Category Archives: Songs from 2000

Album: We Love The City, 2000

Justification: If you’ve read this site for more than a couple of minuntes, you know what my politics. I’m a big ol’ lefty, and I will happily go on record as saying that Margaret Thatcher destroyed Conservative politics. There was a strain of small-c conservatism that was all about being economically cautious and socially responsible, but the Reagan/Thatcher double-hit killed that notion stone dead, leading to the adherence to free market dogma, economics-as-religion, the abdication of community responsibility in favour of some nebulous idea of the individual being entirely responsible for their lot in life, and so on. It’s evil, it’s venal, and it’s demonstrably dangerous. And the world is the better for her absence.

Thwack! Take THAT, right-wing politics!

There’s a myth that the Thatcher years inspired great music, mainly by people that don’t realise that the punk explosion of 1976-79 occured during the ineffectual Labour government of James Callaghan. And sure, there were some great tunes, but frankly this is the best one: the closing track of We Love The City is a brass-driven stomper, a celebration of mean-spirited hatred ending with a children’s choir singing  ”ding dong, the witch is dead”. And if there’s a better mixing the political and the personal than “she wrapped an ankle chain ’round my left-wing heart”, I can’t think of it at the moment.

Genius.

SONG YOU SHOULD HAVE REDISCOVERED THIS TIME IN 2010: Flowers – or Icehouse – were being awesome with ‘We Can Get Together’.

AND HERE’S THE LAST FIVE…

522. Gene: Be My Light, Be My Guide (25 Jan)

523. Space and Cerys Matthews: The Ballad of Tom Jones (30 Jan)

524. Flight of the Conchords: Carol Brown (8 Feb)

525. The Cure: A Night Like This (1 Mar)

526. The Pogues: If I Should Fall from Grace with God (15 Mar)

Album: Figure 8, 2000

Justification: At the time this album was released I felt like getting into Elliot Smith was kind of a cliché. He was the archetype of the sensitive singer-songwriter that equally sensitive men were into, and I was already rocking a whole lot of that (Joe Pernice before and Smog, Goldenboy and Sparklehorse after). And then, of course, there was his suicide in 2003 which cast a pall over everything he did, reminding us – as with Mark Linkous not quite a decade later – that sometimes searching for something in the darkness just means finding more darkness.

‘Son of Sam’ isn’t, supposedly, about the titular killer (David Berkowitz, depending on whether you subscribe to police investigations or internet conspiracy theories) but a jaunty little ode to mental instability generally. And the video is based on the 1956 French featurette The Red Balloon, although I still always think of the Mr Show sketch when I see it. YouTube it. Go on.

Anyway, enough time has passed that I can accept that this is a hell of a song, and only feel a little bit like the abyss is calling when I hear it.

SONG YOU SHOULD HAVE REDISCOVERED THIS TIME IN 2010: PiL were insisting that ‘This Is Not A Love Song’.

AND HERE’S THE LAST FIVE…

514. Cibo Matto: Sugar Water (14 Sep)

515: Jonathan Richman: Since She Started To Ride (24 Sep)

516: Sandie Shaw & the Smiths: Hand in Glove (2 Oct)

517. The Fauves: Self Abuser (8 Oct)

518. Beastie Boys: Hey Ladies (26 Oct)

Album: Distorted Ghost EP, 2000

Justification: It’s another song without a video, but let’s not quibble about such petty concerns: we’re all friends here, are we not? And this entry is a very-slightly tweaked version of a piece I wrote for the lovely Karin Maier, whose blog is here and whose artwork based upon this song is right next to this paragraph. Said artwork is part of an exhibition currently showing in Canberra and looks pretty darn grand.

I’ve already bought this piece for my next place, art lovers. Don’t go getting any bright ideas.

The suicide of Sparklehorse’s Mark Linkous was hardly a complete shock: the man had known serious hardship, physical and mental illness and debilitating chemical dependencies to a degree that few could be expected to handle for long. Even without knowing his biography, the most affecting moments on Sparklehorse’s four albums all seemed to be raging desperately to find some light in the gathering darkness. And I contend that nothing captures the rage, sorrow, bloodyminded hope and heightened physical stress of desperate depression and heartbreak like the unhinged ‘Happy Man’.

From the lo-fi sonics to the off-kilter drumming to the hazy stream-of-consciousness lyric (“I woke up in a horses’ stomach one foggy morning” isn’t a line one expects in popular music), this is a song that I adored then as much as I do now. My ex-wife utterly hated it, though: in fact, it was one of the very few songs that she would angrily switch off if I played it in our house. Maybe she had an inkling that, when our marriage finally sputtered out, it would be Linkous’ desperate insistence that all he wanted was to be a happy man that I would take so much to heart as I entered my own long dark night of the soul.

It gave me a lot of strength at the time, but Linkous’ unfortunate coda – performed with a self-inflicted rifle shot to the heart in an alleyway in Knoxville, Tennessee in March 2010 – is a sobering reminder that a song, no matter how powerful and important, is still only a song.

SONG YOU SHOULD HAVE REDISCOVERED THIS TIME IN 2010: Hmmm. Nothing. Weird.

