This Here Boogie

The first single from 1988’s Daydream Nation, ‘Teen Age Riot’ is also the song that got me into Sonic Youth. Now their album-long ‘Sister Ray’-alikes don’t always do it for me, and some of their stuff is just plain turgid, but when they hit the high notes they succeed spectacularly. Given that this was the late ’80s, when synthesiser ties, Rick Astley and stock exchange crashes were all the rage, ‘Teen Age Riot’ is seriously out of step with the times.

Starting off with some low-key, ghostly guitar and Kim Gordon reciting some childlike phrases (”Say it, don’t spray it”) and generation-specific predictions (”We will fall”), the song seems to be drifting before it’s even begun.

And then Thurston Moore’s distorted guitar kicks in, and you realise why the song’s axe work (did I just say that?) is so highly rated. You’ll certainly have heard this riff before - it’s influenced Pixies, Nirvana, and God knows how many other grunge bands over the years. But here it sounds fresh, energized, and in a huge hurry. Perfect for air guitar, if you live in a trailer and own a dog named Skeeter.

The lyrics are almost a DIY lesson in how to get ‘the kids’ on your side, if you’re a band wanting to make it big. Hero adulation, “Marshall stacks”, platform shoes, “teenage leather and booze”…it’s effectively a song about how to be ‘the next big thing’. As unfashionable as this was at the time - a time when, in the US, teenage girls with big hair tearing up shopping malls with karaoke pop - it’s had a tremendous influence on all of the bands that followed from the US.

The Daydream Nation album is a good listen, and I’ve been told that Sister and Evol are worthy albums too. While a lot of Sonic Youth’s affected Velvets/13th Floor Elevators/Stooges schtick can leave me feeling cold, ‘Teen Age Riot’ is a song that will always bring a smile. Here’s the official video which, again for the ’80s, is extremely cool. Notice Mark E Smith in the middle?

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The Felice Brothers fell under my radar towards the end of last year when I heard the song Roll on Arte taken from the album Tonight in Arizona from which today’s song is also taken. What struck me about the band was to old country-folk sound that they produce that takes your imagination into an old bar room complete with sawdust on floor and swigging whiskey from the bottle, you get the picture. The lead singers voice in uncannily like that of Bob Dylan’s in the 60’s. Actually it sounds like Dylan did on the Basement tapes. I think that its never a bad thing to be compared to good musicians , sometimes being original doesn’t mean being good.

To get the background on the song title and the content of the song I’ll say a few words about Rockefeller who was the governor of the state of New York in the early seventies and during that time introduced some tough new sentences for possession of narcotics including cannabis and marijuana which depending on quantity, and we’re not talking about tons here or even close to it, had mandatory sentences equivalent to second degree murder. 

The song itself is sung at a very down tempo rhythm with only a drum set, acoustic guitar and fiddle to back the excellent lyrics of the song in which basically in the first verse is a guy being arrested for possession  while the second verse tries to explain why stating that he (could be a she also) and his mom needed the cash while third and fourth deal with his brother being shot with him promising to give his children a better live and then describing the scene in prison and he starts his jail time.  The chorus is kind a protest about the length of the sentences in comparision to the quantity.

‘Fifteen grams of heroin
An ounce of speed
Fifteen years to life
Rockefeller, that’s a long old time’

Once you know the background of the song , the kinda sound the band has , if I didn’t screw that up then you should get a good appreciation of the song. I’ll admit that it may take a couple of turns to like the song but do yourself a favour and do it, you wont be disappointed. A live version of the song can be seen here which was taken at a performance in the bowery room.

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I haven’t listened to the Screamadelica album in a long time, probably because it always brings back a time and place that I’ve really gotten too old for. Primal Scream’s third album is a concept album of sorts, charting a night from dance-music-fuelled start to weepy-Stones-ballad comedown finish, with a bit of redemption in the end, like all the best concept albums. Personally, I think 1997’s Vanishing Point is the better album.

It’s dated in parts (’Come Together’ for example) but it really was a step forward for British indie music when it came out, and is still highly regarded in the UK. If you haven’t heard it, you’ve surely heard ‘Loaded’, with it’s “Just what is it that you want to do” snippet from some movie or other.

‘Higher Than The Sun’, the fourth single from Screamadelica, is probably the best song on the album. The soundscape created behind Bobby Gillespie’s vocals is intriguing. It’s a mixture of yawning groans, “the angels sang” keyboard flourishes, theremin-like sounds, and what to my ear is a respirator. It’s very strange indeed - almost dub-like, and the first 45 seconds have no apparent musical structure to them at all. Probably the Scream’s finest musical moment, and one they re-visit to darker effect on Vanishing Point.

