Tag Archives: my ipod

#1334: Blur – Tame

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So Blur’s The Great Escape was released 30 years ago this September just gone. The anniversary will be celebrated with a special 30th anniversary edition, a reissue that, when it was first announced, was mocked and ridiculed by many a Blur fan because of the over-the-top eyesore of a cover that comes along with it. I was surprised when I heard the album was getting this treatment. Although I like it quite a bit myself, I’m a guy who prefers it over Parklife, the LP and the time surrounding it are things that even the members of Blur don’t look back on too fondly. Damon Albarn once described Escape as “messy” and having songs that would be good for a musical. But with this whole Britpop revival thing going on now – Oasis reuniting, Pulp reuniting, Suede releasing new material, Supergrass out and about – someone must have had the idea to capitalise on the occasion.

‘Tame’ isn’t on The Great Escape, but was released as a B-side on the ‘Stereotypes’ single in 1996. I lurk on the videos for the song on YouTube, and some comments go along the lines of, “Oh, this song’s so good! How didn’t this make it on the album?” Well, it’s most likely the case that it didn’t exist during the actual sessions for the album and was written and recorded after its release as B-side material, as bands would regularly do back in those days. Another thing that’s regularly agreed about the song, is how it’s sort of a precursor to the inward-looking, first-person narrative material that was to come on the band’s next album in ’97. Albarn sings about seeing two planes in the sky, game shows on the TV and his thoughts on, I’m guessing, his girlfriend’s confusion about the weather. And among all this is a chorus of the word ‘Tame’, sung repetitively in falsetto. What it has to do with the rest of the song, I still don’t know to this day.

Overall, I think it’s a song about boredom and that sometimes existential dread that comes with waking up in the morning and having to face another day. I just get that from the lyrics and the minor-keyness of everything. There’s something a little spooky about ‘Tame’, a little uncanny. Like, those erratic synths on the right-hand side. They scratch an itch, but they’re very randomly played. Albarn must have just felt like messing around on the keys to shake things up a bit. The short-tape delay effect added to the drums makes what would be a very ordinary drum break into a very effective one. And those constant “Tame” vocals are kind of weird enough, but they’re suddenly made all the more strange when at four minutes, the choice was made to switch from Albarn’s falsetto vocal to his chest vocals where he sounds like he’s almost yelling in pain. I’m a big fan of this one. The band don’t like that period of their time, but a few of their best B-sides were made during it. Too bad that with this B-side mark, they will never regularly play it live on the regular. But they did once upon a time, and you can hear that below.

#1333: Real Estate – Talking Backwards

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‘Talking Backwards’ remains the only track by Real Estate that I have on my phone, ever since I first heard the thing back in 2014. It’s not the worst pick of the bunch to have. I was there when it got its “Best New Track” review on Pitchfork in the first few weeks of 2014, a time when I was checking out that website very, very frequently to get a new music fix. Its video (above) was released on the same day as that review. I liked the song, I think, then and there. Got me all excited about that new album Atlas which was on its way in March. The month came around. Pitchfork heralded the LP with a “Best New Music” tag and an 8.8 score. I’ll say I probably wouldn’t have given it all of that if I was on the writing staff then. But ‘Talking Backwards’ still stood out as that golden gem that deserved the praise it got when it was released as the initial single.

I was thinking about this song prior to writing all this, considering the lyrics, and I built up this image in my mind that it was about a guy talking another person with that recipient just not understanding or paying attention to what the guy is saying. A sort of “lights are on, but no one’s home”, sarcastic kind of tone. So I thought that it was funny that this ridiculing message was set to this very upbeat, sunny, summery music. Makes for good juxtaposition. But then after actually doing some research, I found it’s just a general song about miscommunication in relationships. It was also based on songwriter Martin Courtney’s own hesitant feelings of having to go on a long touring schedule with the band to promote another album after becoming a newlywed. So what I’ve learned is, there’s no agenda behind the lyrics at all and they’re pretty much self-explanatory. Sincere too, and that’s usually a clincher for me.

