Category Archives: Songs from 2004

Album: Satanic Panic in the Attic, 2004

Justification: Hey, it’s my damn blog and I can have whatever I want. Even if its a relatively obscure song by a barely known band (at least outside of the realm of Pitchfork, who voted this song the 260th best song of the 2000s), but it’s an enduring favourite in my brain and therefore gets a place here. Even though this whole album kind of marked the point where I stopped loving OM quite so much: they started off as part of the Elephant 6 bands (along with the Apples in Stereo, Beulah, Neutral Milk Hotel, Olivia Tremor Control and a whole lot of other bands that are amazing), and they came out of Athens, Georgia (REM, B-52s, Love Tractor, Five-Eight, Magnapop, a lot of other bands that are amazing), and they were amaz… well, you get the drift.

Like most of Of Montreal's albums, this cover looks like history's most terrifying rococco acid trip

By this album, though, Of Montreal was effectively Kevin Barnes – at least in the studio. Live he’d put a touring band together, and dress them in elaborate costumes and make ‘em dance around. And while I loved this album, I’m not a huge fan of the subsequent three discs. Although that was partially from seeing them live at Manning Bar a couple of years ago, when they suffered from the same sort of shitty front of house that had also made Okkervil River kinda suck. Honestly, if there’s more than about three people on stage, that PA just can’t cope.

But anyway, I love this song. Join me.

SONG YOU SHOULD HAVE REDISCOVERED THIS TIME IN 2010 and 2011: Neither? Really? Maybe it was an Easter holiday or something. Terrible. Anyway, let’s see what else was happening in 2004.

AND HERE’S THE LAST FIVE…

455. The Smiths: Stop Me If You Think You’ve Heard This One Before (10 Apr)

 456. Mojo Nixon & Skid Roper: Elvis is Everywhere (11 Apr)

457. Jens Lekman: You Are The Light (12 Apr)

458. The Magnetic Fields: Andrew in Drag (13 Apr)

459. Cracker: Teen Angst (What the World Needs Now) (16 Apr)

Album: When I Said I Wanted to Be Your Dog, 2004

Justification: I always forget how much I adore Jens Lekman, possibly because my love for him is confined, pretty much, to this one EP. That’s not say I don’t like his other stuff – I do, very much – but the You Are the Light EP was where I fell in love with this laconic Swede, partially because of this song’s amazing opening line – come on, how could you not adore a man who starts a song with “Yeah, I got busted / So I used my one phone call / To dedicate a song to you on the radio”?

This would be a good LP cover to do a sleeveface with. Just saying.

It’s also got a video that goes through my head every time I’m driving in a tunnel, especially if there happens to be a Salvation Army band keeping pace with the paddywagon I’m handcuffed within.

The other reason was one of the b-sides, the ukelele strum ‘A Man Walks Into a Bar’ which posits that “I know why the Mona Lisa smiles / Da Vinci must have been a really funny guy”. Magnificent.

I believe he was living in Melbourne for a while too, which I assume is the same reason every other o/s artist ends up living here. Nice work, ladies of Australia. He’d be about due for a new disc now, surely?

SONG YOU SHOULD HAVE REDISCOVERED THIS TIME IN 2010: It was a celebration of the brief heyday of the House of Love and ‘Shine On’.

SONG YOU SHOULD HAVE REDISCOVERED THIS TIME IN 2011: That last great flowering of Talking Heads and the military zydeco of ‘Road to Nowhere’.

AND HERE’S THE LAST FIVE…

452. I Monster: Daydream in Blue (3 Apr)

453. Doug Anthony Allstars: (I Want to Spill the Blood of a) Hippy (4 Apr)

454. Martha & the Muffins: Echo Beach (5 Apr)

455. The Smiths: Stop Me If You Think You’ve Heard This One Before (10 Apr)

 456. Mojo Nixon & Skid Roper: Elvis is Everywhere (11 Apr)

Album: The Beginning of the End, 2004

Justification: God I love this song, and I always forget this simple fact until, a couple of times a year, I get a gig guide from the Sandringham Hotel in Newtown informing me that Gentle Ben & his Sensitive Side are playing a gig there – normally as a double header with Ben Corbett’s other band, Sixfthick – and I go “oh wow, I love that band, I’m going to listen to ‘The Beginning of the End’ right now!” So, in the admittedly unlikely event that you also love this amazing song and would have a similar response if you only had Zombie Dog Promotions sending you gig guides every so often as part of your job, allow me to provide you with one of the great shoulda-been-huge bands of the early 00s.

Oh, and having had this circling my head for the last few days, I’ve just noticed that it bears more than a passing chordal resemblance to previous SYSRTBIIA, ‘Cool for Cats’.

SONG YOU SHOULD HAVE REDISCOVERED THIS TIME IN 2010: Oh, how appropriate! This time last year we were enjoying the work of Corbett’s friend and occasional musical collaborator Dave McCormack, back when he was in Custard and releasing singles like ‘Girls Like That (Don’t Go For Guys Like Us)’.

