Category Archives: Songs from 2005

Album: Twin Cinema, 2005

Justification: And we’re back. I know, I should have killed it at #500 but there are just too many wonderful songs out there…

I know all the cool kids got into everyone’s favourite Canadian supergroup via The Electric Version, but this was the album that won me over. And this was the song on said album that did it.

Yeah, it sort of hurts my eyes too.

This sounds like a diss, but it’s not meant to be: the thing that I love most about the New Pornographers isn’t the brilliant pop melodies, the flawless harmonies, the great arrangements, the top-notch songwriting (Carl Newman, Neko Case, Dan Bejar – I mean, these are A1 songspersons) or any of the other obvious qualities. What I love most is that I have no emotional investment in them, and sometimes I need music that neither resonates with significance nor gives me a tepid emotional pool in which to wallow.

See, the thing I love about, say, the Smiths or the Hold Steady or the Weakerthans is that, at heart, these are songs written by men who’ve gone through the same emotionally-shredding things I (and every other human being with questionable decision making abilities) has gone through. And sometimes that’s everything I need to hear, and other times it’s poison.

The New Pornographers, meanwhile, write glorious songs with vague narratives that I find hard to follow and glorious to lose myself within. The closest I’ve come to working out a proper scenario for any of Carl Newman’s songs is ‘Miracle Drug’ on his solo album The Slow Wonder, which I’ve decided is a short story based loosely around the writing of A Confederacy of Dunces – and that’s the deepest I’ve gone. What’s this about? I’ve got no idea, beyond that the protagonist has been “listening too long / to one song”. Which is a great, great refrain, and in no way allows me to dwell upon things that are better not dwelt upon.

There are times I want music that touches me at my very core and reminds me what it is to be human, and other times I want to keep floating up toward the surface where its sunny and warm, and away from the depths where the huge, terrifying things lurk. Glorious pop songs are necessary joys.

Oh, and one of my favourite (apocryphal) stories about how the band got their name was that a US evangelical preacher/convicted fraud Jimmy Swaggart had declared rock’n'roll “the new pornography”. Apparently that’s not true (Newman got it from a film, supposedly), but I choose to believe it anyway.

SONG YOU SHOULD HAVE REDISCOVERED THIS TIME IN 2010: Wow: I  have post-birthday downers like clockwork, if would appear. Bis were briefly the future of indie pop – and the second dawn of a relationship – with ‘Starbright Boy’.

SONG YOU SHOULD HAVE REDISCOVERED THIS TIME IN 2011: The Shins become an elegant metaphor for a failed marriage via ‘New Slang’.

AND HERE’S THE LAST FIVE…

496. Metric: Monster Hospital (13 July)

497. The Bamboos feat. Megan Washington: King of the Rodeo (16 July)

498. The Charlatans: I Never Want An Easy Life… (17 July)

 499. The Hollies: Carrie Anne (18 July)

500. The Smiths: This Charming Man (19 July)

Album: Floor Show, 2005

Justification: There are certain songs that I love so, so much that I feel an almost evangelical need to shout about from the metaphorical rooftops, despite the fact that technically they’re too obscure to be “rediscovered”. Luckily this blog is based entirely on my whims of a morning, so I can capriciously decide that no, you’re going to get ‘C’mon’ by the Soft Pack – or I can come up with some unconvincing explanation for why pulling out Absentee’s ‘We Should Never Have Children’ is entirely reasonable. And so it is that today you get this low-key shoulda-been classic by the son of Ian Dury (as in “and the Blockheads”), who deserves an entry of his own but is now being pipped by his offspring.

Pictured: boobs.

Floor Show landed on my desk and immediately caught my attention because the cover featured a)  the surname Dury emblazoned thereon, and b) boobs. This is the opening track and it took me a long time to get any further into the album because I felt the obsessive need to play and re-play it – the “no matter / how hard / you try, you fall from grace” coda that is at once resigned and reassuring, as sung by a man who clearly is no stranger to the getting-fucked-up arts. I’ve not heard either of his two other records, but this one is still an enduring favourite.

I only stumbled across the clip a couple of days ago when I was idly wondering whether this song had one, and I trust that you too will enjoy some weirdly terrifying nightmares in the weeks to come.

