5.Right Back To The Start –
Merchandise
Merchandise are a trio from Tampa,
Florida (who have actually topped a WF5
post here before) but they sound more like gloomy British post-punk,
and on this track, like British new wave. The synth-hook makes it; it’s
certainly not singer Carson Cox murmuring the lyrics. I looked
the lyrics up: they’re a bit of a downer actually (‘I came
back to my home, it was slashed and torn’ … ‘I spent 39 years collecting the
seeds / But they all died …’). They seem to me like they’re about being at the
end of a relationship and feeling like your efforts are all now for nothing. Almost
they suggest the narrator has jumped realities – ‘went looking for a lover but
she was never born’ – but at the least that he feels like a stranger in the
place he finds himself in.
The band even dresses
in dark tones – I have trouble reconciling all of this with
the Florida sun. If I just think of Merchandise and their music as being from
northern England they make much more sense. But then so too did dark-jacketed
San Franciscans Black
Rebel Motorcycle Club; sometimes dirt and dinginess are just a state
of mind.
Scottish alt-rock stalwarts
Teenage Fanclub recently released their tenth album: a stage of their careers
that ‘The
Ringer’ called ‘too old to be ascendant, too young to come back
into style or resign themselves to the nostalgia circuit’. (The article put
Wilco into the same category.) It’s worth a listen, even if like me you haven’t
heard that much of their past work.
The opening track, ‘I’m In
Love’, is a real winner. Like the #1 song on this month’s list I didn’t know
beforehand this was the single off the album, but it immediately stood out to
me. The title, lyrics, simple guitar chords, and harmonies give it a mid-to-late
‘60s pop-rock feel. As has been noted elsewhere
the chorus – ‘I’m in love, with your love’ – is a bit ambiguous about the
singer’s feelings: is he in love with another person, or just the feeling of love
itself? Regardless it’s a bright, catchy tune that makes the band sound twenty
years younger, as if this style of music was just beginning rather than having
come from the now-distant past.
Some months ago I was watching
the ABC Kids Channel with my daughter and in between shows there was this
somewhat baffling, somewhat charming two-minute animated segment. It featured
two blocks with funny faces sitting on a bench singing a pretty good song
actually about how different they were. ‘We are different / we are different,’
went the chorus, ‘as you can clearly see / A most unlikely pair we are / A most
unlikely pair are we’. One of the blocks was a weird-looking fellow that sang
in a high voice, while the other was more of a ‘hipster’ block in a hat and
glasses who delivered his lines in a rap-like, conversationalist tone. This
allowed the song to carry forward through snippets of exchange such as these:
BLOCK 1: ‘In my spare time I
play hide-and-seek’
BLOCK 2: ‘While I like to
teach rubber ducks how to squeak’
BLOCK 1: ‘You teach them to
squeak?’
BLOCK 2: ‘Yep’
BLOCK 1: ‘That’s unique’
BLOCK 2: ‘Yeah, I try to give
them tips on their squeaking technique’
Big Block SingSong is
largely the creation of two
Canadians, animator Warren Brown and composer Adam Goddard. Each episode features a
unique character and tune, although the voices of the characters are similar
across episodes. Over the past several weeks my daughter and I have had a few
binge-watching sessions through the ABC’s
iview site:
‘More! More!’ my daughter says, pointing at the screen, and then I click on
another episode. I can’t tell you what her favourites are, but I personally
like ‘Wilderness’ (about a block who lives in the forest), ‘Technology’
(Kraftwerk or Devo if fronted by singing blocks), ‘Brave’ (Queen if backed by
singing blocks), and the rock ‘n’ roll ‘Princess’ (one of the few episodes with
a female protagonist). But they’re all great – if you have a young one I highly
recommend getting him or her hooked on them.
When U.S. indie folk band Bon
Iver premiered
their new album at bandleader Justin Vernon’s festival back in August they
announced the song titles by sending them to the festival app. With strange track
names like ‘22 (OVER S¥¥N)’, ‘___45___’, and
’29 #Strafford APTS’ that may have been the only way to announce them, although
Vernon
claims that they are not as hard to say as they look. For
a band that started off as earnest – the famous three months Vernon stayed in a
log
cabin writing their first album such an essential part of
their origin story – it could be viewed as an over-the-top attempt to shake off
that past, and post-Kanye
West friendship and endorsement, to now be seen as brave and
experimental.
What does ’33 GOD’ mean? The
song goes for 3:33 (3 minutes and 33 seconds), but that meaning could have been
added at the end rather than part of its core. Each line seems barely related
to the one before it, apart from the last verse which seems to be about the
singer staying over at someone’s apartment for the night. Vernon auto-tunes the
shit out of his voice, adding to the sense that he is being intentionally
oblique.
But it works. As the
website Pretty
Much Amazing put
it there’s ‘an air of cross-pollination to it … instruments clash with
unprecedented force. On the other hand, you can imagine a stripped down version
with untouched vocals working on the strength of the melodies.’ Indeed, the
sounds do work together. And Vernon’s voice, distorted as it is, still sounds
like distinctly his own. It’s enough to keep it spiralling into
pretentiousness, despite the hipster
cassette-listening parties that marked the album’s release.
The third track from Cymbals
Eat Guitars’ latest album, ‘Wish’ makes the band sound like the lounge act
evoked by the album cover, only way better. In making the album they looked to musicians
such as Bruce Springsteen and The Cure for inspiration. But I didn’t think
of either of those when I first heard this, I actually thought of this early-‘80s
band my Dad used to play, called Mink Deville. Mink
Deville’s ‘hits’ included songs called ‘Italian
Shoes’ and ‘Spanish
Stroll’: they were a bit bluesy, a bit cabaret, a bit punk, and this track
is all of those things in some degree.
The saxophone may give it a
lounge sound, but singer Joseph D’Agostino’s hoarse delivery gives the song an
urgent edge. It seems to be basically about longing – ‘I wish that I told you’ –
but the lyrics are more complicated than that: ‘An inch ahead of the event horizon
…’ goes the opening line for example. And there’s a line ‘Can we shut the
lights please?’ which may be part of the track, or just studio chatter. It’s a
fun little stomp and a great introduction for me to this band.
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