the Friday Fetch-it

Everyone's a costcutter on Vagina Row

About the Friday Fetch-it

Hi! This is the Friday Fetch-it, an occasional blog in which I recommend interesting, obscure and underheard music.

New recommendations appear whenever I have something awesome to recommend, but always on a Friday. (It used to be every Friday, but that became unsustainable.)

If you'd already fetched a song before I recommended it, you may award yourself one highly-coveted Absurdly Alliterative Friday Fetch-it Pre-emption Point™ (AAFFPP™). Absolute gold-dust, those are.

the Friday Fetch-it is written by Greg K Nicholson and is a wholly-owned subsidiary of Mooquackwooftweetmeow.

Tuned: the state of having tunes. Stay tuned.

“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.


(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.


(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.


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.


(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.


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

Questions? Comments? Plaudits? Microblog at me, @gregknicholson on Identi.ca, or with the tag #thefridayfetchit; or email me at thefridayfetchit@gkn.me.uk.

Index