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

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.

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.

D CDs #468: No

You know what? I decline. We're not going to do this.

I mean, I know I do do this, all the time. Rating acts of cultural appropriation is all but unavoidable if you want to talk about music. Next up is Springsteen, for God's sake, an artist I love, but who I couldn't possibly doesn't owe a huge debt to the music Butterfield rifled through for this platter.

But an album which gets picked as important because of how wildly successful the thievery involved was - "Where American white kids got the notion they could play the blues", to quote the Rolling Stone article this series is based on - it becomes something different. The theft is no longer just some awkward, unavoidable fact about the "how". It becomes the "why", too. The applause isn't for something that has been stolen. It's for the act of stealing itself.

Are the songs good? Sure. They've taken from the best. Those lads who nicked the Mona Lisa from the Louvre knew what they were doing, too. And one can perhaps admire the competence, even the audacity of how they pulled it off. 

I'm not going to be calling them painters, though, am I?  

Ten creeping tentacles of white supremacy.

No Apologies For The Infinite Radness 1.3.5 - "Take Me Home" (Wilt)

Post-hardcore was a pretty solid idea: answer the "What if we tripled the speed and intensity of punk?" question posed by hardcore itself with the yes-and of "What if we had some actual fucking tunes?". I've probably tipped my hand to the next half of this intro, though, which is that how well this worked out in practice came down into just how post the post-hardcore proved to be.

British post-hardcore had its moment early into the 21st century, happily coinciding with both my awareness that pop-punk was digging itself into something of a rut, and being able to visit my childhood home often enough to check out MTV Rocks for weeks at a time. As a result, I had both the motive and opportunity to watch the battle for dominance of the post-hardcore scene across These Isles unfold in real time.

For me there was only one winner. It wasn't Wilt, actually, who imploded not too after "Take Me Home" was released. There was a sense it might have been, though, had things been different.

"Take Me Home" is a malfunctioning machine of a song. Or maybe not malfunctioning, but certainly not operating in the manner intended. From the submerged opening riff to the jagged slash that heralds the verse resetting along a new vector, there's clearly moving parts generating momentum, but it's not clear that we're going anywhere.

This is an impression subtly alluded to in the video by the band performing inside a circle of what look not just like camera rails, but train tracks. The lyrics contribute here too, returning to diagonally-adjacent themes again and again, like a looped record inside a fever dream. Our narrator is bringing people through the ground, watching them travel through time, and exhorting them to escape, all while himself being trapped in what might well be an asylum, as he plays the role of holy madman.

There's a sense the machine is running out of time, too, not because (or not just because) of its own increasing erraticness, but because of an impending disaster. "Take the last plane if you can" our narrator begs, one of several lines which recall Terry Gilliam's Twelve Monkeys (again, this is underlined by the rain of ash that falls upon the band in the latter stages of the video). The machine is glitching, but so is the world; something is coming so powerful it will derail the concept of time itself.

And I guess I could relate, if only a little. It's objectively insane to link the concept of a global pandemic to coming to the end of your undergraduate degree - I didn't need COVID to tell me that. But thematic resonance has a habit of completely ignoring a sense of proportion. Especially sat in the house that I no longer lived in, about to leave the latest in a series of rented rooms I'd inhabited for a maximum of two years in a row each, facing a future in which the only certainty was how much of the past would no longer live on it.

Plus, atop everything else, Twelve Monkeys is an extremely off-kilter love story - a romance as presented by a broken Hollywood machine. Our narrator wants - needs - someone to take him home. But like James Cole is he looking for an escape route, or a place to live, or simply someone to lose himself in for a little while? Whichever it was, grappling with an approaching red line of a future, fighting to find the right pills to keep my head level, and defining myself by my singlehood in a way 45-year-old me feels nauseous recalling, Cormac Battle's anguished yell gave me everything I needed.

Someone. Please. Please.

Take me home.

B-side

D CDs #469: Scoring The Score

Spacesquid's "White Boy Rap-Noodling Corner" returns. Sorry.

The Score was fucking everywhere in '96. In the UK at least, though, it'd be fairer to say "Killing Me Softly With His Song" was fucking everywhere. "Fu-Gee-La" had done decent numbers, and "Ready Or Not" would be the Fugees' second UK number 1, but "Killing Me Softly..." was just inescapable.

