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#1462: Arctic Monkeys – The View from the Afternoon

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You might not be able to believe that this will be the first time I’ve covered a song from Arctic Monkeys’ debut album. I’ve written about ‘Fake Tales of San Francisco’ and ‘From the Ritz to the Rubble’ in the past, but those were both concerning the versions on the Five Minutes with Arctic Monkeys EP. Not saying that I’m an OG fan who was downloading songs from MySpace back in the day, but I did hear those Beneath the Boardwalk demos before Whatever People… was released in January 2006. And when the album arrived, a lot of the songs, to me, were just sanitised versions of them. The edge that was once there had now been taken out. A roundabout way of saying I liked the demos more. I’ve always liked the live take they did for the ‘I Bet You Look Good on the Dancefloor’ music video more than how the studio take came out too. It somehow felt too produced, which is funny ’cause the album’s obviously the least produced out of all the work they’ve done.

‘The View from the Afternoon’ wasn’t on that collection of demos, though. I heard the song first via its music video, which was on repeat on MTV2 in 2006 because it was the new one by the Arctic Monkeys. The track was originally going to be the third single from Whatever People…, but the band had announced the Who the Fuck Are Arctic Monkeys? EP just two months after the album’s release. ‘The View…’ was to be included as the leading track on that EP, so the video was made to prepare the people for that rather than what would be an A-side and maybe a couple B-sides. In the video, a young man plays the drums to the song in the middle of a council estate from what looks like morning to night, his hands bleeding in the process, until he’s eventually knocked out by a guy with a baseball bat. We don’t see the impact, but you can see that’s what’s about to happen. This video made me really want to get into playing the drums. Because I also saw the visual first, I didn’t know how the song properly ended until my sister borrowed a copy of Whatever People… from a school friend of hers, ’cause the song cuts out just as the baseball bat’s about to hit the kid’s head. It’s a very nice chord the song ends on, gotta say.

The whole theme of the album is a night out in Sheffield, from perspectives of the people involved to the outsiders looking in at all the chaos. ‘The View from the Afternoon’ is exactly what it’s about in the title. It’s about the people looking forward to the night out, thinking about the endless possibilities a few hours before everything kicks off. The track opens with the line “Anticipation has a habit to set you up for disappointment,” which everyone comments on how clever it is that Alex Turner’s also referencing the hype around the ban. That isn’t the entire lyric, though, so is he really? He probably is. I sometimes thought people were reading too much into it. But yeah, Turner writes from the point of view of someone listing the things they want to see while out on the town. Girls in fancy dress, gambling in the fruit machine, the works. A particular action that’s focused upon in the lyrics is drunk texting a girl you’re interested in, which the band urge the narrator to bear in mind. We have a strong album opener on our hands. The four bandmembers are firing on all cylinders. Maybe there’s a reason why the music video places a focus on the drumming, because Matt Helders is going crazy on ’em. Lot of sixteenths on the hi-hats and frenetic drum fills. Turner and Jamie Cook play very quickly on their guitars, their highlight probably being the part where the song dies down and the two of them play alternating chords that switch from left to right and back again in the headphones. Former bass guitarist Andy Nicholson follows the chord progression of the rhythm guitar, but he does it very well, rounds off that low end. So maybe Whatever People… isn’t my favourite Arctic Monkeys album, but I can’t say it doesn’t get off to a good start.

#1458: Nine Black Alps – Vampire in the Sun

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So Nine Black Alps’ third album Locked Out from the Inside was released on 5th October 2009 – 17 years ago last Monday – which is actually insane. I mean, I’ve been around and existing for the two albums the band had released before it. But when it comes to Locked Out… I vividly remember being very excited for its arrival after ‘Buy Nothing’ was released as a download, and sort of its first single, in April 2009. The song was the first sign that the pummeling, heavy but melodic hard rock that I really liked the Alps for – exhibited on debut 2005’s Everything Is – was back, after they’d gone down a softer, for lack of a better word, approach on 2007’s Love/Hate. ‘Buy Nothing’ was on repeat, I tell you. Sometime between April and October when I was probably looking for the song again, I came across the band playing what appeared to be a new song called ‘Vampire in the Sun’ live on the television station Channel M – a channel exclusive to the people of Manchester – via a YouTube video. Gonna embed that exact video below. And after hearing it, I was all in. I had a deep, deep feeling that this forthcoming album was going to be special.

