“Burning a Path for Us to Share” (the 2006-11-25 Saturday Fetch-it)

Seven months before they recorded Twelve for Give Me a Wall (I just bought that this Thursday 'cos I rock), “spazz-rock heroes” ¡Forward, Russia! recorded another, unreleased, version at a place called Ghost Town in Leeds. They said so.

The most distinct difference (if there's anything distinct about a ¡Forward, Russia! track) is the vocal on “your conscience is low” at the end of each chorus. (Well, it's only a chorus to the extent that there even are any in a ¡Forward, Russia! track.) In the Sahara Sound version (the one on the single and album), Tom Woodhead sings it, using a grand total of two notes for the word “low”. By contrast, in the Ghost Town version it's a single, drawn-out, unmelodious, much-less-reassuring gasp/yelp. The album version sounds more like “your conscience is low... but y'know what? I've come to terms with that, and it's OK with me”; but this way is more uncomfortable, suggests urgency and some sort of crisis and leaves the song hanging more at the end. It makes me want to react rather than just sit there satisfied that everything's gonna be fine.

From the start the Ghost Town version is more chaotic and less tidy; it seems less premeditated. The introductory guitar lick is distorted – perhaps even a little bit jangly – and it doesn't stick with surgical precision to a single note at a time.

I've repeatedly compared ¡Forward, Russia! to Maxïmo Park (well, I've compared lots of things to both of them at the same time, but that's pretty much the same thing) and the comparison is particularly apt for the Ghost Town version. Like The Russia's, Maxïmo Park's songs tend to have a lot of distinct sections, and the song flits between them in different orders throughout. Often in the transition between sections, the music comes to a halt for a second, there's a single drum tap or beat in the middle, and then the bass resumes and the song sets off again, usually beginning a little more subdued than before and then building up again.

Twelve does this after the choruses (of which there are only about two, depending on how you count), and the halt is more distinct in the Ghost Town version. There are fewer layers of noise going on and so less to stop, plus the word “low” doesn't carry on for quite as long so the guitar is bashed into you a few more times before stopping. It sounds particularly Maxïmo Parky the second time (before “Ninety nine...”), when there's only bass and no lead guitar upon resumption. Also like The Park, Twelve crams craploads of music into the time interval it takes Sigur Rós to complete a single note.

And just when you think the song's finished – short of two minutes in – it goes back to “But he couldn't find another way” and skips through another quick verse before finally relenting.

The album version's pretty good as well. If you download one song this week, make it ¡12!. Stay tuned.

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(This entry was originally published on Last.fm.)

“Knocking the Aeroplanes Down with Stones” (the 2006-11-17 Friday Fetch-it)

Do the Whirlwind is a combination of twinkling chimes; garbled chatter; an improbably catchy bassline; an outro; a wood block counter-rhythm; some bongos; multiple Australian singers; the word "quivers"; a cymbal; twee-æsthetic melodies; some increasingly sluggish trombones; a 16-bit video depicting the band as a motley accumulation of cool kids dance/march/strutting along through a succession of weird and wonderful, side-scrolling locales; some increasingly sluggish saxophones; miscellaneous grooveability; probably a sitar; a chorus of harmonising vocals; tapes rewinding; mostly-nonsensical lyrics; some dings; some pops; some whistles; the word "abandon"; plenty of handclaps; and a single extra beat when the phrase "the beat" crops up.

...which it therefore does twice, obviously. If you download one song this week, make it Whirlwind. Stay tuned.

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(This entry was originally published on Last.fm.)

“Promises of Passion and Adventure” (the 2006-11-11 Saturday Fetch-it)

Animator passes the whistle test. After hearing it once or twice, about a month later I remembered the chorus and the instrumental hook just from the title. Yay me.

Guillemotsishly, Pull Tiger Tail perform under almost-plausible pseudonyms – Marcus Ardere, the mild-mannered janitor, becomes Marcus Firefly; the already-moderately-implausibly-named David McKenzie-McConville is transformed into David "Davo" Huevo upon eating a banana; and by night Jack Navarone is the evil Jack O'Moriarty.

Animator begins with the guitar hook, which uses a grand total of three notes and (once again) is bouncily Fingers in the Factoriesish. A bassline that sounds vaguely like Y Control joins in, then lots of percussion.

