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#1364: Billy Talent – This Is How It Goes

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Christmas Day 2006 was when I received both the first Billy Talent album and Billy Talent II as gifts. I was very happy. My experience with the band’s debut album was either through listening to 30-second samples of its songs on a site called artistdirect.com – which no longer exists – or hearing one of them on the rare occasion it played on the Launch.com radio service. But now I had the whole package in my hands. I think it might have been the enhanced CD, a video player that when on to show a little EPK came onto the screen when I popped the disc into the computer. There’s still a couple songs left to write about from Billy Talent, but I’ll say now that I still consider this one of my favourite albums ever, I know almost every word on it from front to back. Lot of angst and anger, a lot of screaming, it could easily be slotted as one of those “It’s not a phase, Mom” albums. But I can put it on today and just let it roll to its end. It goes in… so hard.

‘This Is How It Goes’ is the very first song. The band introduces themselves one-by-one, Ian D’Sa on the guitar, Aaron Solowoniuk with the hi-hats – being the drummer and all – and Jon Gallant’s bass line before leaping into the killer riff that leaps all over the guitar neck, which eventually goes on to play underneath the upcoming choruses. I’m a fan of Ben Kowalewicz’s vocals. A common complaint I’d usually witness from roaming around online back in the day was how grating some people found his voice to be. And to be fair, I could probably see where they’re coming from. But I couldn’t imagine any other tone than the high-pitched, bratty kind he has while delivering the lyrics on this track. He sings, with Ian D’Sa harmonising on certain phrases, before abruptly launching into the screaming tirade that makes up the chorus, everyone in the band comes in together, increasing the intensity with the aforementioned riff playing underneath. A freakin’ juggernaut of energy, such a great way to open up a whole discography, let alone one album.

One thing I found out as soon as I got into ‘…How It Goes’ was how it was written about drummer Aaron Solowoniuk and his battle with multiple sclerosis. He’s very rarely plays the drums with the band in a live setting now and didn’t on their last two albums due to MS relapse in 2016. While the track doesn’t specifically detail Solowoniuk’s experiences, it’s written to give a general sense of how much a burden it could be to live with the illness. Frustration, self-doubt, irritation. All captured in these three-and-a-half minutes. The band had the track in the works when they originally went under the name Pezz. I want to say I read some kind of interview or article where one bandmember said that once they had got this song down, it pretty much set the direction truly wanted to take their music – more toward a darker and brooding energy rather than the lighter and maybe less focused style they had exhibited on their Watoosh! album. I say “maybe” ’cause I like that album too and don’t see it as less focused at all. But it’s fair to say Pezz became Billy Talent when the four of them came up with this song right here.

#1271: Billy Talent – Standing in the Rain

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Back in the days of 2005, Billy Talent’s official website used to look like this. Two years after the release of their debut album, the design was still very much focused on that era. And the example I provide was the page that came up if you didn’t have Flash installed. Now that Flash is busy not existing anymore, not even Archive can go further than that. But I can tell you that when Flash was the thing to have, you were able to watch the band’s music videos, either through Quicktime or Windows Media, catch up on the latest news regarding the group, and listen to three of the songs from the debut album as a kind of preview through an integrated music player on the homepage. I want to say one was ‘Try Honesty’, another was ‘Line & Sinker’, and the third was ‘Standing in the Rain’. So I knew that one almost by heart before I had the album for myself.

‘Standing in the Rain’ is the eighth number on Billy Talent, a bleak one about the struggles of a prostitute. Not sure there’s much to pick apart in my opinion, because the lyrics are very much what-you-see-is-what-you-get. Ben Kowalewicz sings from the point of view of a woman of the night, or man, you don’t know, the gender’s never revealed in the words, detailing their misery. An annotation on Genius says the track was inspired by the Pig Farm murders carried out by Canadian serial killer Robert Pickton. I can’t find any other source by the band that corroborates this interpretation. It may very well be true. Maybe Kowalewicz and guitarist Ian D’Sa were just inspired to write about prostitution and thought it would be interesting to cover it from the prostitute’s point of view. I’d like to think it was just that. You can’t believe everything you see on those lyrics sites.

