Tag Archives: my ipod

#1199: Pink Floyd – Sheep

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Looks like this’ll be the last song from Pink Floyd’s Animals that’ll be on here. But it also happens to be my favourite track on there. I’ve come to think of the record as the band’s almost, sort of reaction to punk at the time. Those gospel backing choirs and saxophones the group used on Dark Side and Wish You Were Here were done away with. The Floyd took a DIY approach to the making of Animals through building their own studio to record it in after leaving their usual work area of Abbey Road Studios. As a result, it’s truly an effort created and curated by the four members, even if Roger Waters will take credit for it all. And plus, there’s a lot of frustration and anger behind it all, which we can all do with sometimes. A lot of people are into ‘Dogs’. A lot of people are into ‘Pigs (Three Different Ones)’. And I swear, for a while, from what I saw, ‘Sheep’ was usually considered to be the weakest out of the three mammoth tracks that make up the meaty part of the album. Something that I couldn’t really understand. Because, in regards to listening to the entire LP, ‘Sheep’ is the track that the entire album has been building up towards.

‘Sheep’ had its origins from before the band even started work on Wish You Were Here a few years prior, as it was usually performed live under the name ‘Raving and Drooling’. Then Roger Waters was inspired by George Orwell’s Animal Farm and the lyrical content morphed into something completely different and now described a dire situation in which people were blindly following an ideology without thinking for themselves or willing to fight against it. Proceedings begin with the sound of sheep braying in a field, smooth chords on the Rhodes piano by Richard Wright and a bass riff that lingers on one note for the longest time. The three together make for a very ominous intro, made all the more so when the bass guitar finally slides down to a different key. Something big is about to go down. And it does, with the whole band entering and Roger Waters delivering a forceful vocal that seamlessly transitions into wild, freaky, spaced out note on the synthesizers. It’s a production trick that blew my mind when that happened the first time. Some genius stuff.

Once the band come in all together for that first verse, the whole track’s a juggernaut from that point forward. Roger Waters howling away on the vocals, while also taking on a rhythm guitar role (buried in the mix), with David Gilmour thrashing out these wild guitar chords. Nick Mason throws out these emphatic fills on the drumkit and Richard Wright fills the sound out with blaring Hammond organ chords. This is a band that’s locked in. It’s difficult for me to not just go through the song minute-by-minute and explain what happens here and there, that’s how quite strongly I feel about this track. This post may be one of my longest in a while. Sometimes you just have to leave it for someone to hear for themselves. But what I will say though, is that the outro to this song is quite possibly one of the greatest of all time. Like one comment on YouTube says, it’s the climax of the entire album. The way the whole track seems to rise in decibels when the cymbals crash and Gilmour’s monstrous descending guitar riff brings everything to a rapturous close as it eventually fades out. If there were musical definition for the words ‘glory’ or ‘freedom’, the two minutes of this song’s outro would be a fine contender.

#1198: Supergrass – She’s So Loose

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Looking back on the previous two songs I’ve written about from I Should Coco, I make a note on how I got the album for a birthday and how initially I thought it was stellar on the first listen, but as time’s gone on there are a few moments are there which are a bit of its time. In a way, I’ve done the same again here. But I guess that means I’ve just run out of different things to say about the album. I think it’s many people’s favourite by Supergrass, released in the midst of Britpop and giving us the summer jam of ‘Alright’. I wouldn’t say it’s mine, but that’s not to say ’cause it’s bad. You won’t go wrong with any Supergrass record you choose to listen to. Usually I think they were the best Britpop band all this time.

‘She’s So Loose’ is the ninth song on Coco. Very, very sure I liked this one on that first run-through on the album however many years ago. The track consists of mainly choruses, three in total, respectively preceded by two short verses and the final instrumental break. Those choruses appear to describe a sexual encounter between two people, in ways that you don’t really have to thoroughly examine to understand, but also not in a way that’s graphic or distasteful. More like a, “this happened, then this, overall, a good time was had” kind of way. Very matter-of-fact. And the activity is celebrated via the rousing melody the track’s title is sung with as the chorus’s last line.

I’ve always thought of this as an example of a perfect three-minute pop number, you know. There’s nothing too complicated to get your head around, though the guitar chord choices in here aren’t the usual G-D-E (or whatever) types of progressions. The changes throughout add a little mystique to the whole affair. And I’m very much a fan of Gaz Coombes’s vocals on there too. Delivered with a youthful exuberance that you can only when you’re in your teens and feeling good making an album. And that little reverb production trick that lingers after the “awaaaaay” in the verses is a minor thing that I appreciate. All in all, the song’s a short introduction, a little verse, a bigger chorus, repeat, and throw a breakdown in there for good measure. Easy to singalong to and very memorable as a result. I don’t have much else to say about it, to be honest. I’ve never found much reason to dislike it.

#1197: Mac DeMarco – She’s Really All I Need

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Rock and Roll Night Club. That’s a bit of a strange one to me. I’m a big Mac DeMarco fan, and I may have said that quite a few times in the previous posts I’ve written before. But I think I’ve only listened to that particular (mini)-album just the one time. It was DeMarco’s very first release, before 2 even came out, but it was the last one I got round to listening to. I remember the recording quality sounding pretty murky, while DeMarco’s vocals sounded much, much lower than usual. A much different vibe from the usual Mac stuff I was used to. But the one song on there that stood out by not being so different is the one I continue to listen to to this day.