In the verse the instruments drop to accompaniment and focus shifts to the lead vocal; the verse's structure and accompaniment are reminiscent of a Maxïmo Park or ¡Forward, Russia! song.

The lead vocals hold the chorus – the title repeated lots – together. They're part-¡Forward, Russia! (but less frantically mental), part-Tom Robinson (but nestle in amongst the instrumentation better) and at times part-Morrissey (but less disdain/depression/apathy–inducing). The backing vocals add a succession of rising "aaah"s to the chorus, which lend the song an epic-like-Dante's-Divine-Comedy-not-like-Doves feel; they're almost dæmonic.

The guitar hook pops up half-way through the chorus, and reappears between the first chorus and the second verse. After the second chorus the lead-up to the bridge is a lot quieter, led by a legato vocal line (of "oooh"s) with the bass playing a take on the hook.

In the bridge and final chorus the accompaniment goes at full pelt, and escalates with added hi-hats and increasingly frantic bass half-way through the bridge. The lead singer (presumably the Firefly bloke, since his name's first) comes closest to unrestraint during the last chorus (prompting accusations of Morrissiness).

A ten-second guitar solo carries the song to its climax, before returning to the hook to close the song.

Now try whistling it. If you download one song this week, make it Animator. Stay tuned.

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(This entry was originally published on Last.fm.)

“I Bet You Find Life Hard to Live with” (the 2006-11-04 Saturday Fetch-it)

Shack Up is dead funky. It begins with bass, percussion, some sultry breaths and clip-clop sounds going off left, right and centre, forming a funk bassline. That's how it sounds, but on closer inspection all of the various unidentifiable noises are intentional – they're repeated two bars later. Gradually a guitar joins in, and then the funk escalates, and then it escalates again.

This is the first twenty seconds.

They're twenty of the grooviest seconds I can recall hearing, and I've heard Pick Up the Pieces. As Camille starts singing, the funkstruments seem to briefly recoil a little as if accommodating her. As the verse progresses they're joined by what sound like (and what I'm gonna choose to refer to as) panpipes, playing a simple tune over the top.

During the instrumental break, which essentially serves as a chorus, the guitar and panpipes play off each other in call-and-response style, with the panpipes carrying the lead melody. They sit out the first couple of lines in the second verse and the funkstrumentation again minimises to accommodate Camille. Of course, when it all resumes it's groovier than ever.

At the end of the second instrumental break, a few disco-style twinkles “conclude” the song and prompt the obligatory applause. Yep, false ending. The funk beat resumes, backed with general breathiness from Camille, and almost seems to peter out before a reprise of the first verse kicks in, funked up to the max.

Throughout, the notes the panpipes hit are often jazzily distorted or discordant, in fact the whole thing has a certain jazziness about it, complementing Camille's voice. Her vocals are half-whispered, half-moaned, increasingly so throughout the song. During the second verse, her “shack up”s (which, in Banbarra's original and A Certain Ratio's more famous cover, were a response to the lead vocal's call) descend to a whisper, but by the song's conclusion are emphatic.

Add to this miscellaneous breaths and the occasional whispered “shack up” and the whole thing exudes sultry.

It's not bossa nova. If you download one song this week, Shack Up, baby. Stay tuned.

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(This entry was originally published on Last.fm. It later transpired that the singer was someone other than Camille.)

“You Threw Pennies In and Wished” (the 2006-10-29 Sunday Fetch-it)

Memorize the City begins with electric guitar jangle, backed with electric organ chords, which is soon joined by hi-hats and then bass as the song gets up to speed. Katie Sketch's vocals are subdued and effortless – she's clearly not setting out to prove anything. The tune is quite simple; it doesn't hurry from one note to the next. This dwelling on one note really drums the words in.

During the chorus the vocals remain subdued, and only occasionally stray from a single, insistent note. The guitar carries the main melody, with the singing and the bass each assuming a different counter-melody.

Coming out of the chorus, the second verse uses a different melody to the first and sounds more like an addendum to the chorus. By half-way through the second verse, the tune has rejoined that of the first verse. Again the lyrics are punched in at the end of the second verse, with almost mechanical determination. Sketch tersely sings "...more. More. More. More." leading into the warm guitar melody of the chorus.

The bridge reassumes the tune of the second verse, as the organ provides an extra melody and the lead guitar hammers out a rhythm very reminiscent of Fingers in the Factories. The guitar, organ and drums build to a crescendo and then subside, giving way to the lead guitar and an instrumental chorus.

