Tag Archives: late

#1177: Dananananaykroyd – Seven Days Late

After having known Dananananaykroyd’s second and final album There Is a Way for 13 years, listening to it since near the day it was released in 2011 and becoming very familiar to every song on there in the process, I made the decision to buy it outright and get a physical copy back in January. It wasn’t cheap. Almost £20, it was. But I knew the music was good, so it was worth it. A lot of things became clear once the copy came in the mail and I opened those liner notes up. For one, I’d been singing along to the majority of the tracks on there, completely differently to how they were originally written. And two, almost all of the music was written by guitarist David Roy and, bar three songs, the lyrics were covered by John Baillie Jnr, who’d been more of the backing vocalist on the band’s previous album while mainly acting as the second drummer. I guess that’s why those two stuck together in a new band when the ‘Kroyd split up a few months after the album’s initial release.

I’ve gone on a bit of a tangent there. Let’s take it back to the point about singing the wrong words. Yeah, that’s what I’d been doing all this time. ‘Seven Days Late’ is a track on the album where there’s a lot of shouting involved. And being the people of Glasgow they are, they were unapologetically Scottish in the way they enunciated their lyrics. It’s an endearing quality. I could only mimic what I could understand, apart from those phrases where it was very clear what was being said. ‘Seven Days…’ is the most intense song on the album. I remember being sort of blown away by Bailie Jnr’s scream at about 2:20 when I first heard it. Bear in mind, I was 16. But there was nothing from Hey Everyone! that made me think they had that kind of scream in them. Really from the chest, sounded truly pissed off. And I’m sure the whole song is simply about someone deciding to stay in a room somewhere and do nothing until their mum and sister comes to take them away.

Thinking about it, there should be no reason why a simple subject like that should be matched with such ferocity and urgency in the music. And if it does, you’d think it probably wouldn’t work out too well. But that’s exactly what goes on here and, in contrast to what I stated in the last sentence, it works out very well indeed. This track makes me damn-near want to punch a wall. Multiple times or something. That’s sometimes what it has to come down to. There’s a frustration and tension that builds and builds throughout, and when the track leaves you hanging when things pause for a brief second near the end, those anxious feelings are beautifully alleviated by the final chord where the band members breathe an almighty sigh of relief – like sitting in a nice, warm bath after a tiring day. It’s such a good moment, I get goosebumps every time.

#715: Supergrass – Late in the Day

‘Late in the Day’ can be found on Supergrass’ second album In It for the Money. That specific album by the band is my favourite of theirs, though I wouldn’t say ‘Late in the Day’ is a song that I’ve wanted to put on repeat. It is always a nice feeling when it pops up on shuffle though. Someone at the band’s record label saw it as commercially viable and it was released as the last single from the album in late 1997.

The song itself is about having a special someone on your mind and constantly thinking about them. It happens that ‘late in the day’ is the time when this seems to happen for singer Gaz Coombes. In comparison to the other singles from Money, ‘Late in the Day’ is mainly led by the keyboard work of Rob Coombes. His playing provides the chord progression of the track, while also adding atmospheric touches like the organ during the verses and the whistling tones during the instrumental bridge. Danny Goffey’s drumming provides a hop/skipping rhythm to the composition, which I’m thinking inspired the pogo-stick heavy plot of the music video. I don’t know what else in the song could have influenced the video directors behind it. It’s a great watch though, captivating in its own way.

Can’t feel bad after listening to this one. Good for a lazy summer day or two.

#714: Kanye West – Late

Coming in right at the end of Late Registration is the album’s (almost) title track ‘Late’. Back in 2005 when the CD was the way to listen to new music, you would have no clue that the song was on the album until you popped the disc into your computer due to it not being mentioned on the album art. So after the single version of ‘Diamonds from Sierra Leone’ finishes – or ‘We Can Make It Better’ for people in the UK – a sudden rush of violins and other instruments of the like fill your ears to introduce this hidden track.

Featuring Kanye’s then iconic sampling method of taking soul classics and making them high pitched, he takes the track ‘I’ll Erase Away Your Pain’ by the Whatnauts and manipulates it in a way to make the listener think it’s singing “I’ll be late for that” when it’s actually saying “I’ll erase away”. That sample makes up the rhythmic backbone of the tune, repeating its climbing bassline and high-pitched wailing throughout. Kanye delivers his verses with a very smooth and laidback delivery, almost like it’s freestyle that he’s just saying from the top of his head, he straight up says he doesn’t have a line he can think of at one point during the song.

‘Late’ is one of my favourite songs from the album. For something that’s almost like a throwaway on the album, it includes some of the college-theme metaphors and referential humour that was an essential characteristic of the mid-2000s Kanye. Could vibe to it all day.

#656: The Streets – It’s Too Late

Mike Skinner wrote two great break-up/end of relationship songs, that I know of, in the early 2000s. One that everyone knows is ‘Dry Your Eyes’, a track that almost every man can relate to – so much so that it reached number one in the UK charts 15 years ago. The other one that people might not know so well is ‘It’s Too Late’, an album cut from The Streets’ debut Original Pirate Material in 2002. Both contain the use of strings to add some emotional weight though I’m sure that’s all coincidental.

‘Too Late’ is from the perspective of a guy who had numerous warnings that this break-up was going to occur. All right there in the first verse the situation’s explained. His girl asks him to meet him somewhere. Narrator instead goes to meet mates and smoke some weed and as a result is late to the meet-up location. The girl has told him before that one day she would leave if he messed up again. He didn’t take the threat too seriously. Ignorance is bliss and all that. The second verse seems to show the narrator trying to make up for this by trying to show up on time in one last chance sort of thing. In the final verse though, he asks her to meet him. She doesn’t arrive. It’s safe to assume that it’s too late to make amends.

I can’t remember when it was that I listened to this song and thought “wow, this is actually great I’m going to add it to my phone so I can hear it all the time”. Mike Skinner’s voice may not be for everyone. His delivery is unapologetically British. I myself don’t mind it. Well…. the way he tries to rhyme ‘there’ and ‘beer’ around one minute and twenty seconds in is…. not too great. The female vocal in the chorus is okay, not too much to my likin’. But even if you don’t vibe with the vocals so much, just listen to those strings. There’s a great sadness and sense of reminiscence to them. They loop and play the same melody throughout the entire thing, bar some points where the dissonant ambient tones come in, but they never get tiresome which is always a good thing. Most definitely the emotional centrepiece of the entire album.