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#1311: Supergrass – Sun Hits the Sky

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“I know a place where the suuun hits the skkyyy!” A great, great opening line to a song, the song in question being Supergrass’s ‘Sun Hits the Sky’ from their second album, In It for the Money, released in 1997. I’ve made it known in many a post before that this is my favourite Supergrass album, and I want to stress again that while you all may get your Britpop fill from Oasis or Blur, Pulp or Suede, all very respectable choices, please, please don’t leave Supergrass out in the cold. You should all be listening to Supergrass. Not one dud exists in the band’s six-album discography. I’m sad that it’s more or less confirmed that they won’t make another one, even though they are kind of together at the moment to celebrate the 30th anniversary. In another way, sometimes it’s best to just let things be. I can understand that. So I’ll leave it at that too.

Anyway, ‘Sun Hits the Sky’ is the sixth song on In It for the Money, closing out the album’s first half if you were to listen to it on vinyl. I have a strong, strong feeling that I heard the song in an advert for a UK holiday resort of some kind. Maybe Butlin’s. Maybe Center Parcs. If any member of Supergrass happens to read this, could you possibly confirm whether this was the case? I would have been a small child when those “commercials” were going around. But come 2005/06 when I was a little older, and by that, I’m talking the age of 10, Supergrass videos were usually playing on the television – a whole lot of fun they’d be too – and the video for ‘Sun Hits the Sky’ showed up one day on one of those video channels. The song was immediately recognisable, but the main thing I got was that it was Supergrass who had made the song – I want to say I had gained a fair knowledge of the band by then – and that this thing called In It for the Money was something to get, because song that was shown on the TV from it was I enjoyed a heck of a lot.

So where is this place where the sun hits the sky? Well, we all know that the sky isn’t this kind of border that the sun reaches up to. It’s all really limitless. I know it’s not meant to be taken literally. In fact, I think this track is about wanting to get really, really high – more in a haze of marijuana smoke rather than a darker deal with heroin – a bit like Paul McCartney’s ode to pot with ‘Got to Get You into My Life’. When you’re in your 20s and in a band, you’re gonna be smoking joints at some point. Gaz Coombes about knowing a place where the sun hits the sky and things get all distorted and strange, and in the choruses he sings about being someone’s doctor and being on the way to prevent someone from coming down. I guess like how it’s a dealer’s job to deliver the goods to their clients. I think I’ve got this song down. Just can’t help but feel good when listening to this one, got such a driving momentum. Very, very hard not to sing along to once you’ve got the words down, and notable highlights are the keyboard solo by Rob Coombes and the psychedelic ending where tablas and bongos enter the mix and the song eventually fades out with Mick Quinn laying down some licks on the bass guitar. A big “Yes” from me for this tune.

#1303: Arcade Fire – The Suburbs

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‘The Suburbs’ is the first song on the album of the same name, Arcade Fire’s third LP, released back in the summer of 2010. The lead up to this album’s release is one that I missed completely, I have to say. During that time, I was getting into The Who and seeing what their discography was all about. It was by chance that I heard ‘Ready to Start’ in an advert for the TV show Skins a month or so after the album’s release, otherwise I would’ve stayed unaware that The Suburbs was a thing that was existing. So I got to downloading it. The title track started it off, and it was a strong, strong opener. It wasn’t the orchestral, spooky, mysterious epic of an introduction that ‘Black Mirror’ was on previous album Neon Bible. ‘The Suburbs’ had a shuffling tempo, a skip in its rhythmic step, with its opening piano part sounding quite upbeat. It was warm, it was inviting. I would have been a little late to the party, but there was something very refreshing with ‘The Suburbs’ being the first thing to hear on an album after three years of waiting for a new one.

Now, ‘The Suburbs’ as a song is one that probably a lot of people out there hold very dearly. I’m not going to say it doesn’t matter that much to me. I will say I don’t think I’ve had that experience where I thought, “Man, this song really hits home,” or something to that degree. Though, I’m sure that time will come soon enough. The track is frontman Win Butler’s recollection of growing up in the suburbs with his brother Will, learning how to drive and having those dreams of what they’d do when they were old enough to leave. And then it gets to a part where he asks a higher power to provide him with a daughter or a son, to show them some beauty before the world truly turns to shit. That tugs on the heartstrings a little. You can call me out for being superficial or whatever, but what I really appreciate about the track is Win Butler’s vocal. He just sings the track really well. And if the “Sometimes I can’t believe it / I’m moving past the feeling” melodic line doesn’t ingrain itself into the memory bank, then the song just probably isn’t for you. And that’s fine. But it is such a great melody, you’ll probably find yourself singing it spontaneously.

