Archive for the ‘OLDER SONGS’ Category

Nirvana “All Apologies”

The guitar line that runs through “All Apologies” sounds like a mid-‘60s Beatles melody stretched out and twisted into a Moebius strip, as though Kurt Cobain had found a way to take the essence of ephemerality and joy in rock music and make it seem eternal and holy. The core of the song, extending out into Cobain’s lyrics, is in this tension between the joy of living in the moment and the vastness of all the time around that moment. It’s like he’s taking this thing he obviously cared deeply about – the inspiration and thrill of the moment, of living and feeling as authentically as possible – and making it into a religion. And in this faith, Rubber Soul is a book of psalms. In this creed, “All Apologies” is as much an expression of guilt and shame as it as a hymn to the power of the rock music can make life feel urgent and exciting and real.

It’s hard to get over how much “All Apologies” sounds like a suicide note set to music, even with the knowledge that Cobain wrote the basic structural elements of the song and its lyrics before Nevermind even came out. A lot of the ideas that Cobain put into his actual suicide note are there in the lyrics, but so was a reference to the famous Neil Young lyric “it’s better to burn out than to fade away.” “All Apologies” sounds like it’s trying to do both – the chorus hinges on the fantasy of being incinerated in the sun, the ending evoking the gradual erosion of time with everything eventually turning to dust.

Cobain had described this song – which is mostly him singing about gnawing guilt and self-loathing and an inability to experience joy like other people – as “peaceful, happy, comfort.” I suppose when he said that, he was mainly thinking of the Lennon/McCartney sunshine in that guitar melody even if he played it as overcast, and in the notion of embracing total oblivion. Or maybe he was thinking of that last “married, buried, YEAH YEAH YEAH YEAH,” a moment of dumb rock fun in a song that’s otherwise heavy and solemn.

For many years I never thought too much about the “married” part of this song, but there’s a passage in Rob Sheffield’s first memoir Love Is A Mix Tape that changed my perspective on it. The book, which is mostly about Rob’s marriage to the late writer Renée Crist, takes place in the ‘90s and there’s a bit midway through the book in which Rob remembers listening to Nirvana’s MTV Unplugged in New York shortly after Cobain’s death. The album really messed him up at the time, and not for the obvious reasons. Rob and Kurt were around the same age and married around the same time, and this point of identification made Rob zero in on this aspect of his life. He heard it all as love songs, especially “Heart-Shaped Box” and “All Apologies.”

A little excerpt:

“He sings, all through Unplugged, about the kind of love you can’t leave until you die. The more he sang about this, the more his voice upset me. He made me think about death and marriage and a lot of things that I didn’t want to think about at all. I would have been glad to push this music to the back of my brain, put some furniture in front of it so I couldn’t see it, and wait thirty or forty years for it to rot so it wouldn’t be there to scare me anymore. The married guy was a lot more disturbing to me than the dead junkie.”

That’s the guilt in the song. It’s the fear of not being enough for your wife and child, of feeling in over your head and not up to the challenge of being what you know is owed to them. Like a lot of Nirvana songs, “All Apologies” is about grappling with the expectations of masculinity, but unlike a lot of Nirvana songs it’s not coming to the conclusion that these gender roles are all bullshit. In this one he’s confronting his shortcomings and inability to “be a man” and deciding he’s not enough and never will be enough. He’s sorry about it, but finding a sort of peace with it. It’s the mentality of someone who’s convinced that he’s a failure and people are better off without him.

Because this song is coming from such a specifically masculine perspective I think it’s a hard song for women to cover, though several have tried. The version sung by Lorde, backed up by the surviving members of the band, Kim Gordon, and Annie Clark, is interesting but when I hear her sing it I don’t sense much connection to the material. It’s more like she’s just engaging with the abstract concept of Cobain, the Pure Authentic Rock Star. The version by Sinead O’Connor, released the same year he died, is better. Her vocal is strong and her connection to the themes comes across, but the arrangement omits the central guitar melody and that’s just too essential to the song for any version to work without it. If you’re not playing that part, you’re just not doing the song.