In many ways, it seemed an odd advert for the album. I mean, it clearly worked; the song was never released separately in the US, meaning people had to buy the album entire if they wanted to buy it. That's a move even Billy Corgan might label as overly arrogant, but the platter want platinum seven times over there, so: point proved.

But the stripped back, almost barren arrangement of a straight-up cover (they'd wanted to take more liberties with the source material, and end up doing so on the album, but technically they only had the rights to a cover version) are a world away from the fast beats and faster wordplay of the broader work. It's really just - "just" - a showcase for Lauryn Hill's phenomenal voice, Jean's occasionally interjections feeling less like actual contributions, and more like a naughty brother objecting to big sister's song getting her all the attention.

Which of course means the single is actually a perfect ad for the album: Hill will dominate, Jean will try to keep up, and Pras will be smart enough to mostly just stay out of the way.

One of the most illuminating comments on the making of The Score comes from producer Jerry "Wonder" Duplessi, who told Complex that: 

If I remember correctly, that song was the last record we did. Everybody was rapping,  rapping, rap, rap, rap. And we’re like. “Hold up, man, we have to have a song on this shit.".

The big joke here is that there are two songs on the album. Either Duplessi didn't really think Jean's "No Woman, No Cry" rewrite really counted as such (though it certainly isn't a rap), or - the funnier option - Jean insisted on getting his own song after Lauren recorded hers, and Duplessi simply completely forgot that this was a thing that had happened.

Not that Jean disgraces himself here. The first side of The Score ranks among some of the best rap I've come across in this project so far, and Hill isn't the only reason why. Ambitiously dense rhyme schemes, a constant flow of references that are clever, funny, and expansive, and all in the pursuit of making its point, it'd all feel like showing off if they weren't making it seem so easy. Lyrically, the album is less distant from the prevailing hip-hop concerns of the time than others have made out. The Haitian seasoning here is certainly tasty, but ultimately we're still presented with stories of surely fictitious felonies and extended treaties on how every other rapper in existence sucks in comparison to the ones currently holding the mics.

But then, you can't master a form if you're not going to work within it. And masterful seems the term here. Hell, the record does more with Hill's laugh than most can manage with anyone's voice. True, the momentum doesn't quite keep up - holding the two ballads for the back half helps hide the fact that the trio were running out of steam after the headlong charge through to the end of "Fu-Gee-La" (though Hill never really stops shining). At its best, though - and The Score is frequently, effortlessly at its best - it's hard to imagine how anyone could do this better. 

Except it turned out that Hill could.

Eight tentacles.

No Apologies For The Infinite Radness 1.3.4 - "Walk Idiot Walk" (The Hives)

The joke is that the Hives only ever write one song. They've had some fun with this accusation in the past - Howlin' Pelle Almqvist once told Rolling Stone that the band was like a school of sharks. "Sharks have been the same for billions of years, and they still rule. You have no need for development if you're a shark".

This is both true and funny, but the truth is the original charge never quite stuck in the first place. The Hives certainly have a very simple template, but - as with the various two-tone suits they've sported over the years - there's plenty you can do within simplicity. Sonically they've - well, not matured, obviously, but they've shifted, from snotty garage punk to snotty pop-flecked rock. In terms of their lyrics, meanwhile, it's true that basically every good Hives song is about how they are smart, and someone else is an idiot.

But it matters who the idiot is.

In this case, the Hives set their sights on teachers and politicians, making the case that they're both ultimately the same job - people pretending they want to help, but really just want private fiefdoms where they can talk at people unable to talk back.

I don't know why I decided to be a teacher. I despised much of my time in secondary school, and indeed suffered what could fairly be called a nervous breakdown at age twelve because my maths teacher at the time was so relentlessly unpleasant to me (and everyone else in the class) that I simply couldn't handle it. I've had a lifelong phobia of electronic alarms because I would lie awake every morning, terrified of when the sound would begin and I'd have to get up for school.

Maybe I just wanted to better than her. More likely, I just have a marrow-deep need to break things apart in front of people to show them how they work, and an equally ingrained need to not use my hands. What else was I going to end up doing but teaching a theoretical subject?

"Walk Idiot Walk" came out in the final days of my NQT year (for the uninitiated, this is the year after you finish your training, where you basically find out if you have any chance of being able to do the job long-term). I'd just decided to give the job at least one more year, a few months before the words "at least" got deleted from the plan.