Well, according to my phone here, it looks as if this’ll be the last Arcade Fire song I ever talk/discuss/ramble about on this blog. May come as a surprise to some, maybe not so much to others. I’ve never been the biggest Arcade Fire fan. I’ve always followed them whenever there’s a new album around the corner, particularly during that nine-year span from Funeral (2004) to Reflektor (2013) when they were the big, big indie act that it felt like everyone was waiting in anticipation for when it came to the thought of new music. I think I even gave my thoughts on ‘Reflektor’, the song, when it was very, very new at one point. Though if I was a rabid supporter like you’d probably find somewhere out there, there’d be many more songs by them on this blog. It is what it is. But the Arcade Fire songs you can find on here are a bunch that I have a huge appreciation for. So click on that ‘arcade fire’ tag and have a look through, whenever you want.

#1283: They Might Be Giants – The Statue Got Me High

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I could probably say that ‘The Statue Got Me High’ goes down as one of my favourite songs by They Might Be Giants. There was a short, very brief time when I didn’t get it that much. And that was when I was about 10 and watching the music video for the first time, on the Internet, on Yahoo’s old music service website. I don’t know what it was, there’s a lot of stuff happening in the music video and the song itself is quite busy in its structure and momentum too. I think it was all too much my little, tiny head to take in. But fast forward about five years to late 2010 when I was downloading the band’s albums and got to Apollo 18, ‘Statue’ started playing and I was into it almost immediately. I think it was the first time I’d heard the track since the attempt those years prior, but it felt like it should have been a certified favourite for all of that time.

Another TMBG track mainly written by John Linnell, ‘Statue’ is about a man who stares at a monument until his head explodes. And that’s pretty much the gist of it. There’s something about the wording of the song title that seems kinda clumsy about it. A sentence like “it got me” isn’t one you hear in everyday situations. But how Linnell sings it is where it becomes very convincing as a phrase. It’s like he’s shouting it from the highest rooftop and wants everyone to know about the situation he’s in. Or the narrator, whatever. It’s a song where I very much enjoy Linnell’s vocal performance. It’s one where he’s belting out the notes from his chest one moment and then singing in a standard baritone, sort of mirror the intensity/moments of relaxation in the music, all while maintaining these glorious melodies and recording these harmonies and backing vocals that add these layers of substance. As much as I like all the instruments behind them all, I think this song’s massive strength is in that vocal work. All so jubilant and earwormy, in general.

I want to say that I read somewhere that Linnell had a daydream depicting this scene and was inspired enough to write a song about it. Though, I may be making that up. I guess that’s how most songwriters fulfill their craft. They make up scenarios and write songs about them. But sometimes I think about how John Linnell can write songs like ‘Four of Two’ or ‘My Man’. And it’s like, yeah, maybe he just has daydreams about a person strangling themselves to death while looking at a clock, or another person suffering from spinal paralysis, and has an urge to write about them. Even the song ‘Unrelated Thing’ is about a woman daydreaming in the middle of a tremendously boring date. They’re not your typical song topics, but that’s what sets the Giants apart from nearly everyone else. And a large majority songs usually turn out good too. I just don’t know how they do it.

#1279: Pavement – Starlings of the Slipstream

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‘Starlings of the Slipstream’ is the penultimate track on Pavement’s Brighten the Corners album, released back in 1997. I can’t recall if I’ve ever said on here, but usually I switch between Crooked Rain… and Terror Twilight as my go-to listen-through Pavement albums. But over the years, Brighten the Corners has been slowly creeping up and calmly nudging it’s way into pole position too. My view, you can’t go wrong with any Pavement album. I’ve enjoyed a good chunk of Brighten… for the longest time. But as I’ve revisited over the years, with the big 3-0 approaching and being 30 now, the record’s become a great comfort. Being the ‘turning 30’ album it is, I can sort of relate with Stephen Malkmus who was going through the same stage of life at the time of making the album, even with surrealism and lyrical wordplay he tends to incorporate in his songs.

