#1025: Nirvana – Pennyroyal Tea

Leave a reply

First time I would have heard Nirvana’s ‘Pennyroyal Tea’ was when I got ’round to listening to In Utero in full for the first time around 2013. ‘Heart-Shaped Box’, from the same album, I’d known for a long time – but that specific year had some weight into my decision to getting round to the whole record so late, as it was the 20th anniversary of its release. The second half of In Utero is where things go off the deep end a little bit, but in the middle of the whole anti-accessible aesthetic that it goes for comes one of the album’s most accessible tracks in ‘Pennyroyal’.

Had Cobain not chosen to go out the way he did in 1994, ‘Pennyroyal Tea’ would have been the next single from Utero to get the music video treatment, the chart placement, the radio airplay. All of the usual. Once you hear it, you can easily understand why. The quiet verses consist of nothing but two lines, wasting no time on each iteration to emphatically transition into the cathartic choruses where the instrumentation is cranked up to eleven. Kurt Cobain belts out those long drawn out notes in ’em, and with all of that together he had made another “grunge” classic. Obviously, it’s never reached the heights of nearly everything that preceded on Nevermind, but those who know know just what a special song this is.

Plain and simply, it’s a about a very, very depressed person (most likely autobiographical) who drinks pennyroyal tea to at least try and somewhat numb the pain and carries out other mundane activities (listen to Leonard Cohen music, taking antacids and drinking warm milk). All of which really don’t help in any way and make the narrator feel even more sorry for themselves than they already do on a regular basis. After the last line in the last chorus is sung, the tempo slows and slows with Cobain quietly groaning with each cymbal crash as if each hit is slowly taking the life out of him. Pretty telling way to really get across the great exhaustion of the narrator in question. As it’s maybe agreed that it’s Cobain singing about himself, it really puts the whole song into perspective.

#1024: The Beatles – Penny Lane

1 Reply

I’m sure I’ve told this anecdote before, but it was seeing the videos for ‘Penny Lane’ along a few Beatle promos (‘Hey Bulldog’, ‘The Night Before’) that fully changed my mind about seeing what all this hype about the Beatles was. In fact, I am certain I have, because I dedicated a whole post to it in about 2014. To summarise that post, I wasn’t really sure about the Beatles before 2009, but then the Rock Band game came out alongside the remasters. VH1 had a timeslot dedicated to Beatles videos. ‘Penny Lane’ was one of them, and upon hearing the music and seeing the jovial chemistry between these four people on-screen – plus, the supposed agreement that this was the best band of all time – I sent myself into the void and ended up researching everything there was to know about the group.

‘Penny Lane’ is one of my favourite Beatles songs. Years after humming the track to myself on the way to school when I was 14, it still brings a happy feeling when those ringing bass notes mark the sudden introduction. But it’s not just for nostalgia’s sake that I appear to be clinging onto this one for some sort of support. Just in general, the track is executed to perfection. Paul McCartney wrote a song about a street in Liverpool he would frequently pass through as a kid, mirroring the same approach John Lennon took on for ‘Strawberry Fields Forever’. While that track became the experimental psychedelic exhibition, ‘Penny Lane’ was much straighter in approach whilst still maintaining a regal air about it with all the woodwinds and trumpets and other instrumentation that were more typical of an orchestra than a rock band.

As I said earlier, the music video played a big part in me wanting to find out more Beatles stuff. In the context of their careers, it was made at the point where the Beatles made it clear they weren’t going on tour anymore. The videos for ‘Strawberry Fields’ and ‘Penny Lane’ were also revealed after an extended break, in which people were wondering if the Beatles bubble had burst and they were heading for a split. They came back with moustaches and promo videos where they weren’t lipsyncing to the words or ‘playing’ their instruments. They make it most clear in this one in a very obvious manner. They ride past their instruments on their horses as if they are above them, to say ‘we’re not doing that stuff anymore’. When John Lennon starts saying “In Penny Lane” at 1:46, the camera switches to another scene as if to say ‘Nope. We don’t do that here.’ And when they are actually handed their instruments at the end, they pretend they have no idea what they are and start fiddling about with them, while Lennon flips a table over because he didn’t get his guitar. It’s a funny, little anti-music video, signifying that these boys were now men. Men with funny looking moustaches.

#1023: Blur – Peach

Leave a reply

This one’s a relatively new add to this long, long bunch. The track, alongside the rest of the Modern Life Is Rubbish 2012 special edition, has been in my iTunes library since 2013. But it wasn’t until a couple years ago that I properly paid attention to this particular number. I was snooping on the Blur subreddit and came across a thread which I think asked if any of the bandmembers had stated/mentioned their own personal favourite Blur songs. One response listed that guitarist Graham Coxon had once tweeted that ‘Peach’ was one of his along with a few others. Upon researching, I’ve found the tweet this was referencing. What better recommendation to give a song a shot than from the guitarist who actually played on it, right?

It hits immediately with the sharp tones of what I think of is a harmonium and a real woozy bassline, with a light acoustic guitar and percussion that certainly isn’t of the drum kit kind. So already it’s quite the oddity, but it’s intriguing from the get-go to say the least. The song’s lyrics are something I’ve haven’t quite grasped. As the songs seems to be fixating on this girl who seems kind of strange, sort of out there (“you’re always your way, you are”) but oddly attractive, I’ve come to think of it as a description of this lady being a bit of an airhead, or something of a free spirit. But I’ve also seen a few comments that really go for the dark side of things, judging by the line in the chorus where a ‘gaping hole’ in the head is mentioned and the “gun in your pocket” lyric. Supposedly, this narrator may have had their heart broken, commits suicide and literally shoots themselves, allowing the birds to feast on their brains. Two polar-opposite situations, here. Maybe this is a case that should be left unsolved.