Over this churning groove, Gillespie gives his take on life:

“I’m beautiful, I wasn’t born to follow,
I live just for today, I don’t care about tomorrow,
What I got in my head you can’t buy, steal or borrow,
I believe in live, and let live,
I believe you get what you give”

The lyrics, a mesh-up of Gill Scott-Heron, Joe Strummer and Jim Morrison, are vintage Gillespie. But I don’t think he ever crystallised his world vision as effectively as in the above verse. Here’s a YouTube video with high-quality audio of ‘Higher Than The Sun’. And notice how I didn’t mention drugs once in this article? Damn. Well, I mentioned it just that once. Listen and enjoy.

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Seeing that the electric picnic festival has just finished up I thought I would mention this song today as it has some related significance to my last adventure at the picnic. As I struggled to maintain the last shreds of human decency late on friday evening this time last year at the picnic I managed to catch these guys playing, i can’t remember the stage but it wasn’t the main one. It was a struggle to get up to the front due the the large audience but I managed it just when they were starting to play this song ( it was probably the end of their set but thats how it took me to get up there). The reason I wanted to get up there badly was to hear this song as it is a kind of an anthem for my mates and I this past year or so and its also the song we played repeatedly on the journey down to the picnic.

The song itself is taken from the album Good news for people who hate bad news which is their fourth studio album. Overall I’m not too sure what to make of Modest Mouse, I guess I could take or leave the band as a whole. Having said that I’ve only have copies of their last three albums so maybe I should get the rest before giving a big thumbs up or down to them.

It’s a really uplifting song lyrically that for me just tells you whatever is going on don’t worry about it and everything will be ok. A song of optimism for those dark days . Its like when a mate pats you on the back and says it alright. Coupled with some a guitar riff and some complementary harmonies it is definitely a song you should have on your playlist to get thru those crappy days. Check out a performance of the song here. We’ll all float on ok…

By the way if anyone is interested, Mark Kozelek a while back issued an album called Tiny Cities which is an album entirely composed of Modest Mouse cover songs. I’ll be posting about Mark in the near future.

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This is a nifty, bare little tune lifted from a Dublin based band called Jape and their 2008 studio album Ritual. Jape is mainly composed of one guy called Richie Egan, who in a previous life was also the bass player in an instrumental rock band called The Redneck Manifesto (are they still together?) another band I had the pleasure to see on numerous occassions at various festivals throughout Ireland these past couple of years.

The song is an emotional tribute or ode to a famous Dublin man called Phil Lynott who was the singer of the band Thin Lizzy and are probably most famous for their song Whiskey in a jar, which is a shame because they were so much more than that. Incidentally both are bass players and both lived in Crumlin, a suburb in Dublin.

Lyrically this is a beautiful song that tells the story of Egan and a couple of mates out at a gig one night in Dublin when there is a lunar eclipse and the song goes on from there when they go outside to see the eclipse whereby Egan gets all bleary eyed and poignant about Phil Lynott and pays a cheeky reference to him while looking at the moon in the lines

“And when he took the stage he owned it
and there right in sky was his half opened eye
he’s still winking at girls in the front row.”

and then his own morality kicks in at the end of the song

“and I was thinking one day I will be a dead man who plays the bass from Crumlin
and I was thinking one day I will be a dead man who plays the bass from Dublin
like Phil Phil Phil Phil Lynott”

I haven’t heard all of the new album yet but I bet you won’t find all songs sung in a similar vain as this one. You can watch a live version of it here and for those of you lucky enough to be heading to the electric picnic festival this weekend in Laois, you could do a lot worse than checking Jape out.

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In true Christopher McCandless style, Bon Iver (MySpace page) decamped to the wilderness to seek some purity. Following the breakup of his band, he moved to a log cabin in Wisconsin to write and record the album For Emma, Forever Ago, which was released late last year. This unbelievably (at times uncomfortably) personal album is a revelation, though the backstory to it has been overplayed a bit by the media.

How and ever. ‘Flume’, the opening track, is a very simple melody played on a bedraggled acoustic guitar, and sounding like something out of a confessional singer-songwriter’s album circa 1972. The lyrics remind me a little bit of Mark Hollis - lines like “Only love is all maroon, Lapping lakes like leary loons” can not really make sense to anyone other than the author. But the opening line:

I am my mother’s only one
It’s enough

are very poignant in an understated, hard to describe way. As an opening line, it gives extraordinary meaning to the song and its creator. There are references to the womb throughout the song, and you get the impression that that’s where he’d like to be. The first time I heard this song, I paid little heed to the words. But looking at the lyrics, it’s very meditative, and would stand up beside the best that Neil Young ever offered.

