#1333: Real Estate – Talking Backwards

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‘Talking Backwards’ remains the only track by Real Estate that I have on my phone, ever since I first heard the thing back in 2014. It’s not the worst pick of the bunch to have. I was there when it got its “Best New Track” review on Pitchfork in the first few weeks of 2014, a time when I was checking out that website very, very frequently to get a new music fix. Its video (above) was released on the same day as that review. I liked the song, I think, then and there. Got me all excited about that new album Atlas which was on its way in March. The month came around. Pitchfork heralded the LP with a “Best New Music” tag and an 8.8 score. I’ll say I probably wouldn’t have given it all of that if I was on the writing staff then. But ‘Talking Backwards’ still stood out as that golden gem that deserved the praise it got when it was released as the initial single.

I was thinking about this song prior to writing all this, considering the lyrics, and I built up this image in my mind that it was about a guy talking another person with that recipient just not understanding or paying attention to what the guy is saying. A sort of “lights are on, but no one’s home”, sarcastic kind of tone. So I thought that it was funny that this ridiculing message was set to this very upbeat, sunny, summery music. Makes for good juxtaposition. But then after actually doing some research, I found it’s just a general song about miscommunication in relationships. It was also based on songwriter Martin Courtney’s own hesitant feelings of having to go on a long touring schedule with the band to promote another album after becoming a newlywed. So what I’ve learned is, there’s no agenda behind the lyrics at all and they’re pretty much self-explanatory. Sincere too, and that’s usually a clincher for me.

Yeah, I wished I liked Atlas a lot more than I did when it arrived. I even revisited it, maybe a few years back during those COVID times, to see whether time would have had any effect on my reception towards the music. It didn’t. And it’s not as if I’m saying the album is bad. I think it’s just, to me, a lot of the songs sort of blended into each other, and it was only the fine, fine melody in ‘Talking Backwards’ alongside its chirpy guitar riff/refrain that made it the strong highlight in the track list. I listened to Days when Atlas was still the band’s most recently released record. It sounded like more of the same. But even as I type now, I can still recollect the chorus to ‘It’s Real’, and I haven’t listened to that tune in ages. But, you know, five years removed from that limbo time we were all in, maybe it’s time to just do a deep dive into the band and see what happens. That’s just for me, though, you can all go about your day.

#1332: R.E.M. – Talk About the Passion

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I remember a time when I really didn’t understand what was going on with ‘Talk About the Passion’. I was going through Murmur for the first time in 2013 or something. That was a moment in my life when I was listening to music, but was trying to listen to it like some kind of critic. Looking at the words and trying to understand what they really meant. I think I was really into Pitchfork and trying to make a way into music journalism around then. ‘…Passion’ came round, and I think I had a feeling that it was being pretentious with the French lyrics. God forbid a band try and be creative with the words they use in their songs, right? Because I didn’t understand the words, I think I wrote it off and the rest of the album. I was missing something internally when I was 18. But fast-forward to the end of 2017, when I was 22, when on a whim I went through Murmur again and found myself having a new favourite album. You guys know. I’ve written about six other songs from the LP on here.

When I was early twenties, I think I’d began to just take music for what it was if I was listening to it for the first time. Taking into account the overall sounds and how they made me feel. Wasn’t a conscious thing, think it just turned out that way. And I remember Murmur making me feel really good. When it came to ‘Talk About the Passion’ that time around, as soon as the opening guitar riff played for the first time, it was like, “I’m probably going to enjoy this one too,” after having already been impressed by ‘Radio Free Europe’ and ‘Pilgrimage’. ‘Laughing’ not so much, I’ve never been able to get into that one. I think Michael Stipe’s vocals are a highlight in ‘…Passion’. His delivery of the titular phrase throughout is one with a lot of warmth and sincerity. That cello adds another dimension to the proceedings. Makes it all sound much more emphatic. And the combination of it and Stipe wailing in the distance as the song closes on a fade-out adds a sweet bow to it all. Makes sense that it was released as a single in its time, but it’s also kind of a bold pick for one as well.

