I’m just about drunk enough that I’m feeling enthusiastic. I been dancing to McLusky. Times was good. I been dancing to Tatu’s version of “How Soon Is Now” two nights in a row. Times was good. You can give it some proper hardcore singer “I HAVE A FUCKING TAPEWORM AND YOU STILL ARE NOT IN LOVE WITH ME AND I HAVE A FUCKING TAPEWORM” bending-at-the-waist mishagas and if I go to bed and wake up I know I won’t be feeling this good and I didn’t go to Doncaster but Saints won anyway and we are 20th and you know why? A: TOTAL FOOTBALL
But dammit these past two days they have made me need to play songs at people cos songs are cool and amazing and I have a guide dog stamped on my hand and I’m not sure why this gives me pleasure but yes it does
PM DAWN – I’d Die Without You
I spent a large amount of today listening to PM Dawn. I am thinking of pitching PM DAWN WEEK to A Music Publication. History left them behind, you can sort of see why – they’re very often verbose for the sake of it, and with verbosity comes hella pretension, and often this leads to non-lyrical flow and annoyance and sweet fuck they’re basically wearing bedsheets, big shiny bedsheets, and you can see why that doesn’t fly nowadays.
But god, PM Dawn. Young people do not know PM Dawn. This was not PM Dawn’s big hit, because that was:
I don’t know if I prefer this as such – it’s more straightforward, the lyrics make more sense, there’s actual narrative flow. It’s one of those love songs that make me feel awkward, cos it’s the subject putting hell of pressure on the object, but god it fucking RESONATES – “Is it my turn to watch you walk out of my life and not do a damn thing?” It’s desperation – “Isn’t it amazing how some things can completely turn around?”
One day I will be a grown up and I’ll know what I’m doing and that day had better fucking come soon cos otherwise a life in admin awaits me and I ain’t want that, and one day I can look at my “PM Dawn Phase” in the past tense and laugh, but for know sweet fuck PM Dawn are the band for me. It’s how fucking lonely yon piano sounds, how every note tinkles and sparkles, how those fucking harmonies just kill in the chorus, that moment of desperation when you will promise absolutely anything regardless of thought or consequence just so long as you can get what it is you want at that precise moment – “whatever babe, what ever bay-bay” - you will swear to literally anything at all, because the moment overwhelms you to that extent, the enormity just swallows you and there is no future or past, only NOW. NOW is all that you know. Human existence is all about you and that fucking instant. This song is that moment, that moment absolutely perfectly.
PM Dawn really need to be reassessed. I want to sing this song to people. All of you, preferably, I am not sure why. I need to sing at you. I need to play records at you. That’s kind of what this post is about.
BELINDA CARLISLE – Leave A Light On
Video here – it used to embed, now it doesn’t. Basts.
People who play “I Think We’re Alone Now” at clubs – I AM TALKING TO YOU.
Yes, it got to number one and this only made number four, but at the same time – why do you play that when this song exists in the world and is unquantifiably better than it? This again falls into the category of songs I must sing to people. I think Richard Hawley would absolutely kill it, but unfortunately, I am not ever actually going to be Richard Hawley, or sing like Richard Hawley, so I’ll have to let you know that the chorus is something I MUST SING because, as Ramzy was saying, you hit an amazing bit AND THEN SOMETHING EVEN MORE AMAZING HAPPENS!
HARMONIES!
HARMONIES!
HARMONIES!
Dammit, why is “Heaven Is A Place On Earth” her enshrined classic? I wanna be in a room full of people singing this song till their lungs give out. It’s so poised! So perfectly measured in its distribution of high points, bits to sing along to…
I have got to find the motherfuckers that kept this off number one.
THEY ARE (taken from ChartStats):
JIVE BUNNY
MILLI VANILLI
REBEL MC & DOUBLE TROUBLE
WHY DID THEY FUCK WITH DESTINY?
PM DAWN – Set Adrift On Memory Bliss
I didn’t mean to include this, by the way, but I’ve got it playing now, and you know what? Their biggest hit, and it’s very, very good. It’s where the lyrics start not making sense, and the video doesn’t necessarily need Tony Hadley to pop up at the end, but the hell with it.
PROLAPSE – TCR
Prolapse are the best band from Leicester ever, because:
a) the only other one I can think of is Kasabian
b) PROLAPSE ARE AWESOME
Prolapse in many ways anticipated the YouTube generation by naming themselves after the medical term for shitting your guts out, since I don’t think Prolapse would have necessarily been hugely in favour of people finding their songs on YouTube and as such would prefer them to get lost in a miasma of videos about shitting your guts out.
