Category Archives: Songs from 2003

Album: Shangri-La, 2003

Justification: I’m not sure if I’ve ever made this clear, but I assume that you listen to these each day by pumping your speakers up nice and loud and experiencing the song in all its mighty glory. If you haven’t been doing this, might I suggest that you do so for this, because it’s a) awesome and b) incredibly underrated, even going by the always-underrated standards of this Perth-then-Melbourne supergroup. Even the band don’t seem to be too fond of it (it was a notable absence from their career-spanning four-disc set, for one thing) and while I appreciate that songs like ‘Smokin’ Johnny Cash’ and ‘This One Eats Souls’ are incredible, this is my hands-down favourite.

"What's that, Sid? You have the new Groove Armada? How about we just leave this on repeat all day, then?"

This album got a huge thrashing in the office of Adelaide’s dB Magazine in 2003, not least because it was one of the few records that my colleague Mercedes “Sid” Eyers-White and I could agree on (with ‘Lost in Space’ by Aimee Mann being about the only other one I can recall). The album had a tortured history, being slated to be recorded in 2000 but put on hold as record company buyouts, mergers and fuckups saw MDS (the Susans’ label, formerly known as Mushroom Distribution Services) gutted by Festival Records, who were in turn bought up and slaughtered by Warners as part of the music industry’s early 00s orgy of blood. Hence, the album’s vision of a mythical non-existant paradise seemed damn near prophetic.

This is by far the most upbeat song on the album, the rest being given over to Rob Snarksi crooning melancholic barroom ballads like ‘A Cat Needs a Mouse’ and ‘The Eastern States’, but his authoritative bellow here never fails to raise my spirits – as do lines like “The music plays all night in Shangri-La / And every singer has an endless repertoire” and “it’s breakfast anytime in Shangri-La!” As a man who considers the phrase “all-day breakfast” to be one of the most glorious the English language has to offer, this band are hitting me right where I live.

It’s the last new album the band have done, although they do tour sporadically.

SONG YOU SHOULD HAVE REDISCOVERED THIS TIME IN 2010: None, so let’s have the June 10 choice which is Radiohead’s best video ever: ‘Just’.

SONG YOU SHOULD HAVE REDISCOVERED THIS TIME IN 2011: Again, June 10 gets an airing with the glacial shoegaze of Slowdive and ‘Alison’.

AND HERE’S THE LAST FIVE…

474. Operator Please: Logic (23 May)

475. dEUS: Little Arithmetics (24 May)

476. Siouxsie & the Banshees: Kiss Them For Me (4 June)

477. The Monkees: Last Train to Clarksville (5 June)

478. The Raconteurs: Steady, As She Goes (7 June)

Album: Tough Love, 2003

Justification: I was so pleased when Magic Dirt, ahem, “sold out”.

OK, they didn’t actually do anything of the sort, but they did sign to Warners, focussed their songs to be more accessible to the brief window of time when Australian bands with guitars actually got played on daytime radio, and accepted that they could write really fucking catchy songs. And while I dutifully shook my head and brandished my worn copy of Signs of Satanic Youth whenever the subjectof how the band’s old stuff being so much better than their new stuff was raised, I was actually totally in love with the Dirt’s version of power pop. When I’d heard the then unreleased ‘Dirty Jeans’ at Big Day Out in 2000 I thought it was pretty much the best song I’d ever heard, and this single kinda-sorta became the hit that should have been. I’m pretty sure this wasn’t the commercially released version of the video, though.

Magic Dirt: reminding vampires about good dental hygiene since 1991.

It’s one of Adalita’s most lusty vocals – strong, sexually powerful (“my hand is always down my pants / Kill, kill kill”) and unexpectedly ambivalent song that’s part fuck-you to an ex not up to the job and part conflicted “so, wanna try again?” for a love lost (and there’s points of comparison here with Elastica’s equally rockin’ ‘Stutter’). And the late, great Dean Turner does such an elegantly understated bassline. Basically, it’s just a fucking great single from a band that realistically shouldn’t have been within spitting distance of a major label, but turned the opportunity into a trio of legitimately fine buzzsaw-pop albums. it was also the band’s commercial high-water mark, getting to #16 in the ARIA charts.