Unusually, the instrumental feels more agreeable and has less tension than the sung choruses. Reduced to just the primary melody and without Katie's brooding vocals, it evokes less hostility. To cap it off, there are tambourine shakes and handclaps on every other line, but shrewdly not on all of them. I don't know why, but somehow it seems better that they're absent from the second and fourth lines.

As the lyrics come full-circle, the guitar, organ and vocals combine to lead the song up to its pounding conclusion.

Handclaps. If you download one song this week, make it Memorize. Stay tuned.

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(This entry was originally published on Last.fm.)

“In Your Eyes that Certain Shine” (the 2006-10-20 Friday Fetch-it)

I can't figure out why I like Rush Hour quite so much. It uses the same driving 8-beat throughout; the chord progression is bog-standard; the instruments are probably all synthesised; the lyrics aren't particularly inventive or clever; Jane Wiedlin's vocals are nice, but not astounding; you can spot the guitar solo a mile off; and at the end it just repeats to fade.

In fact it's almost stereotypical of a 1980s pop song.

But it is impeccably produced. At no point does either the singing or the backing sound at all jarring or contrived. The entire song flows seamlessly from one part to the next, largely due to the way the vocals spill over from one bar into the next. So by the time the song finishes, you don't realise you've just spent the last four minutes listening to it.

And Jane's singing is nice – very nice – without sounding sugar-coated; her personality hasn't been overproduced away.

And she played Joan of Arc in Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure – what more could you want? If you download one song this week, make it Rush Hour. Stay tuned.

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(This entry was originally published on Last.fm.)

“Something’s Drawn Me Here Again” (the 2006-10-15 Sunday Fetch-it)

There's drama in Give Me Strength right from the outset. In the intro the droning chords, simple drumbeat and ominous electric guitar riff set up an intense atmosphere, which is maintained by the grungy guitar strums that lead into the verse.

Dischordant, eerie electronic warbles appear amongst the brooding guitars and vocals, half-way through the first verse and again at the end. Going into the bridge they give way to rumbling guitar, joined in the chorus by lurking, offbeat percussion, that sounds like steel drums heard through an unnaturally heavy fog.

All of this accompaniment is offset by Over the Rhine's usual country-esque singing. The vocals come to the fore going into the second chorus, when the instrumental melody recedes, its echo lingering, as a swirling ambience swells to engulf the resonating vocals. All of this noise is carried into and throughout the second chorus. It all disappears in an instant as the final line is sung, a cappella, and resonates into the silence.

When I first heard the song, I thought it was Dido singing; it's not, but she does share a writing credit.

So she's not entirely awful. If you download one song this week, make it Give Me Strength. Stay tuned.

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(This entry was originally published on Last.fm.)

“Up Her Dosage” (the 2006-07-14 Friday Fetch-it)

Poison conjures up an image of a stark, white room in a futuristic hospital; in which, on a white cuboid table, Gigi Edgley reclines and is inspected as alien by the bespectacled, plummy-voiced retro-sci-fi staff, much to her amusement.

The first minute is dominated by this staff's mostly-impenetrable dialogue, textured with Gigi's breaths and the throbbing hums of background machinery. This use of quaint spoken voice samples is quite reminiscent of Just Give 'em Whiskey.

After a minute this gives way to the actual song; its backbone is an almost ambient, liquid combination of hi-hat, synth, bass, a funk-infused pseudo-guitar line, some eerie whistling, and miscellaneous blips, whirs, breaths and distortion, all of which wouldn't sound out of place in The X-Files.

Gigi's vocals are breathy and sensual; their layering is æthereal and eludes to a fantastical dislocation from reality, with an accompanying inquisitiveness. The instrumentation – especially the mutedness of the grunge-guitar towards the end – reinforces this.

By the time the voices re-emerge four minutes in, the whole thing is sounding very much like a drug-induced altered state of conciousness, and eventually descends into catatonic incoherence.

Yeah, her out of Farscape. If you download one track this week, make it Poison. Stay tuned.

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(This entry was originally published on Last.fm.)

“I View from Afar” / “Once I Have Found the Words” (the 2006-07-07 Friday Fetch-its)

I often bang on about songs building tension; here that shall be mostly implicit. Confide in Me begins ponderously, almost coming to a halt twice in the first minute. In the first prelude, the sweeping strings and vocals lend an air of tragedy, and the minor-key piano suggests drama. The sound of distorted voices, as if coming over a radio, suggests some sort of concealment or conspiracy, especially since it's so quiet, hardly noticeable. The whole thing feels nocturnal.