‘She’s Really All I Need’ appeared in my Discover Weekly playlist on Spotify one day at work back in 2018, and initially I was confused. That slinky Mac guitar tone was all there, and the standard calming vocal delivery was present. It was obviously a Mac DeMarco song, but why hadn’t I heard it before? Was this a new song? Then I saw it was from Rock and Roll Night Club, and that answered the question. But because I liked the tune so much from the jump, think I downloaded it to my laptop when I got home, it gave me the motivation to actually go ahead and listen to the whole album. From the first paragraph, you may have sussed that it’s not one of my favourite DeMarco records. But ‘…All I Need’ is definitely one of my favourite songs of his. And so I write to you in the hope that you might enjoy it too.

The track is one of the many, many love/relationship songs that DeMarco has in his catalogue. May even be safe to assume that it’s another written about his longtime girlfriend. Though if you want to get into more depth, it sees DeMarco write about his anxieties. He’s waking up in the middle of the night with shivers. He’s bummed out by these people waving their degrees in front of his face, reminding him of his own inadequacies. But in the end, none of that really matters because he’s got his lady to calm him down and get him on the right track. All very endearing stuff, with a bunch of relatable, humorous lines and a general laid-backness to the proceedings. Also notable in that there’s an actual bridge in the track that DeMarco solos over, which I don’t think he’s done ever since.

#1196: Fall Out Boy – She’s My Winona

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Fall Out Boy have been together longer now since reforming in 2013, than they were after initially forming in 2001 and breaking up sort of acrimoniously eight years later. I can’t say any of the albums released in this second stint have had quite the lasting effect for me as those, I guess, “iconic” ones they did in the first. Mainly I’m referring to that trilogy (you could call it that) of 2005’s From Under the Cork Tree, 2007’s Infinity on High and 2008’s Folie à Deux. It’s the latter of the three where today’s track can be found. Fall Out Boy aren’t the band who are considered to have classics in the canon of pop-punk, alternative rock, whatever you want to name the genre. But if they were to, Folie… would be my nomination. Out of those three “best” albums, it’s definitely the one that holds up. Still strong after almost 16 years.

And I can sort of remember listening through the record for that first time. I think I would have been 14, Folie… would have been out for a few months at the time Popped the disc into the computer, got quite hyped after the celebratory opener which abruptly but effectively transitioned into ‘I Don’t Care’, the “comeback” single that everyone knew by that point. ‘She’s My Winona’ begins right after that, flowing with the same tempo and starting on the pickup of what would be the next measure of ‘I Don’t Care’. So there, something was established. This was an album filled with transitions where songs would start while the previous one was still ending, or the beginning of track would actually begin in the one that preceded it etc. And I was a sucker for those kinds of things even then. ‘She’s My Winona’ carries on the pumping, upbeat energy of the album’s opening moments, filled to the brim with vocal adlibs where there would maybe usually be empty spaces in the music. Patrick Stump really wanted to let you know that he had some singing chops on this album.

On the Genius page for the track, Pete Wentz actually added in personal annotations behind his thinking for a number of its lyrics. So if you want to get the verified, solidified meanings behind those, go right ahead and check it out. My work here’s done pretty much. But if you want to get my take, I’ve come to think of ‘Winona’ as Wentz’s general take on life, at the time of writing, and also something of a mission statement. He explains it in his annotations, so there’s not much reason to get into much depth here. The reason He he gives as to why the song is named the way it is can be found on there too. The explanation kind of opened my eyes a little while also leaving me a bit confused. ‘Winona’ can be anything you want it to be, and to him ‘Winona’ is reality, but he’s his own Winona. That’s what he said. I want to say I understand. Must be a lyricist thing. Their minds work in ways that I’ll never get.

#1195: The Offspring – She’s Got Issues

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So it’s come to this. The last song by The Offspring that I’ll ever write about on here. I don’t know if I’ve said, it’s been a long time since I’ve featured the band on the site, but The Offspring was one of my favourite bands at one point. A real starter group for me, I’m talking when I was about eight years old. 2003-ish. I was very obsessed with ‘Hit That’ at the time, which led me down a hole of watching their music videos on their website via Windows Media Player (pre-YouTube days, people), getting excited whenever they were showing on TV, and eventually getting their Greatest Hits compilation and Americana. Then it took five years for the band to release another album after Splinter, and my own personal hype for the group somewhat diminished in that time.

Some Offspring songs sounded much better then than they do now. ‘Least to me. ‘Pretty Fly’, ‘Why Don’t You Get a Job?’, ‘Original Prankster’… man, even ‘Hit That’ are just a few examples that I haven’t willingly listened to in a long, long time. But then there are others that I get a kick out of whenever, wherever. And ‘She’s Got Issues’ is one of them. The track was released as the fourth and final single from Americana, almost a year after the album’s initial release in 1998. And I think because people were so caught up in the three that came before and still are, I guess, to this day, ‘She’s Got Issues’ has flown under the radar for all this time. I think I saw the music video on MTV2 one day, featuring a young, pre-star Zooey Deschanel, and thought the song was all good. At whatever younger age I was, I assumed the singles that had the music videos were usually the best songs. So when I got Americana as a gift, I was immediately drawn to the track as a result.

There’s not much interpretation the listener has to do on their part while going through this one. It’s a very ’90s male take on a woman who, to be fair, may need some help in a professional way. But the way in which Dexter Holland tells the story is pretty funny. I think the listener is meant to feel sorry for the perspective from which the song’s told, but there’s definitely an asshole narrator element to the whole affair that I think levels the playing field. It’s a depiction of a relationship where the two involved are just as bad as each other. Though calling out an ex’s name when in bed is for sure a big red flag. Apart from the crunching riff and those whipping noises that alternate between the two speakers throughout, I think the main musical highlight is Holland’s vocal. He drily approaches the verses before belting out the “Yea-heah, YEAAA-HEAH”s in the louder choruses. As much as I try, I can’t replicate those without my voice completely breaking. But it’s always worth the effort.