Anyway: this is not the best Prolapse song. However, this is one of the few that they did a proper video for (in America!), and it is still very good. Find their records and listen to them and love them.
SKY LARKIN – Fossil, I
I tried doing a poll on ILM about which was the best song Huw Stephens played the other week, and FOUR WHOLE PEOPLE voted, and, er, I wasn’t one of them, so there we go. This was my favourite song that he played. It is not especially big or clever but it has stuck and stuck hard and they made a video (in America! Even though they’re from Leeds!), plus I saw them live and thought they weren’t that great, but no, this is a good single and makes me think I have missed something.
THE PASSIONS – I’m In Love With A German Film Star
It is fabulous. It is slow and slinky and goth-but-not-quite-goth and it’s always a little faster than I think it is. It’s so very great, really it is.
NE-YO – When You’re Mad
This is my favourite Ne-Yo song. What is yours? If you do not have one, you should get one. He’s very good. This is a good place to start – it’s about how he finds his girl even sexier when she is angry, and that premise is kind of dickheaded, but he delivers it in such a way as to be adorable. He’s good at that. Very good.
NE-YO – Closer
This gets better the more you hear it. I heard it on the top 40 last week and it was beautiful.
JORDIN SPARKS & CHRIS BROWN – No Air
Though obviously this is better. I do not get how people can resist this. It is heavenly, from tip to toe. It’s the pitch, it’s the tempo, it’s the way the vocals run not-quite with the beat, it’s how they open up, it’s how in the video when they finally meet all they can think to do is scream “NOOOOO” at each other, it’s the chorus – IT IS TOTALLY THE FUCKING CHORUS – it’s the way they rip off “Umbrella”, it’s when Chris Brown walked and ran and jumped and flew you believe, you believe that it is possible that Chris Brown does transcend humanity that much, it’s how it’s a song about constant struggle but the struggle is always completely worth it, it’s the bits where the strings get tense, it’s the keyboard solo, it’s the ballad for this year, it’s the ballad for these times, it’s the constant fucking rise, I need it to hit you, I need you to feel like I feel, I want that moment, I want to know it isn’t just me, because this is too damn big to be just me. This song, and possibly only this song, is why I listen the top 40 nowadays, so I can be reminded that no matter how many other pieces of shit people listen to, this is still there, this still lives and breathes and walks and runs and jumps and flies and flow-ows every Sunday afternoon, and all the rest of the damn time.
ULTRASOUND – Stay Young
God, this encapsulates me too well. I’m old enough that I’ve come to realise that youth is slipping away from me, and I’m getting annoyed with the people that are younger, but I know I am wrong to do this, and I know I am jealous of them and that’s stupid and it hurts, and when I look back on my youth I won’t do shit but regret and that’s stupid too, but that’s not Ultrasound’s fault, and I don’t want you thinking this song is kneejerk stuff and it’s bitter indie and can be ignored, because ignoring this song is the last damn thing I want you to do.
This song is extraordinary. I had a ten year gap between the first time I heard it and the second, but somehow on the second I could remember it exactly. The first time I heard it, I liked it cos the guitars reminded me of “Lucky Man” by The Verve, because, well, 10 years ago, that excited me, and I don’t want to act like that didn’t happen, because it did, and, well, it’s part of the reason I’m where I am at the moment. The second time, all the layers came rushing upon me; all the contradictions operating at once, all the vulnerabilities coming to light…
I wanna stay young, wanna go and never come undone – I wanna go out, wanna have fun and never come back home
You realise how transitory an experience youth is, particularly when youth is sold to you through music. All that bollocks about how rock should always be about pissing off your parents – the deliberate barriers it sets up, the deliberate exclusions it incorporates – and never thinks of those it excludes, because rock is for winners, rock is for youth – “It’s a naked pagan glory, celebrate the new” – and it leads the fans to believe that the rest of the world doesn’t matter…
And yet the song envies that too, it envies the freedom, it chases that fucking feeling. Hear them guitars, hear their heft, hear how they clash, how they yearn for the eternal and the epic and perpetuity. Hear how the vocals contrast: Tiny Wood (the man) is drawn, haggard, despairing, lunging to cling onto what he’s got, searching for that one more hit he doesn’t know if he’ll get, or if he’ll deserve; Vanessa Best (the woman) is aloof, tremulous, riddled with dramatic, quivering highs. They don’t interact, they just happen to exist at the same time; they are both completely extraordinary in their own ways. The song is rock destroying you and creating you all at once, and you can’t tell if it’s a good thing or not, it’s just what you do, it’s all you know, and it is the most beautiful, most empowered you have ever been, but at the same time you know it won’t last, there is doubt nagging at you all the goddamn time, and bear in mind that this song was Ultrasound’s first charting single. They’d not had an album out by this point. It’s still their highest-charting single, too – the first time I heard it was on the top 40. It got to number 30.