The fact that it doesn’t sound adhere to the the usual rock band conventions is maybe a reason why it never made it onto the Modern Life… album in ’93, instead being released as a B-side on the ‘For Tomorrow’ single. Doesn’t much fit in with the British lifestyles theme that they had begun to delve into on there either. But hey, I’ve come to like it more than a few of the songs that did make the cut. It’s a mysterious dark horse of a track. Out of those three ‘Life trilogy’ albums, Modern Life… is my favourite. Covered a couple songs from it in the past. There are a few more still to come.

#1022: Animal Collective – Peacebone

Leave a reply

Animal Collective’s Strawberry Jam was the second of the group’s that I got round to listening to. It initially took a few goes with Merriweather Post Pavilion. But when that album finally clicked, it only made sense to find out what the band was really about by listening to what else they had offer. According to 18-year-old me who wrote the post on Strawberry Jam‘s closer ‘Derek’ back in the old times, that track and today’s track ‘Peacebone’, the album’s opener, ‘left a mark’. A bit of a vague remark there. I would say that meant that it left an impression of ‘Hell yeah, I’d listen to that again any time.’ I’ve always been the guy who always likes a bit of well-executed oddness in songs, and I think when I was 18, ‘Peacebone’ was that track falling under that category that I had been waiting to listen to for my whole life up to that point.

‘Bonefish’ is the first word you hear on the album before your suddenly smacked with the splattered wall of frizzling synthesizer sounds. That seems to last forever until the ‘bonefish’ sample is repeated to mark the entry of Panda Bear’s drums, which establish the bouncy, forceful rhythm the whole song relies upon. There’s something real cartoony about this one. The bounciness, the samples that come in and out of the frame at various points. The slidiness of the guitar chords in the pre-choruses. I could imagine a child going crazy to it, despite them having no idea who Animal Collective are or what the song’s about. But it would be rather fitting, seeing as the whole album has a running theme of nostalgia and the innocence and loss of childhood running through it. Maybe it was Avey Tare’s & co’s plan all along.

Speaking of Avey Tare, his vocals are absolutely mezmerizing here. Pitchfork’s review on the album made a note highlighting his performance with his cords throughout the album. But even if you didn’t go on to listen to the rest, it’s all on show here. The chorus has him leaping from his standard chest voice to a heady falsetto, which will in turn then be wiped away with this absolutely primal screams. Nothing will prepare you for that anxiety-inducing break where he’s yelling with sheer intensity. It’s absolute insanity. And then it just goes back into what’s the final verse as if nothing happened at all. Can’t say this track is boring, that’s for sure. Almost ten years on from that first experience with it and Strawberry Jam, but I still can’t resist the urge to wig out when this track gets going.

#1021: Interpol – PDA

Leave a reply

Oh, God, it’s my birthday. Hooray, hooray, hooray. 28 and still going on. A lot of people never made it this far. Very sure I had mu 18th birthday post on here. Might have to check that one out, see how I was doing. Actually, I’ll skip that – 2013 was a bit of an awkward one. Clinging onto what’s left of the 20s now, but probably feeling happier now than I have been in a long while. And that’s all that matters really, right? Personal well-being and all that. Anyway, let’s move on, let’s move on.

Eagle-eyed readers out there who might have a keen interest in Interpol and what I write on here may have noticed that I once wrote about ‘NYC’, and now I’m on ‘PDA’. So you may wonder, “Well, where was the post for ‘Obstacle 1’?” Answer is, I used to like that song quite a bit. But then it lost me along the way. ‘PDA’ though, is probably my favourite song from Turn on the Bright Lights, without question. Initially, I came across it by chance when its video showed up on MTV2 many years back. I had been accustomed to at least some of the band’s work at that point. Videos for ‘Evil’, ‘Slow Hands’ and the aforementioned ‘Obstacle 1’ were usual sights to see. As a result, ‘PDA’ was like a new track to me. But with the short attention span that I had as a kid, and the fact that TV speakers never do music justice anyway, I didn’t think much of it. But give the guy a few more years of life and some good headphones, and he exposes himself to broader horizons.

This track constantly feels like its pushing itself forward, constantly striding with this driving quality, and it all begins with the very first strike of the crash cymbal. After a few measures of the bustling drum introduction, the rest of the guitars join in – and every note/chord that’s struck is hit simultaneous alongside every beat happening on the kick drum, which also adds to this building tension. I think it’s agreed amongst the indie consensus that the rhythm section is the highlight in the majority of the album’s songs, particularly Carlos Dengler’s bass playing, and, my god, is there no better example of that aspect than on this song. Many times I’m humming and “ner-ner-ner”-ing to his bass and completely disregarding everything else. He starts and stops, climbs in scales and descends again, leaps to higher octaves, and all of this done in such a fluid manner. This was all from a person who stated that he disliked playing the instrument.

But even trying to pay attention to the lyrics is kinda difficult enough. They’re hard to break down, which I don’t mind too much, though listeners might think about what Paul Banks is even trying to convey in this. The title doesn’t appear in its lyrics, but it’s understood to stand for ‘Public Display of Affection’. So there’s something about love, or the ending of it, in there somewhere, buried deep within. What I like about it most though, is the flat, deadpan delivery that only reaches a peak during the choruses. Even then, it’s not much. But it just works. Also, a big hand goes out to the amazing outro, which I didn’t get to hear that first time because the music video used the radio edit of the song.