Tag Archives: slow

#1223: Kings of Leon – Slow Night, So Long

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It was during the Aha Shake Heartbreak era of Kings of Leon that I properly go into the band, due mainly to the three singles that popped up around those youthful times of 2004/05. But I didn’t get my hands on a physical copy of it until 2008, when I got it as a gift for Christmas. I don’t know what it was about that year that made me request it. By that time, Only by the Night was the band’s latest album which hoisted the group into household names thanks to ‘Sex on Fire’ and ‘Use Somebody’ which were now worldwide hits. I’m going to guess that, even at the age of 13 that I was that year, I was one of those people who thought, “Man… Kings of Leon have changed,” and wanted one of their old albums to remind me of the good times. But that is just a guess, I feel like I might be making that up completely.

‘Slow Night, So Long’ opens the album up, and I’ll straight up say it doesn’t really hold a lot of sentimental value. It was one of those songs where I heard it that first time and knew that it was a keeper, and so it’s been in the library ever since. Unlike the opener on the album before, which got things started quite swiftly, ‘Slow Night…’ builds itself up layer by layer, letting the anticipation set in before the whole band eventually kick into gear. Gotta appreciate that bass guitar hook by Jared Followill in that introduction, it’s the melody of that which Caleb Followill almost mirrors with his vocals and the riff that I think really ties the whole song together. I didn’t know this before typing out, so it’s a surprise to me as much as it might be for you, but the song concerns Caleb Followill’s feelings about a girl younger brother Jared was seeing at the time. He kind of liked her, the feelings weren’t reciprocated. It was a weird thing going on there. And Followill at the end of the song asks where the ‘leading ladies’ can be found, in the search for an emotionally stable relationship. KOL songs in those days were usually about women in some way, but would never have guessed any of that myself.

But as the people who enjoy this song will know, this track has a little surprise for you. The band come to a big finish, but there’s still about a minute and a bit remaining until time runs out. And after a bit of suspense, with Nathan Followill’s last chord still sort of ringing nearing silence, Caleb Followill’s guitar comes in on the right-hand side introducing a completely unrelated chord progression and segueing into the smooth coda to which you wanna grab your partner and slow dance to. Even got a little güiro going on low in the mix there. During this part, Caleb asks the “gold digger mothers” out there if “they’re too good to tango with the poor boys”, which I think could mean anything whilst also being very obvious. And with a nice touch of piano, the whole song comes to its actual close. But not really because ‘King of the Rodeo’ picks up right where the next bar would begin. No time to rest before kicking things up again.

#1222: Interpol – Slow Hands

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Well, this is the last Interpol song that’s gonna be on here. A real shame, to be sure. Some of you may click on the ‘Interpol’ tag at the end of blog, witness the others posts about the band I’ve written on here and come to a conclusion that I might be quite the basic fan of them because they’re all singles. And I wouldn’t argue with you. But I’ve listened through at least five Interpol albums. The band’s first three are the best ones, and the singles are almost usually the best numbers on them. At least to me. And then bassist Carlos Dengler left after the fourth one, and it hasn’t been the same since.

But when the songs are good, they’re very, very good, and this can be said for today’s featured number ‘Slow Hands’ – the first single from Interpol’s Antics, released in 2004. It may have very well be the first Interpol song I’d ever heard too, again, thanks to the good people who were working at MTV2 back in the day. I want to say I may have saw the video a couple times initially, a few months passed, and then for some reason the video started showing quite regularly. That reason turned out to be that the song was being released as a single again over in the UK. It got to a lower position than the first time.

The old family CRT-TV had this thing where the right speaker played much more loudly than the left. And from listening to Antics, I know the interplay between Daniel Kessler and Paul Banks’s guitars are usually the main focus. So I missed out on that for a while. But even hearing the right side, featuring Kessler’s guitar part, it didn’t stop the song from sounding as good as it did. ‘Slow Hands’, I think, is a song about love and all the aspects of it. Falling into it, not trying hard enough to find it, being heartbroken after rejection. I put an emphasis on ‘I think’ because Paul Banks’s lyrics are written in a way that really doesn’t make the subject matter obvious in any kind of fashion, yet they still possess a poetic quality to them. Banks sounds fantastic behind the microphone here too. He does throughout the whole album. The comparisons to Ian Curtis of Joy Division was a huge thing for a while. The reference to a song of that band here may be a joking nod to them. But there’s a particular tone to them on this track that have always been captivating since that first time I heard it.