Bon Iver’s voice in this song is striking. He comes across as a slightly higher-pitched Skip Spence, quite similar to Neil Young but in a less child-voice way. The beautiful melody of course compliments the voice, and the lazy acoustic guitar and minimal, ethereal background all add up to an atmospheric, magical song that’s both relaxing and very thought-provoking. Here’s a really nice version of the song - if you like it, check out ‘Skinny Love’, another favourite of mine from the album.

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Following on from my previous post here, I’m continuing with my fondness for songs that tell stories from start to finish. Today’s song is a protest song taken from the Desire album by Bob Dylan and co-written by  Jaccques Levy, who incidentally, co-wrote a lot of the songs with Dylan on Desire, which by the way, gets my vote as Dylan’s best album.

The context of the song is based around a US Boxer called Rubin Carter  and his conviction for the murder of three guys in Paterson, New Jersey. After spending 20 years in prison and following numerous appeals Rubin Carter was finally released. There has been several books written about this topic and also a film called The Hurricane  which starred Denzel Washington as Rubin Carter. I first heard of Rubin Carter years ago when I read one of the books about him, this was long before I heard the Desire album and found the story very interesting which to this day still sways opinion regarding the guilt or innocence of the man. Check out the song  here .

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If you’ve seen 2001: A Space Odyssey, or if you’ve graduated secondary school in Ireland, or if you’ve ever been to Vienna, you’ll surely have heard ‘The Blue Danube‘. It’s such an ubiquitous piece of classical music that it’s featured as muzak on fairground rides, in Disney cartoons, and is effectively the unofficial national anthem of Austria. It’s also the song that got me into classical music.

I visited Vienna back in 2001, when I was inter-railing, and thought it was such a beautiful city, with lots of faded Habsburg glamour bustling side-by-side with the cosmopolitan feel of a modern German city. Vienna has been the home of much history, from Mozart, the Ruprechtskirche, the focal point of the Anschluss, the big wheel from The Third Man and Before Sunrise and the Viennese cafes that served as breeding grounds for ideas that defined much of 20th century Europe.

But, as usual, I digress. ‘The Blue Danube’ was first noticed by me when watching the famous “mothership” sequence in 2001. Only later did I realise that I’d waltzed to it at my “grad”. As I started to listen to Lyric FM, I used to plague them with requests for this lovely piece. Usually they acquiesced. Here’s the famous scene from 2001 - watch and listen.

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Every now and then I usually throw some Irish folk artists to let the artists regale the stories of old Ireland through song. For those of you that don’t know The Wolfe Tones, they are a long running traditional Irish band that continually tour the world singing their own brand of Irish folk songs which are mostly associated with ‘rebel’ songs. Taken from their album Spirit of a Nation album, this song was written by Liam Reilly but these guys have made it their own.

I generally like songs that tell stories within the lyrics from start to finish. This song tells the story of a young Irish guy heading over to an uncle in New York, like some many have done down through the years, to work during a time when emigration was high in this country but on the way over his uncle is killed as he was a cop. The song continues to tell how the lad chose to stay in New York and eventually becomes a cop himself following in his uncle’s footsteps, how at the start that he felt some home sickness, how he never really came home except to attend his father’s funeral and how he started his own family in New York. It’s a pretty poignant song that you should check out. The lyrics speak for themself.

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The Kinks deal in that type of songwriting that I like so much - winsome, nostalgic, pastoral, conservative, English. For an Irishman, that’s something to admit. Nobody does this better than Ray Davies - not Weller, not Lennon, not Bowie, not anyone. Ray Davies had it down perfect.

Taken from the album of the same name, and not to be confused with the also-excellent ‘Village Green’ from the same album, ‘Village Green Preservation Society’ is Davies’ hymn to an England that, by the late ’60’s, was forever gone. If it was ever there, outside of postcard pictures and Arthuric legends.

In very matter-of-fact and to-the-point lyrics, Davies sketches his manifesto, telling the listener what they are for and against. They are for “vaudeville”, “the George Cross”, “tudor houses” and “little shops” among other things. As sure as God is an Englishman, they’ll come down hard on “office blocks”, “skyscrapers” and, well, change of any kind.

Although Davies often poured scorn on those who “do the best things so conservatively”, it’s hard to imagine him singing this entirely tongue in cheek. He seems fairly authentic in what he wants, and the whole Village Green… album is based on a theme of rose-tinted views of Ye Olde Englande. It’s this theme, recurrent throughout the Kinks’ career, that put a stop to them becoming as worldwide as the Beatles or the Stones.

Anyway, it’s a really nice song, and strangely makes me nostalgic for about 1996, when I got into the album. I was in college, and Dublin was quite a different place then, pre-”Tiger”. As things seem to be starting to go a bit pear-shaped with the economy, I can see nostalgia-drenched tunes like this coming back in. Listen to the song on YouTube.

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