Tag Archives: out

#1336: The Strokes – Tap Out

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Man, I wish someone in the Strokes comes to a realization one of these days that there are more songs on Comedown Machine that are worth playing in a live setting. They’ve done both ‘Call It Fate, Call It Karma’ and ‘Welcome to Japan’ so little times you could count them on one hand. At the time of writing this, they were most recently performed at the Chelsea in Las Vegas. ‘One Way Trigger’, they’ve done a few times too and also in that Vegas show. But there are others on that LP that I feel so many fans would tear a limb off to witness. For me, ‘Tap Out’ is a frontrunner in that category. Whenever you have a Strokes album, the first track on there usually goes down as one of the best on there. It’s just a thing that’s known. ‘Tap Out’ has strong competition with the likes of ‘Is This It’, ‘Machu Picchu’, ‘The Adults Are Talking’, and the others which will get their posts on here so I’ve chosen not to link them. But ‘Tap Out’ holds its ground. In fact, I might even say it’s one of my favourite Strokes songs, period.

I remember how unceremoniously Comedown Machine was treated by all parties when it came around in 2013. The band, taking a media blackout stance, didn’t promote it in any way. A music video for single ‘All the Time’ was made, which has since been made unavailable on YouTube. Goes to show how they feel about that. Its cover art was giving off the impression to some that the package was more a kiss-off to the label they were on than a fully-focused project. To quite a few, actually. And critics were pretty dismissive of it too. Pitchfork had a streaming platform that let listeners hear the album a week before its official release. That platform is now gone. ‘Tap Out’ was the first thing I heard. And it seemed so strange. Here was this new Strokes album that was getting no hype at all, but here was its first track that was entrancing, groovy and had all the markings off a great Strokes song. It was different, but in a good way, and was a mark that this new album wasn’t going to be the Is This It/Room on Fire throwback that I recall people desperately wanted at the time.

To me, ‘Tap Out’ feels like Julian Casablancas reflecting on the overwhelming hype the band received at the turn of the 21st century when they were deemed the saviours of rock and roll by many a publication, a hype that’s there to a lesser extent today but still lingers, and detailing a feeling that this whole Strokes thing might have resulted in something a little more than he bargained for. Particularly being the subject to many a question from an interviewer that he can’t muster the energy to provide an answer to. But despite the annoyed sentiment that I perceive, like I said earlier, the song is a groove. Classic guitar interplay between Nick Valensi and Albert Hammond, Jr. occurs throughout. The track introduces the vocal technique of Casablancas singing in his normal voice, with a falsetto overdub over the top, which is used frequently throughout the LP. And over the years, I’ve grown a particular appreciation for what I think is the organ on the left side that comes in during the choruses. Adds a divine, floaty dimension to the song while the other bandmembers continue on with the tight rhythm. This song is tight. Tight, tight, tight. Here’s where I would paste a video of a band performing the subject song live, but for reasons I’ve stated, I can’t. But one day. One day.

#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.

#1298: U2 – Stuck in a Moment You Can’t Get Out Of

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1,298 songs in, and we reach the first U2 song. It’ll be the only one, though, sorry. There are people out there who despise the band, mostly because they don’t like Bono. Me? I don’t have anything massive against them. I’m neither here nor there. I can’t say I’m the biggest fan. But they do have some fine, fine songs. When I really started getting into alternative/rock music in about 2004, it was during a time when the video for ‘Vertigo’ was playing almost every day on MTV2. The How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb era. And nine-year-old me thought it was a cool song. So I can sort of thank U2 for getting me into the genre a little more. But today’s song isn’t from that era of the band. It’s from the one that preceded it a good four years earlier. In 2000, U2 returned from an experimental phase during the ’90s with a back-to-basics rock album in All That You Can’t Leave Behind, and ‘Stuck in a Moment You Can’t Get Out Of’ – the second song on there – was released as its second single in 2001.

And this is one of those occasions where I have a clear, clear memory of seeing its music video on TV during that time, even though I would have only been five years old. It was playing on The Box, which was kinda the mainstream UK pop music video channel of the time, and there was Bono on the TV screen rolling around on the floor over and over again. And because I was a child and still had years until my voice dropped, whenever I tried to sing, “Stuck in a moment and you can’t get out of it,” that “can’t get out of it” part was too low for my register. I didn’t have the diaphragm for it yet. For the longest time, in the back of my mind, I thought that if I was able to sing that phrase, it must have meant that the process of puberty had finally happened. I can gladly say at the age of 30, I can sing along to the track just fine. It wasn’t until a few years back that I revisited the song, gave it a few more listens with that core memory flashing in the brain and realized that I liked it a bunch.

Think it’s common knowledge that the track was written as a tribute to Michael Hutchence, a good friend of Bono’s, who was famously known for being the original lead singer for the rock band INXS. Hutchence passed away in 1997 through suicide, the action of which is kind of alluded to by Bono in the song’s bridge (“I was unconscious, half asleep” / “I wasn’t jumping, for me it was a fall” / “It’s a long way down to nothing at all”). Bono, saddened by what happened, wrote ‘Stuck in a Moment…’ as a things-he-wished-he-could-have-said song. He expresses his admiration for Hutchence and is still effected by him even with absence, but wishes he could have told him that whatever tough times he was going through, they would eventually pass and there was no need to feel so down. Guitarist The Edge also gets a moment on the lead vocal near the song’s end with the falsetto on the “And if the night runs over…” section. Though funnily, it gets pushed back into the mix to make way for Bono’s adlibbing. I like this one a lot. A track that reminds you to reach out to your friends in times of trouble. Or just on a frequent basis. ‘Cause you never know what could be happening.

