No Apologies For The Infinite Radness 1.3.8 - "San Francisco" (Alkaline Trio)

Right. Where were we?

No-one could accuse the Trio of not cleaving to the punk aesthetic. Matt Skiba himself has said every song on their debut album is just the same three chords in different orders. Their subject matter is similarly narrow - every song is about someone who is miserable, commonly due to either drugs, booze, heartbreak, or a combination of same (to be clear, none of this is a complaint). 

But then there's the plane thing. Skiba doesn't sing about planes a lot, exactly, but they're certainly a recurring theme in his work. Planes can offer escape ("Trucks And Trains") or send you unknowing into disaster ("Dead On The Floor") (they can also be a metaphor for both love ("Nose Over Tail") and dickheads ("You're Dead")). Mostly, though, they're what tears you from the people and places you love.

"San Francisco", Alkaline Trio's first plane song, is a case in point. The narrator sits in an airport lounge, waiting for the flight which will take him from the city he has fallen in love with, back to "sour home Chicago", and spending his wait tracing a downward spiral of self-pity and solo drinking. It's a bleak, slightly morbid song, taking the titular metaphor from Tony Bennett's "(I Left My Heart) In San Francisco" and making it rather less warm and fuzzy a proposition. It's an early example of how perfect a vocalist Skiba is for these tales of death, dearth and drinking; his trademark bruised baritone for the verses, shifting into a howl of gravel and blood for each chorus. The last of these sees another shift, the melody both soaring and becoming more desperate as our hero flies upward and outward, leaving his beloved bay behind.

Douglas Adams once wrote "it can hardly be a coincidence that no language on Earth has ever produced the expression "as pretty as an airport"." I've actually been to at least one pretty nicely done-up airport, but I take Adams' point. Airports are liminal spaces absolutely nobody wants to be in. Everybody surrounding you - and that's generally far, far too many people, either wants to be at their destination, or resents having to have left their point of departure. They're the closest thing to Purgatory most of us will ever know during our mortal span; it's no surprise it's tough to figure out how to make that look good. It's no surprise our narrator can't think of anything to do while he waits for his plane to Hell but start on the booze. Not so much drinking away his sorrows, but drinking to his sorrow of going away.

And keep drinking. Even at insane airport/aeroplane prices. It's not wholly clear in the song why the drinks get more expensive for our hero when he hits 5pm. One option is that it's because he's now on the plane, and the booze has become even more outrageously pricy. The other though is that he's drinking in an airport bar which has just upped the price, post-happy hour. I like this interpretation, because it gets to the other thing about airports, which is that they're not just awful places to be, there places you're forced to find it awful to be for hours. And that's even if things go well - there's always the chance your flight will be delayed, possibly for hours, and with you still having nothing to do but buy more pints and feel more sad. It's a peculiarly unique sensation to be stuck in a place you didn't want to be, but also not wanting to leave the only way you'll be able to leave, and to be annoyed because the trip you don't want to take is going to start later than you thought it would. All whilst increasingly drunk.

I guess that's just a way of noting a more general truth, that when we're stuck in statis, we'll eventually get to a point where we'll happily make things worse, if only so that something changes. I also guess that explains no small amount of why people drink themselves miserable in the first place. In any case, however much the song's themes can be generalised, it's the specifics that hit me hard. Every time a gigantic tube of metal, fuel and assholes is prepared to take me away, I find myself acting this song out in the least miserably crowded bar the relevant three-letter coded shithole has to offer. The only difference, when I'm doing it, I'm singing this song in my head all the while.

B-side

Friday Talisman: Somebody Embosses A Dwarf

Or his armour, anyway. Pretty happy with this particular ginger axe-swinger. It's an unusual Talisman figure just because of its density, but that lent itself well to some blacklining, which I always like as a look.

Friday Talisman: "I Kick Arse For The Lord!"

Regularly voted one of 4th edition's worst characters, it's the one man brave enough to bring spectacles to a dragon fight: the Priest!

Just look at that bling! I guess being able to banish any spirit he stumbles across means he doesn't have to fret about the spectre of Communism. Sooner or later this lad's going to learn that Strength 2 ain't much use against a guillitone, but until then; respect to a lad willing to go questing in slippers.

No Apologies For The Infinite Radness 1.3.7 - "Zero" (Smashing Pumpkins)

We're back here again. The Pumpkins was where this ludicrous series of posts began, a hair over a decade ago. 

The two tracks could hardly be more different. Imperial phase Smashing Pumpkins were nothing if not eclectic, or expansive. I don't know what's more notable - that this shift occurs within just four songs on Mellon Collie... or the fact that stretch constitutes just one seventh of the collection as a whole.

Anyway. Difference. I assume I don't have to justify why these tracks couldn't be much further apart. We slide from a lone piano with accompanying woodwind, and a synthesiser that's more haunting the piece than contributing to it, to a veritable orchestra of overdriven guitars and Jimmy Chamberlain drumming out the end of days. The Ragna-rock, if you will.

I want to talk about a much more important difference between the two tracks, though. "Zero" has words.

Billy Corgan is not a technically accomplished writer of verse. His poetry collection, Blinking With Fists, is something of a chore. About the best thing I can say about it is that occasionally, you'll read a entry and find your brain can almost hear the Pumpkins song it could have been the lyrics to.

And Corgan is a good lyricist. Or at least, he's a very effective one. Certainly, his work is an extremely strong demonstration of the difference between lyrics and poetry. On paper, Pumpkins lyrics are leaden doggerel. They're hardly shy of imagery, sure, but all the charcoal teeth and bumblebee mouths and machine-gun blues float unconnected; random adjective, random noun.

