Tag Archives: keep

#690: Goldhawks – Keep the Fire

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Rewind to late 2009. I was lying in bed watching Friday Night with Jonathan Ross. Why that is I’m not sure, guess it was something to pass the time. He was about to interview Andre Agassi. Before that happened, a little montage played showing Agassi’s highlights as a tennis player. This exact montage actually. I thought the music that played matched the visuals perfectly and it sounded fantastic. I had to know what this song was and who it was by.

It took me months to find out. I thought it was Supergrass for a while, because the vocals sounded just like Gaz Coombes. I believe I sent an email to a Supergrass fansite asking if this was some exclusive new song the band had made. It wasn’t. Supergrass ended up splitting in 2010 anyway. So here was this great song by a new band that I could possibly get into and no one seemed to know who they were. Lyrics weren’t available online. You couldn’t download it. It took me months to find out who made this song. It started playing in football adverts and everything, it was very frustrating. It’s so long ago now I actually can’t remember how I finally found out who it was. I actually think it was on some forum somewhere after someone asked what song was playing in a particular advert. The response was more or less “The song’s called ‘Keep the Fire’ by Goldhawks’. And there it was.

The track is the third on the band’s only album Trick of Light, released in 2010. As you can assume from what I’ve read it’s the first song I ever heard by them. It was only the track’s chorus and its ending that played that night on that Jonathan Ross show, but I thought it was the best few seconds of a song I had heard in a long time. I’ve tried to describe the band’s sound in a suitable manner in a previous post. Listening to it more and more, it’s basically about trying to keep a relationship alive and flowing so thing’s don’t get so boring. Though I think its focal point is lead singer Bobby Cook’s vocals. He just sings it brilliantly. A lot of emotion, and very earnest.

A year and a bit after I initially heard the song, the band finally made a music video for it. You can see that at the top of the page. I was very disappointed in it. It definitely deserved better than what it got. They basically did a Pixies move. I definitely prefer to just listen to it and have my own visions in my head while it’s playing.

Anyway, you don’t hear much from Goldhawks now. That’s because the members no longer play together. This song’ll last forever though.

#689: Simon & Garfunkel – Keep the Customer Satisfied

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Heard Bridge over Troubled Water for the first time in 2013, I think. Not the song, but the full album. This was during a time when I was feeling down and should have been focusing on preparing for my A-Levels. But whilst studying for exams in subjects that I didn’t necessarily care for, I took the time to listen to a load of albums that are considered to be classics.

‘Keep the Customer Satisfied’ is the fourth track on Troubled Water, and is a sonically joyous song about being exhausted by the seemingly endless touring that Paul Simon experienced. The first verse is pretty self-explanatory. Simon feels good now that he’s home, and the chorus just explains that he’s just doing his job but still gets the occasional verbal abuse from people who don’t care for his music. He plays with the narrative in the second verse by singing about an altercation with a deputy sheriff who’s giving him hassle. This may or may not have happened to him in reality, though I think it’s just a scene that visualises some of the stress he felt at the time.

He and Art Garfunkel both sing the lead vocal in unison with their iconic harmonies included. The track is carried by a bass that flows all over the place, climbing and descending in scales and generally setting a driving tempo and rhythm. Things are taken to another level when that brass comes in. Initially arriving in a few short blasts, it’s in the little “whoa-oa-oa” section where those biting horns set up this astonishing wall of sound.

This has been a favourite of mine from the album for a long time now. Never hear people comment/discuss/talk about it that much. Though on an album that also has ‘The Boxer’, ‘The Only Living Boy in New York’ and its title track…. you can’t blame anyone.

#688: Tame Impala – Keep on Lying

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A five year wait for a new Tame Impala album ended last month when Kevin Parker gave the world The Slow Rush. I gave it a listen on Valentine’s Day (that’s the day it was released on). I’ve given it a few more since. And I have come to my conclusion that it just doesn’t hit the sweet spot for me. ‘It Might Be Time’ is probably my favourite song on there. As Parker moves towards his pop-oriented singer-songwriter , it felt like the whole album was missing a proper groove. There weren’t many interesting rhythms that were always so present on the preceding three albums.

The majority of the time, the bass guitar has been a major melodic element in Tame Impala songs. ‘The Less I Know the Better’ is a prime example where the instrument takes the centre stage. There are many others too. Some of which I’ve written about. ‘Keep on Lying’ is another in which the the rhythm section is just as, if not more interesting than the vocals and production that surrounds it.

