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#1355: The Who – They Are All in Love

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This marks another instance that an album will be represented for the last time on here too. I’ve covered three tracks from The Who by Numbers before, and the presence of ‘They Are All in Love’ today makes it the fourth and final one. Only a third of the album, if my calculations are correct. But even though I may only find that fraction of the record enjoyable to a degree that I’d want to hear it over and over, I’d listen to the thing the whole way through if someone, anyone, out there were to put it on. The lyrical themes are a bit of a downer. It wasn’t labelled ‘Pete Townshend’s suicide note’ by a critic just for show. But if you just want a good rock album with no constructed concept and strong performances, …by Numbers isn’t a bad shout. Out of all those old ’70s rock bands to exist, you may as well go to The Who if that’s the particular type of record you’re looking for. They don’t do too bad on the concept side either.

I remember really not rating ‘They Are All in Love’ when I went through …by Numbers the first time in about 2012 or so. The waltz timing and the dainty piano among everything else on the album made it stick out like a sore thumb. Made it difficult for me to take it seriously, so I never gave it that much attention. But as the years have gone on and I’ve relistened here and there, I’m at the point now where I’ve realised that the tune is essential to the themes of frustration and irrelevancy that thread through the album. When John Entwistle’s half-joking take on getting into the music business with ‘Success Story’ is finished, we zip back to Pete Townshend’s problems with ‘…in Love’. He finds himself being the outsider to pretty much everything that surrounds him and succumbs to his feelings of irrelevancy as he becomes the old man – at the age of 30 – in the young man’s game of rock and roll. When he writes (and Roger Daltrey sings) “Where do you walk on sunny times” or “Where do you fit in (blows raspberry) magazine”, he’s really asking himself “Where do I etc etc.” As a writer, you’ve got to address the audience in some way, and with the second-person narrative, he does easily. But it makes it the more hard-hitting when he switches to first-person in the final verse with the lines, “Goodbye all you punks, stay young and stay high / Hand me my chequebook and I’ll crawl off to die.” It’s a sucker punch.

So who’s the ‘They’ that are in love as the harmonies so delicately lay out in the choruses? To me, I don’t think it matters. ‘They’ could be anyone. The main implication from the lyric is that while everyone else is in love, Townshend on the other hand, isn’t, with anyone or anything. And no one’s loving him either. A downer, to say the least. And this carries on until the album’s end where he tries to force himself into liking the simple things in life while feeling like rubbish (‘Blue, Red and Grey’) and contemplates who he can really trust in his personal life (‘How Many Friends’) to the point where he flat out states he’s lacking direction (‘In a Hand or a Face’). Might be one of the most overlooked streaks on a Who album, those last four tracks on …by Numbers. So it goes to show the 17-year-old I was in 2012, underneath the unserious-sounding music lay a strong song that was actually very serious in its lyrics. The sprightly piano on here is easily the highlight, brought to you everyone’s go-to session musician Nicky Hopkins. He carries everything with those fingers.

#1335: Queens of the Stone Age – Tangled Up in Plaid

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Lullabies to Paralyze. An album that very much could have been Songs for the Deaf 2 very easily. But thankfully Josh Homme was very much against that idea, and made a rougher-around-the-edges collection of songs with his bandmates that all had a creepy tone linking them together. It’s been a while since I’ve listened to the whole thing myself. But what I would like to put out for certain is my notion that the run on the LP from its third song ‘Everybody Knows That You Are Insane’ to the seventh in ‘Little Sister’ is one of the greatest in the band’s entire discography. A very underestimated run, though, because of the album it’s on. It may start earlier or end later for some people. That’s just my opinion. Also in that selection of numbers is ‘Burn the Witch’, ‘In My Head’, and today’s subject of analysis: ‘Tangled Up in Plaid’ – the fourth track in the album’s listing.

I’ve always thought that ‘Tangled Up…’ could have been a single. At least to me, it has everything I’d assume makes a record label person go, “Yep, that’s one to release to the masses,” or whatever those types of people would say whenever they’re getting a single ready. The first chorus doesn’t come in until two minutes in, I guess. Not that it should matter all that much. Just that more people would know about the song as a result. The tone’s set with these plinking piano notes, snare drum strikes and haunting guitar wails, the kind of incidental music you’d hear in a film where someone’s going down a dark, haunted hallway or something. I get a musical kind of vibe from that introduction too, feels like something you’d hear on a Broadway stage. But then the guitars come in and completely negate that whole sentiment. Homme completely owns the track vocal-wise, he’s got that almost-Elvis tone going on again – singing those high chest notes, going into the ghostly falsettos and then belting out the notes again through some kind of fuzz effect for the choruses. Very enjoyable on that front.