Album: Funeral, 2004

Justification: It was so easy to know where I stood with the Arcade Fire at first: I hated ‘em. They were the band that every damn music critic was creaming themselves over, penning reviews that were waxing rhapsodic about this married Montreal couple who, like, weren’t about having hard and fast rules about being in a band, man, it was just about everyone contributing and hey, if they wanted to move on that was totally cool. I’d long since decided that Canada had enough of their damn musical collectives with floating line ups with Broken Social Scene and the New Pornographers and Godspeed You! Black Emperor and fuck these la-di-dah upstarts.

And then I listened to Funeral.

Goddamn.

It’s is still one hell of an album – there’s not a dud track on it – and dear god I wanted to stand by my principles and not fall into line with Pitchfork/NME/Magnet/Mojo/everyone else, but it wasn’t having it. I had to love it. And love it I did, and do: especially this one perfect, perfect song. Hearing it again while writing this is sending shivers up my spine: the way it swaps from major to minor in the chorus never fails to thump me in the solar plexus.

Don’t much care for Neon Bible, though. Too long, too over the top, a good four songs too many, but their Enmore Theatre show was a religious experience. And I’m pretty damn fond of The Suburbs, although the fact that it won the band a Grammy feels uncomfortably like they might have become Coldplay without my noticing.

THIS TIME IN 2010: Pulp’s greatest single: ‘Lipgloss’.

Album: This Is For Real, 2004

Justification: Oh, sweet Pink Grease. You meant nothing to no-one despite your best glam-revival efforts and briefly-but-heavily played singles like this, and for some reason one late, winter’s night when I was entering gig listings at dB Magazine while the rest of the city enjoyed their revelry I played this song upwards of 50 times in a row. I don’t know why it suddenly connected with me*, and nothing else on that album even rates as a blip in my memory, but for some reason that glam stomp and bass-plus-sax bottom end (echoes of Morphine? Why, perhaps) snaked its tendrils into my brain and never let go.

They were British too, which I only realised when reading up for this entry. I’d just assumed they were from the East Coast of the US.

SONG YOU SHOULD HAVE REDISCOVERED THIS TIME IN 2010: Weekend, by the looks of it.

*Other things that have suddenly required my playing them on constant repeat whilst doing listings for magazines: Amon Tobin’s soundtrack to the game Splinter Cell, and the Decemberists’ ’16 Military Wives’.

Album: The Dresden Dolls, 2004

Justification: No-one makes me want to write songs more than Amanda Palmer. She’s a much-underrated lyricist, dropping puns and wordplay left and right before blindsiding the listener with a confession straight out of a psychiatrist’s case notes, and every time I listen to either her solo stuff or the Dolls material it sends me straight to my notebook. She’s started to dial the wacky up too high of late, as on her Amanda Palmer Goes Down Under album – see what happens when you get all happy and contented, Little Miss About To Marry Neil Gaiman? – but I will happily hold the likes of ‘Sex Changes’ or ‘Missed Me’ up as being among the most perfect lyrics ever written. And it was this song that first introduced me to the duo: at first I thought it was a novelty song by a pair of theatre grads, but it was the bridge that took my breath away. That and the fact that the album it was on was released through metal label Roadrunner, which confused the hell out of me at the time.

Both she and drummer Brian Viglione are absolutely fantastic interviews, by the way. Smart, funny, articulate – damn them and their cursed talents.

Oh, and technically the album was released in 2003 through the band’s own indie label 8ft; I’m going on the Roadrunner international release, because I’m not cool enough to have been hanging out in the Boston cabaret scene at the time.

Album: Franz Ferdinand, 2004

Justification: Do you remember how goddamn strange this sounded when you first heard it? You know, before topping the Hottest 100, before Guitar Hero, before it became The Song That Everyone Knows By Franz Ferdinand That Gets Referenced When You Play Them ‘Do You Want To’ Or ‘Ulysses’ And They Say “Oh, His Voice Is Familiar, What’s He From?”.

And oh, what a song it is. Call and response vocals just made for shouting at gigs. A lyric whose “I know I won’t be leaving here / With you” neatly abbreviates the “So you go and stand on your own, and leave on your own” bridge from the Smiths’ ‘How Soon Is Now’, updated for a new generation of awkward boys and again boasting a beat the indie girls can groove unobtainably to on the dancefloor – not to mention that strange intro suggesting that the Scots quartet were the heirs apparent to the Strokes until suddenly opening the curtain on the real song, as though to say “Nope, we’re into Gang of Four!”

Genius.

Album: Good News For People Who Love Bad News, 2004

Justification: I’ll come back to this some time and really explain it, but the short version is that this is what got my wife into Modest Mouse, and thus what got me into them too. Yet I don’t mind hearing it, whereas ‘Dramamine’ fucking kills me every time.