After the first pause the second prelude uses none of the same instrumental pieces. Here the piano is major-key, there's an electric guitar flourish in the background, and although the muted voices remain, they no longer sound sinister – more like a conversation. (You can see where this is going, can't you?) This bit sounds like a dawn to the first prelude's night. Or perhaps each is the introduction of a character, the first the confider, the second the confidant. (It's all very GCSE English.)

The intro-proper begins after the other pause and the main string loop begins, full of anticipation. The drumbeat kicks in and flecks of detuned, slightly Asian-sounding plucked strings appear. The verses' vocals are sung almost in a whisper, growing to a sweeping, strings-like, almost operatic legato for the chorus.

As the song progresses, chanting of “confide in me”, “and then you'll see” and some other lyric I can't make out is added to the chorus parts, bringing extra urgency with it. Those flecks of plucked strings increase to a full-blown instrumental part, almost taking the lead towards the end.

Throughout the song there are spots of other sounds; in the verses, more noticeable in the second, there are little whirs and clunks of distortion that remind me of The Blue Room EP. There's even a bit of funk guitar under the Asianesque string solo after the second chorus. And at times the electric guitar hints at Hendrixianism (I just made that word up now – good, isn't it?). The whole song is very much a layered piece.

In the last minute-and-a-half, the plucked strings' repetitious, urgent pseudo–ad libbing (while slightly gratuitous); the main string loop's insistent repetition; the legato lead vocal; and the background chanting; all combine to build tension towards the end, when all the instrumentation comes to a head and drops, leaving the lead vocal to close the song.

Yes, I am recommending a Kylie Minogue song. If you download one track last week... Wait a sec – I did that joke last time.

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Colours is quite typical of Editors. It begins with drums and several guitars forming a driving rhythm and a repeating riff, with a little bit of a screech at the end. Few notes are used and small sections are repeated, hammering them into the listener.

The vocals are typically minimal – few and repeated. And the lyrics are also quite typical – “You mean a lot to me, you've got a heart of gold” and “You are the colour, my dear” are the sort of nonsense Tom Smith often comes out with, to great effect.

So the first two minutes proceed pretty much like any other Editors song. Then after the brief pause at the end of the second chorus, the driving rhythm disappears. The repeating riff that replaces it verges on the socks-off-knockingly good. It's particularly long among Editors riffs, and its 3-3-3-3-2-2 rhythm lends it a striking complexity. The drumming that backs it is minimalistic but distinctive.

Not to dwell on this wonder-riff for too long, after two iterations Tom's vocals re-emerge, overlaying it with “Fill your life with something else, baby”. The two parts carry the song whilst the bass, drums and vocals all gradually intensify. Half a minute before the end, the wonder-riff makes way for a good old-fashioned cymbal-thrashing, still in 3-3-3-3-2-2 rhythm. It and the vocals take the song to its abrupt conclusion.

Even though there's such a schism between its two halves, somehow it all still holds together as one song. Don't ask me how.

If you download two tracks this week, make them Confide In Me and Colours. Stay tuned.

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(This entry was originally published on Last.fm.)

“There is No Peace that I’ve Found So Far” / “Drift In Your Eyes” (the 2006-06-23 Friday Fetch-its)

Fans of Breathe Me will like this. I don't know who wrote Set the Fire to the Third Bar, but it sounds to me like more of a Martha song than a Snow Patrol song. The lyrics are very personal – almost every line contains “I”, “you”, “we” or some variation thereof.

Its backbone is the combined vocal of Gary Lightbody and Martha Wainwright, but calling Set The Fire a duet is somewhat misleading. Here they both sing one vocal part together, rather than the more usual call-and-response format adopted by most duets. Their voices blend together impeccably; somehow both voices seem to stand out at the same time.

Fairly conventionally, the verses smoulder – the instruments and vocals are all quite subdued, as befits the tone of the lyrics – and then at the chorus the instrumentation swells and the lid comes off. The song's structure (two verses, a chorus, another verse, then two choruses) gives an overall sense of escalation.