Things got even better, because the album ended up being streamed exclusively on we7.com, a whole two months earlier. That’s how the site looked in December that year. So I’ve been listening to the album since August 2009. It’s crazy. Time is definitely something. I liked the whole thing there and then. Credit for changing things up on the last album, but this was the Nine Black Alps I knew. ‘Vampire in the Sun’ is Locked Out’s… opener. It’s a strong one. Opens very boldly with frontman Sam Forrest on guitar, laying down the song’s riff, before everyone else launches in to properly get things underway. The phrase ‘Vampire in the Sun’, you’ll see it and think there’s a lot of angst behind it. I know that’s what I definitely thought. Vampires, blood, Dracula, gothic, other associations. But thinking about it for the sake of this post, I think the song captures a narrator who tells themselves that they’re going to see the good in people, even though they may have done wrong in the past, and make the best out of the day no matter what happens. Very quickly though, the narrator finds themselves way out of their depth. They’re already a pessimist at heart and consider themselves a bit of a useless person, a bit like a vampire in the sun. ‘Cause they die once they’ve been exposed to sunlight and all that. It’s still very angsty actually after laying my interpretation down.

Song’s structure, pretty standard. First verse, second verse, chorus, third verse, chorus, instrumental break, chorus done to death ’til end. Still executed very nicely. My favourite part? When Forrest yells out ‘Sun’ followed by that moment of silence before the band fall into the song’s final moments. I still get chills in that silence. That exact part was what sold me when I heard the song the first time via the aforementioned live performance. I got a physical copy of Locked Out from the Inside in January 2010. Still have the CD somewhere around. I was always looking forward to whatever Nine Black Alps did after it. 2012’s Sirens came around, and what turned out to be their final album, Candy for the Clowns followed a couple years later. Sadly, I never liked those two albums as much. As a result, I sort of see Locked Out… as the last, really great album the band did. I can firmly say it’s my second favourite by them. You can probably guess which one’s on top. But as I’ve come to the realisation that this’ll be the very last time a Nine Black Alps will ever appear on this blog, I’ve got to make clear that all of the music the band did I just personally hold a great attachment to. Was just 10 years old when I came across them, thought they were cool and liked them ever since. They also used to see my posts whenever I wrote about their songs on the old Blogspot site and liked them on their Twitter page. If they were to reunite one day, with the original members too, I’d be intrigued to see what came out of it.

#1454: The Libertines – Up the Bracket

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So I’m sure I’ve mentioned in the past, I’m a Black man. It shouldn’t really matter all that much. But, you know, the type of music I share my thoughts on wouldn’t usually say “Black” to most people. Regardless, it’s the truth. Growing up and watching MTV2 UK in the mid-2000s, you’d wouldn’t see many, if any, Black faces on music videos. Kele Okereke of Bloc Party’s was probably the first one I saw via ‘Helicopter’. It was the only one for a while. But then the video for The Libertines’ ‘Up the Bracket’ showed up one day. It wasn’t the first of the band’s that I’d seen, but it was certainly the first I watched that featured all the members. Gary Powell was the first Black drummer I’d ever encountered. He didn’t look like he was playing the drums with much focus or precision in the video for ‘…Bracket’, and it got me wondering whether he was actually in the band or a stand-in for someone else. That’s quite messed up, I know, shows you how my 9- or 10-year old brain was conditioned. It wasn’t until I saw him again in the video for ‘Bang Bang You’re Dead’ by Dirty Pretty Things that I understood, this was an actual drummer who could actually play.

