Rocket (Smashing Pumpkins)

Ever since Yoichi nearly banged my door down in glee on Tuesday brandishing the Smashing Pumpkins DVD he’d just bought, and we rushed downstairs and monopolized the TV room by sheer noise and enthusiasm and nostalgia, thumping out drumming climaxes on the tables, belting out choruses and air-guitaring ourselves into a frenzy, everything has been building up to this morning.

Sun. Breeze. Saturday. All you need is Rocket.

Around 1.00 the riffs start sliding into that wonderful progression and I realize the rules I learnt in Grade 5 music theory about how some progressions just work and always will were actually spot on.

Around 1.20 what I’ve always somehow thought of as the “Indian motif” comes in. It’s too insistent and compelling to feel sensuous, but it’s damn sexy in its own way all the same.

They haven’t hit us with the big chorus yet. It’s coming. At 2.00 the guitar wails steadily and inexorably upwards, Billy sings “the moon is out, the stars invite. Think I’ll leave toniiiiiiiiight…” and we’re off, up, away, employ all the rocket metaphors you want, baby, because they’re all good.

Jumbled Headmusic

From a piano session with Tay last night, Carrot Rope (Pavement), Jed The Humanoid (Grandaddy) and Evaporated (Ben Folds Five) are sitting cross-legged on the floor and swaying dreamily.

From The Royal Tenenbaums on Sunday, Me And Julio Down By The Schoolyard (Paul Simon) is throwing sand and thumbing its nose at the above three.

From Alec putting on The Cure last night, Lullaby (ohhhh, when that bass comes in) is slinking and gasping its way round clawing at the walls while simultaneously reapplying layers upon layers of black eyeliner.

From the radio this morning, Witness (Roots Manuva) is bursting the bionic zit splittah, downing ten pints of bittah, right now seeing clearer than most and sitting here contented wit’ dis cheese on toast.

Very Occasionally A Lyrics Person

I’m not really much of a lyrics person. It doesn’t really matter what Sonic Youth or Fugazi are singing to me as long as it sounds good with the guitars. Other Tori Amos fans gape at me in disbelief when I confess that I don’t really bother reading her lyrics. Apparently they’re deeply meaningful. I’m generally indifferent to the sort of music review where the reviewer quotes extensively from lyrics and concludes that the album is about redemption or tortured love or dark nights of the soul or whatever. I tend to home in on descriptions of how it all sounds and ignore analysis of meaning and themes.

I’ve always felt a bit guilty about this – sort of shallow and non-indie. Most people I’ve mentioned this indifference to lyrics to have certainly reacted with surprise and a little bemusement, and I suppose I’d get raised eyebrows from the A-list music bloggers as well if any of them read this blog (ha, I think not). I can’t really figure out why this is either – I love words intensely in every other context, but the pleasure I derive from most of the music I listen to is overwhelmingly sensory rather than emotional or intellectual.

This doesn’t mean that music lyrics are completely meaningless to me; they do affect my appreciation of music but in a limited and asymmetric way. If I already find a song musically appealing, lyrics I like make me like it more, but bad lyrics have negligible effect.

Which is why it’s unusual that I love Silver Jews’ American Water. There are lines throughout it that jump out at me and elevate what would otherwise feel like exceedingly pleasant but humdrum alt-country to an album of moods and stories and places. Random Rules has In 1984 I was hospitalized for approaching perfection; I know that a lot of what I have to say has been lifted off of men’s room walls; and But before I go I gotta ask you dear about that tan line on your ring finger, which are all quite amusing, but something in the ending gives it a similar sort of poignance as Papa Was A Rodeo (Magnetic Fields) except perhaps not as sharp. Wild Kindness closes the album saying I’m going to shine out in the wild silence and spurn the sin of giving in, later I’m going to shine out in the wild kindness and hold the world to its word, and I don’t even really know what this means, but it feels good to hear him sing that.