For a song with such a sweeping, epic feel to it, it does seem a tiny bit brief at 3:23. Having said that, it's definitely good that they haven't dragged it out to unnecessary length. There's no long, protracted coda and no excessive chorus repeat; they stop as soon as the song's finished.

And because of its succinctness, you will want to hear it again. If you download one track last week... oh, hang on.

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La Ritournelle opens with just a piano, a drumkit and some subtle string backing. To these are soon added lots of sweeping strings, which if I was more knowledgeable I'd be able to identify as particular instruments; suffice it to say they all sound lovely.

The piano and strings take turns at providing the leading melody, through an incredibly natural chord progression until, before you know it, it nears the end of the fourth minute and the strings once more build to a climax. And then he starts singing.

The singing bit is backed by some funky electric bass, ever-so-slightly reminiscent of Lady (Hear Me Tonight). After only eight lines and forty-odd seconds, the strings once again take the lead, with the piano in tow. Over the next three minutes, the strings and then the piano quietly fade out, and the music comes to a gentle coda.

Amazingly, for a seven-and-a-half-minute piece of music – and especially such a simple piece of music, with no sudden twists and turns, and only eight lyrics – La Rit never seems stale. The music never seems to be standing still, nor going around in circles; it always sounds like it's going somewhere.

So this is a piece of music that repeats itself for seven and a half minutes, and yet doesn't repeat itself at all. Try figuring that one out.

If you download two tracks this week, make them Set The Fire and La Rit. Stay tuned.

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(This entry was originally published on Last.fm.)

“Change Before I Slip Away” (the 2006-06-09 Friday Fetch-it)

After a couple of agenda-setting chords, Iwe opens with a driving drumbeat topped by Shingai Shoniwa's smouldering vocals. As the music's urgency builds, Shingai's vocal delivery stays audibly restrained. At the chorus, the guitar, drums and vocals all erupt into an all-out rock frenzy. As the guitar fades into the second verse, Shingai slides back into tempered mode.

Throughout the second verse she slips effortlessly between menacing temperament and unrestrained screaming, at times dwarfing the instrumentation (which gains a couple of flourishes over the first verse), at times barely discernible above it. All the while the music builds in intensity, so that by the time the second chorus comes around, no change of volume or pace is needed going into it.

When the chorus reaches its natural conclusion, the music recedes to mellow chords that by now sound positively quiet. Naturally, Shingai's vocals catch up instantly. Melodiously, over a surprising chord progression, she repeats – she chants – “Iwe”. The rhythm guitar returns and, with the vocals, builds tension to a crescendo. After exhausting one last breath, Shingai leaves a classic rock guitar solo to conclude the song.

You could not want for a stronger vocal performance, nor better-suited accompaniment.

And no, I've no idea what “Iwe” means. If you download one track this week, make it Iwe. Stay tuned.

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(This entry was originally published on Last.fm.)

“There is Liberation Here” (the 2006-06-06 Tuesday Fetch-it)

Track eleven of Ruby Blue is a fifty-second instrumental called Prelude to Love In The Making. There is actually a full song, Love In The Making, whose lyrics appear in Ruby Blue's album insert; Prelude is simply the intro and outro of Love In The Making shoved together. Before Ruby Blue came out, all twelve songs had been released on three limited edition vinyl EPs collectively entitled Sequins; Love In The Making appears on Sequins 2.

The song itself is something of a slow-burner. Róisín's vocals provide the melody, layered over a lo-fi percussive rhythm; every so often her voice swells, accompanied by itself several times over. Like most of Ruby Blue, the verse-chorus structure is somewhat indistinct, but it is there.

Also present, to a certain degree, is Róisín's tendency to split one lyric over several vocal parts and to spread individual vocals out rather thinly (both particularly notable in Sow Into You).

The synth effects prominent throughout most of the album are conspicusouly quiet, but the song still has the same woozy, dischordant quality. Love In The Making sounds – to my ear anyway – vaguely south-Asian. I don't know if that's a sitar; I'm fairly certain there are some instruments that aren't well-tempered.

Because of this simplicity, it would be the stand-out track on the album, if only it were actually on the album. If you download one track this week, make it Love In The Making. Stay tuned.

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(This entry was originally published on Last.fm.)

“All You Need Is” (the 2006-05-26 Friday Fetch-it)

Not many artists order a track-by-track remix of their début album. But then not many artists are Bloc Party, which is probably for the best – how would we tell them all apart?