Yeah, I wished I liked Atlas a lot more than I did when it arrived. I even revisited it, maybe a few years back during those COVID times, to see whether time would have had any effect on my reception towards the music. It didn’t. And it’s not as if I’m saying the album is bad. I think it’s just, to me, a lot of the songs sort of blended into each other, and it was only the fine, fine melody in ‘Talking Backwards’ alongside its chirpy guitar riff/refrain that made it the strong highlight in the track list. I listened to Days when Atlas was still the band’s most recently released record. It sounded like more of the same. But even as I type now, I can still recollect the chorus to ‘It’s Real’, and I haven’t listened to that tune in ages. But, you know, five years removed from that limbo time we were all in, maybe it’s time to just do a deep dive into the band and see what happens. That’s just for me, though, you can all go about your day.

#1332: R.E.M. – Talk About the Passion

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I remember a time when I really didn’t understand what was going on with ‘Talk About the Passion’. I was going through Murmur for the first time in 2013 or something. That was a moment in my life when I was listening to music, but was trying to listen to it like some kind of critic. Looking at the words and trying to understand what they really meant. I think I was really into Pitchfork and trying to make a way into music journalism around then. ‘…Passion’ came round, and I think I had a feeling that it was being pretentious with the French lyrics. God forbid a band try and be creative with the words they use in their songs, right? Because I didn’t understand the words, I think I wrote it off and the rest of the album. I was missing something internally when I was 18. But fast-forward to the end of 2017, when I was 22, when on a whim I went through Murmur again and found myself having a new favourite album. You guys know. I’ve written about six other songs from the LP on here.

When I was early twenties, I think I’d began to just take music for what it was if I was listening to it for the first time. Taking into account the overall sounds and how they made me feel. Wasn’t a conscious thing, think it just turned out that way. And I remember Murmur making me feel really good. When it came to ‘Talk About the Passion’ that time around, as soon as the opening guitar riff played for the first time, it was like, “I’m probably going to enjoy this one too,” after having already been impressed by ‘Radio Free Europe’ and ‘Pilgrimage’. ‘Laughing’ not so much, I’ve never been able to get into that one. I think Michael Stipe’s vocals are a highlight in ‘…Passion’. His delivery of the titular phrase throughout is one with a lot of warmth and sincerity. That cello adds another dimension to the proceedings. Makes it all sound much more emphatic. And the combination of it and Stipe wailing in the distance as the song closes on a fade-out adds a sweet bow to it all. Makes sense that it was released as a single in its time, but it’s also kind of a bold pick for one as well.

I’ve always sort of thought that ‘…Passion’ was kind of a religion song. Same way I think ‘Pilgrimage’ is too. Like, talk about the passion. What passion? The passion of Christ? I guess that could work. “Empty prayers.” Prayers have to do with religion too. But apparently Michael Stipe described the song as being about hunger, which is where the “empty mouths” thing comes in. So it’s a track about people praying for food, having a intense need for it and wondering how long they have to wait until it arrives. “Combien de temps” does sound much cooler than “How long”, gotta say. Plus, it has the right number of syllables to fit in the music, so you can probably see why Stipe went with the choice of phrasing. Yeah, this is a good song right here. At least, I think so. I don’t think I can say it’s my outright favourite on Murmur. But put it on and I’ll be singing along to it. And if any song can do that to me, then it’s done its job.

#1331: Panda Bear – Take Pills

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After downloading Panda Bear’s Person Pitch in late 2013, it sat dormant in my old iTunes library for a considerable amount of time. It was then that I was a real Pitchfork-head and going through what are considered to be the indie classics. And plus I was the host of a show for my university’s radio station, so I was just downloading whatever album I could get, and whatever songs that stuck out were keepers. ‘Comfy in Nautica’ and ‘Ponytail’ were the two tracks on the album that I decided were the best. And that was how my judgement stayed until I revisited the album in 2016. I was working at a music magazine at the time. There was a lot of time I could spend on Spotify without being judged. And I remember that being a time when I was going through the albums I had at home that I hadn’t listened to for a long time. Animal Collective had either just released Painting With or it was on the horizon. Person Pitch had the obvious association. I ran through it again. And it’s amazing what being 21 compared to 18 can do because the whole album was an immediate click. Maybe I just didn’t have all the cells in 2013.