This happens elsewhere too. I’ve written about Papa Was A Rodeo before. Lyrics are more important to me in rap, and are the absolute essence of why I love 8pt Agenda (Herbaliser featuring Latyrx) madly, and rather enjoy Eminem. Lyrics (and okay, I admit, my secret hopeless romanticism. Stop laughing.) are big reasons why Somebody (Depeche Mode), Sometimes When We Touch (Dan Hill) and Annie’s Song (John Denver) render me weak-kneed, sappy-smiled and mushy-hearted. My enjoyment of Hefner’s The Fidelity Wars is equal parts funny lyrics and appealing melodies.

But most of the time lyrics don’t mean that much to me, which is why I went hmmmm while listening to American Water last night. Funny how these rambles of mine get triggered.

Always Your Way

Today there seemed to be an exhilaration in My Vitriol’s Always Your Way that I never quite noticed before. Walls of sound that shimmer and ripple and whirl themselves round you rather than remain static. Amazing energy in the guitars. I’ve been meaning to listen to the album for a while – this was a timely reminder.

Maybe it’s just that I was at my wits’ end trying to write the damn moot arguments (see previous post), but it reached out and grabbed me in a way nothing else on Xfm managed to the whole day, and yes, they did play The Strokes’ Last Night, which I remain completely underwhelmed by.

Portishead: Roseland NYC Live

I’ve been trying to return Portishead’s Roseland NYC Live to Yoichi for weeks but it refuses to leave my CD player, or my head. It’s hard to try and describe without sounding pretentious, but there’s an incredibly palpable extra dimension the tracks take on when played live that makes the studio versions (which I’ve loved for years) seem sterile in comparison. There’s a sense of weight and texture, of empty cold cavernous spaces the songs inhabit and move through. Feels perfect these winter nights.

Moments I love:

Somewhere around the fourth minute of Mysterons: quietly menacing lower strings, reverberating warped walls of sound, upper strings clawing their way up, up, up to climax, and then? Soft. Shadowy. Tiptoe to a close.

In Over, when the drums first kick in. They really put the whammy on you.

Spiralling claustrophobia in Glory Box starting from “This is the beginning of forever”. A feeling of eyes rolling back in your head and flashing lights behind your eyelids until the return to “I’m so tired” leaves you paradoxically gasping both to catch up and slow down.

The vocals in Roads. One moment eerily ethereal and perfect the way they echo through the air, the next moment plaintive and pleading and quaveringly imperfect, every moment of this song just feels imbued with poignance and longing and regret and I never ever want to listen to it when depressed, but for now it’s amazing.

All Mine is the only track that feels vastly inferior here from its album incarnation. The horns just don’t feel as sexy and imperious and James Bondy. In general the song just seems to lack that whole “fuck with me and I’ll beat the shit out of you and you’ll love every minute of it” vibe. Which is quite a pity.

Great album. I hope Yoichi’s a patient man.

Sonic Youth: Documentary and Dirty notes

Crept downstairs last night during an extended break from jurisprudence to watch 4Music’s Pioneers feature on Sonic Youth, which reassured me that my marked inability to evoke the sheer joy this band’s music gives me in any sort of articulate way is shared by lots of other people, including the band themselves (although we didn’t even hear from Kim and Steve at all, boo, C4). There was Butch Vig using the tired old (but still frustratingly spot-on IMO) “glorious noise”, Brian Molko talking about getting chucked into volcanos and swimming around in magma (also quite apt, really), and Sonic Youth themselves (grovel, worship) sounding very art-rock and cliched and saying how everything is about the music, blah blah blah.

But be not deceived by this flippance. Truth be told, I sat in front of the TV for those precious 20 minutes like a 14 year old girl watching a Westlife porn video.

I was then, unfortunately, forced to stay downstairs trying to wolf the rest of my supper down while David Gray sang what felt like the same song for half an hour, after which I staggered back up to my room and put Dirty on very loud, because I was in the mood for it (yes, I know it’s supposed to be the sell-out album and lots of people hate it but I like it anyway), and here are random notes:

Does anyone else find the riffing in Drunken Butterfly incredibly seductive?