‘Starlings…’ was originally known as ‘The Werewolf Song’, assumedly because of the “ah-woooo” refrains during the chorus, and was introduced as so when the band played the Tibetan Freedom Concert in 1996. They did this performance on either 15th or 16th June, and a month later, they were in a studio in North Carolina recording the music that would end of being Brighten the Corners. Somewhere in between, Stephen Malkmus found the time to get some lyrics down to set amidst the music. Or maybe even during the recording sessions he did, the band usually got the performances to tape first and he would lay down his vocals afterwards. And with the final lyrics, you get a set of words that aren’t very easy to break down and get to the nitty-gritty about. They’re vague in typical Malkmus fashion. But just the song title of ‘Starlings of the Slipstream’ is enough to bring an image my head, much like a lot of other lyrics you’ll find in the track. So maybe it’s more about the imagery in this song, rather than the meaning.

So it would be the logical move to go through this song line-by-line to try and express what imagery’s conjured up by each respective lyric. But I feel that would kind of be a waste of my time, and you probably wouldn’t want to read that either. Rather, I’ll just list the few things that stick out to me when I think about the song. Overall, the chord changes and the stopping/starting motion the music holds in the verses. Each smack of the crash cymbal with the guitar strum feels very releasing. And then those stop-starts transition into the werewolf choruses where Malkmus recites the song’s title. Those moments are quite entrancing in their own ways too. The way Malkmus intensifies his vocal on the “I put a spy-cam in a sorority” line. Didn’t need to do it, comes from out of nowhere, but always grateful that he chose to sing it that way. And I like how the track just falls into this noisy outro with two guitars wailing between notes before everything fizzles out to an end. Somewhere I read a comment that referred to ‘Starlings…’ as the song that sounds like the final track but isn’t. And while I got a laugh and did think that the comment was sort of right, it does the best job as the second-last one. Gives us that last bit of levity before ‘Fin’ really ends the album on a poignant note.

#1278: Graffiti6 – Stare into the Sun

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The only reason I know of Graffiti6’s ‘Stare into the Sun’ is because of the song’s inclusion on the soundtrack for the 2011/12 iteration of EA Sports’ FIFA series of videogames. A roundabout way of saying FIFA 12. At that time, my GCSEs were over and done with. I was now onto studying for my A-Levels. It was quite the raise in difficulty. But instead of devoting more time into researching and putting more effort into my work at home, I carried on my usual tradition of buying the yearly FIFA game and dedicating time to that instead. My original YouTube account also got taken down around this period, so I think I was a little depressed. But the FIFA soundtrack wouldn’t let me down, it hadn’t since 2002. And ‘Stare into the Sun’ was a major, major highlight from there.

In ‘Stare into the Sun’, songwriter Jamie Scott sings about looking around at all the happy couples being together in the summer sun after having recently had his heart broken himself. He’s on his own, he’s feeling low. Feeling blue, as he says in the lyrics. But he also knows that this is how life goes, and after he’s done crying, he’ll be able to see the light and have brighter days coming his way. You see where the whole ‘staring into the sun’ metaphor comes into play. The music’s all upbeat and sprightly, got these whistles/xylophones that sort of heighten the positive energy. That descending piano riff at about 20 seconds in and what closes the song out too was enough to get me interested in the first place. Overall, what you’ve got in ‘Stare into the Sun’ is one of those happy-sounding songs about a sad situation. It’s a type that I’m usually into, and when it’s done well, it’s an instant like on my end. So here I am hopefully writing an engaging overview about it.

Hearing the track repeatedly through the TV speakers, I reckoned the track was sung by an American group potentially fronted by a Black vocalist. As you can see from the music video, it is not. And the group are from London. Just saying this ’cause it’s true, not to complain or anything. Doesn’t effect how I enjoy the track in any way. This was probably one of the last tracks I came to know from a FIFA soundtrack. I got FIFA 13 the next year, and that was the edition where I suddenly realized EA Sports were barely putting in any effort into the games anymore. Plus, the soundtrack was kind of unremarkable. That was the true sign that things weren’t right. The song can be found on the group’s Colours album, which then got re-released with new artwork and an extended tracklist. ‘Stare into the Sun’ probably got the re-release treatment too, as it then got another official music video made for it. Think I prefer the one above, though. It’s all the same song.