SONG YOU SHOULD HAVE REDISCOVERED THIS TIME IN 2011: The Only Ones were celebrating the joys of heroin with ‘Another Girl, Another Planet’.

AND HERE’S THE LAST FIVE…

466. The Pains of Being Pure at Heart: Heart in your Heartbreak (1 May)

 467. Paul Simon: The Boy in the Bubble (2 May)

468. 10,000 Maniacs: Candy Everybody Wants (7 May)

469. Starky: Hey Bang Bang (14 May)

470. Hefner: When the Angels Play their Drum Machines (16 May)

Album: The Sophtware Slump, 2000

Justification: You know, when this came out it was hailed by rock critics as the spiritual successor to OK Computer. Seriously, every review was absolutely creaming itself over this album, including mine at the time, and having just spent an afternoon re-listening to it while editing an interview with former frontman Jason Lytle I can confirm that it’s still an amazing piece of work. While the individual tracks are magnificent, the album as a whole is greater than the sum of its parts – and for an album obsessed with failing technology losing a battle against nature it’s got the best title of all time, especially if you’re a music critic who delights in terms like “the sophomore slump”. Although that also means you’re either American or a tool.

In my professional opinion, any writer who uses the term “sophomore” when they could use “second” is just being unnecessarily wankerish – and most of them seem to be publicists, it would appear. And for those who aren’t US music writers, “sophomore slump” is what British music writers call “second album syndrome” – the idea that album #2 is generally a disappointment, mainly because bands have their entire lives to make their first album and usually about 18 months to make the second, often while touring heavily and realising that being a working band actually kind of sucks. So this was basically the band pre-emptively taking the piss about their own second album, except that it was their undisputed masterpiece. Things started to get patchy not long after, but The Sophtware Slump is freakin’ perfect.

Anyway, I saw Grandaddy once during their sole Australian tour, and they were amazing. Aside from the whole not-doing-the-final-encore-that-would-have-been-’Summer Here Kids’ thing, of course.

SONG YOU SHOULD HAVE REDISCOVERED THIS TIME IN 2011: Screamfeeder were rockin’ their one-shot classic clip with ‘Hi-Cs’.

AND HERE’S THE LAST FIVE…

416. De La Soul: Ring Ring Ring (Ha Ha Hey) (24 Jan)

417. Grant McLennan: Easy Come, Easy Go (25 Jan)

418. Wire: Eardrum Buzz (27 Jan)

419. Jellyfish: The King is Half Undressed (30 Jan) 

420. The Rapture: No Sex for Ben (31 Jan)

Album: Latvian Lovers, 2000

Justification: Oh, how delicious Australian rock’n'roll irony was at the tail end of the century. TISM were at their commercial zenith, the Drugs and Machine Gun Fellatio were having it both ways with songs that were catchy as hell and tonguey as cheek, and then Not From There appeared – a band of Australians formed in the UK – and no-one was entirely sure whether they were a legit band missing the point, a joke band playing it straight, or a legit band with a sense of humour. This single – from their second and final album – made the case more clear, especially with their creepily close-up video, but by that time the band were more or less vanished. I never saw them live, but I was assured they were astonishingly hit-or-miss.

SONG YOU SHOULD HAVE REDISCOVERED THIS TIME IN 2010: I was on holidays, so go back over the 2000 archive. It’s really good!

AND HERE’S THE LAST FIVE…

399. Mint Royale: Don’t Falter (13 Dec)

400. Lloyd Cole: No Blue Skies (14 Dec)

401. Jean Michel Jarre: Oxygène (part IV) (15 Dec) 

402. The Damned: Smash It Up (19 Dec)

403. Echo & the Bunnymen: Bring on the Dancing Horses (21 Dec) 

Album: Nixon, 2000

Justification: Lambchop are best known for having something like 17 members, all of whom have day jobs and other responsibilities which meant that they barely ever toured in large numbers. Whenever they did get it together Uncut would go nuts for them since its editor Allan Jones was an alt.country nut who saw his life’s work as getting Ryan Adams the attention he felt was deserved: in other words, all of the attention.

I’m pretty sure that it was thanks to Uncut that I discovered the band at all, for which I am grateful. Frontman/songwriter Kurt Wagner was freakin’ amazing when I saw him perform solo at the Grace Emily in a double header with Joe Pernice around this time: it was just him, a guitar, a voice barely above a whisper, and a detuned radio playing static through a volume pedal. Stunning.

Anyway: this song is not only amazing (and was their commercial breakthrough, thanks mainly to a remix by Zero 7) but is also impossibly sad – written by Wagner about his slow realisation that he and his wife were never going to have children (hence that desperate “come on, progeny” toward the end of the song). It’s an effect that’s almost – but not quite – overshadowed out by the creepy lip synchin’ Nixon in the video.

Lambchop have given their albums some amazing titles: Thriller and the double album C’mon/No, You C’mon spring to mind.

SONG YOU SHOULD HAVE REDISCOVERED THIS TIME IN 2010: So I took off the public holiday this time last year too, it would seem. OK, 2000 archive it is.