I think the best part of this album for me is the three song sequence in the middle. Sugar Kane initially sounds like another one of those exceptionally accessible Thurston-vocal SY songs like Teenage Riot and Sunday , but the minute you hear that intro you just know this song isn’t just going to be about catchiness, and that they’re not going to be able to resist some sort of descent into chaos later in the song. You can’t wait, but you also sense some return to order will follow, this is a song they’ll taper to a close. They do…and then they launch into the rollicking riot of dissonance and attitudinal Kim that is Orange Rolls, Angel’s Spit. And after this you get Youth Against Fascism, which is one of those songs which SY detractors probably jeer at as aging rockers’ attempting to keep in touch with the Ghostworld crowd, but which to me feels exuberant and brash and something I could mosh to without getting killed, and hey, sometimes that’s all I’m asking for. No one ever said they were political philosophers, after all, and yeah the president sucks/he’s a war pig fuck is fun to yell.

April March / Sue Garner + Rick Brown

Recent arrivals from Django:

April March: Chrominance Decoder

Right now I find myself incapable of saying more about this album other than that it is incredibly boring. Nothing of the rambunctious tweeness that made Chick Habit such a romp. The liner notes are amusingly pretentious and say things like “So April is a child. But nothing is quite what it seems. Could it be that she really loved you, Mr Clever? And what, or who, does she think of when the end-credits dissolve from the TV screen and the murmur of radio parasites wraps her in electrical snow?”, but I can write nothing about the music, because each of the four times I have tried playing it, it fades into the background within minutes, and believe me, when you have a very bored Michelle ploughing through the Brussels Convention on Jurisdiction and the Enforcement of Judgments in Civil and Commercial Matters 1968 and longing for distraction, something has to be very boring indeed if it doesn’t distract. And this album is very boring. Please talk to me if you have heard this album and like it. I would like to stop being bored.

Sue Garner & Rick Brown: Still

Earlier this year I described them (inadequately) as “Sarah McLachlan’s voice singing with Ani DiFranco’s attitude accompanied by Sonic Youth remixed by Tortoise”, and I am unfortunately unable to come up with a better description, but they really do deserve better than my fumbling reductive comparisons. Different feels to the songs depending on who’s singing: her tones are as dulcet as anything the Lilith Fairies can warble, and his are as nondescript as most of indie-rock’s finest, but in every song you feel this is a band that likes the subtleties of sound – in a lot of the second track (I Like The Name Alice) the sound we hear with the most clarity and detail are the steely plucks of the guitar, with her voice farther away, and each note’s got a twang, a twist, an emphasis of its own that the other notes don’t have. A note of its own in the wider scheme of notes. This appeals to me. I’m a believer in the individuality of notes.

(Still eagerly awaiting Leaves Turn Inside You, which has yet to arrive.)

(Elsewhere in the convenient world of online music reviews, Pitchfork likes the new Silver Jews, Flak reviews the Piano Magic compilation, and I really wish I could rave about MJ’s latest as much as PopMatters does.)

(Did I mention Chrominance Decoder is boring?)

The Mercy Seat (Nick Cave)

The Mercy Seat is dizzyingly claustrophobic; no matter where you run, you keep running up against “And the mercy seat is waiting”, and a menacing wall of sound closes in, frenetic psycho strings, crashing piano, approaching terror in the drums, close your eyes and you see flashes of cold steel, the jagged violence of electricity, shadowed corridors that eventually close in and engulf you.

Clockwork Orange, The Eye In The Door, The Passion

“Then, brothers, it came. Oh, bliss, bliss and heaven. I lay all nagoy to the ceiling, my gulliver on my rookers on the pillow, glazzies closed, rot open in bliss, slooshying the sluice of lovely sounds. Oh, it was gorgeousness and gorgeosity made flesh. The trombones crunched redgold under my bed, and behind my gulliver the trumpets three-wise silverflamed, and there by the door the timps rolling through my guts and out again crunched like candy thunder. Oh, it was wonder of wonders. And then, a bird of like rarest spun heavenmetal, or like silvery wine flowing in a spaceship, gravity all nonsense now, came the violin solo above all the other strings, and those strings were like a cage of silk round my bed. Then flute and oboe bored, like worms of like platinum, into the thick thick toffee gold and silver.”
– A Clockwork Orange, Anthony Burgess

One of my all-time favourite passages about music, and certainly one of the most distinctive. The other day some words from it came to mind when I was listening to Sigur Ros, so I thought I’d put the whole passage up here for everyone else to love too.

