkled throughout the album that my odd self appreciates thoroughly. But this is a good song. Definitely worth 4-and-a-half minutes of your time.