I’ve always sort of thought that ‘…Passion’ was kind of a religion song. Same way I think ‘Pilgrimage’ is too. Like, talk about the passion. What passion? The passion of Christ? I guess that could work. “Empty prayers.” Prayers have to do with religion too. But apparently Michael Stipe described the song as being about hunger, which is where the “empty mouths” thing comes in. So it’s a track about people praying for food, having a intense need for it and wondering how long they have to wait until it arrives. “Combien de temps” does sound much cooler than “How long”, gotta say. Plus, it has the right number of syllables to fit in the music, so you can probably see why Stipe went with the choice of phrasing. Yeah, this is a good song right here. At least, I think so. I don’t think I can say it’s my outright favourite on Murmur. But put it on and I’ll be singing along to it. And if any song can do that to me, then it’s done its job.

#1331: Panda Bear – Take Pills

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After downloading Panda Bear’s Person Pitch in late 2013, it sat dormant in my old iTunes library for a considerable amount of time. It was then that I was a real Pitchfork-head and going through what are considered to be the indie classics. And plus I was the host of a show for my university’s radio station, so I was just downloading whatever album I could get, and whatever songs that stuck out were keepers. ‘Comfy in Nautica’ and ‘Ponytail’ were the two tracks on the album that I decided were the best. And that was how my judgement stayed until I revisited the album in 2016. I was working at a music magazine at the time. There was a lot of time I could spend on Spotify without being judged. And I remember that being a time when I was going through the albums I had at home that I hadn’t listened to for a long time. Animal Collective had either just released Painting With or it was on the horizon. Person Pitch had the obvious association. I ran through it again. And it’s amazing what being 21 compared to 18 can do because the whole album was an immediate click. Maybe I just didn’t have all the cells in 2013.

After the kind of chanting, call-to-action introduction of ‘Comfy in Nautica’, ‘Take Pills’ arrives next and marks the first instance of the production trick Noah Lennox utilises to great effect for a few numbers on the LP, which is merging a sample from one song into another from a totally different number over a carefully thought-out period of time. In this case, he uses the opening of Scott Walker’s ‘Always Coming Back to You’ for the first section – which I think he in turn times that with what sounds like a skateboard on the sidewalk – before that slowly transitions into the next section from 2:30 based on a sample of ‘Popeye Twist’ by the Tornados. The song as a whole is inspired by the state of Lennox’s family and his own wellbeing, after the tragic passing of his father. The first half depicts the grieving process of his mom, who passes on the advice that things eventually get better after the loss. And despite initial impressions you may have from the the song title, the second half is call not to resort to drugs in order to handle that struggle during those sad, sad situations. Because we’re stronger and we don’t need them. A very wholesome message.

There are plenty of songs out there in the sphere made by combining pieces of unrelated musical ideas together. You’ve got ‘The Chain’, ‘A Day in the Life’, ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’, ‘Paranoid Android’… Could go on for days listing them. And ‘Take Pills’ is very much in that category. But what makes it so unique is how its two sections are blended so seamlessly into one another – a gradual fade-out/fade-in with a huge reliance on samples – that shouldn’t work as well as it does, though somehow manages to make sense once that Lennox begins the “Take one day at a time” refrain. Gets the shoulders shimmying. I like the little aside Panda Bear in saying that it’s not bad to take pills. I can think of a song of his where he sings about wanting to get stoned and walk in the rain. He likes to get high every once in a while too. But just don’t rely on the stuff. That’s where things can get a little out of hand. So this is where the road ends for Person Pitch on here. Not so much for Panda Bear. If only I’d liked ‘Bros’ as much back in the day as I do now. That would have been an ordeal to write about. But if you haven’t heard of the album before now, I’d say you’ve got nothing to lose if you listened to the thing right now.

#1330: Franz Ferdinand – Take Me Out

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It’s tea time. That’s right. Back at it again for the ‘T’ section on a random Saturday evening (where I am, it could be morning for you somewhere or late night somewhere else). And it starts off strongly, I’d say. ‘Take Me Out’, I think, was the first song I ever heard by Franz Ferdinand. I think that might be the same for a lot of people. I have a memory of being slumped in a chair, guess I must have been either eight or nine, watching MTV2, and the “I know I won’t be leaving here’ section of the song was playing alongside the repeating visuals of the music video near its end. It left an impression. The band name showed up, ‘Franz Ferdinand’. Thought it sounded pretty cool. ‘Matinée’, the next single, was where I really became interested in them. ‘Darts of Pleasure’ was the band’s first single officially. But with ‘Take Me Out’, the band became a household name in that British post-punk revival scene in the ’00s and the track became one of the biggest indie dancefloor anthems.