I’m more fond of Herbie Hancock’s instrumental take on it, which really digs into the possibilities of Cobain’s guitar and vocal melodies while voicing it all with more soulful inflections. It engages with the musical tension of the song, that pull between right now and forever. Hancock’s version is like a What If? comic, imagining what the song would’ve been if it came out of a totally different artistic lineage – jazz, R&B – but was reckoning with all the same ideas and feelings.

There are several recordings of “All Apologies” by Nirvana besides the original studio version on In Utero and the famous acoustic version from MTV Unplugged. Demos at various stages of completion, a early live version with unfinished lyrics, a handful of different mixes for the In Utero version. One of the most striking things about even the earliest versions is how the differences between them and the final recording are relatively minor – the structure doesn’t change much and though he revised the lyrics a few times the sentiment is always the same. The greatest variation is in tone, and I imagine one’s taste in “All Apologies” versions largely comes down to what aspect of the song is most resonant. If I had to choose, I probably like the proper In Utero version mixed by Scott Litt the most, but I do love the deep, funereal cello moan and soft landing of the Unplugged recording. I like the way the “2013” mix adds some scuff marks and texture to what Litt arrived at in the booth. Even the one demo version on the deluxe In Utero with the often barely audible scratch vocal and the overbearingly jangly Lemonheads-ish second guitar part is worthwhile, if just because there’s something perversely wonderful in hearing Cobain force the song into a happier, more carefree shape.

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Sonic Youth “Saucer-Like”

Sonic Youth’s records have a way of reflecting the environments in which they were made – Confusion Is Sex and Sister evoke different angles on the gritty Manhattan of the ’80s, Experimental Jet Set Trash and No Star is a snapshot of downtown Manhattan just as a new wave of gentrification set in, and Murray Street and Sonic Nurse have an open and pastoral feel that made sense given that half the band had moved out to Western Massachusetts.

Washing Machine, released in 1995 only a year after Experimental Jet Set, covers similar ground but it conjures up very different weather. Whereas Experimental Jet Set sounds like overcast skies and cramped subways, Washing Machine feels like walking around the city on a gorgeous sunny day. The guitar tones are clean and bright, and the music feels light and spacious, largely because there’s very little bass guitar on the record. The classic Sonic Youth tension and noise is still there to signify the city-ness of it all, but the palette brings out the beauty of the place rather than the grime.

Lee Ranaldo sings on two Washing Machine songs – “Skip Tracer” and “Saucer-Like” – and his lyrics directly address living in the city. In a sense they are two sides of a thematic coin, with “Skip Tracer” written from the perspective of a New Yorker who feels out of place anywhere else – “L.A. is more confusing now than anywhere I’ve ever been to, I’m from New York City, breathe it out and let it in” – and “Saucer-Like” is more about drifting along in Manhattan and embracing the joy to be had in feeling small in this grand and densely populated place.

A lot of writing about New York tends to be about someone feeling as though the city and its people are encroaching on them in some way, like it’s this external pressure sapping their energy and driving them mad. “Saucer-Like” is the opposite, in which internal anxieties dissolve just by going out into the world and watching so much life go on all around you. “I’m having a wonderful vision of the city today,” he sings during the bridge, observing the landscape and architecture, and boats coming into docks along the coast. He sounds so grounded and grateful to be “just a little free,” and fully present in his surroundings while lost in his thoughts.

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Archers of Loaf “Nevermind the Enemy”

“Nevermind the Enemy” is a song of gleeful schadenfreude, and while that’s not necessarily the most admirable feeling in the world, it can certainly be valid. The context for this song is petty – at this point in his career Eric Bachmann was writing mostly about the record industry and scene politics from the perspective of someone who was both highly competitive and likely to opt out of participating in anything he thought was distasteful or corrupt. It’s extremely smug but in a very fun way, and because he’s so focused on repping for underdogs and losers it’s relatable and inclusive, and always comes across as punching up. In this song, he’s proudly declaring “I found a reason to quit” and is inviting the listener to opt out too. He makes it sound like watching sports – “we can watch their plans fall through,” “never mind your friends ’cause you can make a joke of them.” The music sounds scrappy and energetic, with Bachmann’s distorted riff punctuated by sharp tones that sound like a truck backing up. It’s always made me think of getting in on a joy ride.

