Tag Archives: song

#1322: Blur – Sweet Song

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Blur’s Think Tank is the one album of the band’s that sticks out like a sore thumb to many a Blur fan. Why? Well, ’cause Graham Coxon isn’t on there. When the band started work on what would become the album in 2001, Damon Albarn didn’t really want to do it anyway because of the success he’d had with Gorillaz earlier in the year. But when Coxon didn’t show up, he was in rehab for his alcoholism but this hadn’t been communicated to the other members, Albarn took it as a slight and started work with bassist Alex James and drummer Dave Rowntree. Coxon eventually joined them, but the mood was tense and unsettled. They made ‘Battery in Your Leg’ during this time, the track marking the end of the band as we’d known it in its place as the close on the album. Things fell apart though, and Coxon left, leaving Blur with an unusual-looking three-piece lineup.

The band carried on the recording sessions in this new configuration. But although he probably wouldn’t say it out loud, Damon Albarn was missing his best mate. He was in a waiting room one day, saw this picture of Coxon on the cover of a magazine and was inspired. The inspiration resulted in ‘Sweet Song’, a sad, sad number all based on Albarn’s disappointment in the whole falling out situation. A few songs on Think Tank allude to his and Coxon’s relationship. But it’s ‘Sweet Song’ that lays it all on out on the table. “What am I to do? / Someone here’s really not happy” – the first lines of the song – sets the scene rather plain and simply. The track centres around a piano loop, harmonized ‘oohing’ backing vocals and a pulsing kick, making everything sound like a warm hug to the ears. Albarn concedes that he has his own faults, making it clear that he never wanted to hurt Coxon and leaves an offer of reconciliation if ever the time was right. As we know now, this is all water under the bridge. But it was looking very bad for a while.

I heard Think Tank in full the first time in 2013, so I’d obviously heard ‘Sweet Song’ then. I don’t think I really listened to it, though, if you understand what I’m saying. Would have been years later, I want to say 2019, I really can’t pinpoint it, that I think I just searched the track up in YouTube or something. I listened again, and it was an immediate feeling of “Oh, well, I should obviously put this one on the phone now,” ’cause it was obviously a very good song. Should have been listening to it for years up to that point. I’m all for songs about friendships. I’m sure I’ve written about a few on here. But there’s something about this one, especially. Albarn got all vulnerable on the previous album 13 regarding the breakup with his ex, and here he was again (with the producer of 13 working only on this one track) dealing with the cut ties with his mate he’d known since secondary school. And with such sincerity. It’s all too much.

#1248: Queens of the Stone Age – A Song for the Deaf

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So, I didn’t realise this until getting ready to type this out, but depending on whatever copy of Songs for the Deaf you have, this song’s either listed as ‘Song for the Deaf’ or ‘A Song for the Deaf’ on the tracklist. Same going for the ‘Dead’ song too. Just think that’s mildly interesting. All this time, I’ve been used to listing both with ‘A’ at the beginning in the various music libraries and stuff, and so I thought Spotify were just being lazy. They’re both correct. But being set in my ways, I’m not changing the title for anything, so the ‘A’ is staying. The big climactic finish to Songs for the Deaf, the almost title-track takes the listener through the final leg of the trip through the California desert, which the whole radio concept of the record is built around. It’s not necessarily a happy end. Things take a very dark and gloomy turn here. Does the driver even make it to the end of the journey? I think it’s up in the air.

The song’s a twisted waltz, its tempo set out by the menacing bass riff that’s then continued on by Josh Homme’s guitars. Written by both Homme and Mark Lanegan, the song’s a showcase of the contrast between two’s vocal styles – the smoother tones of the former mixed with the deeper, gravelly sounds of the latter – and I think it’s very suitable that the last big vocal contributions we hear from Nick Oliveri before he was fired from the band are the manic and hysterical screams that pan from side to side in the bridge before the final chorus. It may have the least plays out of all the songs on the album, at least on Spotify – and by quite a large margin too, I don’t understand – but I think the track exhibits one of the best performances by the band on the entire LP. There’s a reason why people think of the Homme – Oliveri – Lanegan – Grohl line-up of Queens as the golden era of the group, and this song is just of one many of them.