Doing these posts gives me a chance to actually think about what these songs are about. I’m too busy singing along to them you see, I’m very much like the guy Kurt Cobain describes in ‘In Bloom’. From the chorus alone, I went ahead to think that it was sung from this overprotective narrator in a relationship, who realizes their flaws and tries to ease up on their overbearing nature. The whole “I know you gotta be free” bit. But looking into it more, it looks as if it’s the ‘other’ in this situation rather than the narrator who’s the destructive one. What I never thought before, after looking up some theories online, is how this whole song may potentially be about former bandmate Nick Oliveri, who was fired from the band before work on Lullabies… got started. Definitely puts a new perspective on things. But I’m sure I’ll enjoy the whole package all the same. It’s that swinging feel the track possesses, it takes me away every time.

#1299: The Darkness – Stuck in a Rut

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And with this track right here, the end of The Darkness appearing on this blog is marked. We had a good run. There’s a small chance you’d have realised that all the songs by the band I’ve given my thoughts about are all from their 2003 debut album Permission to Land. That’s because I, at least, still have an amazing time listening through it. Plus, I’ve had it since I was eight or nine and the sentimental value’s very high. I’ve said in passing that The Darkness got me into rock music, and it’s the truth. That whole Permission to Land era… Songs like ‘I Believe in a Thing Called Love’, ‘Love Is Only a Feeling’, ‘Christmas Time (Don’t Let the Bells End)’. If it weren’t for them, I’d probably be casually listening to the UK Top 40. So thank God for The Darkness, honestly.

‘Stuck in a Rut’ is the seventh song on Permission to Land, starting on-beat straight after the song before it finishes. I have a good memory of listening to this one on my Playstation 2 a long, long time ago. Years later, I returned to it and found that the melody of the chorus had never left my head. The track is about a burning desire to get in a car of any kind and leave your hometown without looking back. Three of the original members of the band are from Lowestoft, a coastal town in the Southeast of England. I’ve never been there myself, but as Justin Hawkins refers to it as a ‘shithole’ and a ‘sty’, the negative reception doesn’t provide an incentive to go and visit. “Oh, kiss my arse, kiss my arse goodbye” is still a hilarious opening line to me, even though it’s meant in all seriousness. Hawkins uses the American pronunciation of “aluminium” in it too, which confused me when I was younger, but I can understand now because of the syllable numbers. And like all the other songs on the LP, he delivers his vocals with that trademark falsetto and high pitch that you could only imitate and never replicate.

Something I’ve noticed about this song is how much rawer in terms of production it sounds in comparison to the rest of the songs on Permission… While tracks like ‘Growing on Me’ or ‘Friday Night’ have these “big”, layered guitar elements to them. ‘…Rut’, on the other hand, sounds like it was a one-take performance captured live in the studio. The mix overall sounds a lot more closed in than usual, almost as if they’re playing in a small room. If that’s the case, I think it makes the track all that more impressive, especially when considering Hawkins’s vocal performance. Of course, there’s the high pitches and everything. But then there’s the insanity he captures in that adlibbed bridge where he begs his master to kill him, and the last “Yeah” in the song that faultlessly breaks into a whistle tone. It’s awesome, awesome stuff. A deep cut that’s always worth a listen. To me. But it could be to you as well.

#1298: U2 – Stuck in a Moment You Can’t Get Out Of

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1,298 songs in, and we reach the first U2 song. It’ll be the only one, though, sorry. There are people out there who despise the band, mostly because they don’t like Bono. Me? I don’t have anything massive against them. I’m neither here nor there. I can’t say I’m the biggest fan. But they do have some fine, fine songs. When I really started getting into alternative/rock music in about 2004, it was during a time when the video for ‘Vertigo’ was playing almost every day on MTV2. The How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb era. And nine-year-old me thought it was a cool song. So I can sort of thank U2 for getting me into the genre a little more. But today’s song isn’t from that era of the band. It’s from the one that preceded it a good four years earlier. In 2000, U2 returned from an experimental phase during the ’90s with a back-to-basics rock album in All That You Can’t Leave Behind, and ‘Stuck in a Moment You Can’t Get Out Of’ – the second song on there – was released as its second single in 2001.

