Some Songs Considered - Posts Tagged 'xl recordings'

March 11, 2010

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“Danger! High Voltage (Soulchild Radio Mix)” – Electric Six
(Words/music: Joe Frezza, Steve Nawara, Anthony Selph, and Tyler Spencer, available on Danger! High Voltage EP, XL 2003)

Right now I have a cold – thankfully one that’s not too dehabilitating, but one that’s just enough to make eating a chore and frustrate me with the periodic coughing. Most relevantly, it’s only made me more tired the last few days. Naturally, I looked to music before over-the-counter medication (or quality rest, perhaps the wisest option). The hope was that the right song would dislodge whatever ails me and put my brain back on solid footing.

So I turned to “Danger! High Voltage” in my time of need hoping that it would de-gunk my insides. Maybe it’s the Taco Bell line, but I hoped this song would have a Tabasco-like cleansing effect. Perhaps it’s over-the-top absurdity and driving beat would lift my spirits. If nothing else, that gaudy saxophone at the end would give me a laugh, and folk wisdom suggests that laughter is the best medicine, right? Or maybe listening to it would fill me with nostalgia for the first time I saw this video on the internet, probably in Real Player format before YouTube would make something like this immediately accessible. As a last resort, I could picture Jack White and Dick Valentine standing over a small fire, manically screaming back and forth at each other about their desires.

Of course, this didn’t work. I’m still hacking away, but at least I’m smiling a little more. And now I really want a quesadilla.

More on Electric Six: Allmusic | Amazon MP3 | Emusic | Last.fm

December 23, 2009

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“The Kids Don’t Stand a Chance” – Vampire Weekend
(Words: Ezra Koenig, Music: Vampire Weekend, available on Vampire Weekend, XL 2008)

I will be the first to admit that I have an early track bias. While I may not actively prefer the first few songs on an album, I end up paying more attention to them than the ensuing songs. I’m culpable because my attention for an album generally peaks when I actively seek it out and put it on. Even with some of my favorite albums I might be distracted by something else. However, I want to think that it runs deeper than just attention spans and distractions. If nothing else, I wonder how many bands sequence an album considering “first impressions,” or at least with the knowledge that people like me will generally spin the first side more than the second side.

This bias isn’t necessarily a negative one; in fact, some songs benefit from flying under the radar a little longer, escaping the lightning quick judgment we make instinctively at the beginning of an album. These might be more challenging songs, songs that build on musical or lyrical themes presented earlier, or songs that do something different from the opening sequence. In this case, I’m drawn into “The Kids Don’t Stand a Chance” largely because of Ezra Koenig’s vocal delivery in the song. While it’s not an outright departure from the rest of the album, Koenig offers slight variations on his vocal style. He strains his range slightly at the end of some of the lines, not by screaming, not losing the note, but only slightly out of his comfort range. He sounds a little less relaxed and a hair more anxious as a result, but really only by comparison to some of his more buttoned up vocal performances near the end of the album. He even cracks into a strange falsetto near the end, perhaps as the last twist on his debut album. While “A-Punk” and “Oxford Comma” hooked me early on, “The Kids Don’t Stand a Chance” (and “Walcott,” the penultimate track) is the most played songs on my digital copy of the album. I wonder how that would be different if it changed positions.

More on Vampire Weekend: Allmusic | Amazon MP3 | Emusic | Last.fm

September 23, 2009

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“Harrowdown Hill” – Thom Yorke
(Words/music: Thom Yorke, available on The Eraser, XL Recordings 2006)

In interviews around the time The Eraser came out, Thom Yorke alternately acknowledged, denied, and distanced himself from the inspiration for “Harrowdown Hill.” I’m not as interested in pinning down the subject as I am by Yorke’s statement about the song’s evolution. “It’s one of those really odd things where I wrote half the lyrics before considering what I was writing about. It happened over a long period of time. By osmosis, these things were going on and they ended up in the tune.” I’m not really interested in Yorke acknowledging or distancing himself from David Kelly, a British chemical weapons expert found dead in a mysterious manner, because that’s not what the song is “about.” If Kelly was the inspiration for the song, Yorke moved it beyond a factual report of the situation and tapped into the underlying emotions.

Yorke’s lyrics with Radiohead touched on ideas of paranoia, detachment, and recognition of a dark undercurrent, yet he called “Harrowdown Hill” the “most angry song I’ve ever written in my life.” His anger, in this case, comes from exasperation. The “we think the same things at the same time / we just can’t do anything about it” comes from the same place as the Orwellian visions in Radiohead’s songs, but Yorke seems more focused on the inability to act against these forces rather than the things he detests. If Yorke felt incredulous before at the things he saw in society, he’s rendered speechless by the methods used to perpetuate the cycle. In that sense, it’s no wonder Yorke wants to distance himself from the song’s origins, lest he go back down that rabbit hole of frustration and anger again.

More on Thom Yorke: Allmusic | Amazon MP3 | Emusic | Last.fm

August 7, 2009

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“Once Around the Block” - Badly Drawn Boy
(Words/music: Damon Gough, available on The Hour of Bewilderbeast, Twisted Nerve / XL Recordings 2000)

Even if my habits indicate otherwise (or, in this case, my readers), I like to think of myself as a creative person. Like many creative minds (as opposed to concrete minds for the sake of argument), mine wanders a fair amount. I spend a lot of mental energy (both conscious and sub-conscious) making connections between things, often leading me to re-imagine something as something else. Over the past seven months, this blog became my primary hobby, so a lot of that idle mental energy goes towards these songs or the act of writing itself. Naturally, these roads intersected, leading me to start pondering what my writing process would sound like – if I were to soundtrack a montage of me sitting at my computer hammering out one of these posts, what might I choose. “Once Around the Block” feels like the best fit, perhaps because the snare drum sounds like a typewriter. More importantly, it sounds like a typewriter working in an irregular rhythm – sometimes it locks right into the waltz-like rhythm on the track, other times it creates a polyrhythmic effect, and other times it sounds lost.

Listening to the song again this morning, I still hear the typewriter hammering away, yet I noticed for the first time that it feels slightly behind the beat, whether by design or just because it’s played with brushes rather than sticks. Combined with the starts and stops, it almost sounds like the drums are chasing the rest of the band (or, for the sake of my metaphor, that the words are chasing the song). This captures the purpose of writing about music (for me, at least) – taking a song and trying to get to the root of it, chasing the magic until it reveals itself to me. These mini-revelations make the pursuit worthwhile – all of the sub-par posts, blank stares, and revisions morph from pain to payment when I learn something new. Ideally, good writing strives to be like “Once Around the Block,” sounding effortless and light despite careful and precise orchestration. Even Gough’s lyrics fit in with the act of writing – chasing infatuations, outrunning fears, striving for the perfect word, and ultimately starting over again.

More on Badly Drawn Boy: Allmusic | Amazon MP3 | Emusic | Last.fm

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