Incidentally, speaking of Turner, I would have loved to have heard him remaster this album. Tough Love and its predecessor What Are Rockstars Doing Today both suffer from being produced by Phil Vinall (Auteurs, Placebo) who is clearly not a man who thinks about adding a bottom end to the albums he works upon.

SONG YOU SHOULD HAVE REDISCOVERED THIS TIME IN 2010: Eh, weekend. Or something.

SONG YOU SHOULD HAVE REDISCOVERED THIS TIME IN 2011: Hey, there was nothing here either. The hell? OK, fine, here’s the 2003 archive.

AND HERE’S THE LAST FIVE…

441. Baxter Dury: Francesca’s Party (7 Mar)

442. Archers of Loaf: Web in Front (8 Mar)

443. Blondie: Hanging on the Telephone (14 Mar)

444. The Handsome Family: Your Great Journey (16 Mar)

445. Bacarra: Yes Sir, I Can Boogie (19 Mar)

Album: Give Up, 2003

Justification: This song damn near kills me every time I hear it. There’s something so yearning and hopeful about Ben Gibbard’s voice when it’s not deep in the beautiful melancholia of Death Cab for Cutie and their sole album Give Up is a glorious collection of Dntl’s music and Gibbard’s lyrics showing that sometimes these collaborative efforts can become more than the sum of their parts.

However, it’s that hope and yearning that aches when I hear it. The lyrics paint a grandiose think-of-what-we-can-do picture, though implying that these dreams are unobtainable, and the video of two people in isolation suits backs up the idea that some distances – emotional or geographical – just can’t be bridged no matter how much the protagonists may wish otherwise. I can neither confirm nor deny that this reminds me of particular relationships I’ve had in my life and certain regrets I may or may not have. Either way, I think it’s a good thing that there’s been no follow-up album. Also, Gibbard, stop stealing my thoughts.

UPDATE A FEW HOURS LATER: Oh, just heard the news about Gibbard’s marriage to Zooey Deschanel ending. Um, sorry to hear that, Ben.

SONG YOU SHOULD HAVE REDISCOVERED THIS TIME IN 2010: An appropriate companion to the above, actually: the catchy electo-focussed pop of Fischer-Z and ‘The Perfect Day’.

Album: Fire, 2003

Justification: It took me a while to realise that Electric Six weren’t simply a joke band. Then, a little while later, I realised that actually yeah, they pretty much were.

That hasn’t stopped them having made many, many songs that I adore – ‘Mr Woman’ is a perennial favourite, second only to TISM’s ‘Jesus Pots the White Ball’ in terms of Songs About The Machinations Of The Music Biz, but this is their debut single and best known song. And if you can not dance to it when it’s spinning on the dancefloor of your choice then, sir, you’re a stronger man than I.

Also, while Dick Valentine (aka Tyler Spencer) is the only constant member – and is sporting an impressively luminous wang bulge in this Tom Kuntz-co-directed clip – the band have maintained an impressive number of pseudonyms for the 20-odd people who’ve passed through, including The Colonel, Rock and Roll Indian, Smorgasbord!, Percussion World, Macro Duplicato and Disco.

Oh, and yes, that’s Jack White adding vocals under the name “John S. O’Leary”, which was apparently his non de plume of choice at the time. Honestly, Jack, Rock and Roll Indian it ain’t.

THIS TIME IN 2010: I think I was still making my way back from Splendour in the Grass. So hell, let’s see what 2003 was doing.

Album: Speakerboxxx/The Love Below, 2003

Justification: If there’s on lesson to take from Kiss, it’s this: don’t have all the members make solo albums. Outkast had been a cred-heavy voice in Southern US hip hop for almost a decade (and had enjoyed largish hits with ‘Rosa Parks’ and ‘Mrs Jackson’) by the time they made their fifth album, Speakerboxxx/The Love Below which was an Outkast album in the sense that it had the members of Outkast on it, but not in the sense that they were actually collaborating in any serious way.