Elsewhere in reading, I finished Monday’s library books and headed back for more yesterday: Norwegian Wood (Haruki Murakami), The Ghost Road (Pat Barker, the last book in the Regeneration trilogy), Art And Lies (Jeanette Winterson), The Child Garden (Geoff Ryman).

From Monday, The Eye In The Door was a worthy sequel to Regeneration, which says a lot given that I loved Regeneration. It moves away from Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen to focus on Billy Prior, who had initially intrigued me less than the former two because he was completely fictional, as opposed to being a war poet I entered the story already loving. The book’s success, for me, lies in two accomplishments: firstly, making me interested in Prior as an individual beyond morbid fascination with his war experiences, and secondly, the idea of divisions within the self in almost everything the book explores, from homosexuality to class conflicts to Prior’s psychological problems to Dr Rivers’ difficulties in treating Sassoon. Engaging stuff, and Pat Barker’s accessible writing style helps a great deal.

Loved The Passion. Loved the language, loved the imagery, loved the quirky humour, loved it, loved it, loved it. Not exactly a hard-hitting book of ideas, and not particularly insightful even with regard to its major theme (passion, unsurprisingly), but all the way through I felt caressed by words, and often, that’s all I need or want.

Matthew Sweet Tangents

Does Matthew Sweet deliberately think to himself, “Okay, you’ve got a couple of rather unhappy dark songs, so make sure you give them the catchiest, happiest melodies you’ve got”?

Sick Of Myself (which, of course, is the ideal song to begin an album called 100% Fun with) is exuberant and rollicking from the get-go. It’s a song for convertibles, and the wind in your hair, and turning the volume up on the car stereo, and even as you sing “But I’m sick of myself, when I look at you” you can’t help but bob your head. There’s that playful, percussive guitar which starts it off, and there are those multiple false endings, and the entire song does actually sound like lots of fun, as long as you don’t listen to the words. I could go on and on about it, but I did a little digging and found someone else who loves it as much as I do and wrote about it better.

The dark songs on Altered Beast are, at least, in a minor key, but I still find myself swaying and smiling and singing along with gusto because they’re just so thoroughly pleasant.

Devil With The Green Eyes starts off like a lightweight 80’s big-haired rock ballad, with the sort of keening guitar feedback you expect from November Rain or a song by the Scorpions. But then the drums and harmonied vocals kick in, and you think the intro was meant to throw you off. But then he’s singing “The devil with the green eyes said you were never meant to be mine/’cause I came up from a dark world and every love I’ve ever known is dead/if you come close enough to see I am inhuman, I will tell you why you’re feeling so uncertain/Every word I say has a way of turning evil in you”.

And then of course there’s Someone To Pull The Trigger, where he sings “Well I’m waiting and willing/The clarity is chilling/But I’m not turning back/And neither can you/I need someone to pull the trigger…so if you’re what I think you’ll be/if you’re who I think I see – shoot”, and the quietly jangly country-laced guitars sing along.

This intrigues me because it makes me wonder about the songwriting process. I guess different people have different ways of doing it, but I always thought that whichever came first (melody or lyrics), the writer then tries to make the other components of the song suit what he’s already got. So both the lyrics and the music of Good Vibrations convey exactly that. And everything in You Oughtta Know echoes “And when I scratch my nails down someone else’s back I hope you feel it”. And She Don’t Use Jelly is as silly and lovely and weird as you’d expect it to be.

But then for each example I think of there, counter-examples jump out at me. Mack The Knife. Most stuff by eels.

Oh well, yet another train of thought skipping merrily off the rails and dangling its bare feet in a countryside pond while munching on buffet car sandwiches and throwing crisps to frustrated ducks…