Ultrasound now are footnotes, if they’re even that; they made their first album a double album (that’s a double-CD album, by the way, due to the last song being 35 minutes long). It didn’t sell. They were shuffled out of the back door and split up, cos rock had had its use, they hadn’t served it as it saw fit, and there’s always more, always younger, always fully ready to bend and submit to cultural behemoths, always willing to obey and not challenge things, not try and change things; they can be honest, of course, but that’s only cos apparently that’s the kind of thing that women are into todays. Honesty, skinny jeans, ukeleles; hint at your vulnerability, hint that it might exist. Don’t actually say it out loud.
I can’t let “Stay Young” lie. I can’t. British guitar music tends to churn out ignorable stuff cos that’s what fuels it – there always needs to be someone at number 26 in the charts, and every week it changes. British guitar music is disposable by nature, almost by necessity. It is clumsy, it is overly blatant, it will be forgotten inside a year, it will not make any lists beyond the ones that get put out in order to try and recoup the label costs. Ultrasound’s mistake, on this evidence, was to try and get clear, to try and take the generic big sound of British guitars and make it actually big, actually grand, but no-one would go with, and so people haven’t heard of Ultrasound because then 1999 happened and someone else came along instead and their guitars were just as big, and people didn’t realise how special Ultrasound were, and so repping Ultrasound now is like setting yourself up as the biggest joke – in a world where Radiohead and My Bloody Valentine and Slint and Shellac and Fugazi and Belle & Sebastian and Nirvana and U2 exist, why hitch yourself to these? Are you mental? Are you stupid?
Look, this song is bloody special, it cuts deeply, it is bloody painful, it needs to rise again, I can’t help it, I love it, it’s too goddamn much for me to start making any remote amount of sense about, I want people to hear it and listen to it and love it just as much as I do and unfortunately I am afraid that it and me are currently intertwined that badly that somehow anything less just wouldn’t bloody work, you know? Look, I’m drunk, and hell, I’ll regret this in the morning or afternoon or whenever it is I wake up, cos that’s what happens when I’m sober, but I can’t let this bastard song lie, I can’t let its textures get away, I can’t let its confidence, its exceptionality go ignored – oh God, even though I’m drunk I know exactly how ludicrous I’m sounding, and that this is all screaming out for an editor, and I wish that was how I worked, I wish I could write in something other than these flurries of inspiration, that I could organise and plan and plot, and I know I’m the problem but I genuinely can’t figure out how to sound sensible about this matter, because I need you to hear this song and fall for it totally and utterly and just bloody realise.
“I’d Die Without You” is the only thing in my head. Its madness fits in nicely with my own.
ROCK HARD POWER SPRAY – Trigger Nation
Sometimes, as weak as it makes me look, I can’t explain beyond “This riff is pretty great. This chorus is pretty great. I need to dance to this as soon as is possible.” This is that time.
SUPER FURRY ANIMALS – Demons
There are people whose hearts don’t melt during the bit in the middle of this song where it’s just trumpets, and one day I would hope to join them, but, well. If I can’t help crying at the end of The Snowman (this is the Raymond Briggs one, by the way – I am sure there are several films of the same name, but I’m not talking about them), then I’m pretty much powerless against this.
I have not really bothered with either of the last two Furries albums, but maybe I should – I’m not sure there’s many other bands that can do poignant as well as they can.
SABRES OF PARADISE – Wilmot
Maybe I just like to get infested by things, maybe I want things to fill my brain when life happens, and if that’s true, then this is where music reaches its zenith.
MARIT LARSEN – Don’t Save Me
Myself and young people listened to ABBA the other night, I should have played them this too. It ain’t easy being a Marit Larsen fan, but her songs are too bloody good for me to choose any other option.
MARIT LARSEN – Under The Surface
STOP PLAYING WITH YOUR HAIR. You’re too articulate for that. Dammit, Marit Larsen, you’ve got some annoying habits, and hot damn but you are hell of twee, but you’re so incisive, so articulate, so damn true – Scandinavian pop is clean and elemental and the criticism is that it’s too cold, it divorces the emotions from reality too much, so pain is only know because pain happens in pop songs, and Scandinavian artists only feel things for art’s sake; Scandinavians, so it goes, aren’t actually real people. They’re too cold and analytical, too pleased with themselves in their bilingualism. They know how the parts fit together and they fit their words and play their notes around that accordingly. They pull strings, they use tactics, they arrange things just so.