And this is one of those occasions where I have a clear, clear memory of seeing its music video on TV during that time, even though I would have only been five years old. It was playing on The Box, which was kinda the mainstream UK pop music video channel of the time, and there was Bono on the TV screen rolling around on the floor over and over again. And because I was a child and still had years until my voice dropped, whenever I tried to sing, “Stuck in a moment and you can’t get out of it,” that “can’t get out of it” part was too low for my register. I didn’t have the diaphragm for it yet. For the longest time, in the back of my mind, I thought that if I was able to sing that phrase, it must have meant that the process of puberty had finally happened. I can gladly say at the age of 30, I can sing along to the track just fine. It wasn’t until a few years back that I revisited the song, gave it a few more listens with that core memory flashing in the brain and realized that I liked it a bunch.

Think it’s common knowledge that the track was written as a tribute to Michael Hutchence, a good friend of Bono’s, who was famously known for being the original lead singer for the rock band INXS. Hutchence passed away in 1997 through suicide, the action of which is kind of alluded to by Bono in the song’s bridge (“I was unconscious, half asleep” / “I wasn’t jumping, for me it was a fall” / “It’s a long way down to nothing at all”). Bono, saddened by what happened, wrote ‘Stuck in a Moment…’ as a things-he-wished-he-could-have-said song. He expresses his admiration for Hutchence and is still effected by him even with absence, but wishes he could have told him that whatever tough times he was going through, they would eventually pass and there was no need to feel so down. Guitarist The Edge also gets a moment on the lead vocal near the song’s end with the falsetto on the “And if the night runs over…” section. Though funnily, it gets pushed back into the mix to make way for Bono’s adlibbing. I like this one a lot. A track that reminds you to reach out to your friends in times of trouble. Or just on a frequent basis. ‘Cause you never know what could be happening.

#1287: Stephen Malkmus and the Jicks – Stick Figures in Love

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The tale of how I came to know Stephen Malkmus and the Jicks’ 2011 album Mirror Traffic is one that I think I told quite well and hopefully with some clarity, when I wrote about other song ‘Senator’ a few months back. Without trying to repeat myself, I’ll just say the record made those first few months of my fresher year in university that little more enjoyable whenever I was in those moments of solitude in my room in the student flat. Can’t say I took in the whole package, I think, even at 18, I was still adjusting to really focusing on albums and listening to them in one sitting. But songs like the aforementioned ‘Senator’, ‘Fall Away’, the first track ‘Tigers’ – which will get its due on here one day – and the seventh song, today’s feature, ‘Stick Figures in Love’ were instantaneous likes on my part, from what I can recall.

I go on Spotify and I see ‘Stick Figures…’ being the most popular song on there, at least at the time of writing this, with a little over 3.2 million plays. Just over two million more than the next one. It was released as a promotional single for the album in 2012, but it’s not like it hit the airwaves and played constantly. Didn’t make it into the charts. So I can only put the popularity down to the immediate appeal initiated by the opening guitar riff. Straight out of the gate, Malkmus lays down a lead guitar passage that soars and gallops – changing up the delivery as the basic rhythm underneath goes on for an extra measure or something. This riff comes back at regular intervals, sort of acting as an instrumental chorus of the track. Choruses are meant to be the most memorable parts of a song, right? From how I’ve come to know music, anyway. And that’s certainly the case for the guitar solo ‘Stick Figures in Love’ revolves around.

And then in between those, Malkmus sings some verses. ‘Cause you’ve got to have verses at some point. When I sing along and decipher what Malkmus is relaying to us, I come to find quickly that they seem to make a lot of concrete sense. Or at least there’s no sort of cohesive thread from line to line. I am a fan of the verses here, Malkmus delivers them all lightly and softly. He increases the intensity of his vocal for the third and final one, though. He corpses during the last line of the first verse, which I think is cool that was left in the final product. But I do get a feeling that those parts are meant to keep us listeners occupied before the thrilling guitar riff comes in again. All that being said, this one’s still a major highlight from Mirror Traffic. The title doesn’t appear in the lyrics. I’ve only recently thought of it as a way of saying “Skinny people in love.” I feel like there can be a comparison there. Malkmus isn’t the thickest of human beings, so maybe it’s a love song in his own way. That’s as far as I’m prepared to go in terms of interpretation.