I'm not saying this song influenced that decision, but it was a timely reminder of whose shoulders I was rubbing against. "I'm one of the good ones" isn't just an excuse for remaining a cop. The education system prefers to do its damage over a much longer period, chronic afflictions rather than discrete incidents of assault and murder, but a lot of people still come out the other end at least as injured as they were informed.

And for what? Online lyrics sheets be damned, the line here is "Still you never learn nothing, and nothing is enough". Your school teaches you nothing of value, except by accident. Your teachers are idiots. They're robots, programmed to program you to accept incoherent and petty power moves from gurning bullies at every stage of your life. They tick your name on the register, you tick their name at the ballot box. Just say you're present - nothing else is wanted or required.

Is all that true? No. Not any more than it's true that the Hives have the technological base to declare nuclear war. But here's what it all boils down to: it was fucking true enough.

Within a few months, I'd handed in my resignation. My pupils would have to watch some other idiot chalk up his name on the blackboard.

B-Side

People are still Bezzing in the post COVID age. Amazing.

This Is How I'll Do All Music Reviews From Now On

 (With apologies to Alexei Berrow's apologies to Brian Molko)

It's been seven long years, but hey ‘Lexei Berrow
I’ve finally made my first home-ground show
When I found you in the teenies
All sick riffs and ghost beanies
You’d made meals from each time you ate crow

I turned my friends to converts, I went looking for concerts
But you’d shut shop on cruel ironies
Just those embers left strewn cooled on closed-comments Youtubes
Sharp sadness it hurt just to see

So I respect what you’ve built up with time
Learned structures still stand, planned on land you’ve not self-undermined
That you can just risk feeling fine

And that new JoFo is lit
Tongue further from cheek
Sun on the peaks, lights in the deep
More beauteous than bleak
In King’s Heath

Held Steady

So, back in 2022, The Hold Steady - one of my all-time favourite bands - announced they and their people were putting a book together, and were looking for submissions from fans. Stories about what the band means to you, the effect they've had on your life, that sort of thing.

I submitted a piece, and never heard back. Looking through the book itself, I can see why it didn't get through - there's a broadly similar but much more narratively satisfying tale there, so fair enough.

Still, now that the hypothetical event in the piece has actually come to pass, and I no longer need to worry about my then-girlfriend, now-fiancée reading it and learning of Forbidden Knowledge, I thought it might be nice to get it out into the world.

I fell for a girl and The Hold Steady at essentially the same time. I’d bought Boys And Girls in America blind, and span it up driving home after one of our first dates. Everything clicked. Sure, this boy and girl happened to live in North-East England, but that’s the thing about the whole Hold Steady deal. The details are crucial, but they’re not a barrier to entry.

The first time we danced, it was to “Sequestered in Memphis”. We still barely knew each other’s rhythms, each other’s bodies. It didn’t matter. Hell, maybe it helped. We were awkward, and we were incandescent. Stumbling but still in it, by mutual consent. Later, I told her what the song was about, but that didn’t matter either. For all that I’d at least rent out my soul to write like Craig Finn, the moment transcended anything so restrictive as the story he happened to be spinning.

But that’s the point, isn’t it? The Unified Scene operates according to very simple rules. Yes, the lyrics tend to the tragic, just as the tracks lean to the loud. But what they deliver is joy. And more than joy: connection. The actual specifics are incidental. Not because they matter; they very clearly do. It’s just that something else matters much more. The details are crucial, but not a barrier. The policy is open door.

The girl and I are still together, 622 weekends and four Weekenders later. Every year, we head for London (or the internet), and wait for the band to break into a certain song. When they do, we light up, and we dance together again.

One day soon, I’m going to make more one connection. I’m going to propose. The first question, obviously, will be “Will you marry me?”. The next will be “Can ‘Sequestered In Memphis’ be our second first dance?”.

I’m pretty sure she’ll say “yes” to both. Maybe I’m counting my chickens. But hey. I gotta stay positive.

No Apologies For The Infinite Radness 1.3.3 - "Trouble Breathing" (Alkaline Trio)

Get used to these guys.

I started with A3's third album, and worked my way backwards. The original Trio trio, as it were. I picked up their debut album from a cramped record shop off of Waverley Steps, on what I think was my first visit to Edinburgh.

Edinburgh is my favourite city, but still: this proved the best part of the trip.

We've got plenty of time to talk about what makes the Trio special, but we might as well start with a summary: they're where the self-aware morbidity of the Cure crashes against the gleeful refusal to be serious that characterises the SoCal punk scene. The result is a mission statement that's staggering in its simple accuracy: depression, addiction and mortality are, above everything else, just astonishingly fucking ridiculous.