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Blur “On Your Own”

If Damon Albarn had written “On Your Own” for Parklife or The Great Escape it could have fit in just fine with the sort of fussy ultra-British arrangements he was using at the time: dial down the garage rock, dial up the music hall. But the arrangement Blur arrived at for the song on their self-titled album is far more inspired, particularly the odd guitar effects that Graham Coxon put on the main riff to make the end of the melodic phrase sound stuttered and broken. Everything in the song sounds like it’s been blasted out just beyond limits, like the band are kids playing too rough with their toys because they’re having too much fun in the moment to show any caution.

As with everything else on the record, it’s an expertly built tune dressed up in a carefully crafted simulation of carefree messiness. Coxon is going wild with his tone, but it’s all just-so, and the big shouty sing along chorus feels weirdly spontaneous despite being the crux of the song. The biggest reason this feels so loose and free isn’t entirely because Albarn and Coxon know how to make something sound this way, but mostly because the joy they’re bringing to this music isn’t something that can be faked. “On Your Own” describes tasteless scenes and embarrassing moments, but also expresses the pleasures of letting go of your ego and embracing stupid fun. When Albarn sings “my joy of life is on a roll, and we’ll all be the same in the end because then you’re on your own,” it’s just a more wordy way of saying “YOLO.”

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Shudder to Think “Survival”

Shudder to Think’s 50,000 B.C. is technically the group’s final album but is nevertheless a transitional work that falls between the odd collision of post-punk and prog rock on their 1994 classic Pony Express Record and the genre-hopping pastiche found on their late ’90s soundtrack work and most of primary songwriter Craig Wedren’s subsequent work outside the band. The prog elements and Wedren’s fascination with fitting his melodies and lyrics into odd meters remain, but it’s all smoothed out into a bright, shiny tunes that foreground the glam rock that was previously buried beneath all the jagged edges of their music.

“Survival,” the most overtly glam song on the record, is built around a slinky melody that makes the most of Wedren’s glorious vocal range and wry attitude. The lyrics allude to his fairly recent experience of surviving cancer without directly announcing it or even necessarily being entirely about that topic. About a quarter of the lyrics are written in Wedren’s abstract absurdist style, but he sings lines like “grease the temple” and “balloons light the lawns” in a way that suggests he has a very precise personal meaning in mind that’s just not for us to know.

The rest of his words sketch out the mood of a man who feels some gratitude for his luck, but also a bewilderment when it comes to what to make of his life in the aftermath. He sounds like he’s attempting to weigh the significance of a lot of things – why he got spared, the value of particular relationships, the prospect of not doing all that much with his new lease on life – and all the scales are broken. I think when it comes down to it, this is a song about shrugging off all the heaviness of meaning and learning to just enjoy the simple pleasures of being alive and getting to write a song, and another one after that.

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Father John Misty “Please Don’t Die” (Live)

I’ve been waking up with this song in my head a lot in recent weeks, as if my brain was searching for a song in my memory that would be almost too on-the-nose for the circumstances of the world at the moment. The sentiment could not be more clear and sincere, especially from a singer-songwriter who deals so often in irony and dark humor: “You’re all that I have, so please don’t die.” It doesn’t take much effort to ignore the parts of this song that are about someone struggling with addiction and nudge it into something more general about being very afraid of losing someone you love. The chorus, which hangs on a gorgeous melodic turn, is so pure in its emotion. The language is unusually plain and direct for a Father John Misty song, partly to convey an earnest wish, but also to let you linger on how helpless the phrase “please don’t die” sounds. It’s tugging on just a strand of hope, but in a lot of cases, it’s all you can really do.

Buy it from Bandcamp. All proceeds from Off-Key In Hamburg will be donated to the MusiCares COVID-19 Relief Fund.