First time I heard Songs for the Deaf in full, I was in primary school and a friend of my sister’s loaned the album to her. The tracks were playing out of the loudspeaker in the living room. It wasn’t very active listening on my part, but I think I was about 10 so cut me some slack. But the very vivid memory I have of the experience was hearing the guitars at the end of ‘A Song of the Deaf’ all kind of feeding back in that wall of noise before it sounds like their souls are taken from them with a ghostly echo. Me and my sister looked at each other, both sort of stunned, and all she said was “Whoa.” We hadn’t heard anything like it before. Since then I’ve always thought of this track as the one with the spooky ending.

#1247: Bloc Party – Song for Clay (Disappear Here)

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Been a long while since I listened through Bloc Party’s A Weekend in the City in full. I’ve got a physical copy of it sitting on the shelf upstairs in my room, the special edition that included ‘Flux’ after that song was released as a single way after the album’s original copies that excluded it. And back in those days, that’s really all I got albums for. Just so I could have easy access to the singles. ‘Song for Clay (Disappear Here)’ wasn’t released as one of those. After knowing all these years, I’ve thought it had the potential to be one. Instead it has the important role of being the album opener, introducing the themes that are to be explored throughout the rest of the record.

Kele Okereke’s voice is the very first thing you hear when that CD/record starts spinning, and I think it’s meant to be a bit of a symbolic choice. Weekend marked a change in Okereke’s vocal style where he wasn’t melodically yelping like he did on Silent Alarm, but properly singing from the diaphragm and stuff. It sort of began with ‘Two More Years’. But it’s on full show throughout the album. Maybe he got some vocal lessons in between the two album cycles. And even though he goes a little sharp on the second “I am tryiiiiing” and the falsetto he introduces is a little shaky, the delivery gets much more confident and in the bag when the rest of the band eventually enter the frame.

Bloc Party had a new, heavier sound to them, aided by the production of Jacknife Lee who makes the guitars of Okereke and Russell Lissack sound like industrial machines, which is a perfect match for the ominous “times of today” lyrical content. The narrator of the song is a person living in the East London of 2007, getting their fair share of action on the weekend, and not really enjoying anything of what they see and experience before them. Talk of ordering foie gras and eating it with complete disdain. Trying to look cool on a dancefloor by showing no emotion whatsoever. These are things that get the narrator down. And the drama of the lyrics are heightened by sinister backing vocals from Gordon Moakes and the overarching minor key-ness of the music. The song comes to a close, a loud ringing leads into the next song and the album continues. I’ll go back to A Weekend… one of these days. It’s easy to fall into the “Silent Alarm was the best and everything else was never as good” crowd. And the statement may even be true. But I at least need to check again.

#1246: Blur – Song 2

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Going into this, I was really thinking, “Wouldn’t it be funny if I just typed ‘Woo-hoo’ for the post and nothing else?” A little part of me still wants to as I type this. But I reckon it would be a bit of a cop out if I did. I would have been two years of age when Blur’s ‘Song 2’ up and around as the second single from the band’s self-titled album from 1997. And as a result, I think I really missed how inescapable the song was during its heyday. But even when I first saw the video/heard the song in 2005 or something, it sounded like a tune I must have heard a hundred times before. It’s Blur’s most well-known song, even by people who don’t know who the band is, and to this day if you were to see the band live, ‘Song 2’ is a guaranteed play because I don’t think they’re allowed to leave the stage without performing it.

The story that people tend to agree upon with the song is that it was written to parody American grunge music, with the whole soft verse/loud chorus with the lyrics that make no sense thing going on. The real story is Damon Albarn originally had the track demoed in a slower, acoustic arrangement with the “woo-hoos” originally being wolf-whistles. Something quite similar to this, actually. Graham Coxon heard it, suggested to mess it up and make it nastier. And so, Albarn laid the vocal track in the control room while Coxon, bassist Alex James and drummer Dave Rowntree rocked out in the live space. The placeholder lyrics Albarn originally ended up as the final thing. He had actual lyrics he wanted to lay down, but they didn’t seem right. The guide vocal track which was meant to be recorded over stuck too. And made as a joke to freak out the label representatives, the joke fell flat because the people at the label ended up loving it and backed its potential as an actual single.

