Album: Live It Out, 2006
Justification: It’s catchy as hell, that “bam chicka bam” intro is a glorious throwback to the gloriou nonsense of rock’n'roll’s more playful past, and it’s welded to one of the very, very, very few popularly-available protest songs during what we can laughably call the War on Terror.
Suddenly: knives.
And none of that is unconscious either: Emily Haines knows exactly what she’s talking about every step of the way, namechecking and paraphrasing Bobby Fuller’s ‘I Fought the Law’, repurposed here as “I fought the war, and the war won”. That being said, the video clip went out of its way to emphasise the “monster” bits of the title with zombies and bleeding walls and fairly ropey attempts to remake bits of Polanski’s Repulsion. The single sleeve, on the other hand, is a pretty pattern of falling knives. Point taken, you Canadian pinkos.
Oh, and Daddy Warbucks was the man who took in Little Orphan Annie, and who made his millions making weapons for the US army. That’s what’s called “nominative determinism”.
SONG YOU SHOULD HAVE REDISCOVERED THIS TIME IN 2010: One of the most gloriously melancholy songs ever written: The The’s still-amazing ‘This Is The Day’.
SONG YOU SHOULD HAVE REDISCOVERED THIS TIME IN 2011: Paul Simon and Chevy Chase yuck it up in ‘You Can Call Me Al’.
AND HERE’S THE LAST FIVE…
491. Visage: Fade to Grey (6 July)
492. Modest Mouse: Satellite Skin (9 July)
493. The Trammps: Disco Inferno (10 July)
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