Like every hedgehog band, Trio would later struggle to figure out how to write the second line of their manifesto. That's some way ahead of us, though. "Trouble Breathing" isn't just the best song from their debut, it's the best signpost. A miserable guy meets someone much more miserable than he is, and is equal parts fascinated, concerned, and just plain amused at what weapon's-grade Goth bleakness can look like. I wrote out my version of their guiding principle above, but they give it to us themselves here, perfect right out of the gate. "It's one or another/between the rope and the bottle". Self-medication is still medication, given the definition includes the things that stop you from being dead. They then immediately follow that up with a jet-black pun, though: "I can tell you're having trouble breathing". You have to laugh, or else you'll cry, and the alcohol abuse hasn't left you all that much moisture to work with. 

(There's also the amazing couplet "Look at all those stars/look at how goddamn ugly the stars are", a lyric I adored so much I stole it for a story I was writing, only for that to be the pull quote our uni fanzine used when they published it. AWKWARD.)

The fact all this talk of strangulation and breathlessness is accompanied by Matt Skiba pulling at his guitar strings like he's fixing to employ one as a garrote is just the poisoned icing on the incinerated cake. A lot of Trio songs are quite simple in structure, but when the mood takes him Skiba can put together some pretty sweet guitar parts for his sour stories. This is one of those times; a sweeping array of shifting ideas your average just-starting-out punk band might struggle to match over half an album.

It's miserable punk-pop perfection, in other words; a triumphant take on the ways it all can fail.

Good mourning, lads. We'll see you again real soon.

B side

D CDs #470: And Could He Give Us More?

I know what you're thinking. Finally an ill-informed white boy dares to discuss a hip-hop revolution.

Wikipedia tells me LL Cool J's Radio represents the vanguard of the shift in dominance from old school hip-hop to new school, a fact I relate both to introduce what I want to talk about, and by way of warning the reader I know so little about hip-hop that I'm reduced to reading Wikipedia.

With my ignorance fully admitted, then, the thesis statement: Radio was the sound of the future. 

Even in so banal a position, I run into problems. Yes, it was astonishing, having listened to this, to learn it was released as early as 1985. But what does that actually mean? What I want to be true is that this represents how forward-thinking Radio is, that it encapsulated the sound of the early nineties almost a decade ahead of time. What I fear is true is that all I've picked up on is time-lag; the inevitable dissemination delay between block parties in Brooklyn, and the mix tapes of suburban North East England. 

When we get down to brass tacks and golden tracks, though, that's just noodling on how much Cool J (along with DJ Cut Creator and Rick Rubin) had one eye on the future, while the other focussed on the charts and communiques he used to conquer hip-hop. What matters is the victory.

There's perhaps some irony in the fact Cool J became the genre's emperor through democratising music. By showing you anyone could do it, he ensured everyone would do it, and some of them better than he did (I'll toss out here an entirely unsourced and uninformed opinion that this is why Charlie Juliet never hit so hard with an LP again). Radio is so minimalist it feels weird describing it with so long a word as "minimalist". It's just a dude with a microphone, a drum machine, and the occasional sample, clipped so short and tight they land like lightning strikes amid the storm of percussion. The pressure is fully on Cool J to be enough almost on his own, which he embraces in a statement of intent far more powerful then any number of balls-out braggadocio broadside ever could. Maybe that's why he gets the inevitable boast-track out of the way immediately, so he can move on to better things.

And those better things are genuinely great. It's absolutely the case that you just need to hand this guy a microphone and a tight beat and he can bring it. It's really hard to make something look this easy. Especially when you also make it funny. "You Can't Dance" (dips into ableist language aside) and "That's A Lie" in particular are notable for brilliantly tearing chunks out their targets, and doing so without ever reaching for a word you couldn't say in a Saturday morning cartoon. "Dear Yvette" is almost as fun, the admittedly uncomfortable sexual politics of its slut-shaming slightly sweetened by Cool J's own tales of heterosexual entanglement being oddly sweet in their hopeless romanticism.