You can find that funny, you can find that truly insane. I’m somewhere in the middle thinking on it now. More towards ‘insane’, though. Despite the naive prejudice I gathered on the first viewing, it didn’t distract from the fact that the song itself sounded very nice. Doherty sings about meeting two dodgy men on Vallance Road, supposedly an allusion to the infamous Kray twins who used to live there, and telling them to fuck off by sticking two fingers up at them. Not the peace sign. And then the song focuses on two people for the choruses, a boy and a girl, who look like they’d be the perfect pair but are lost in their own little worlds. A slight change in theme, but it works somehow. The video added to the enjoyability. The band walk up an alleyway (Grove Passage in Bethnal Green, London – a mecca for Libertines fans), Pete Doherty and Carl Barât mime the words while doing so, and they all end up back at someone’s flat, performing the song in their iconic red jackets, in a party-like atmosphere while girls dance around them. Very easy watching. If there are two people who know how to mime lyrics and walk towards the camera, it’s Pete Doherty and Carl Barât. If you see videos by either of them, solo or with their other bands, that’s usually what happens.

‘Up the Bracket’ is the title track on the band’s debut album. It opens the second side, if you were to buy the record on vinyl. As much as I like ‘Up the Bracket’ as a whole, it’s the small, little details that make it an engaging listen. There’s the yell by Doherty right at the beginning, one of frustration, recorded during a moment of chaos in the studio. Barât joins in on the lower harmonies on the “See these two cold fingers” lines, those sound cool. He also plays the descending guitar line in the choruses, he for sure plays the lead guitarist role in the song. There’s that moment during the second chorus when a scratchier vocal track comes into frame, revealed to be inserted from another take of the song in the 2022 anniversary edition. The aforementioned yell is also in that same take. I didn’t know that before writing the sentence, but I’m keeping this all in. I think the oddity that puts the cap on everything is the audible ‘fuck off’ that’s said near the end of the guitar solo. That ‘fuck off’ went uncensored for years on TV. When it was about 2012 or something and I saw the video on what had turned into ‘MTV Rocks’, probably the last time I saw the video on the channel, it appeared that someone at the MTV offices had figured out there was a clear curse word in the song and censored it. I was falling out of love with MTV2/Rocks around that time, the music on rotation there just didn’t seem to as interesting as it used to be. Just that small censorship move showed me that things had really changed on that channel. Couldn’t tune into it the same way anymore.

#1449: Blur – The Universal

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Readers from the UK, it is that song from the British Gas adverts. There will be people out there who would have been introduced to Blur’s ‘The Universal’ through its use on the company’s advertising campaign in the early-2010s. I wasn’t one of them. It was those instances where I’d catch its music video on the TV somewhere, about ’05/’06 time. When it came to ‘The Universal’, I found myself changing the channel, the song’s video would be playing, but it would almost be at its end. It seemed to be a pattern that I’d never catch the beginning of it. YouTube was just in its early stages of being a working company, I didn’t know about its existence. But I did watch the video online on a site that I can’t remember and is probably irrelevant now. It wasn’t like I was missing out on much. The opening just shows a microphone, its cord being pulled and a long pull-out shot of the band as they mean-mug the camera. All an imitation of A Clockwork Orange, if you didn’t know already.

I mean, it’s ‘The Universal’, innit? I think even fans who don’t regard The Great Escape as one of Blur’s finest moments – again, I’m not one of them – can still put their hands up and admit that the track’s one of the band’s best. You ever see the group play it live, it brings the people together. It’s that “really, really, really could happen” refrain, just grabs you. I don’t think I’ve ever been able to pin down what the track is about. It seems to be about everyone and everything. When I say “everyone”, I mean the people of Britain. That was Damon Albarn’s whole thing for a while back then. It’s about being under surveillance, it’s about nights out at the karaoke bar. I think the “Tomorrow’s your lucky day” and “Really, really could happen” stuff refers to the National Lottery, which was a relatively new thing in 1995. It’s a subject “discussed” in fellow album track ‘It Could Be You’ too. The track has a sort of ‘The Future Is Now’ theme going on, heightened by the musicality with the horns and choir sections, but undercut by the mundanity of society as observed by Albarn.