Mazzy Star “Disappear”

David Roback, the man who composed all the music for Mazzy Star, passed away earlier this week at the age of 61. He’d been a figure in the L.A. neo-psychedelic scene for years before forming Mazzy Star at the very end of the ‘80s, but his work in that band in collaboration with singer Hope Sandoval is his most inspired and historically crucial, particularly as their song “Fade Into You” became a crossover hit in the mid ‘90s. The sound of Mazzy Star, and of that song in particular, was not unprecedented, but it was rare and distinctive in a mainstream context. It was overwhelmingly romantic and unmistakably sexual; erotic in ways that were heightened in dramatic terms but not sensationalized or prurient. Gen Xers greeted the song as the perfect thing for their crush tapes and make-out mixes, and it’s never really gone away. There’s an entire lane of indie music built upon the foundation of what Roback and Sandoval accomplished on their first three records, and even Taylor Swift draws on their influence – what is her recent hit “Lover” if not “Fade Into You II”?

Mazzy Star was the synthesis of two perfectly simpatico romantics. Sandoval seemed mysterious and aloof, and sang everything like an old soul trapped in the role of the ingenue. She always sounded like she’s overcome with feelings, but too shy to express it outside of the implied hyper-intimacy of their songs, and even then, only just scratching the surface of everything in her heart. Roback played often simple parts with a poetic feel. He could make a churning drone sound remarkably sensual, and bent the notes of his leads in ways that suggested a depth of feeling beyond the expressive range of words.

“Disappear,” one of his finest compositions, displays most of his finest moves and is an especially good example of how effectively he could build a potent atmosphere. The song opens their third album Among My Swan, and within ten seconds you’re just fully transported into their world. The sound makes the air feel different, it makes time feel like it’s slowing down. You put these records on to enter Roback and Sandoval’s world, and hope to feel more like how they feel, and if you’re lucky, absorb some of their sentimentality and romanticism into your own life.

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Erykah Badu “Time’s A Wastin'”

There are many amazing and beautiful things about this song, but for me “Time’s A Wastin’” has always been about the relaxed keyboard chords at the core of the arrangement and the particular tone of that instrument. I’m not an expert and it’s not specified in the liner notes, but I think it’s a Fender Rhodes? Something like that, at least. It’s a warm, wholesome tone that also suggests something cosmic or spectral beyond the physical realm. Badu is offering wisdom, advice, and encouragement in her lyrics, and the keyboards support that by conveying patience and gentleness even as she calls for immediate and decisive action. The song is basically about coaxing someone out of inertia, and she sings from a place of deep empathy – she’s obviously been in some place before. The implication isn’t that she knows much better and is condescending to this other person, but that she’s got some perspective. In its mellow feel and stately pace the music suggests a panoramic view going back ages, but Badu sings it all like someone firmly grounded in the here and now.

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Blonde Redhead “In Particular”

“In Particular” feels both twitchy and very even, like someone keeping something in a tidy order out of obsessive compulsion. There is an anxiety in this music, but it’s dialed down and kept at bay as Kazu Makino sings lyrics that sketch out a vivid portrait of a depressed person and expressing genuine empathy towards them. It’s a little ambiguous what the singer’s relationship with this person is – is it just platonic friendship, or is this romantic? – but the affection is clear and forthright, and the love is given unconditionally. But despite all that, the song is anything but sappy. There’s no sentimentality to the tone of this piece, and the rigidity of the musical structure makes Makino’s message come across as more logical than emotional: Of course I love you despite your “hysterical depression.” Of course you are special. Of course I am your “only friend.” Why would you ever doubt this?

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Bette Midler & Bob Dylan “Buckets of Rain”

I only recently learned of this Bette Midler cover of a Bob Dylan classic recently, as a result of working on the 1970s surveys. This version, which she performs as a duet with Dylan himself, was recorded around the same time as the original on Blood on the Tracks and came out only a few months after that album in early 1976. It’s an incredibly charming recording, and has the feeling of something the two of them decided to throw together on a lark.

Whereas the Dylan version is an earnest acoustic ballad, this is more of a cheeky honky tonk barroom piano tune that plays on Midler’s strengths as a campy cabaret act. They sound like they’re flirting and goofing around – like, why did they change the word “bucket” to “nuggets” here other than to be silly? Midler’s ad libs are both beautiful and hilarious, especially when she sings “Bobby, Bobby, hey there Mr. D, you set me free!” The playful spirit continues through the fade out in which Bob and Bette have a bit of charming banter that ends with him noting “you and Paul Simon should have done this one.” I disagree, that could not have possibly been as cute as this.