#1221: Gorillaz – Slow Country

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Moving out of the city and into the countryside is a theme that Damon Albarn explores a lot, at least that I know of from listening to the stuff he does with Blur. The earliest I can think of is on ‘Chemical World’ from Modern Life Is Rubbish in ’93. There’s a b-side of the band’s called ‘Get Out of Cities’, which is pretty self-explanatory. And in 2003, he sings about the country having a hold of his soul and having no town to hide in in ‘Good Song’. I guess there’s something about the natural landscape that interests him. And I’m also gonna guess that it was on his mind again when he was casting off his Blur shackles for a while at the start of the century, started Gorillaz with Jamie Hewlett, and wrote a song called ‘Slow Country’ that was included on that project’s debut album.

I don’t think it’d be a wrong thing to say Gorillaz gave Albarn a sense of freedom that he probably wasn’t able to fulfil, being in a band with three other guys for a good part of a decade up to the point of Gorillaz’s inception. And with this reinvigoration, he laid out bare his interest in dub and hip-hop that no Blur fan would have guessed existed. ‘Slow Country’ is a track indebted to the former, led by a thick bass line and formed by a generally spaced-out soundscape, reinforced by the windy sound effect sampled from ‘Ghost Town’ by The Specials. A lot of the lyrics on the Gorillaz debut, I feel, were mostly written around the music, written more for the sake of feel rather than a narrative standpoint or having a sense of direction. Albarn also found that he could sing in any way he wanted, switching up the timbre of his vocals plenty of times throughout. It’s no different on ‘Slow Country’. Sometimes I think any lyrics site that has the words to the track on their pages don’t have the correct ones, just because of the loose and playful way he enunciates the words.

From what I’ve come to understand after hearing it for so many years is that ‘Slow Country’ may be about Albarn getting out of the city, no matter how attractive it might be with all those vices and all, and focusing on upping his funds and generally getting his life sorted out. It’s quite serious stuff. But with this new Gorillaz project, he could disguise it in a way that made it off-kilter and quirky. He didn’t have to deliver his words as earnestly and could instead joke around and have fun a little. Instead of electric guitars, there’ll be a piano playing a childlike melody. Musical breaks with drifting synthesizers that make you feel like you’re floating in space. And of course those unforgettable “noot noot” vocalisations that remarkably sound very similar to those of everybody’s favourite animated penguin.

#1220: The Strokes – Slow Animals

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And just like that, The Strokes’ Comedown Machine will have been out for 12 years this coming March. But I was there to report when it was streaming on Pitchfork before it was officially released (if you scroll a bit further down after clicking the link). The album gets unfairly shafted because the band didn’t do any kind of promotion for it. Everyone thought it was a fast-release thing so they could get out of their record contract with their label at the time. But they still released The New Abnormal with RCA anyway, sort of. When it comes to Comedown Machine, I wouldn’t say it’s my favourite Strokes album. But it definitely has a few of what I think are the best songs ever on there. That makes me appreciate it a whole lot more. Have always thought it was much better than Angles, personally.

‘Slow Animals’ is the seventh song on the album and another that sees Julian Casablancas continuing to explore other ranges of his voice, something that happens a lot throughout Comedown. With ‘Animals’ he adopts a very soft delivery, it’s almost like a whisper, guarded by larger presence of Nick Valensi and Albert Hammond Jrs’ guitars on their respective left and right hand sides of the sound space. I’m a person who’s usually looking more for the feel of the music rather than the words that are sung, and there’s always been a smooth, night-time drive atmosphere to the track that I’ve always appreciated about it. Even looking at the lyrics now, although they sound so pleasant the way Casablancas sings them, they’re quite abstract though still very evocative. They’re an observation on romantic and familial relationships. Whether there’s anything deeper there, I couldn’t tell you.

I don’t know if what I’m about to say was a factor in why Comedown… was criticised in those earlier times, but Julian Casablancas’s vocals always seemed strangely recorded to me. On a lot of songs, it sounds like there was one microphone to capture the reverb with the other placed directly in front of him, with the former being the most prominent of the two in the mix. It’s more obvious on a couple other numbers, but it does apply here too. The softer vocal that starts it off is almost ghostly and not directly in the centre. Then in the pre-chorus, another vocal take with his lower register enters the frame which then switches up for the busier choruses. But that initial reverby vocal is the one that gets the more attention. It’s a weird one to describe. Maybe in the next Comedown Machine song I write about on here, it’ll make more sense.