As part of a song, though, they shine; hidden diamonds suddenly sparkling in a new light. There's a theory - I forget where I saw it - that Corgan's genius is his ability to gift any song with a thematically perfect guitar solo. There's a huge amount of truth to that, not least demonstrated by the howling outbreaks of what loosely constitutes a "solo" here. I want to extend the idea, though. It's not just the solos that perfectly match the broader composition, it's the lyrics, too. Corgan's hyperbolic Rorschach bombs suddenly make total sense when they detonate against the music's emotional landscape. "Zero"'s central riff is an absolute avalanche of fissile material, collapsing again and again into harmonics that chop and buzz like the hornets of Hades. In that context, unmoored references to fashion victims, enchanted kingdoms, and sinking ships make more sense than making sense ever could.

There's another theory, that says "Zero" is a song about Corgan's reaction to fame after Siamese Dream started doing silly numbers. He feels like a fraud, a "zero", replaced as an actual human being by the millions of people who saw themselves reflected in his lyrics - the faces in our dreams of glass. And I don't think that reading is wrong, but I mean that in the exact same sense that no-one is wrong when they describe what they see in cloud formations, or tarot cards, or inkblots. "Corgan is terrified he's become a reflection of the listener", ultimately, is just another reflection of the listener. Which is to say, another route by which the music burrows into our souls, ultimately no different from Corgan's uncanny knack for a thematically appropriate solo. 

If I wanted to summarise the Smashing Pumpkins project - if I wanted to tell you about the face in my dreams of glass - it would be about this synergy. This refusal to see it as a meaningful distinction when people say "music AND lyrics". To commit totally to what a song needs to say, without second-guessing or undercutting or, horror of horrors, a sense of irony. It always seemed ridiculous to me that Pumpkins were seen as a grunge band. Grunge, to me, is the idea that disaffection is the only sane response to the world. That feeling nothing is better than feeling the wrong thing. To put it in modern terms, grunge saw just about everything as cringe, and so defined cool as an almost total absence.

The Pumpkins took a different path. They saw what roamed the dead highways. They saw the face of the king of the horseflies. They saw where boys feared to tread. And they rejected it totally. Cringe is cool. What's better than feeling nothing? Feeling fucking everything.

"Zero" is about how being at zero is the worst thing a person can possibly be. At least, that's what I see in my reflection.

What do you see in yours?

B-Side

I went looking specifically for an acoustic cover, to see if it could be done. QUESTION ANSWERED.

Friday Dreadfleet - Cultural Appropriaship

Not super-sure how I feel about The Flaming Scimitar as a concept. I mean, it looks great, all the Dreadfleet ships do. I'm just keenly aware of how liberally it swipes from a culture neither mine nor the designer's.

Still, it is what it is. Trying to get the masts, sails and fire efreet to all coexist on the model was basically fucking impossible. The efreet's head should be higher, really, but having broken it off twice and the rear sail come loose three times just to get to the state you see below, I decided to abandon ship.

And here she is with her auxiliary cog.

 

Friday Talisman: Yosemite Swam

My ongoing attempt to paint every miniature I bought before 2010 continues, with this: the third of the four toads from Talisman 4th Edition. This time, I based my paint job on a Yosemite toad, using the picture below as a rough guide (image credit: Roger Hall at Science Photo Library).

Not a hue amount to say about this one, except that this is easily the most successful application of Agrellan Earth I've yet managed. I read a tip about giving the base an Ardcoat coat before trowelling the Agrellan Earth on, which seems to have worked.

With this wee bufonidian boy done, I'm down to just twelve Talisman figures from the noughties, including the aforementioned and truly feared fourth toad. For how long will he squirm away from my paintbrush? SOON WE SHALL KNOW.

No Apologies For The Infinite Radness 1.3.6 - "Get Free" (The Vines)

 

The Vines had an oddly rocky introduction to the music world, given how desperate everyone was to talk about them. This is easily, if not happily, explained: the band owed an obvious (though ludicrously overstated) debt to one of the 90s better rock bands, and had was fronted by someone who was struggling to balance the stresses of touring with their neurodiversity. Back then, it simply wasn't possible for music journalisms to recognise that description, and to comport themselves accordingly. 

They probably also didn't know what neurodiversity was.

Undervalued in all this was the fact that The Vines' first three singles, released between April and November 2002, are all indisputable bangers. "Get Free" might be the best; a snot-nosed ascending spiral of rejection-sensitive teenage apoplexy. A call-and-response bludgeon of a song, an opening number for a gig in hell.

All of which made the endless comparisons to That Other Band not just tiresome, but unconvincing. There's none of the too-cool-for-school exhaustingly cultivated air of disinterest here. Craig Nicholls might as well be screaming "Never mind? Are you shitting me, mate? Have you actually seen this fuckery we got right here?". Teenage confusion isn't disaffected, it's a white hot fury, quenchable only by the actual fucking sun. She doesn't love me; why should anyone? Nothing to do but charge towards the freedom of death, in the most extra way humanity has to offer.

It's massive, and it's dumb, and it's impossible to deny. It completely embraces the stupidity of one's teenage years without glamorising them. Can you believe we shits had to go through that shit?

Once a year or so, I get together with a bunch of old uni mates to play games, drink beers, and take stock of how far we've come. Oftentimes, we'll break out various iterations of Rock Band, for the concatenated nostalgia of both the songs themselves and the game that lets us pretend to play them. Sooner or later, we'll spool up "Get Free", and it's glorious, four men in their increasing years just devouring a song two decades old about being barely two decades old. And once we're done helping Nicholls scream and thrash and bark at the sun, we turn the game off to do something else. 

Because how the fuck are you going to top this?

B-Side

I went through dozens of videos of covers of this song, and absolutely none of them stray far from the original. This is the most divergence I could find, by virtue of including a female vocalist. That to me is a mark of a brilliant song - there's just no other way to imagine it existing.