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Animal Collective “Daily Routine” (Live in Las Vegas, May 30 2009)

The version of Animal Collective that recorded and toured in support of Merriweather Post Pavilion was a trio – Avey Tare, Panda Bear, Geologist – performing almost entirely with electronic instruments. This isn’t unusual, but the band’s approach was. The core of the band’s music was rooted in folk and psychedelic rock, but they mutated it all by forcing it all to work within the limitations of their instruments and, more specifically, what could be done when approaching machines that were not necessarily designed to be played “live” with the improvisational spirit they would bring to guitars and drums.

The studio versions of the MPP material are very focused on conveying Avey and Panda’s songwriting, which by this point in their career had fully matured structurally and melodically. The live versions were far more chaotic, sometimes seeming as though they could collapse or deviate wildly off course at any moment. Ballet Slippers, the new live album collecting recordings from this period, isn’t always easy to listen to, as the more improvisational elements of the performances are more compelling in the moment and sometimes rather tedious outside of that context. But even still, the energy is there – often disorienting, vaguely mystical, sometimes mesmerizing, and totally dazzling when those gorgeous melodies settled into the foreground.

“Daily Routine” translated particularly well to the stage as the trio could click together well in the more traditionally structured chunks of the song, and the composition allowed a lot of space to drift off into ambiance and abstraction in the second half. This coda sequence is rather lovely in this performance and emphasizes a sensuous shoegaze quality that’s less pronounced in the studio recording. The song’s lyrics are written from the perspective of a young parent getting used to the seismic lifestyle shift of caring for a child and the anxiety around trying to do it right, but in this wordless sequence Panda’s voice conveys a mix of joy, love, and fear that’s beyond what could be communicated with words.

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Boards of Canada “Aquarius” (Version 3/Peel Session 1998)

The voices in “Aquarius” are all sourced from Sesame Street clips from the ‘70s, but only the bit of a child’s voice saying “yeah….that’s right!” signals itself as such. The rest either sounds remarkably like a numbers station or melts into incoherence, another texture in a psychedelic funk song that’s halfway between nostalgic vague familiarity and the unknown. In the context of Music Has the Right to Children “Aquarius” feels like a piece of a larger musical collage pulled from some Jungian collective unconscious of Gen X childhood. This version of the song – ostensibly recorded live in session for the BBC though I cannot tell exactly what constitutes “live” for this sort of music – feels somewhat looser and warmer, and somehow takes a different shape in isolation while being just about the same in structural terms. There’s a little more urgency to the rhythm and a bit more pop to the bass. When the numbers start falling out of sequence the mischief of it feels more pronounced, like you can tell that on some level the BoC brothers were enjoying the chance to mess with people’s heads in real time for once rather than well after the fact.

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Neon Indian “Fallout”

Like any genre made up by music critics, chillwave is both silly and poorly thought out AND a very useful way of categorizing an ephemeral aesthetic. It doesn’t hold up to scrutiny but you see the word “chillwave” and you know exactly what the sound and look of it is, and how it connects to a specific moment that feels very innocent and optimistic from the perspective of late 2019.

Neon Indian’s Alan Palomo didn’t run away from the aesthetics that made his project one of the defining pillars of chillwave along with Washed Out and Toro y Moi, but he did do a lot to expand its expressive range and dynamic possibilities. “Fallout,” the first single released from his post-Summer of Chillwave album Era Extraña, is emotionally heavy in a way that feels very removed from the stoner vibes of Psychic Chasms, which never got much deeper than conveying ennui or a vague pensiveness. In “Fallout,” Palomo kept the thick atmosphere of his first wave of songs but applied it to a composition with a much darker palette and an overtly romantic sensibility. The song vaguely resembles Berlin’s “Take My Breath Away,” but its sentiment is almost the exact opposite, with him trying to convince himself to fall out of love with someone who he’s realized is all wrong for him.