The majority of Silent Alarm Remixed proceeds much like Silent Alarm, with some sounds added and taken away and a few extra wolves here and there. The Pioneers [M83 remix] bears no resemblance whatsoever to the original track.

It's an immersive, epic stringscape, layered with a rhythmically repeating, disjointed burst of a Kele Okereke vocal; this punctuated by intermittent fragments of the song, slightly out of sync with the rhythm. Think a passenger of the Titanic running futilely for their life along a collapsing corridor, in slow motion and in black and white.

It seems brief even at 5:47. Perhaps it's because there are so few words.

They even used it on Top Gear a couple of weeks ago in a piece about the new Honda Civic. What more could you possibly want from a song? If you download one track this week, make it Pioneers Remixed. Stay tuned.

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(This entry was originally published on Last.fm.)

“Hear Me Say Now” (the 2006-05-19 Friday Fetch-it)

On The Radio was on this week's Roundtable; I found it quite pleasant but almost entirely forgettable. Far more memorable is You Can't Hurry Love, an impeccably-constructed pop song. It's composed in a sugary-sweet poptastic style, but there's no jingly-jangly piano in the execution. The instrumentation, and particularly Victoria Bergsman's woozy, ever-so-slightly discordant vocals, seem mismatched with the song's ostensible style.

Yes, there are hand-claps (with a tambourine in the middle), but for some reason I reckon they're ironic. They do nothing to sweeten the song's delivery. Can't Hurry Love fools you into thinking it's a sugar-coated pop song, but when you pay attention to it, it actually doesn't sound sugary-sweet at any point.

Or maybe I'm reading too much into it and it is just a jaunty pop song. If you download one track this week, make it Can't Hurry Love.

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(This entry was originally published on Last.fm.)

“But You’ve Gotta Know Their Lies” (the 2006-05-12 Friday Fetch-it)

Since I actually physically own this week's song as a single on a compact disc (I bought it on Wednesday), I'm gonna write a little bit about its B-sides first.

Stars And Spit sounds like it was recorded in the middle of a busy street, while the microphone was drunk. It has the same sort of wooziness as a lot of Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots, particularly in its vocals.

Death Cock is really chilled. Stars and Spit was chilled, but this is catatonic. And it's a waltz. Waltzes are good. Part way through, the music comes to a coda and someone says “That's it”, but the song starts up again and carries on for another few minutes. Maybe they only eventually stopped because their instruments got too dusty.

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I always like songs in unusual time signatures. I especially like that Broken Social Scene haven't bothered trying to be cool about it – they even named 7/4 (Shoreline) after its time signature. And parenthesised subtitles are always good.

Like its first B-side, Shoreline is a mid-tempo light-rock-stylee driving song, great for cycling through York in the summer. Each vocal line starts half-way through a bar, so it flows into the next one; the whole thing progresses smoothly. There's even a car's interior in the video – what more could you want from a driving song?

Since it's driven by the rhythm section, it sounds far worse on speakers with crap bass. The melody, however, is held solely by the vocals, led by Feist, accompanied by one of the other fifteen band-members ...a male one. You can tell from the video. The sort of richness in sound you'd expect from a song performed by sixteen people is there; it'd be inaccurate to call Shoreline's sound “layered” – it's more like spaghetti than lasagne.

Nonetheless, there are several reasonably-well-defined categories of noise present: the rhythm section (comprising the driving bass and drums); the vocals; several lead guitars and other guitarage; and lots of miscellaneous other sounds. Most of the noise lives in those last two layers, with the first two holding the song together.

Feist's vocals make the song. It'd be a great song with someone else singing her bits, but her performance adds that extra embellishment that makes it a classic.

And she doesn't even sound like The Pipettes. If you download one track this week, make it Shoreline.

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(This entry was originally published on Last.fm. The other (male) band member is probably Kevin Drew.)

“You Never Understood Me” (the 2006-05-05 Friday Fetch-it)

In much of the Northern Hemisphere, and certainly here in York, it's now summer. And summer requires pop songs!

“But isn't pop just pap with one less line?!”

Not necessarily. The problem is that lots of pop songs descend into chorus repeat two-thirds of the way through. This chorus repeat's many functions include showcasing the soon-tiring vocal talents of the popstar in question; padding the song out to the usual 3:30, and getting all the pop-hungry kids singing along. All of which is predictably cynical.