Incidentally, that’s the five-year-old Baxter on the cover of his dad’s classic New Boots & Panties.

SONG YOU SHOULD HAVE REDISCOVERED THIS TIME IN 2011: The brief, false second dawn of Suede’s creative axis that was the Tears with their swoonworthy debut single ‘Refugees’.

AND HERE’S THE LAST FIVE…

436. Five-Eight: Karaoke (29 Feb)

437. Lucious Jackson: Naked Eye (1 Mar)

438. Menswear: Daydreamer (2 Mar)

439. Vampire Weekend: Oxford Comma (5 Mar)

440. Real Life: Catch Me I’m Falling (6 Mar)

Album: The Cloud Room, 2005

Justification: As with ‘Flagpole Sitta’ earlier this week, there’s something special about a band who really only have one great song in them. Lots of bands can suck for entire careers, but putting out that one perfect gem that endures way beyond a band or a singer is something that deserves celebration. Which it never gets, of course: such acts are derisively labelled as one hit wonders, which is terribly unfair. Releasing one perfect single is a magnificent thing: it’s only when the performer goes “oh fuck, now we need an album” that it becomes a problem.

That’s basically what happened with the Cloud Room: J Stuart got a false positive on an HIV test in 2004, an event which caused him to start writing songs (including ‘Hey Now Now’) to help cope with his sudden brush with mortality. It was enough to make him decide, once it was established that he was in fact virus-free, that life was too short and he was damn well forming a band. They got early buzz, more or less entirely on the basis of this song, and because of a number of factors which Stuart explained to me in an interview before their first (and to date only) Australian tour included pressure to get a disc done while there was buzz, the need to record in a particular studio while it was available and looming tour commitments, they banged out the first album very quickly, despite not having a proper band or anything like enough songs. You can actually hear the inspiration dry up as the album goes on, starting strong with ‘Hey Now Now’ and ‘Waterfall’, plateauing out around ‘The Hunger’ and fizzling out on a sketch of an idea with the go-nowhere ‘We Sleep in the Ocean’.

The album didn’t do so well, since it didn’t really have more than about three and a half songs on it, and the band never made the commercial crossover that seemed a slam dunk when all the cool blogs were pushing this song. Technically they still exist and have recorded a second album entitled Zither, although that piece of information – that the album is DONE – is the most recent posting on their website (as of today), and is dated October 2010.

Still, this is one hell of a song.

SONG YOU SHOULD HAVE REDISCOVERED THIS TIME IN 2010: Aww, look! It’s another US one hit wonder! Nada Surf and the bitter, glorious ‘Popular’.

Album: Gimme Fiction, 1995

Justification: OK, I’m just going to come out and say it: Spoon aren’t great live.

And it’s not because they can’t play – clearly they can. And it’s not because they don’t have great songs, because clearly they do. This one, for example, and damn near everything else they’ve ever done. But I’ve seen them three times now and every time they’ve, well, sucked.

Part of it is that oh-so-annoying thing that certain somewhat precious bands do to show that dammit, they’re in control and they’re not going to play the things people know, regardless of how keen the audience are, which means that sets lack any singles: a particular insult given how great their singles inevitably are (which is my way of saying that I was looking for a clip for ‘The Way We Get By’ first, and then figured this was probably better known than ‘Jonathan Fisk’) and part of it is that so many of the songs they do need other elements (like once you take the brass out of ‘You Got Yr Cherry Bomb’, there’s really nothing there). But the albums are flawless.

That said, when I first heard this my head kept morphing it into Big Black’s cover of ‘Do Ya Think I’m Sexy’. There’s a mash-up I’d like to hear.

THIS TIME IN 2010: Robyn Hitchcock & the Egyptians were quirking out with ‘Balloon Man’.

Album: Picaresque, 2005

Justification: There are times, normally when I’m barrelling to deadline with listings, that I just need to listen to one song over and over and over again. In recent years, that song is ’16 Military Wives’ by the Decemberists. Why? I have no idea. I do love the song dearly, certainly, and I think Colin Meloy’s lyrics beautifully skewer the gung-ho government of George W Bush, the culpability of the media and the opportunism of celebrity whilst also keeping the human cost of the US’s foreign policy in tight focus, but those concerns aren’t generally foremost in my mind when I’m running late for a deadline. To be honest I think it’s the perfect pace of the song, as well as the superb arrangement (I utterly love where the drums come in two bars after you’d expect them to), but maybe it puts things in perspective for me on some level while I’m panicking about a venue not having sent me their gig guide.

