I have been. Thankfully, some surprising, relaxing, slightly odd pop produced by the Fleet Foxes — another great pick-up by Sub Pop — has come along to soothe:
PS A total ad, but I’d love you to check these out:
I’m over at The Sport Count (all about bad contracts, great signings, surprising trades and the best of the NBA) and The League Count (about rugby league, launched yesterday, and already a lot of great stories about very big men hitting the shit out of each other).
It’s a little played out, the whole ‘take a pop smash and re-do it earnestly, accompanied by acoustic guitar’ thing. And yet, I can’t stop myself liking it. Travis did it with Hit Me Baby One More Time (and it was good), and Ted Leo did it with Since U Been Gone (and it was good).
And now Israeli-French* singer Yael Naïm (you may know her from the Macbook Air ads**… or not) has done it with Toxic. And hey, it’s good:
I’ve mentioned The VH1 Effect in the past; the strange process through which a seemingly mediocre or outright terrible song transforms into a quality single you can’t get enough of simply because you’ve heard it so many times. (The opposite? The Pictures Of You Effect, in which a song that seemed either comically bad or sort-of-tolerable becomes completely, life-alteringly fucking terrible upon repeated listenings).
Which brings us to Scream, the fifth single fromTimbaland’s Shock Value.
On first listen, it definitely sounds like a classic fifth single: not especially catchy or accessible, seemingly released solely to cash in on whatever Timbalust the record-buying public still needs sated. But upon further listens, and after your tenth viewing of the film clip, the VH1 Effect comes into effect. Full effect. And all of a sudden you love the song.
And you try to understand why you love it. You ask questions:
1) Why is the chorus so goddamned good? Is it the way it emerges from nowhere, exploding like a melodic dove shot from a cannon? Is it the way ’scream’ is more of a whisper than an exclamation point?
2) Seriously, why are girls in balaclavas so hot?
Here’s one theory: the hotness of the women sets off one part of your brain (the part that likes attractive humans), and the garb so strongly associated with criminal behaviour sets off another (the part that gets excited/freaked out when you see bank robbers). When both parts of the brain go off, there’s a culmination of senses, leading to a heightened ‘that’s weirdly and totally sexy’ response. This is, of course, an extremely scientific theory.
Another idea: the women are transformed into hypersexual caricatures of feminity, the focus resting solely on their eyes, lips, arse and tits. As such, men enjoy the image… but it’s kind of chauvinist that they do. I know a woman named Germaine who agrees with this.
And the final theory: Timbaland understands something about aesthetics, and women, that the rest of us never could. This is likely.
3) Why does Timbaland now insist on going shirtless in his clips?
4) And why is he always diddling about with futuristic touch-screen technology in his film clips? Did he pop one thousand boners watching Minority Report or something?
Fuck me, can you imagine someone not loving this song? And if you met a hater of Harry, could you trust them?
Personally, I can’t think of a harsher indictment of someone’s character than an inability to love this 1994 classic; those exuberant horns blowing the water out of the Mississippi, the charmingly awkward rhymes (the highlight: ‘opinion/dominion’), and Harry singing cool and slow, like he doesn’t realise just how good the song around him really is.
It’s easy to forget that Cake were good. But they were. Just in a really 90s way. So if they release anything nowadays it’s like, Cake? Seriously? Still?
Most of us share a strained, distant relationship with the Beastie Boys. Those boys we once loved.
Sure, we remember the magic times Yauch, Diamond and Horovitz soundtracked: punching cones after a good old skate, getting messy at that party where Nathan totally fingerbanged Katie, stealing Posca markers for a teenage graf session. But now, when we hear Ill Communication, an awkward distance emerges from the recognition that those magic times have passed, and we’ve all moved on.
It’s easy to be awed by the amount of beautiful music in the world. Moments come when it’s difficult to believe that humans could create such sounds: so perfect, so free, so true.
These moments rush at you, the melodies seem divine of origin, and the world slows. It might be hearing the Paris, Texas soundtrack on a cold, empty country road in the early morning. Or Fire And Rain playing as you watch drops fall on the leaves in your backyard. Maybe it’s Harry Nilsson’s primal scream on Without You after she leaves the home you both made.
And then there’s the other side of the coin: the tracks so poorly played, or ill-advised, or grotesquely stupid that you wonder what you did to deserve such aural insult. The songs that wreck moments, disappoint fans, and anger ear owners everywhere.
In the coming months, the Warship will explore those songs. The absolute worst of the worst.
We start with an obvious target: a real head-scratcher from Duran Duran’s immensely terrible Thank You, a mid-90s cover album designed to heap praise upon the artists who inspired LeBon and the boys. What was supposed to pay homage comes across more as a cruel insult.
Especially the bizarre acoustic cover of Public Enemy’s incendiary 911 Is A Joke, a track that seems weirdly racist when a white, English, upper-middle class arsehole in a linen suit sings it:
There’s nothing good about that. And a lot wrong with it: the inexplicable fake American accent, the dodgy breakbeat, the fact it’s Duran Duran doing Public Enemy. The worst part is that it even happened — Simon sang it, the engineer recorded it, the record company released it. Someone should’ve said something. Anything. ‘Why are we doing this song? We’re Duran fucking Duran.’