#1297: Radiohead – Street Spirit (Fade Out)

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On Radiohead’s The Bends, there’s a theme about the fear of getting old that shows it’s face throughout the record. On ‘Bones’, Thom Yorke sings about not wanting to be “crippled and cracked”. On ‘Fake Plastic Trees’, he talks about gravity always winning in reference to aging women who went through plastic surgery in the 1980s. Thom Yorke would have been 25/26 when working on the lyrics for the songs that would make up The Bends. But even then, I think it’s fair to say he might have been going through some existential crisis of some kind at the time. I think as we all do when we get to that mid-20s period. And closing the album off is a song about a thing we all know is certain in life. Death. The track is ‘Street Spirit (Fade Out)’, one of the group’s most sombre numbers which also happens to be one of their most popular too.

When it comes to me, well, I think I first came to know about the song when its music video played on MTV2, or one of those alternative music video channels, back in the 2000s. In between 2003 – 2007, when the band were on a bit of a hiatus, a Radiohead music video showing up on those places was a regular occurrence. Probably because the band were known to have some of the coolest of those types of media. The video for ‘Street Spirit’, with the whole manipulation of time thing going on in its scenes, was cool to witness to the small kid I was at that time. Thought it was so cool, in fact, that I tried to find the video online, which in a pre-YouTube world was very hard to do. Can only imagine what it must have felt like seeing something like it in 1996, when the song was released as a single. The track may be one of the band’s darkest. But man, if it isn’t catchy in its own uniquely bleak way. When that opening, circular guitar riff gets going, it’s very hard to stop listening to everything else that follows.

In the first verse, Thom Yorke depicts an image of a helpless figure feeling closed in by the houses that surround them. The second sees him referring to a machine that can’t communicate “the thoughts and the strain [he’s under]”. This got me thinking, maybe he’s talking about his guitar. Maybe he was really going through some things at the time. Or maybe he’s taking a point of view of a general machine used by an employee somewhere. After which he suggests we unite and be people of the world before we all end up underground. And in the third verse, he brings up imagery of cracked eggs and dying birds screeching through their lasts breaths. I did mention this song was bleak, didn’t I? Despite all this, the music is extremely infectious. You’ve got the riff I talked about in the last paragraph, but then there are the “Ah-na-na” vocals during the instrumental breaks. And then there’s Yorke’s actual vocal take, which just soars over everything. He changed up the way he sang from OK Computer onwards, so to have that Pablo Honey/Bends era style finish on this track is a massive way to go out. All very morose, but a lot of people love it, including myself, to the point that, if given an opportunity, there will sing it even louder than Yorke at a live performance. Like in the one below.

#1174: Reel Big Fish – Sell Out

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Well, looks like this here’s another song that I have to thank the good people at EA Sports for. A long, long time ago I came into the possession of FIFA 2000 for the PC. As to how I did, I’m not so sure. But I want to say it was through my cousin. This happened such a long time ago that I can’t remember what age I was when I was usually playing it. Judging by the year, I’d assume I was four or five. But I also remember redownloading the game again some years later. What matters is, it had some decent tunes on there. One of them I’ve written about in the past. But then there were other bangers like Apollo 440’s ‘Stop the Rock’ and Robbie Williams’s ‘It’s Only Us’, which was specifically made for the game. They were good. But ‘Sell Out’ by Reel Big Fish was one of the couple that really left made its mark on me as the youngster I was.

First of all, I think it was all about that horn section. You would be navigating the game’s menus, choosing what team you wanted to play with, what weather you wanted to play in, what mode you wanted etc. etc. And amongst all that came those horns playing the catchy melody, which also acts as the song’s whole chorus pretty much. So I was always humming along to that. And I want to say that after a while I was singing along to the words too. There would have been a few mumbles on my part to account for the lyrics I hadn’t quite got. But if it had me even doing that, then it would most likely be a song that I wouldn’t forget for a while. So what’s the song about? The song’s narrator gets the offer of a lifetime. A chance to sign for a record label that gets them of their dead-end fast-food job. The narrator’s girlfriend warns them to think about it. The narrator signs it with no hesitation. He’s under the record company’s control. He could end up not being paid at all. If things go wrong, he can’t go back to his old job as he’s already quit. But the narrator has the utmost faith that things will be all right because the label said so.

This song’s considered to be the band’s signature tune, but it acts as a both a blessing and a curse in some ways for them. It was the only single of Reel Big Fish’s to make it in the charts, and there was a bit of a one-hit wonder situation that came along with it for a while. I’ve never gone out of my way to listen to a full Reel Big Fish album. Not because I think they don’t have better songs than ‘Sell Out’, but more because I like ska music in small amounts. But anyone can tell me an album that’s worth a go and I’ll be right on it. Maybe the only ever Reel Big Fish tune I’ve heard was their cover of the Toot & the Maytals song, ‘Monkey Man’. Think that showed up on Kerrang! or something one day. That is a bunch of fun, I gotta say, though it’s no something I’d probably seek out to listen to. ‘Sell Out’, though. That’s one for the ages.