Just a solid, solid performance throughout by the band. D’Sa very much plays a strong rhythm guitar on this one rather than doing the simultaneous lead/rhythm guitar playing he carries out on the vast majority of the record. But the chord choices and progressions are still as strong. A lot of the attention, I think, may probably be directed to the harmonies and general singing carried out by D’Sa and Kowalewicz. They sing in unison for the pre-chorus, before the former goes to the higher harmony for the actual chorus. And then in the break, D’Sa takes the lead for a brief second before Kowalewicz joins in and the rest of the band crash in together for the song’s closing moments. On a personal note, I’ve always thought the mixing of the cymbals sounded a little strange during the opening. I know they were recorded separately from the actual drumkit during production, but I don’t know what it is. Anyone else can agree or disagree. But if you can at least get what I’m on about, I’ll be plenty happy.

#1128: Billy Talent – River Below

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Ah, the very first song I ever heard by Billy Talent. I can sort of remember it like it happened a few weeks ago. I want to say it was late 2003, but Wikipedia says the track was released as a single in the summer of 2004, so it couldn’t have been. I know I was in Year 4 at the time, so those two years check out. I was watching MTV2 as per usual, its video showed up, and I genuinely thought it was the greatest song I had ever heard. If this did happen in 2004 – which thinking about it now, it probably did – I was just about getting into rock music as a whole, spurred on by a huge liking for The Darkness. ‘River Below’ showed up on whatever day it was, the guitar riff was killer, I thought the chorus was amazing, it was unlike any other type of song I’d come across. Take into account I was either eight or nine, so cut me some slack.

The song was awesome. But because I was so young, I didn’t have the attention span to properly absorb the artist/song name when they appeared on the little banner that popped up near the end of the video. And for more than a year, I was left wondering what the name of that cool song I saw on MTV2 that one time was. “Into the river below/Running from the inferno….” – I could have sworn I typed those words into Google and nothing would ever come up. It was an itch that desperately needed to be scratched. Eventually I did find it. Someone decided to use it as the music for their Ed, Edd ‘n’ Eddy music video, which had been uploaded on a fansite dedicated to the cartoon. That show is one of the most underappreciated of its kind, by the way. The search was over. The song was just as I remembered. And that started my obsession with Billy Talent, as I went to their website, listened to the songs they allowed to be played in full on there + the music videos and found that I had a new favourite band on my hands. A strong following of the band that would last for many a year started via this very song.

And with all the personal stuff out the way, let’s put a little more focus on the subject at hand. The track’s lyrics describe a man who’s a little messed up in the head, has never been able to fit in and generally feels the world’s against him. He makes a bomb, planning to take himself out and other innocent people in the process, taking them into ‘the river below’ upon their quick and sudden deaths. It’s a nasty subject matter and a bit of a commentary/take on the same types of people who commit devastating acts of terror for news recognition, using situations like Columbine, the ’95 Oklahoma Bombing and the then-recent 2002 sniper attacks in Washington D.C. as inspiration. Like a lot of Billy Talent songs, Ian D’Sa’s guitar playing is very much the highlight throughout, playing licks and guitar phrases that sound like the work of two people. There’s a call/response dynamic going on through the verses. D’Sa and bassist John Gallant are the callers with lead vocalist Ben Kowalewicz retorting. There’s the cool pre-chorus, again with D’Sa’s unique chord progressions, and it falls into the almighty chorus, which I think is one of the best in the band’s catalogue. There are a lot of songs in this style that I used to like but wouldn’t think of listening to in these times. But 20 years on, ‘River Below’ is still one-of-a-damn kind. Just as good as I first remembered, then forgot, then found again.

#1064: Billy Talent – Prisoners of Today

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When I got the first Billy Talent album as a Christmas gift in ’06, or somewhere around that time, I was already well-acquainted with the majority of it. After having rediscovered the group after a chance encounter online, that’s a story for another post, I spent what I assume would have been almost a year listening to 30-second samples of the tracks on there on this website called Artistdirect.com. Back in 2004/05, YouTube wasn’t existing and sites like this were the things I had to resort to to hear just a glimpse of the music I wanted to own without having to pay for it. Songs like ‘Cut the Curtains’ and ‘Lies’ for example, I remember vividly listening to those clips, wishing I could hear the full thing. The band had the music videos for their singles on their own website. ‘Line & Sinker’ and ‘Standing in the Rain’ were able to be played in full on there too.