Bonus track: For those interested in songs that seem weirdly racist when white people sing them, check out Neil Diamond’s cover of Mr. Bojangles. The ‘dance! dance! dance!’ demand makes Diamond sound like a bored slave owner:
I’m surprised by how good the new Death Cab For Cutie is. Not because I don’t like Gibbard and the fellas. Far from it. It’s just that the three albums released pre-Narrow Stairs were so good, I figured the band was due for a misfire.
Turns out we’ll have to wait a little while longer for sub-par Cutie. In the three years between Plans and now, it seems Ben has drawn divine inspiration from Robert Smith and Brian Wilson’s best works. Or am I imagining it?
If you’ve used the internet in the past week, probably not.
But there are those people who get behind a keyboard just to a) check their email b) post on Christianity forums c) read the Music Warship. And so, for those poor deprived folk, here is the ridiculously cute Lily Allen on holidays:
It’s kind of difficult to remember. Even when she releases a half-decent single like Piece Of Me, you can’t help but think of that busted fiveheaded chinless blob, jabbering in an English accent, or smacking gum against her mouth, or looking like an extra from Alien Nation, stabbing a car with an umbrella.
(Have you noticed how many iconic images Britney has given us? Kissing Madonna, the schoolgirl outfit, the ridiculous red rubber suit, the baby on the lap as she drives off, the weave-sporting mess dancing like a Minnesota drunk at the Grammy’s, the post-Caesarian vagina. And yes, there’s an Arts graduate writing a feminism-centric post-structuralist thesis on this right now).
Remember when she brought the heat? Boys was ridiculous, and so was Slave 4 U. Yes, a lot of the credit has to go to Pharrell and Chad for those scorchers, but it was the slow, calculated transformation of Britney from virgin to whore (is that you, Susan Faludi?) that made the great beats all the more compelling.
There was Toxic, written by anonymous Eurogeeks, and wonderful, full of urgent synth strings, and promoted with a kitschy film clip that cost two million dollars (seriously! Was the catering really good on set? Where did the money go?) and boasted New Zealand’s moderately famous Martin Henderson (oh, that’s where the money went). It represents the zenith of the Spears trajectory, marking the exact point when magazines, the music industry, and the punters said ‘we can’t get enough of you, Britney.’
There’s no doubt it’s over for Britney. She’s entered the Jackson Zone; that terrible place where you can get your life on track, release great singles, donate the profits to charity, and the public still won’t be able to forget. All they’ll think about is a melting nose, a bald head, a dangling baby, and an exposed vagina.
The Mayer Unit is all too often used in the service of the distant past. We’ve had the best songs of 1966, 1968, 1974 (that was such a good year), 1984 and, of course, Phil Collins’ greatest works. But what about this decade? This fine millenium, that has offered us such pop riches? And so, we ask that beautiful hunk of objective, highly-scientific metal what the greatest songs of 2001 were:
1. MP3: The Shins - “New Slang” (from Oh, Inverted World). C’mon, it was never going to be anything else. Zach Braff could further twee the shit out of it by releasing Garden State 2: Our New Slang and it’d still be a highwater mark for recent pop music.
3. MP3: Craig David - “7 Days” (from Born To Do It). I fear the United States may have missed out on the near-perfect rhythm and pop of Mister Craig David, a teenage prodigy with a silken voice, a great production team, and the most perfectly-manicured facial hair since George Michael turned up for the Faith cover shoot. (Apparently Born To Do It went platinum in the US, but that’s not saying all that much; my debut album went platinum in the US).
4. MP3: Ben Kweller - “Falling” (from Sha Sha). It was a banner year for slow, piano-driven indie ballads — both Falling and Ryan Adams’ Rescue Blues represent a pinnacle in the irony-free channeling of Elton John.
5. MP3: Ted Leo & The Pharmacists - “The Gold Finch And The Red Oak Tree” (from The Tyranny Of Distance). Where Have All The Rude Boys Gone? marked Leo as a songwriter to watch; a potential heir to the punchy, stacked-chorus, Buddy-Holly-visits-London pop of Elvis Costello. The Gold Finch… just made you wonder if James Taylor had regained his talents, and answered a Lookout! Records job listing looking for ghostwriters.
(And, of course, all those dreams were dashed when Leo released the ridiculously sub-par Living With The Living).
If you’ve wasted time at work reading music press recently, you’re no doubt aware that Goldfrapp’s latest represents a substantial departure from Black Cherry and Supernature. But is Seventh Tree really that radical a shift?
For the most part, it sounds like a thoroughly improved, tightened re-do of their debut, Felt Mountain, a largely confused, messy mash-up of Portishead, David Arnold, The Notwist and the Wizard Of Oz soundtrack.
With Seventh Tree, the dated production of Felt Mountain is thankfully replaced with slow, chartreuse river strings borrowed from Kate Bush or Nick Drake:
Seventh Tree is a lovely record, perfect for an autumn Sunday picnic. And it is admirable to see a band move so emphatically from one sound to another from record to record (take note Strokes, 50 Cent, Kaiser Chiefs, et al). The vocals are as ethereal and beautiful as ever, and the strings stir like branches in a meadow. Sometimes, like on the first half of A&E, we even get a return to the straight-up pop of Goldfrapp’s earlier work (minus a big beat, of course).
But it’s tough to shake the feeling that Seventh Tree is largely a genre exercise — a love note written in fine script that doesn’t say all that much. It’s difficult not to yearn for that electrified whip strut that Alison Goldfrapp executed so perfectly:
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