After the kind of chanting, call-to-action introduction of ‘Comfy in Nautica’, ‘Take Pills’ arrives next and marks the first instance of the production trick Noah Lennox utilises to great effect for a few numbers on the LP, which is merging a sample from one song into another from a totally different number over a carefully thought-out period of time. In this case, he uses the opening of Scott Walker’s ‘Always Coming Back to You’ for the first section – which I think he in turn times that with what sounds like a skateboard on the sidewalk – before that slowly transitions into the next section from 2:30 based on a sample of ‘Popeye Twist’ by the Tornados. The song as a whole is inspired by the state of Lennox’s family and his own wellbeing, after the tragic passing of his father. The first half depicts the grieving process of his mom, who passes on the advice that things eventually get better after the loss. And despite initial impressions you may have from the the song title, the second half is call not to resort to drugs in order to handle that struggle during those sad, sad situations. Because we’re stronger and we don’t need them. A very wholesome message.

There are plenty of songs out there in the sphere made by combining pieces of unrelated musical ideas together. You’ve got ‘The Chain’, ‘A Day in the Life’, ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’, ‘Paranoid Android’… Could go on for days listing them. And ‘Take Pills’ is very much in that category. But what makes it so unique is how its two sections are blended so seamlessly into one another – a gradual fade-out/fade-in with a huge reliance on samples – that shouldn’t work as well as it does, though somehow manages to make sense once that Lennox begins the “Take one day at a time” refrain. Gets the shoulders shimmying. I like the little aside Panda Bear in saying that it’s not bad to take pills. I can think of a song of his where he sings about wanting to get stoned and walk in the rain. He likes to get high every once in a while too. But just don’t rely on the stuff. That’s where things can get a little out of hand. So this is where the road ends for Person Pitch on here. Not so much for Panda Bear. If only I’d liked ‘Bros’ as much back in the day as I do now. That would have been an ordeal to write about. But if you haven’t heard of the album before now, I’d say you’ve got nothing to lose if you listened to the thing right now.

#1330: Franz Ferdinand – Take Me Out

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It’s tea time. That’s right. Back at it again for the ‘T’ section on a random Saturday evening (where I am, it could be morning for you somewhere or late night somewhere else). And it starts off strongly, I’d say. ‘Take Me Out’, I think, was the first song I ever heard by Franz Ferdinand. I think that might be the same for a lot of people. I have a memory of being slumped in a chair, guess I must have been either eight or nine, watching MTV2, and the “I know I won’t be leaving here’ section of the song was playing alongside the repeating visuals of the music video near its end. It left an impression. The band name showed up, ‘Franz Ferdinand’. Thought it sounded pretty cool. ‘Matinée’, the next single, was where I really became interested in them. ‘Darts of Pleasure’ was the band’s first single officially. But with ‘Take Me Out’, the band became a household name in that British post-punk revival scene in the ’00s and the track became one of the biggest indie dancefloor anthems.

And, I think again like many others, when I heard the song in full for the first time, I was wondering how its beginning worked its way into sounding like it did at the end. Because the track begins in a totally different direction. Well, according to singer Alex Kapranos, he and fellow guitarist/bandmember/songwriter Nick McCarthy, who isn’t in the band anymore, were working on the song for sometime. They were trying to work out the structure and found that the verse/chorus/verse type structure wasn’t working. They would have to change tempos when going from one section to the next, which just didn’t sound right. Eventually they decided to lump all the faster verses at the beginning and put the slower choruses at the end, transitioning them together with that gradual slowing down in tempo around 50 seconds in. Or rallentando for you music theorists out there. That’s probably the best part of the song there. That tempo decrease marks that build in anticipation for what comes next.

What comes next is hook after hook after hook, as I sort of said earlier, usually accompanied by that widely recognisable guitar riff. They play it live, everyone sings the riff. It’s just how it goes. As to the lyrics and what it’s about, well, there’s a nice little podcast where Kapranos and bass guitarist Bob Hardy discuss these topics. I listened to it a while back, so I can’t remember exactly what was said. But I seem to remember Kapranos saying he took inspiration from a film of some kind, or a certain type of film made by a certain director. You’d better listen to the thing yourself. But just on the surface, without going too deep, you hear the words ‘Take Me Out’, I’d say you’d either there’s a romantic sentiment or a violent one. Like an assassination or something. And that would be neat with the band being called Franz Ferdinand and everything. I think it’s a little bit of both.