But when it comes to ‘Prisoners of Today’… well, I can’t remember this track ever being one of those tracks that I sought out to hear the sample for. And to this day, I’m not sure why that is. So it was really like hearing a brand new song when it came ’round for its time to be played when I popped that CD into my computer for the first instance. ‘Course now it’s like water off a duck’s back whenever it arrives on shuffle in the playlist. But it was a bit of an outlier to me for quite a while. That’s enough for the me, me, personal angle. I’m trying to get you to want to listen to these songs at the end of the day. If you’re familiar with Billy Talent’s earlier work, then the song’s not so much different from what you’d expect. Overall a pummeling punk rock performance, propelled by the driving rhythm section of Jon Gallant (bass guitar) and Aaron Solonwoniuk (drums) and heightened by the fantastic guitar work of Ian D’Sa, whose playing I’ve made sure to comment on every time I’ve written a post about a song from this album. Still amazes me to this down how he’s able to play those lines so smoothly and yet with such energy and urgency.

The track concerns being unhappy with the 9 to 5, five day of work/two days of play routine that the majority of the world has to go through for all of our lives, and acts as a reminder to use our initiative and conjure up the motivation to change our ways of living and not feel like we’re being held captive by the seemingly restrictive layout of everyday life. The two verses appear to be from the points of view of two people, or maybe it’s one in both, who have these wishes they want to fulfill but are let down by their own lack of courage or general bleak outlook on life, so much so that they just don’t bother in taking the steps to pursue what they truly want. This track I believe is in a minor key, so you know automatically that there’s sort of something sad about it, but with the furious pace that everything’s delivered, I also think it gives a feeling of ‘Well, if you feel sad, then stop feeling sorry for yourself and do something, ya bum.’ Ben Kowalewicz builds up into a full-throttle scream alongside D’Sa and Gallant’s backing vocals at the rushing finish, really signifying that pent-up frustration the song suggests, and it’s a moment like that which makes me wonder why it took me so long to warm up to this one.

#950: Billy Talent – Nothing to Lose

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I’ve done something here that I don’t think I’ve done on here before and that’s put a video of bandmembers discussing a song’s background at the beginning of a post, rather than the music video itself or one of those custom official ones with the album track and cover. I’ve never thought that Billy Talent were one of those bands to be lumped in with those bands that everyone labelled as emo in the 2000s. My Chemical Romance, Fall Out Boy, The Used, you know the ones. But when you hear a song like ‘Nothing to Lose’ and realise the track is about suicide, someone might feel the urge to just yell “Emo” and disregard it entirely. Actually hearing the context the track was based on and hearing about how much it has meant to fans in the years that have passed will hopefully warm your hearts to it. Even if it means skipping the next couple paragraphs to watch the official video.

‘Nothing to Lose’ was released as the final single from Billy Talent’s first album, more than a year after the record had been released. It’s also the second to last song on there, and thank goodness for that because it would have been too much of a downer to end things on. If you didn’t watch the video above, the song was written after lead singer Ben Kowalewicz read a story about a boy in high school who was continuously bullied at school. After a kid asked that boy, “Why don’t you just kill yourself,” the boy went home at lunch period and hung himself in his basement. And so the track is an attempt to take on the first-person view of that boy, or anyone who was generally in the same situation. There’s practically no introduction. Just on straight away with Ben’s vocals and Ian D’Sa’s guitar. And with the first verse describing how alone the narrator feels and the chorus further detailing how if the narrator ends their life, nothing lost because no one cared about them, there’s only one way this song is going to go.

So, yes, the song’s about suicide and bullying and the horrible things a teenager can go through in high school when it really gets to that horrible level. But what I’ve always thought sets it aside from all of those other songs that are about those very things is just how damn passionate it is. Some might find Kowalewicz’s vocals grating, I’m sure I’ve read a few reviews who can’t help but mention their opinion on them, but you can’t say that he doesn’t sound like he cares. And when he’s screaming from his chest during the final choruses, I can’t help but feel those goosebumps. I barely like songs that have screaming in them anymore, but when the final choruses hit here I always nod my head gently and really feel it, you know? It’s very powerful. And plus I’ve got to give a nod to Ian D’Sa’s guitar playing as I do in every Billy Talent post. I can’t help it, his style’s consistently awesome. Just the chords he chooses and the way he plays them, there’s a lot to keep you engaged.