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My iPod #132: Linkin Park – Breaking the Habit

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I don’t like Linkin Park very much mow. They’ve done a Coldplay, which means they’ve changed their sound so much I don’t even know who they are anymore. “Mylo Xyloto” is pretty shitty. I’m more of a “Parachutes” man. This is very much like Linkin Park. I think the only newer song I liked was “Waiting for the End”, but I haven’t bothered with their newest albums. “Meteora” is my favourite album, which will probably polarize a lot of you readers.

“Meteora” gets a lot of crap for apparently sounding the same as “Hybrid Theory”, but I haven’t listened to that album. The singles are good enough. Meteora on the other hand, you’ve got the song seguing into each other and Chester and Mike get an equal contribution on everything. “Breaking the Habit” is the exception. That is Chester’s song. For sure. Mike doesn’t rap on it, there’s no distorted guitars. Just a lot of keyboards and synth-strings. It’s very emotional.

The “Breaking the Habit” video is the first of Linkin Park’s that I can actually remember watching on the TV when it was released. It freaked me out. There’s nothing wrong with it. It’s just that when I was seven, my uncle got me this “Animatrix” DVD which is supposed to link in with “The Matrix” film series. It is also rated fifteen by the way. That DVD was so confusing and fucked up – I think I can remember a person’s head being squashed or something – and the animation for “Breaking the Habit” reminded me of it. So I didn’t want to watch the music video for a while. I got over it though.

Until tomorrow.

Jamie.

My iPod #131: Red Hot Chili Peppers – Breaking the Girl

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I’m very happy. Today marks the first time I make a blog from my new laptop.

No more will I have to suffer with the forever slow and freezing mess that is the family desktop. If you guys want a laptop, ASUS is the way to go. Forget Dell. My sister has a Dell laptop that’s basically falling apart. Whether that’s due to the manufacturer or if my sister abused it I’m not sure. I know that I’m not messing this mine up though.

Now with that intro out of the way, is this my first Red Hot Chili Peppers post? Because I’m pretty sure I haven’t touched upon one song of theirs. They probably don’t have a lot of songs beginning with the letter ‘A’ that I know of. Except for “Aeroplane” of course.

So… Red Hot Chili Peppers….. Ah! “Fight Like a Brave”. That was the first song I’d ever heard by them, thanks to Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 3. When they released “By the Way” in 2002, I had no idea that it was the band who wrote that song until I actually looked at the in-game menu.

In 2002, I wasn’t really into music. Being six/seven at the time, I was either incessantly up at early hours in the morning to watch Cartoon Network or Thomas the Tank Engine videos. 2006 was the year that I can actually remember the build up towards a Red Hot Chili Peppers album, which we all know is the double album “Stadium Arcadium”.

I can remember it now, the video for “Dani California” premiered at midnight on Channel 4. It was then played every hour on MTV2 the next day. My sister and I liked it. She had a friend who liked the band, who then gave her the “Greatest Hits” album. This is where “Breaking the Girl”comes in.

The song became a favourite of my sister’s. I recall not liking the song as much as the others though. I thin it was the fact that amongst the others on the compilation, this was a tune that I had actually never heard before. Even when I did listen to it, I found it… boring.

However when I downloaded “Blood Sugar Sex Magik” a few months ago, I found myself wailing along to the chorus and air drumming to the trash-can percussion in the instrumental break. I loved it. “Breaking the Girl” isn’t boring at all. The eleven-year old me was a silly child. If you are going to write a song about a meaningful relationship that went wrong and you feel as if you are to blame, you probably wouldn’t want to make it a funky jam as the Peppers normally did around that time. Something more melodic will do. This is that song you want to write. Yes.

Well, until tomorrow you guys.

Jamie.

My iPod #128: Mystery Jets – The Boy Who Ran Away

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“The Boy Who Ran Away” was Mystery Jets’ third official single in 2006. Their first album “Making Dens” was out, and they were played a minority of the time on MTV2. Most of their airtime came in the NME Chart, before NME up and went to go and have their own channel.

At first, “The Boy Who Ran Away” wasn’t to my liking. I would always skip the channel everytime the video came on. I take that back – it’s not that it wasn’t to my liking, it was just that I barely gave it a chance.

I did like their other songs though. “Alas Agnes” was a good one, as was “You Can’t Fool Me Dennis” which weirded me out because the lead singer looked very similar to a friend I had in primary school. “The Boy Who Ran Away” must be alright then, shouldn’t it?

Well, yes it is. I wouldn’t be wasting my time on writing about a song I didn’t like. The majority of people in the UK liked the song too; it reached #23 over here and remains to be the band’s highest charting single.

The song tells a story about… a boy who runs away. From home apparently. But he ends up in a rubbish place, and goes home back to his parents even though he knows they don’t like him. Pretty miserable. It’s an upbeat song, so you probably wouldn’t realise the tragedy.

Look out for the ‘lo-lo-lo’ bridge singalong too. That’s catchy as hell.

Until tomorrow.

Jamie.

My iPod #125: The Who – Boris the Spider

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One time when I was bored on YouTube, I remembered this cartoon from the nineties that would show on the BBC. The cartoon followed the adventures of a clumsy spider, who played around with his human friend. I completely forgot what the animation was called, until I found the other day that it was simply called “Spider”.

During that time, I typed in ‘spider’ which instead resulted in videos involving real spiders and “Boris the Spider” by The Who. The video above was the one that I clicked onto.

This time, it’s not a song by Pete Townshend. No, no. “Boris the Spider” was the second song on the band’s second album “A Quick One” which is known for being the only album by the rock band to involve songs written by all four members. “Boris” was the first song John Entwistle wrote for the band, and took a tolling time of five minutes to write.

Seems about right. It’s a tale of a black, hairy and very small spider, who crawls up a wall then drops to the floor, heads toward the bedroom door, comes out again, crawls into a ball and is then squashed with a book by the person who sees all of this activity. The spider’s name is Boris too. And all of this is sung over a simple bass line and a haunting bridge where John puts on his falsetto.

This song is also known for being the first in music history to incoporate the ‘death growl’. Betcha didn’t know that, huh?

So that’s the song for today. That fake spider in the video is very similar to one that I saw on my living room floor the other day. I was so freaked out wandering what to kill it with that it disappeared under the sofa. That bastard hasn’t come out since. It’s only a matter of time.

Until tomorrow.

Jamie.

My iPod #112: Violent Femmes – Blister in the Sun

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Violent Femmes are a band from Wisconsin that formed back in 1980. They’ve split up twice but have got back together this year.

I’m not a fan of them; this is the only song by the band that I have. Not because I’ve listened to their songs and thought that they were crap, but because I haven’t listened to anything else they’ve put out. Well, apart from “Gone Daddy Gone” (not a Gnarls Barkley song), and “Add It Up” (which I can barely remember). But even those are on the same album as “Blister”.

“Blister in the Sun” came on when I was on the LAUNCHcast internet radio in the mid-noughties. It immediately caught my attention when the catchy riff started, and it’s hard to forget it seeing as the riff melody is the same as the lead vocal too. The song was first released on the band’s debut album in 1983, but sounds like it could have been released in the sixties. I don’t know what it is, when I think of the eighties I think of long hair, Footloose, keyboards and drum machines. “Blister in the Sun” sounds like the complete opposite with it’s minimal instrumentation. It makes for good listening when you’re walking in a park, on a nice summer’s day.

Until tomorrow.

Jamie.