And, I think again like many others, when I heard the song in full for the first time, I was wondering how its beginning worked its way into sounding like it did at the end. Because the track begins in a totally different direction. Well, according to singer Alex Kapranos, he and fellow guitarist/bandmember/songwriter Nick McCarthy, who isn’t in the band anymore, were working on the song for sometime. They were trying to work out the structure and found that the verse/chorus/verse type structure wasn’t working. They would have to change tempos when going from one section to the next, which just didn’t sound right. Eventually they decided to lump all the faster verses at the beginning and put the slower choruses at the end, transitioning them together with that gradual slowing down in tempo around 50 seconds in. Or rallentando for you music theorists out there. That’s probably the best part of the song there. That tempo decrease marks that build in anticipation for what comes next.

What comes next is hook after hook after hook, as I sort of said earlier, usually accompanied by that widely recognisable guitar riff. They play it live, everyone sings the riff. It’s just how it goes. As to the lyrics and what it’s about, well, there’s a nice little podcast where Kapranos and bass guitarist Bob Hardy discuss these topics. I listened to it a while back, so I can’t remember exactly what was said. But I seem to remember Kapranos saying he took inspiration from a film of some kind, or a certain type of film made by a certain director. You’d better listen to the thing yourself. But just on the surface, without going too deep, you hear the words ‘Take Me Out’, I’d say you’d either there’s a romantic sentiment or a violent one. Like an assassination or something. And that would be neat with the band being called Franz Ferdinand and everything. I think it’s a little bit of both.

#1329: The Rolling Stones – Sympathy for the Devil

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Years and years ago, back when I was going to secondary school, I’d be getting changed into my uniform with the TV going on in the background. It’d usually be on Channel 4. Whatever years that channel had the TV show According to Jim in the mornings was when I became aware of the subject of today’s post, completely by accident. In the episode, there was a scene where Jim (played by Jim Belushi, younger brother of John) is visited by an apparition of the devil, played by some actor who I think also played his friend in the show, I can’t remember, it wasn’t A-grade TV. The devil-person appears and says to Jim, “Please allow me to introduce myself…” Jim interrupts and says, “Let me guess, you’re a man of wealth and taste.” Canned audience laughter cues. And I thought, “That must be in some kind of song or something.” The line sounded very familiar. I think I Googled it, just to make sure I wasn’t making things up in my head. Surely it wasn’t an original thing the writers of that show came up with.

And the Google results proved me right. The line is the very first lyric in ‘Sympathy for the Devil’ by the Rolling Stones, the opening track on the band’s 1968 album Beggars Banquet. That particular LP marked a return to a back-to-basics blues rock approach by the band after their psychedelic turn on Their Satanic Majesties Request the previous year and began a run of studio albums up to 1972’s Exile on Main Street that many a fan see as the band at the peak of their powers. On ‘Sympathy…’, Mick Jagger sings from the point of view of Lucifer, Satan, Beelzebub, however you prefer to address the Devil, noting how he’s been around for a lot of bad things that have happened in the world up to the time the song was written. Where the ‘sympathy’ part comes in is where, you know, people will say it’s because of evil forces that these atrocities and murders and the like happen. But it’s us as humans who do it. It doesn’t happen for no reason other than human decision. I’d think this was quite the shocking song to put out there, especially in ’68. From what I’ve read, that year was a rough time.

You know, I think most listeners would point to Jagger as the highlight of the whole track just for the showy, very spirited vocal that gradually ramps up in intensity as the track goes on. I’d like to make a note on the piano in the right ear played by the most dependable session player, Nicky Hopkins. Those piano chords behind Jagger’s vocals in the opening moments are very tasty. That climbing scale behind the “man of wealth and taste” line is exquisite. And just like Jagger, he heightens that intensity when he starts thundering on the keys at the beginning of the second verse. Those train whistle-like “woo-woos” come in for the third verse, staying there for the remainder of the song and that’s when the whole track becomes a party. You just want to form a conga line to the samba atmosphere of it all, even if it’s from the perspective of the fallen angel. It’s a fine way to start the album. I’d say it doesn’t get much better than it from that point onward. But it’s always good to have a bold statement from the jump, and ‘Sympathy for the Devil’ isn’t anything but that.

Ahhhh, and that’s it. The ‘S’ section is done. That’s definitely the longest one I’ve done so far. Spent a whole year on it. I’ll be back on the ‘T’ journey sometime soon. But I need a break. I’m sure you guys understand. So take care of yourselves. Catch you on the flipside.