It was also their final song at their show at Beck’s Bar for Sydney Festival in 2010 (I think), which was magnificent. They’re much better live than you’d necessarily think, the Decemberists. Hilarious video too.

THIS TIME IN 2010: Looks like I had some time off. Maybe it was when I was moving house and didn’t have internet. Or maybe I was distracted by a bee or something.

Album: With Love And Squalor, 2005

Justification: We Are Scientists are a lesson in why bands should give good interview. Their music is good – really, really good – but my longtime advocacy of the band is mainly down to how damn funny they are to speak with. Bassist Chris Cain transformed my life with a spirited conversation around the time of this album which was less a discussion about his band and their music and more an artistic defence of the Josh Lucas/Jessica Alba/Jamie Foxx action-movie flop Stealth. Arguing – accurately, as it turns out – that “It’s a movie that takes several hairpin turns and each one sends you careening off the cliff of comprehension” he proved himself as gifted a bullshitter as he is a master of the four-stringed arts, and that takes some doing. And a later conversation with singer/guitarist Keith Murray was the first time that a little film called The Room was picked up by my pop-culture radar, so I have a lot to thank the band for.

And that would probably have been that, were it not for their show at the Metro in support of their magnificent-if-appallingly-titled second album Brain Thrust Mastery where they comprehensively demonstrated that, if parties require rockin’, they’re the band for the job. They were also a highlight of Splendour in the Grass 2010, despite playing in the middle of the day. But even if they sucked live, I’d be a fierce advocate for them simply on the basis of their interviews.

Oh, they also did a comedy series for MTV called Steve Wants His Money, which was entirely about how they’d borrowed cash off a guy called Steve and their various ideas of how to raise the money to pay him back. The episode about “porno radio” is especially brilliant. YouTube it now.

THIS TIME IN 2010: Hoodoo Gurus make their first proper classic single, ‘Tojo’.

Album: Here Come The Tears, 2005

Justification: Oh, the hopes we had when we heard that Brett Anderson was once again working with Bernard Butler. The first two Suede albums were (and are) magnificent creations, despite Butler leaving before 1994’s Dog Man Star was completed, and although Suede hit their commercial peak with 1996’s subsequent Coming Up only mad people think that there was much left to love after the band from there on in. So the news that hatchets had been buried and fences mended between the pair in 2004 filled right-thinking people with joy, and album the following did not disappoint.

From the outset it was clear that strange alchemy was rekindled and in fact this, the first single, suggested that nothing had changed much in the intervening decade. The whole album was pretty damn good, but the band fizzled to a halt quickly: the record underperformed, they were dropped from their deal and, after a handful of live shows, retreated to “write the next album”. Which clearly proved harder than they’d expected: the official website quietly vanished in 2006, Butler got busy discovering Duffy, and Anderson made some more terrible solo records until the Coming Up-era Suede reunited in 2010. But as false dawns go, this song suggested a particularly beautiful day was about to begin.

Album: Oh No, 2005

Justification: Poor OK Go: they write genuinely great song pop songs, but they’re now completely overshadowed by their videos: the synchronised dancing of ‘A Million Ways’, the elaborate Rube Goldberg device of ‘This Too Shall Pass’ – but mainly this: a slice of 70s-UK-inspired power pop with an amazing video clip, even though the lip synch was mainly done by the bassist rather than the singer. Which I never really understood.

They’re amazing live too, by the way.

Album: Separation Sunday, 2005

Justification: The Hold Steady appeal to certain demographics. These include “men”, “men in their thirties”, “men who enjoy beer”, “men who grew up going to see bands”, “men who have a certain subtle but pervasive sense of ennui attributable to the sense that their youth is inexorably passing by and that nothing they can do, no matter how many beers they chug or choruses they sing along with, will ever bring those precious moments back again” and “music journalists”. Since I fall in to several of those categories, the band – which, let’s face it, basically means singer/lyricist Craig Finn – has an unassailable place in my heart. Although I’m not Catholic, a meth head or from Minneapolis, the narrative of the band’s second album, Separation Sunday, spoke to me like an old friend when my friend and fellow dB Magazine writer Sam Vinall handed it to me, saying “you’re a lyric guy, you’ll love it.”