Oh, and they're generally quite crap as well – that doesn't help.

The Big Sky comprises 15 seconds of verse followed by a good four minutes of chorus repeat; and it's great. Unlike all those pop songs, The Big Sky actually develops during the chorus repeat (henceforth referred to as “the song”).

Instruments are added, vocal bits inserted and drums drummed more heartily. It's not marvellous in any profound, significant or even subtle way. But, it's a catchy, æsthetic, upbeat pop song.

And there's not a single key-change in sight. If you download one track this week, make it The Big Sky.

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(This entry was originally published on Last.fm.)

“I’ll Wake Up in Fifty Years and Feel the Same” (the 2006-04-29 Saturday Fetch-it)

You should know who Guillemots are by now, so I'm gonna try to steer clear of the obvious. For the unenlightened, Good Weather For Airstrikes's Mega-Profile includes this week's track, lots of others, and some carefully arranged letters, numbers and punctuation, a fine example of which is “you can't go wrong with a Guillemots song”.

The Aristazabal Hawkes-sung (and written) By The Water – from their Of The Night EP, released via the web this Valentine's Day – is simply lovely.

Her voice sounds a lot like Régine Chassagne of The Arcade Fire, and Feist; incidentally, all three are Canadian.

By The Water is the kind of song that mesmerises right from the start. The fade-in intro builds to an attention-grabbing and assertive opening line; the confident vocals accentuated with some slightly-jazzy piano draw you in. It remains intoxicating throughout its gradual progression towards the slow, quiet coda.

It's the sort of song you snap out of afterwards. If you download one track this week, make it By The Water.

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(This entry was originally published on Last.fm.)

“The Doors Have Metal Plates” (the 2006-04-21 Friday Fetch-it)

Skip To The End was on this week's Roundtable; I thought it was an odd choice of lead single from The Futureheads' forthcoming album, News and Tributes – it's slower than the typical Futureheads track, and it doesn't help that the intro sounds like Decent Days And Nights at half-pace.

Better than Skip To The End, though, is Area, The Futureheads' stand-alone single released late in 2005.

Unlike Skip to the End, it has the pace of Decent Days And Nights, A to B and indeed much of The Futureheads' eponymous debut.

Added to this is The Futureheads' trademark vocal harmony hook, à la Hounds of Love.

It's like the best bits of every track on The Futureheads (apart from the weird time signature of The City is Here for You to Use) condensed into 2:45.

And that's another thing; like many great songs (i.e. A Certain Trigger bar Acrobat) it's far shorter than it sounds, which belies the song's intricacy – it doesn't seem probable that so much song would fit into so little time. If you download one track this week, make it Area.

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(This entry was originally published on Last.fm.)

“We’re Two of a Kind” (the 2006-04-14 Friday Fetch-it)

I was planning to start off with my favourite song ever just to get it out of the way, until last night I happened to read (on Teletext on ITV4) that The Slits are going to reform.

The Web doesn't seem to agree; nonetheless, I'll begin instead with probably the best cover version of a song ever, I Heard It through the Grapevine.

Although Marvin Gaye's version of the song wasn't technically the original (as I heard through Wikipedia), it's the definitive recording of the song and probably the one the Slits would've been thinking of when they did theirs, so I'm happy comparing their effort to it.

The Slits managed to take an already-great song, completely change its style, its mood and a fair number of the words, and yet not completely screw it up.

The fact that the song can be uprooted from one genre and plonked comfortably into another is testament to Whitfield and Strong's songwriting; the fact that the Slits dared to do it is testament to their great confidence (the punks call it “attitude”, right?). The fact that they pulled it off is testament to their skill as musicians.

Oddly for a supposedly-punk record, the song lasts a full four minutes; odder, that's a good fifty seconds longer than Gaye's version. And crucially, without outstaying its welcome – at no point are they just repeating themselves.

I'm convinced that Ari Up didn't bother learning the real words and just sang what she thought they were. And “I heard it through the bassline” is just genius.

After the first verse and chorus of Gaye's version, I'm completely satisfied with the song – it's already delivered, and it would have been near impossible to screw it up after that, short of rambling on for ten minutes. Sure enough, the song carries on satisfactorily until the end, but without really adding anything.

But the Slits' version delivers constantly throughout the entire song. The whole thing is... just inspired. If you download one track this week, make it Slits Grapevine.

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(This entry was originally published on Last.fm.)