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#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.

#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.

#1231: Nine Black Alps – So in Love

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Although I wished it wasn’t the case, I remember being slightly disappointed by Nine Black Alps’ Love/Hate album. Their debut Everything Is was and is so great. The power and energy from the songs on there was off the scale. The 12-year-old me in late 2007 was expecting the same when the band’s sophomore album came around. That wasn’t to be the case though. There was less power and more of a focus on the musicality and the melodies with a rougher recording style too. The songs didn’t leave much of an effect on me, except ‘Forget My Name’ which I’ve written about before. I ripped it to my iTunes library, though. Could always have another listen one day.

And years later I did. I can’t remember what year exactly. I’m sure it would have been after the band released their third album. Maybe even their fourth. But it was on that re-listen that ‘So in Love’, the ninth song on Love/Hate suddenly sprang out to me. That particular track is the shortest one on the album, a sharp shock lasting for just over two minutes. It’s led by an ugly-sounding riff that’s more Nirvana than anything they did on the first album, as Sam Forrest alternates between softly singing and harshly yelling about the chokehold being in love can have on a person. Or at least that’s what I get from listening and looking at the lyrics.

‘Burn Faster’ was the first single to be released in the lead-up to Love/Hate. If you listen to that song, you can probably tell why. But I like to imagine a world where ‘So in love’ was that first piece of new music Nine Black Alps provided after those couple years of waiting. It’s really nothing like anything on Love/Hate and is a bit of a ‘What the fuck’ moment as a result, but it still has those melodic hooks than can win you over. The “Try to get out, try to get out” choruses sound so ’90s and are fun to sing along too, there’s a use of two-part harmonies during the verses that they never did on their first album. The whole track gives a huge rush that is sorely missing throughout the whole record. A lot of the B-sides from this era of the band probably could have been on here instead. There’s one in particular that will come around on here soon.

#1227: They Might Be Giants – Snowball in Hell

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They Might Be Giants’ ‘Snowball in Hell’ from Lincoln is a number that I remember liking almost immediately after listening through that album for the first time sometime in 2010. I had actually heard the track years before when I was an actual kid who had just got broadband in the house and was checking out this Internet radio station on a place called LAUNCH, owned by Yahoo!. Before YouTube existed, if you wanted to listen to music and watch music videos, that site was the place to go. It’s thanks to that site that I have any idea who They Might Be Giants are. ‘Snowball in Hell’ played on a station one day. Being the, I think, 8-year old I was, I promptly forgot about it. Short attention span.

But hearing it again all those years later, in context with the album and fully paying attention, it felt like a song I properly knew and had been listening to for years up to that point. There was a warmth and familiar feeling to it proceedings, it felt like a given that it would be one of my favourite songs on the album. The track revolves around this two-note doorbell “ding-dong” melody, over which John Flansburgh sings about being in a less than ideal situation spurred on financial troubles. He sings with much sincerity, backed by harmonies from John Linnell, incorporating wordplay and lyrical twists that result in a few of the band’s most memorable and devastating lyrics. “Money’s all broke and food’s going hungry”. That’s a good one. “If it wasn’t for disappointment, I wouldn’t have any appointments”. That’s a great one.

The song is also notable for the breakdown, over which dialogue taken from a how-to-organize-yourself cassette plays. Given to him by album producer Bill Krauss for his 25th birthday, Flansburgh went on to find that the tape didn’t contain much in the way of advice. But he, Krauss and Linnell all found it interesting enough to let it have its own little snippet in ‘Snowball’. Permission wasn’t asked to use it. No one’s threatened to sue. And its inclusion goes down as one of many memorable moments in TMBG’s discography. Back in June, a cassette of rough mixes from the Lincoln sessions was found in the archives of a university in Canada, and a work-in-progress ‘Snowball in Hell’ was found on it. As you can tell, the mix is a bit different. The acoustic guitar is given more prominence, a different model drum machine is present and more snippets from the self-help cassette are used. It’s the same song in essence, but sometimes I prefer this rough mix to what ended up on the album. It’s certainly a different approach. All the more happy to know it exists.

#1187: The Beatles – She Came in Through the Bathroom Window

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Well, this track comes as a bit of a weird one to talk about. It’s The Beatles. ‘She Came in Through the Bathroom Window’ is from Abbey Road. Everyone likes that album. When I think about it, it’s not the one I return to when I want to hear a Beatles album in full. That would probably go to Revolver or Rubber Soul or something. But I won’t argue that it has some of the band’s best songs on there. ‘She Came in…’ is a part of the medley that makes up the majority of Abbey Road‘s second half, kinda closing out its first part, and was performed in one take alongside ‘Polythene Pam’ whose closing solo segues right into the introduction.

For the longest time I looked at the medley with a bit of a side-eye. Blasphemous to say, I know. This was the masterstroke that marked the ending of the Beatles’ recording career. But seeing as it was made up of tunes that John Lennon and Paul McCartney had in the can going back to 1968, the album was released in Autumn 1969, I used to see it as the guys sort of scraping the bottom of the barrel for material and shmushing them together. Although I appreciate it a lot more these days, I do usually have that feeling lurking in the back of my mind. As a result, I like some of the parts more than the whole. And I can’t say that I have a deep, deep connection with this particular tune other than I found myself singing it to myself whenever I was out shopping or in the shower. If I was singing it in those situations, that probably means I’ve liked it somewhere along the line.

‘She Came in…’ was inspired by a real-life incident where a fan broke into Paul McCartney’s London home, literally through the bathroom window while he was out. The parts about being ‘protected by a silver spoon’ and sucking her thumb ‘by the banks of her own lagoon’ I have no idea about. Only McCartney could tell you if he asked him. But being a grandmaster of melody that he is, he makes the whole two minutes the song goes on for sound rather good. I guess he just let his imagination run wild about this particular person, wondering what she does as a job and what her aspirations may be. It’s all a bit up in the air, this one, regarding the lyrics. But regarding the harmonies, the backing vocals, Harrison’s guitar licks, the sort of half-time tempo McCartney’s bass takes for the second verse. That’s all good, good stuff. One of my highlights out of the so-called ‘Long One’.