That being said, while I heard this album and liked it (particularly this and ‘Cattle and the Creeping Things’) it wasn’t until I saw the band live that it all clicked. They were on a bill with Les Savy Fav (and Thunderbirds are Now!, incidentally) so you understand just how great they had to be in order to change my life.

Separation Sunday‘s sorta-kinda a concept piece (loosely defined) and while the characters of Holly, Charlemange and Gideon have turned up in other songs, this is their album. It’s an OK starting point, although Boys and Girls in America is probably a smidge better (and is their masterpiece, hands down).

I will say this, though: for a song that I love so freakin’ much, it wasn’t until embarassingly recently that I realised the line in the second verse is “St Teresa came to me in dreams” rather than “sanctuary”.

Oh, and I thought the Hold Steady could do no wrong, right up until the release of this year’s Heaven is Whenever album which I was profoundly unjazzed by. This, therefore, makes me objective, right?

Album: The Sunset Tree, 2005

Justification: OK, this is going to require a little bit of context.

The idea behind Songs You Should Rediscover Because They Are Awesome is spelled out in the title: they should, ideally, be songs that you haven’t heard in a long while but had in the back of your mind so you go “Oh, wow, haven’t heard this in ages!” ‘This Year’, however, did crazy well on the Triple J Hottest 100 but a few short years ago and is just about the only song that anyone who has heard of the Mountain Goats actually knows. So, you may justifiably ask: why choose it?

Well, probably non-existant interlocutor, it’s partially because the Mountain Goats are – and remain – one of my favourite bands and I therefore want to include them here because this blog is nothing if not about pandering to my slightest of whims. However, they (by which I guess I mean “John Darnielle”, mainly) didn’t make videos for any of their songs previous to this because they were the smallest of small-time indie until signing to 4AD for Tallahassee, and for some reason 4AD couldn’t see its way clear to make clips for ‘No Children’ or ‘Palmcorder Yanja’, the insane bastards. No wonder the band left them for Merge earlier this year.

So: it’s probably the only ‘Goats song that someone not a devoted Darnielle fan is going to know and therefore be able to rediscover because it is awesome, and it’s also one of the few songs with a video clip that I can lovingly embed. If you are currently going through a moment of “wow, I really need to listen to a bunch of Mountain Goats records right now”, here is my scientifically-unimpeachable list of which five of the 20-odd albums you should get first, and the order in which to get them:

1. Tallahassee (2002)
2. All Hail West Texas (2002)
3. Heretic Pride (2008)
4. The Coroner’s Gambit (1995)
5. We Shall All Be Healed (2004)

Also, seeing (and, as it happens, opening for*) John Darnielle in 2002 at the Grace Emily was a life-changing experience. First Mountain Goats song I ever knowingly heard was his opening number – ‘Jenny’, from All Hail West Texas – and by the time it hit “Hi-diddle-dee-dee! Goddamn! A pirate’s life for me!” I was a lifelong convert. The fact that my then-girlfriend and I lived about 150 metres away from the pub meant that running home, grabbing our rent money and spending it on every single disc he was selling after the gig was an easy matter (and, given how tricky getting hold of many of the earlier MG records has gotten, a damned shrewd move). I can’t recall if that was a very financially-tight fortnight as a result, but those discs are sitting on my shelf right this minute. The lesson here is: when in doubt, buy the CDs.

And he gave me a discount too. What a guy.

*That would be a boast under normal circumstances – “yeah, Career Girls totally opened for the Mountain Goats” – but the fact is that the only reason we were on the bill was that our Perth friends Showbag were touring him and wanted to borrow our gear rather than have to hire stuff in Adelaide. It was a wet night in the middle of the week and I was feeling tired and grumpy so my plan was to play, watch Showbag, applaud politely, then slink off home before the American guy started his set. Except then the American guy set straight up in the middle of the stage, right in front of my amp, so I couldn’t load out and was therefore forced to stay and have my mind blown. It was the best inconvenience of my life.