The most intriguing lyric of the song is the line that gives us the best sense of who the other person is – “are you still carving out a man, is that the plan?” It seems to be the type of person who wants to “fix” a partner and make them into the kind of person they want to be with, and being on the other side of that can be quite taxing. You always feel like you’re disappointing and never good enough, or that the person you are in the moment isn’t as worth loving as a person you might never actually become. Palomo’s vocal isn’t very expressive, but it suits the dejected tone of the lyrics, and when he sings “if I could fall out of love with you” in the chorus, he sounds like someone who doesn’t believe he has the strength to break it off or become this person he’d so badly like to be for them.

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Slow Club “Two Cousins”

I originally wrote about this song twice – once on this site and only scratching the surface of it, and again on Pitchfork in the context of a review of the album it’s from, Paradise. I’m coming back to it now as I’m going back through favorite songs from the past decade.

It’s generally understood that listeners make their own meanings for songs, but this one for me is an example of deliberately only hearing what I want so I can hammer it into what I’ve needed it to be. And what I’ve needed it to be is so specific and personal I don’t really want to get into it, but it’s really just tapping into the core of what this song is actually intended to be about, which is estrangement. Rebecca Taylor’s lyrics put that feeling in the context of family, but those are the bits I’ve learned to tune out in the interest of utility. What I’m really interested in here is the way she sings it all – you can hear a lot of guilt and regret in her voice. She sounds defeated, like she knows there’s just no fixing what’s gone wrong.

This song is from the summer of 2011 and from the distance of autumn 2019, the song resonates in a slightly different way. Back then relating to this song was urgent and rooted in events of the recent past, but now it’s all stuff I have to strain to remember. Things that were once incredibly important are vague memories now, and people become strangers. So now the part that really cuts deep is the end of the chorus, in which Taylor imagines crossing paths again in the future: “I look into your eyes / you don’t know who I am.” And that’s where I am now – a stranger to even this old version of myself. It’s about a different sort of loss now.

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Stone Temple Pilots “Silvergun Superman” (Live at New Haven Veterans Memorial Coliseum, New Haven, CT, 8/23/1994)

“Silvergun Superman” is a freaky hybrid juggernaut, like if mid-period epic Led Zeppelin merged with David Bowie in his glam-boogie phase but was recorded with the aesthetics of grunge. It’s the logical outcome of the Stone Temple Pilots collective rock obsessions, and made distinctive by the slightly odd angles and tangents of the DeLeo brothers’ guitar parts and the slippery charisma of Scott Weiland.

It’s still so difficult to get a handle on what made Weiland such a compelling presence – he had the look and the voice, sure, but also a peculiar balance of raw sincerity and eagerness to obscure himself in personas and poses. At the time this mercurial identity was considered crass and inauthentic and was subject to merciless ridicule, but now it’s clear that he was acting out genuine fandom and trying to protect himself. This is most obvious when he’s singing the more aggressive and macho STP songs – he’s play-acting masculinity, and in his own way critiquing what would later be commonly known as “toxic masculinity.”

The more glam and arch STP got, the more it seemed like we were getting the “real” Weiland, and that’s probably true to some extent. But it’s also pretty clear that the songs confronting his self-loathing and struggles with addiction were deeply felt. And so while a cheeky glam song like “Big Bang Baby” is still a very good time, a song like “Silvergun Superman,” which is sly and winking AND extremely bleak in its portrayal of life as a junkie seems like the greater triumph. Weiland’s lyrics are very vivid in this song as he sketches out scenes of pitiful lows with a touch of sentimentality and grapples with paranoia in a way that grounds terrible decisions in the context of loneliness and a deep need for connection.

This live recording of “Silvergun Superman,” included in a full 1994 concert included in the recent deluxe reissue of Purple, doesn’t change much about the song but presents it in a state that’s a bit more loose and raw than the album production by Brendan O’Brien. The DeLeo brothers really shine here, particularly in the final third when Robert’s bass part gets a bit more fluid after mostly thudding through the main riffs and Dean gets to emulate the graceful shredding of Jimmy Page on the outro.