I must have heard this tune over a few hundred times now, surely. And you know, it’s a repetitive, sure. It’s got the “woohoo” thing going on. The lyrics are a bunch of nonsense. It’s over before you even realize. But I swear, every time the band comes in on that first “woohoo” with the riff and the double-tracked bass, it’s an automatic screwed face on my part. I just can’t help it. This a great song, just in terms of the feel of it all. Sometimes you do want to shout melodically about the most random of things, and ‘Song 2’ is the prime example that allows you to do that without thinking too much about it. Sometimes I think it’d be nice for a lot of other Blur songs to have at least half of the popularity ‘Song 2’ does. They’ve got some nice songs to their name. But then I think, if it’s gonna be one, why not ‘Song 2’? What it doesn’t have in substance, it makes up for in feel and attitude. And that’s all right with me.

#1063: System of a Down – Prison Song

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Whoa. The last time I wrote about a song of System of a Down’s was eight years ago, one which marked the beginning of a bit of an hiatus on here while I interned at a music magazine for a year and completed my degree at university for another. According to my links, I’ve written about four (including ‘Hypnotize’) other songs of the band’s on here. While pre-hiatus me was very much into them, the person writing to you now isn’t as much. As much as SOAD songs can be some of the most twisting/turning, zany and intriguing pieces of music you’ll ever hear, they can tire you out hearing them over and over again. Well, at least that’s my case. There’ll be millions of you who’ll completely disagree with that statement. And that’s fine. Not to say that my musical tastes have evolved or matured ’cause there will be times when those four songs pop into my head and I’ll just start singing/vocalizing them out loud. Let’s just say if I was to start this whole thing all over again, those four songs probably wouldn’t be featured.

But. But, but, but. I’ve got a lot of love for ‘Prison Song’ right here, the opener to SOAD’s classic Toxicity album from 2001. A monster of a record. I once heard ‘Prison Song’ many, many years ago on the Yahoo! Launch internet radio service. Wanna say that was around 2005 or something. But I never got ’round to listening to Toxicity in full until about 2014, better later than never. And when I did, it was pretty much like hearing the song virtually for the first time. I, maybe like you, was also left wondering whether that very first short, sharp stab of a chord was my computer freezing right at the beginning of the song. But no, it was most likely the band messing with us into thinking that’s what happened. The band start and stop, cymbals crashing with each stomp of a guitar chord, after which each rest is filled with Serj Tankian creepily whispering “They trying to build a prison” into our ears. The song proper gets underway after the teases, and what follows is a critique of, well, the prison system of the United States. Its high incarceration rate, the war on drugs… two subjects touched upon here via a well-executed mix of strong melody and face-screwing inhale growls and screaming.

What I really appreciate on the track, and throughout the album really, is the back and forth going on between Serj Tankian and guitarist/songwriter Daron Malakian. The verses have the former delivering motor-mouth couplets for the first four measures before handing over to Malakian to deliver the “My crack, my smack, my bitch…” line (not “I smack my bitch”, by the way), alternating again to Tankian who again delivers a straight fact about the prison system of the country and finishing with Malakian growling “They tryna build a prison”, which again transitions into the chorus where Tankian repeats that phrase but powerfully yelling it at the top of his lungs. It’s a dynamic that’s not so much push and pull, but more turns you to face one person with the other waiting for their turn to grab you by the shoulders forcefully to make you face their direction. That never really lets up until the breakdown where the rhythm’s allowed to ride for a bit and I think the moment written for the audience in mind to jump to the beat before the fast pace kicks in again for the final pre-chorus and chorus. What a way to get an album started. I don’t know what it was like for a SOAD fan to wait for those three years between the band’s debut and Toxicity, but with the way ‘Prison Song’ starts the proceedings, it must have felt like they never left.