Album: The Teaches of Peaches, 2000

Justification: There are very, very few live acts more compelling than Peaches. Whether touring solo or with the Herms (featuring the never-not-awesome JD Samson of Le Tigre) her gigs range from the amazing to the absolutely fucking amazing. And she’s a lovely interviewee too, I should add: Peaches may seem terrifying at times, but Merrill Nisker’s a witty and erudite conversationalist.

This song is significant not so much because of its awesomeness (had ‘Fuck the Pain Away’ been a single it would have been here instead), but because it marked Peaches’ closest approach to the mainstream. It was her highest charting song and it was the first and only single released during her very, very shortlived deal with Sony: after tiny German indie label Kitty-Yo put The Teaches of Peaches out in 2000, Sony’s European operation expressed an interest and agreed to fund the clip for a 2002 re-release of the remixed ‘Set it Off’. Once they actually saw the thing they tore up the deal and reportedly demanded their money back – apparently it wasn’t the clip’s rampant multi-sexual sauciness that was a problem, but the expanding armpit and pubic hair that was just too far beyond the pale.

She then signed to UK indie XL who were apparently OK with her having a thick, luxuriant beard on Fatherfucker, so clearly they’re a little less squeamish about body hair.

SONG YOU SHOULD HAVE REDISCOVERED THIS TIME IN 2010: ‘Twas a weekend, so here’s the 2000 archive. It’s a good one too.

Album: All Hands On The Bad One, 2000

Justification: Sleater-Kinney – along with Built to Spill and Redd Kross – were pretty much introduced to me when I bought my friend Kate’s Barina off her around 2000, since she left a cassette therein which our mutual friend Nick had made for her. Your loss, Kate: my new favourite driving tape was awesome, and this song was on it. Thanks to it I discovered the wonderful, yelpy world of Sleater-Kinney, fell madly in love with this album and proceeded to not really like any of their other stuff nearly as much (actually, The Woods is still really good).

I only saw them live once, at the Adelaide Big Day Out in 2006, and they weren’t great. They did do a savage version of ‘Entertain’, though. They split up not long afterwards, though there are whispers of a reunion. It better not interfere with Carrie Brownstein writing and starring in Portlandia. My god but she’s good.

SONG YOU SHOULD HAVE REDISCOVERED ON THIS DAY IN 2010: A throw-down classic from the B-52s: ‘Private Idaho’.

Album: Veni Vedi Vicious, 2000

Justification: There aren’t many bands who can say that the events of September 11 benefitted their career, but the Hives are one – at least in Australia. Despite being virtually unknown at the time, they headlined the Falls Festival that year purely by virtue of the fact that they were game to get on a plane and fly to Australia when every other band was remaining resolutely earthbound. That gave them a huge captive audience of punters pretty keen to get their mind off things, and having a bunch of well-drilled Swedes inform said punters they were about to see their new favourite band was just the ticket.

The Adelaide-based promoter Craig Armstrong was there at the time and told me about how contemptuous he was of the band when they made their signature claim, and how completely turned around he was by the end of their set. And mad props to ‘em – any band that calls their album Tyrannosaurus Hives gets a lifetime pass from me.

THIS TIME IN 2010: Ethereal Flying Nun guitar pop from Straightjacket Fits and ‘Down In Splendour’.

Album: single 2000, When Young Terrorists Chase The Sun 2001

Justification: Oh, poor Gerling. They were on the up and up through the late 90s, making great singles like ‘Death to the Apple Gerls’ and previous SYSRTBTAA entry ‘Enter, Space Capsule’ and were all set to break through with their masterpiece, 2001′s When Young Terrorists Chase The Sun. It had been heralded by this magnificent single, which acted as a bridge between the bratty guitars of their early material and the album’s pick-and-mix electronica, and thanks to subsequent singles ‘Dust Me Selecta’ and ‘Hot Computer’ had done relatively well locally. But the band had their eyes fixed on the rest of the world: Japan was falling in love with them, the UK was starting to crack, and they were starting to make their first forays to the US.

Here’s the quiz question: keeping in mind that the album came out in the first half of 2001 in Australia, and was looking at international release some months later, is there anything about that title that might have limited the band’s chances of worldwide exposure after, say, the 11th of November?

The band never really recovered, despite a quick album title change (it became self-titled locally and, according to Wikipedia, was released in the UK as Head2cleaner), and while the subsequent albums had their moments they never quite caught the playful, anything-goes spirit of their second disc.

This was also a staple track at Space Capsule, the aptly-named Adelaide club run by one of my sisters and then-girlfriend-now-ex-wife (who are two separate people, I hasten to add), which was very handy with regards my getting of free drinks. Unsurprisingly, every time I hear it I’m reminded of happy, carefree times with people who were once so very important to me, and now – for the most part – barely cross my mind. Adelaide in the 90s: you’re a different country.

These days Darren from Gerling records and tours as the E.L.F, while Presser’s doing art stuff and Burke has become one hell of a producer (and has been playing with the Mess Hall, at least the last couple of times I’ve seen ‘em).

THIS TIME IN 2010: We were getting all arty-video with New Order’s last genuinely great single, ‘True Faith’.