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The 25th anniversary reissue of R.E.M.’s Monster is out this weekend, and I’m very proud to say that I wrote the liner notes for the set, with new interviews with Michael Stipe, Mike Mills, Peter Buck, and Scott Litt. My liner notes appear in two versions of the reissue – a 2CD version featuring the remastered album and a substantially altered full album remix by Scott Litt, and a 6-disc set featuring those discs along with demos, a previously unavailable live show from 1995, and a Blu-Ray featuring the Road Movie concert film, all the videos, and hi-res audio. (It will also be available on vinyl.) It’s a beautiful set that is designed to give you a lot of new ways of looking at this brilliant and unique album. I think one of the coolest things about this set is that between my liner notes, the demos, and Litt using so many alternate takes and unearthing buried elements of the music, you will get a very deep understanding of the band’s creative process at the time.

I think the most stunning “new” piece of music included in the set is Litt’s remix of “You,” which has always been one of my favorite songs on the record. In one of his boldest remix decisions, he cut out all the percussion on the first third of the song. It changes the atmosphere of the music significantly, and makes it even more haunting and emotionally charged than before. Here’s that remix, along with what I wrote about the song many years ago.

R.E.M. “You” (Scott Litt Remix)

It’s a bad idea to try to pin any sort of narrative on Monster — simply put, one does not exist — but in the context of the album, “You” is the logical conclusion to its general theme of obsessive, unrequited love. By the time we get to “You,” the cuteness of “Crush With Eyeliner,” the coyness of “King of Comedy,” and the earnestness of “Strange Currencies” are all distant memories, and even the destructive self-loathing of “I Took Your Name” and “Circus Envy” has run its course. At this point in the record, the singer’s religion is thoroughly and irrevocably lost, and all that is left is an aching emotional void and a lingering, undead desire.

Peter Buck’s guitars dominate the track, with an eerie pulse emphasizing a sense of post-traumatic shock, and a heavy, slashing rhythm evoking nothing less than total emotional devastation. Michael Stipe’s vocal performance is intense yet slightly disconnected, lending even his most benign sentiments a creepy, unhealthy tone. The song contains some of the most evocative images of Stipe’s career as a lyricist — “all my childhood toys with chew marks in your smile,” “I can see you there with lunar moths and watermelon gum” — but the peculiar specificity of the words only highlights the song’s desperate, deranged sensibility.

As the track comes to an end, Stipe repeats the word “you” with increasingly urgency as the music hits a chilling peak. It sounds like an act of self-nullification, as though he could only think to destroy himself by focusing his entire existence on someone else. When the song begins, Stipe’s character seems physically disconnected from his body and the world, and in its final moments, his mind seems to disappear as well.

(Originally posted on Pop Songs 07 on April 4th 2007.)

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Stereolab “Jenny Ondioline” (7″ Version, Alternate Mix)

Stereolab is now best known for an immaculate, groovy, keyboard-heavy sound, but their breakthrough record Transient Random Noise-Bursts with Announcements only barely hints at that aesthetic in a couple tracks and places all emphasis on Tim Gane’s overdriven guitar riffs, buzzing synths, and Krautrock-derived rhythms. It’s a highly distinctive aesthetic – a maturation of where they started on Peng! and the Switched On singles, but far less lounge-y and refined than where they’d end up only a year later on Mars Audiac Quintet. But whereas the former record is a transitional work on the way to Gane and Laetitia Sadier truly finding their stylistic lane on Emperor Tomato Ketchup, Transient is a fully formed masterpiece. They could have kept iterating on this vibe, but probably understood it was unlikely to top what they had accomplished with it.

The version of “Jenny Ondioline” that appears on Transient is a side-long 18 minute suite which also includes what is separately known as “Exploding Head Movie” on the Refried Ectoplasm compilation. That sequence is essentially a reworked cover of Neu!’s “Hallogallo,” the very definition of what is called the “motorik” aesthetic. The primary part of the song, which is about the first 7 minutes on record but is edited down to under 4 minutes for the single version, is pretty much the pinnacle of the first phase of Stereolab’s career. All of Gane and Sadier’s musical and lyrical concepts culminate in this piece, and in the process, they level up as pure songwriters.

