Tag Archives: take

#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.

#1026: The Kinks – People Take Pictures of Each Other

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Was this song in a car advert once? You’d think that with the Internet existing and everything, you’d be able to find evidence of this in a split second. But I can’t find it anywhere. I have this vague memory of hearing this song in the advert. And then watching a video of that advert on YouTube somewhere. This was all years ago. But before listening to the Kinks’ Village Green Preservation Society, that was how I came across ‘People Take Pictures…’ for the first time. It sounded so familiar when Ray Davies started singing those opening lines. Maybe I dreamed that advert up. If someone else remembers it, send answers on a postcard, please.

‘People Take Pictures…’ is the second song on that album concerning pictures being taken of memories gone by. The first to appear on there, ‘Picture Book’, focuses on the good aspects of looking at these photos and having those good ole moments of nostalgia. In ‘People Take Pictures…’, Ray Davies takes the more cynical approach, expressing a feeling that everyone’s just taking pictures of things just for the sake of it, to show their friends were missing out on or to show that they were there when something was happening just to gloat about it. On an album that’s focused on preserving the things of things that were sacred and pure, it’s here that Davies doesn’t want to see anymore pictures from the past after he’s shown an old picture of himself when he was three years old, sitting with his mother by an old oak tree. He wishes to see no more photos, and with those last words the whole record ends on a fadeout of perky ‘la-la-la’ vocals.

The sort of listener who like huge climactic finishes to their albums may be sort of let down when it reaches this point. A short and snappy number, this song is just over two minutes in length and it ends on a fade out rather than a true ending where everything comes to a concrete stop. Kinks fans will know that it was during this period that the band had also recorded ‘Days’, and if ever there would be an ideal album closer, then that track was right there. I personally like ‘People Take Pictures of Each Other’ in the place that it’s in. I think it works in concluding a summary to the album’s theme, through a funny 180-turn from all the ‘god-saving’ in the opening title track, you know? Looking at the past can be fine, but only in its amounts. Too much of that could probably get you down.