Once I found the video online and heard the whole song in full, it was pretty much a given that ‘The Universal’ was gonna be a tune I’d return to for years. By 2006, or whenever it was, that had already been the case for millions of other people. But it goes to show how strongly the song held up even 11 years from its initial release. Let’s take away Albarn’s vocal, which he provides so effortlessly across the board, from the coolness in the verses to the rousing delivery in the choruses. Graham Coxon provides two guitar parts, the stabs in the left ear and the pretty, fluttering pattern in the right. Alex James alternates between ‘silky’ and ‘busy’ in terms for settings for his bass guitar work. And I’ve got no complaints about Dave Rowntree’s drums, he gets the job done. It’s a tight band performance. But the strings, the horns, the “Just let them go”s from the harmonizing lady vocalists. Those are what takes the song to another level. Imagine the song’s triumphant almost-instrumental last-minute ending without those three components. The section would end up sounding very empty. But the mix of the band and the outside performers altogether, that’s what gets the people tearing up at their shows. It’s right in the center of The Great Escape. I have no problems with ‘Yuko & Hiro’ as the whole closer. But I’ve seen a complaint saying ‘The Universal’ should have been, and I see it. It at least closes out the first half.

#1445: Weezer – Undone – The Sweater Song

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So I have a vague recollection of where I was when I first heard Weezer’s ‘Undone’. I was in the living room, just sitting on the floor. I’ll say I was about nine years of age, early to mid-2005, those were prime sitting-on-the-floor days. Would have been early in the morning, ’cause that was the only real time that I could have the TV to myself before either my mum or sister woke up and took charge of it for the rest of the day. MTV2 was on as per, and the song’s video was there on the screen. I remember kind of being entranced by it. ‘Cause the song’s a bit slow, but powerful at the same time, and with the slomo action in the camera work, everything came together. Couldn’t take my eyes off the thing. The dogs come running out at the end of the guitar solo, the band appear to give up performing. This was a different kind of video with its simplicity. But it was very effective. The way Patrick Wilson was acting had me thinking he was mentally challenged. Once I became aware of the video’s context – the band had to play the song at a high speed over 25 times – the way everyone was acting made a lot more sense.

And ‘Undone’ might just have been the first song I ever heard by Weezer. ‘Cause I remember seeing ‘Beverly Hills’ and thinking “The drummer seems fine here. I wonder what happened to him.” ‘Undone – The Sweater Song’ was the song that introduced the band to the world, when it was released as the first single from the band’s debut self-titled album, commonly known as “The Blue Album”, in 1994. Kurt Cobain had died. Grunge was kind of on the wane. The followers were lost. And over the hill came four guys whose frontman had the thickest framed pair of glasses and a bowlcut that only a mother could love to give the youth something new. At least, that’s how I saw the band’s arrival with this song summed up in an article somewhere. The song’s meaning can get lost because it sounds like Rivers Cuomo singing about a sweater and not much else. He says ‘Undone’ is meant to be sad. I can see it being from the point of view of a guy telling another person to simply take advantage of them, so much so until he’s nothing but a husk of a man, vulnerable, lying on the floor and scarred from the abuse they’ve taken. It’s a bit much, sure. I think it’s a valid interpretation.

That being said, I would understand why any deeper meaning would be lost on anyone, because the song’s too damn catchy. The riff, good, hypnotic. The verse vocal melody mirroring the riff, good. The opening “I’m me, me be…” verse feels like a statement tailored for Gen X, I don’t know why. The explosion when the crunchy guitars come in for the choruses, now, that’s the good stuff. This song’s such a great guitar song, gotta break out the air guitar when listening to it. And I particularly like how, for the first chorus, Rivers Cuomo and Brian Bell sing the lyrics quite straight. But when the second chorus comes around, they go back and forth with the extra phrases, harmonies and vocalizations, making it even more of a singalong than it already is. Then in the final chorus, there’s the further added lines about tank tops and “Superman skivvies” before both Cuomo and Bell belt out the song’s last word, with the former’s voice cracking to top it off. It’s the big release that then falls into the big ending. But then again, the song doesn’t want to seem to finish ’cause there’s that piano outro that comes out of the guitar feedback on the album. ‘Undone – The Sweater Song’, thinking about it, it’s really a mammoth of a track. A damn classic, I’ll take all of it that’s it got.