“Jenny Ondioline” is rough and loud but elegantly composed, and bracketed by two power-strummed guitar sequences that work like sonic columns. The main rhythm is mechanical and precise, but has a brightness to it as well, like sparkling light on chrome. The section just before the chorus, in which the music drops back and a “oooooooh” vocal is foregrounded, builds drama but also offers a more sensual sort of beauty. The chorus is probably the best proper chorus of their career – bold, emphatic, and defiant with punk spirit even if the tone is more reasonable and pragmatic. Sadier is bitter but idealistic here, singing about the dire state of encroaching fascism and the disappointments of socialism in action, but with a genuine hope that conditions can be improved. This is a thematic thread that carries on through her work for many years, but it’s rarely stated as clearly and as powerfully as it is here.

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Stereolab “Come and Play in the Milky Night”

“Come and Play in the Milky Night” has a swing to it that sets it apart from Stereolab’s tendency towards more rigid grooves. The song feels light and effervescent, with Tim Gane’s gentle chords playing off Andy Ramsay’s cymbals in a way that evokes light reflecting off water on a summer night. The bass, keyboard, and vocal melodies are just as lovely, and it all comes together as one of the group’s most relaxed and beautiful recordings. It’s strange that this song is something of an outlier in their discography – the feel of it seems very natural for them, or at least for Ramsay. As the catalog progressed, Gane’s compositional style moved mostly towards tighter constructions, to the point that the later works often felt more like listening to structures than songs.

Laetitia Sadier sings at the top of her register here, and given the way her words are clipped by the melody, I didn’t realize for a long time that she was singing in English rather than French. The words just didn’t register at all, and the vocal here feels more atmospheric than central to the composition. The lyrics support the tone of the track, offering up images of stars and the night sky while suggesting a move away from rational thought. It’s like she’s just telling you – “it’s alright, let it all go for now and enjoy this moment.”

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Stereolab “Wow and Flutter”

There is an odd sort of optimism in Laetitia Sadier’s lyrics, in that she consistently acknowledges the worst of the world but also the impermanence of any condition. This is most clearly stated in the mantra of “Crest” from Transient Random Noise-Bursts with Announcements: “If there’s been a way to build it, there’ll be a way to destroy it, things are not all that out of control.” “Wow and Flutter,” a song from the subsequent album Mars Audiac Quintet, expands on this notion and goes beyond aphorism into more specific context. She roots it in personal experience of youth – “I didn’t question, I didn’t know,” “I thought IBM was born with the world, the US flag would float forever” – before embracing hope in the understanding that all things will end.

The faith at the core of “Wow and Flutter” is in that what comes after a grim present is a brighter future, or at least that it’s possible to correct mistakes rather than let them metastasize further. Sadier’s tone is cold and sober, her hopes are not particularly high but there’s a feeling in the music of swelling hope and pride. “Anthemic” isn’t a mode Stereolab worked in often, but it sorta applies to this one, and the way its chorus rises emphatically over a chugging rhythm. The song isn’t promising anything but entropy, but the music is asking you to do your part to help shift the arc of time and history towards something more bearable.

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Stereolab “Brakhage”

There are a lot of things happening in “Brakhage” but the center of the song is just two chords, strummed in a steady and relaxing pattern through all the rhythmic and melodic changes. As with “Metronomic Underground,” there’s a suggestion of objects moving in an unconscious synchronicity through a physical space. I closely associate the sound of this with commuter trains and hub spaces, moving walkways and airports. The tone isn’t tense or agitated, it’s more a sense of calm and order. It’s turning your mind off and going on autopilot as you navigate your way from point A to point B.

You follow the pulse of Tim Gane’s guitar until there’s finally a deviation of the pattern in a break sequence a little over 4 minutes in, and you get a different two chord pattern for a few seconds before clicking back into the original sequence. There is a feeling of low-key relief in that switch-up, like you’ve just arrived at a destination only to get back to moving through corridors on your way to someplace else.

Laetitia Sadier’s lyrics reinforce the commuter interpretation by repeating a mantra – “we need so damn many things to keep our stupid lives going” – that spells out the motivation of keeping oneself in this loop of passive behavior. The tone isn’t angry or dismissive, just self-aware and clued in to the absurdity of it all. It’s the awareness of how fragile needs make us, and how much we risk by stepping outside of this system.

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