Big Boi’s half, Speakerboxxx, continued in their previous vein, but Andre 3000 eschewed rap to get all Stevie Wonder on his disc The Love Below, mixing up jazz, Prince-flavoured r’n’b, soul and, on the biggest hit, damn fine pop. Its hook of “shake it like a Polaroid picture” reportedly did wonders for Polaroid and has been cited as the reason the company went back into production after having gone into administration in 2001. If so, it was short-lived: they went bankrupt in 2007, bought out and are now banking on Lady Gaga to make them popular again.

Outkast struggled in its aftermath too, making 2006’s hip-hop-meets-30s-gangster film Idlewild (which only just made back its $10 million budget) and companion album, but they’ve been quiet since.

THIS TIME IN 2010: Nothing. It was a weekend, apparently.

Album: Reconstruction Site, 2003

Justification: To celebrate an entire year – yes, really – of Songs You Should Rediscover Today Because They Are Awesome – I would like to indulge myself with a song that you may need to discover for the first time, unless you’re Canadian.

In their home country The Weakerthans are genuinely big (well, y’know, indie-big) while here they’re something of a cult proposition. That said, their inexplicable inclusion on the Soundwave line-up in 2010 (in the Completely Awesome And Utterly Inappropriate Soundwave Act tradition which also saw Gang of Four be jaw-droppingly amazing in 2011) meant they played at the Annandale to a full house of people damn near crying with joy, myself among them.

John K Samson, you see, does one thing better than any other songwriter alive: male guilt. Anyone can write a Baby You Left Me song, but it takes a very particular genius to create a line like ‘Civil Twilight’’s “I wonder if the landlord has fixed the crack/That I stared at instead of staring back at you”, which perfectly catches that I-had-my-moment-to-say-something-and-it-passed experience that everyone has had at some things-might-have-worked-out-differently moment, and breaks my heart a little bit every time I hear it.

However, it’s their third album Reconstruction Site which is, in my opinion, their hands-down masterpiece. It takes in songs about joyful friendship (‘The Reasons’), demanding change (‘A New Name for Everything’), death (the three parenthetical sonnets that bookend and divide the album), the exquisitely specific love/hate that comes from living in a nation’s lesser metropolis (‘One Great City!’, which applies as perfectly to Adelaide as it does Samson’s Winnepeg), a buck-up-little-camper song from a depressed person’s cat (‘Plea from a Cat Named Virtute’*) and, I would argue, popular music’s most gorgeously insightful exploration of romantic regret in ‘Benediction’.

However, the song that I loved most then and now is the single ‘Our Retired Explorer (Dines with Michel Foucault in Paris, 1961)’, which is the best song ever written about a fictional meeting between the subtitular philosopher and an unnamed member of Ernest Shackleton’s Antarctic expedition of the early 20th century, and certainly the only one that makes the claim that “a penguin taught me French.” It’s gloriously upbeat, it’s got a hell of a video and it has a bridge that asks “Say, do you have a ship/And a dozen able men/That maybe you can lend me?” Genius.

The place damn near exploded when they dropped this into the Annandale set, three songs in.

*For the record: the subject never perked up, and Virtute gave up and left. She explains it in the utterly heartbreaking sequel ‘Virtute the Cat Explains Her Departure’ on 2007’s Reunion Tour.

THIS TIME IN 2010: It was the first ever Song You Should Rediscover Today Because It Is Awesome, kicking off in spectacular style with the Saints’ mighty ‘Know Your Product’.

Album: Fever to Tell, 2003

Justification: This was the song that turned the Yeah Yeah Yeahs from noisy little New York band into a worldwide proposition, since it showed that they weren’t just writing bratty singles like ‘Bang’ and ‘Date with the Night’: this is one of those songs that you could strip down to chords and melody and it still stands up. Which is what the band did on their last tour, turning Karen O’s anguished song of heartbreak and desperation over Liars frontman Angus Andrew into a good ol’ fashioned singalong. Never underestimate the power of a great ballad – or a good acronym, since (supposedly) the title stands for My Angus Please Stay. The relationship may not have endured, but it led to an astonishingly powerful song.