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#771: Kanye West ft. Bon Iver – Lost in the World

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So pretty much two months from now, My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy – Kanye West’s magnum opus, arguable to some – will have been out for 10 years. I wonder how West will commemorate it. Probably with a Twitter rant of some kind. He probably won’t. He has admittedly said that he doesn’t care for the album that much and considers it a backhanded apology for that VMA incident in 2009 that made him one of the most hated people in America. I was 15 years old when the album came out, but somehow completely missed the GOOD Fridays campaign that led up to it. For all I knew, ‘POWER’ was the only song he’d released before it. I want to say that I remember the exact first time I listened to it in full… I can’t. I do remember listening to it a lot in those first few days though. I was just glad he was rapping again. A decade has passed and it’s a bit of a bummer, a bit scary too.

‘Lost in the World’ is the final track on the album in which Kanye is present. Very much the climactic point of the whole record. It’s largely based on the song ‘Woods’ by Bon Iver, and I think West bought that band’s leader Justin Vernon into the studio to re-record some lines as well as just add some vocal embellishes on there too. The whole message of the track? Basically, being a rapper in this crazy world and dealing with the struggles that come along with it. And it’s done amidst this massive musical backdrop of pummeling percussion, synthesizers, vocal samples, live choir-vocals…. the lot. The track is essentially its chorus repeated with elements built on top with each iteration, apart from one sole verse from West full of contradictions that was later confirmed to be inspired by Kim Kardashian.

The only thing that bugs me about this song is that following outro, and the album closer, ‘Who Will Survive in America’ is its own separate track. ‘Lost’ feels horribly incomplete without it. If the birthday skit with Chris Rock was appended onto the end of ‘Blame Game’, why couldn’t the same be done with ‘Lost’ and ‘Who Will Survive’? Whatever. That’s just a minor thing for me. I’m there are a lot of people who appreciate the separation. Despite this minuscule issue I hold, there’s no denying that both tracks are worthy of their place in closing out one of the greatest hip-hop albums of this century.

#770: The Wombats – Lost in the Post

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I may not have listened to a Wombats song since about 2011 but I still enjoy a lot of songs from their first album quite a bit. ‘Lost in the Post’ is one of them. There’s nothing too deep about it. The lyrics concern the end of a relationship where the two involved just aren’t very compatible, and the narrator admits that it’s his own doing that has probably closed the affair a lot sooner. Once it’s over the lady seemingly vanishes into thin air, disappears, and is compared to those Christmas letters that children write for Santa which get sent to some unknown area.

It’s a great sing-along, I can’t really say much more. I don’t know who writes the melodies as all of their songs are credited to all three bandmembers, but lead vocalist and guitarist Matthew Murphy sings them well. There’s a weariness in the vocal delivery, I think, that appropriately matches the lyrical subject matter. And the rhythm section of Tord Øverland Knudsen (bass) and Dan Haggis (drums) support Murphy up with the ‘ooh-ooh’ backing vocals that are a constant throughout the whole album. Possibly the only thing about the track that I’ve fallen out of favour with is the ‘Go to Santa’ bridge which seems to last forever. It’s a bit repetitive. Has some great interplaying backing vocals during that section too though, which perks things up quite a bit.

The band made an actual video for this track though it doesn’t feature the song as it appears on the album. It seems to be a much older version recorded way before the group were signed to a label. The recording sounds a bit rougher; Murphy sounds considerably younger. It’s the same song, but I much prefer the final version.

#756: Billy Talent – Living in the Shadows

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It never occurred to me how many songs from the first Billy Talent album begin with the letter ‘L’. It feels like I wrote the last one to do so only a few days ago. It’s been three weeks! There are only three songs on that record that begin with that letter, but that still makes up a quarter of the tracklist. This is the last one from those that I’ll cover. It’s ‘Living in the Shadows’, and it’s the second song on the album.