And that ain’t Marit. She’s too close, too real, too damnably human, too right. She knows too much, perhaps. She’s painful – you think “these are fantastic melodies, these would fit on X’s mixtape just perfect”, then you hear the words and start to worry that X will either think you fancy them or – worse – that you think they fancy you and are trying to disavow them of said opinion. Marit Larsen is dangerous for your health, seriously. She’s too damn brilliant for reality.
CAMERA OBSCURA – Lloyd, I’m Ready To Be Heartbroken
“HEY, Lloyd!” I fear that is the moment I bloody crave, I wanna make sweeping statements about how Cammie Ob (I need to remind myself I am not an American music critic – how? With NICKNAMES!) won’t ever be this good again, since the possibility that they might would possibly make my brain explode. This song puts me right on the pop-not-pop divide, it makes me wonder where indie stops and pop begins, it makes me wonder where the fences get put up – this song is brilliant, it’s about how your relationship to pop defines your attitudes to actual romance and how dangerous that actual concept really is. That’s CO’s gift – they don’t wanna be twee, cos being twee is fucking the hell out of their lives. Onceuponatime I had this excellent review in me about how Underachievers, Please Try Harder is an album about the really dark bits of twee – about how self-identifying as a failure isn’t actually as easy as all that, about how scarring your soul is actually rather painful, about how much “opting out” really fucking hurts, about how you will desire normality and curse yourself for failing to achieve it. CO definitely are not a band who approach C86 as some kind of a godhead, who genuinely believe that their way of doing things is better – they are as they are because, well, that’s what happened, isn’t it? They do not want to be boxed in, but that’s what happened, and they’re trying to get the fuck out but something has gone fucking wrong in the process.
In a way, it’s like Marit – the music is crazy mad painful, but the trumpets are just EXCELLENT.
If you’re wondering, “I’d Die Without You” is still there. “Take every little bitty piece of my heart” – the insertion of bitty to make it scan, to show the extent to which Prince Be (that is what he is called) is going off his rails in order to try and hang on.
I need to keep writing cos I can’t fall asleep. Self-consciousness is descending upon me and it’s making me worry that this post is not sufficiently celebratory, and these songs are celebratory and should be celebrated. This is the peril – the need to prove how happy you are. Over-compensation – lurching. Scary business.
And “Steal My Sunshine” won’t embed.
LEN – Steal My Sunshine
That should not stop me from mentioning it in bold, though, because it is not a thing to be frowned on. Here it go.
Plus I am in a really good mood. Thus far, it has been an excellent weekend, hence this post. I have talked to people, and dammit, I enjoy that. So consider this an extension of me talking to people. I apologise that sometimes I get kinda dark and depressing when I talk at length, it just seems to happen. I wanna share this with you not because I want to depress you, but because this stuff makes me feel incredible.
SEO TAIJI – Moai
Incidentally – how incredible is this song? It’s basically radio pop, but the beat is full-on fucking glitch. It was a big hit in Korea. Lucky fuckers. The wheeze and ease of the organ over the click and rumble creates this amazing effect, totally otherworldly and utterly great.
PETER FOX – Alles Neu
And then this! Leave shit on a positive note, is what I think would be an idea, and this is as positive as they come. Mad drums, menk strings, and a bunch of lyrics in German about rebirth and regeneration and being “completely renovated” and “Peter Fox 1.1″. Oh god I need to fucking play songs at people again and not doing so is driving me bloody mad and I’d clearly be completely sick of it after a while (i.e. and hour) but jesus this is IMPORTANT TO ME and, well, wow. Need dance, need sing, need do something.
But for the moment, this blog post will have to do.
EDIT: I FORGOT:
THE KNIFE – Marble House
I do not know any other record quite like this. I bet there’s loads. But. Oh, the Youtube don’t convey the way that bass rolls in the chorus, the way it rides – just how sensationally tactile it all feels, just how incredible this cadence actually physically makes me feel, how it goes beyond just sound to whole other bastard worlds. What a fucking album this is.
THE BIRD & THE BEE – Again & Again
I don’t mind if I have to dance to this by myself. I’d just really love it if other people were dancing to it too. This song just keeps making everything right, in a slap-tambourine-on-arse twice then hop! kind of way.
Yeah, I’ll regret this in the morning, but it isn’t morning for at least another couple of hours. I’m glad we had this discussion.