Parker sings about being a terrible person who can’t stop lying to their other half, hiding important information and generally causing emotional distress. In the end, he’s left alone to face the truth that ‘it never really was love’. That is in the first minute and 45 seconds of the track. What follows for almost the duration is an instrumental passage led by a thick bassline, dueling guitar riffs, organ solos and keyboard vamps which are sometimes drowned out by sped-up and spun round clips of people having conversations. It gets crazier and crazier as the song goes on and on before a guitar suddenly starts freaking out at the four minute mark. And just when the track is about to close its first verse comes back in again, I guess to signify the repeating nature in which Parker will just continue to lie to the next lady he meets.

This song’s a jam. Not to say that Kevin Parker has to make another Lonerism. We already have one. It’s done. But, for me, if there weren moments that matched this music on The Slow Rush…. I would have enjoyed it more by a large margin.

#687: Weezer – Keep Fishin’

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So I completely forgot to do this yesterday. I was on my laptop almost all day too so I’m not sure how that happened. But we carry on, it’s nothing to get hung about.

Some time, I’ll say in about 2005, I was watching Kerrang! and the video for ‘Keep Fishin” came on. I would have been nine going on ten and I knew who the Muppets were. Weezer, not so much. But I thought the song was good and the video was good for comedy value too. YouTube was on the verge of being created, so the music video site I knew was the LAUNCH media site that was run by Yahoo! (If anyone remembers that who’s reading, you have my respect). I was able to watch a majority of my favourite videos on there. If they weren’t region-locked. But I remember showing ‘Keep Fishin’ to my good friend back in primary school and we would laugh and joke about what was going on. And through those repeated viewings I steadily began to appreciate that this was a great song. Good hook. Swinging rhythm and memorable melodies/vocal harmonies. That’s really all you need. And I think that was the first song by Weezer that I had ever heard.

Fifteen years on, I still care about Weezer a little. The Blue Album and Pinkerton are undisputed classics. The band’s last release that I was really into was The White Album, some great songs on that. Their new album’s due to be out in about May(?), if I remember correctly. I’ll listen, but I’m not counting down the days towards it or anythin’. Maladroit, the album that ‘Keep Fishin’ appears on, is all right. It saw the group return to a heavier/metal-influenced edge to their music after the relatively tame Green Album. That works well for some songs on there more than others. There are only a select few tracks on it that I’m into, ‘American Gigolo’ is one. ‘Dope Nose’ is another.

Listening to Maladroit for the first time, I was unsettled that the version of ‘Keep Fishin’ on there wasn’t quite the same as the one in the music video. It sounded a lot more rough, less sleek. Kinda messy in some aspects. Turned out that the band re-recorded the guitars, bass and drums for the single release. I’m sure that there are many people who prefer the album version to that of the single. I am not one of those people. So I’ll just clarify that it’s the single version of the track that I’ve grown accustomed to for the past fifteen years.

Here is that album version if you want to compare.

My iPod #161: They Might Be Giants – Can’t Keep Johnny Down

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Last post for today.

It was my sixteenth birthday when the details of They Might Be Giants’ forthcoming fifteenth album “Join Us” were released to the public on Pitchfork. I was so excited. A new They Might Be Giants album? What could be better? Only a link to the brand new single!

Yes, “Can’t Keep Johnny Down” was probably the first song in full that They Might Be Giants fans heard from “Join Us”. The band had been releasing ‘teaser’ videos of work in the studio, but this was the the moment that they had all been waiting for in 2011.

Although it did take a few listens for me to get into the swing of things, “Can’t Keep Johnny Down” was an appropriate choice of song for people to hear. Some may have been worried how the band would sound after they had released children’s albums in 2008 and 2009 with “The Else” being their last ‘adult’ album in 2007. This song proved that there was no need to be worried at all.

I did assume that it was autobiographical, probably just because it has the name “Johnny” in the title. As in “Johnny” Linnell or “Johnny” Flansburgh. But that was until they said that it was from the point of view of an ‘asshole’. Those are Linnell’s words, not mine.

The band then commenced the biggest fan contest to have ever existed. That was to create their own video for the song, and whoever won it received a cash prize. The winner was the entry above.

Jamie.