This track just carries on the anger and ferocity that is established on album opener ‘This Is How It Goes’ and threaded throughout the 41 minutes the album lasts for. There’s a theme of seeing through artifice and lies that also runs through the album – and a lot of the band’s discography, thinking about it – and it’s definitely the predominant subject in this song too. Ben Kowalewicz’s sings/screams about those who hop on trends and put on a front to try and look cool but are ultimately lying to themselves because it isn’t truly how they are. All of this is summed up in a chorus which blasts these people for trying to change other people when they don’t even know themselves and are ‘living in the shadows’.

I think this song’s just great. Everything about it is so furious. How Kowalewicz’s can switch from singing to screaming in a split-second during the choruses is beyond me. And the song’s ending where he repeats the chorus among the barrage of guitars, snare hits and cymbals makes it a classic to me. I see it like a sister song to ‘This Is How It Goes’; they’re both sort of similar musically and even use the stop-starting guitar break in their respective instrumental bridges. Both those tracks are just so negatively charged in their outlook of the world… but they both work as a great one-two punch to begin the album.

#725: Julian Casablancas – Left & Right in the Dark

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I want to say that I was the first person to get the lyrics for this song on the Internet back in 2009. If anyone remembers the website we7.com, I believe Phrazes for the Young was an exclusive on there before it was officially released a week or so later. Somehow the lyrics for every other song were up on sites already, but no one had taken the time to try and decipher ‘Left & Right in the Dark’. So I did. I listened to this song over and over again, pausing and restarting at various points in order to decipher exactly what Casablancas was singing. I think I did an alright job. I’m very sure that the lyrics I typed up (back a long time ago on letssingit.com) are the ones that are available all over the World Wide Web today. They may have been edited at some point though.

And it was through that somewhat tedious task that I got to know this track. While some may have become sick of the track if they were in my shoes, I found that Casablancas’ song was still bearable. The album was his first solo project outside of The Strokes; while that band is stemmed by 60s classic rock like The Velvet Underground, Phrazes signified an emphasis on glossy synthesizers and drum machines in debt to 80s new wave. ‘Left & Right in the Dark’ makes this apparent right out of the gate with an awesome keyboard riff that is echoed by Casablancas later on in the song.

The track sees Casablancas having almost something of an existential crisis. He reminisces on days when he was a child, when he may have wronged people, generally situations in the past where things were so real. Now they are just moments in time and Casablancas wants the listener to make the most of the time they have in the here and now. Like a lot of Stroke songs, the track is characterised by the songwriter’s classic croon, which seems to sound quite different to how it usually does in his band’s recordings. That might just be down to the mechanical sounding guitars and glossy drums that surround it though.

I listened to Phrazes for the Young fully for the first time a good decade after it initially came out. Wasn’t really for me. This is my highlight from it, still.

#724: Fleetwood Mac – The Ledge

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To cut the long story short, Lindsey Buckingham didn’t want to make a second Rumours – an album that was absolutely huge in 1977 and considered a classic in rock history. He cut his hair and went on to follow some unorthodox methods of making songs, recording his vocals in a push-up position and sometimes just playing all the instruments by himself at his home.

A lot of these home-studio recordings ended up on Fleetwood Mac’s double album Tusk, the record that eventually followed Rumours and took a few people by surprise just because of how strange it could get in places. ‘The Ledge’, written by Buckingham, features the guitarist taking on the percussion, bass, and vocals here – and is yet another that is surely directed at bandmate and ex Stevie Nicks, minus the gloss and production value that threaded throughout its predecessor.

The track has this country do-si-do twang to it aided by its 2/4 time signature and the dry timbre of the guitars and drums. While all this make the song an upbeat composition to dance to, one can’t dismiss the bitterness of Buckingham’s lyrics that tease a former lover, telling her that she’ll never find anyone as good as him. There were obviously a lot of strong feelings that carried over from their previous project. Even so, as the second track on Tusk, it acted as a clear statement that this wasn’t going to be a typical Fleetwood Mac album if you hadn’t already guessed by the wealth of material that was on it.