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.

“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.


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.


(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.


(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.


(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.

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