If there's a problem here, it's in the timing. Assembling a meal with the smallest number of ingredients doesn't just force you to get everything you're adding absolutely right, it means no matter how well you prepare the food, people won't want to each all that much of it. Just about every track here starts brilliantly, and just about every track ends a verse after you want it to.  Sure, it's genuinely amazing that this formula works so repeatedly ten times in a row (we'll ignore "El Shabaz" here, for all that making a mid-disc palette cleanser the filthiest dish on offer is pretty fun). But I don't care how sick your rhymes are, sooner or later I'm going to stop caring how much you hate a guy whose dancing you dislike.

But then what am I recommending instead? Messing with an almost perfect formula? Adding more tracks for which, if they existed at all, there was presumably a good reason why they got left off originally? About the only advice I could offer, which stopped being timely forty years ago and never started being useful, was that these are two of the best EPs ever written, which maybe didn't need combining into a format where their genius is slightly blunted.

Still, even if I'm right (and ifs don't get much bigger), that wouldn't necessarily translate into Radio scoring a bigger win. And really, how much more total did its triumph need to be?

Eight tentacles.

No Apologies For The Infinite Radness 1.3.2 - "Anthem Part 2 " (Blink-182)

Things get weird after you make it big.

Blink-182's second album Dude Ranch didn't exactly fail to sell - it was nearing platinum status while the group recorded Enema Of The State. It was ...State that sent them stratospheric, though. By the time the trio were in the studio putting together their fourth album, ...State had reached quintuple platinum in the US alone. Them's crazy figures.

As is so often the case, the sudden colossal increase of attention, adoration, and account digits brought about - or perhaps here simply exacerbated - an identity crisis. Tom Delonge wanted to expand the group's sound beyond unusually polished, unusually puerile pop-punk. Mark Hoppus wanted to tap deeper into the vein.

The result was Take Off Your Pants And Jacket, a collection which felt for the first time like it was written by two distinct voices, rather than simply sung by them. You can hear the strain at the centre of the band, as DeLonge tries to escape the gravity well of the simplistic shtick that nevertheless made them famous, only to see Hoppus pull them back time and again.

Just seconds into "Anthem Part 2" the first song on Take Off... and released as a single in the summer of 2021, it becomes clear Tom had it right*. A glorious building rush of overlapping guitar parts sweeps us into a summary the American teenage nation. And OK, its really, really fucking stupid summary, but there's a universality in the banality. An awareness that people are listening, which people in particular will mistake directionless punk energy for guiding wisdom, and providing comfort in stating the bleedin' obvious: pretty much none of this is teenagers' fault. "If we're fucked up, you're to blame". A ludicrous statement when sung by a man twenty-five years old when he wrote it, but which holds real power when screamed out by a million teenagers, stagger-drunk on watery beer in the garden of the friend whose parents are out of town. This is political songwriting not as lecture, but as gift.

DeLonge directly addresses that fizzing mass of confused anger that's trapped within every teenager being forced to twist themselves to fit the bizarre, arbitrary rules society relies on to avoid having to actually fucking change anything. There are any number of smarter ways to summarise that all-consuming blaze than "Young and hostile, but not stupid", but there's not necessarily many better. This isn't a manifesto. It's an anthem. Teenagers don't need smarter slogans, because Gods know they're not losing the argument because the previous generations have more brains. What they need is power, and if anger is an energy, then music that channels anger is a power source.

For one glorious summer, before two men fell out and two towers went down, Blink were a battery for a generation. Not bad for the dudes who gave us "Dick Lips".

B-side: I couldn't find any particularly interesting versions of this song, so instead I present the second piece of evidence which conclusively proves Tom the victor in the 2001 Creative Visions war that almost tore the band apart. Because Jesus Christ, Mr Hoppus. The fuck you call this?

No Apologies For The Infinite Radness 1.3.1 - "A Jackknife To A Swan " (The Mighty Mighty Bosstones)

When Franz Nicolay quit The Hold Steady after three-and-a-bit albums, he explained his choice by saying he felt like "a fox in a hedgehog band". For those unfamiliar with the analogy, foxes are pretty good at doing a bunch of different things. Hedgehogs absolutely excel at their one trick. Clearly this has worked for them, evolutionarily speaking - we can't really blame Mother Nature for not predicting cars. What keeps small mammals alive and what keeps New Hampshire jazz-accordions invested aren't likely to intersect, though.

Personally, I've never seen a problem hedgehog bands. My obsession with the Hold Steady themselves is proof enough of that. Then there's the Mighty Mighty Bosstones. You get two flavours with these loud lads: ska with rock, and rock with ska. The song will be about Boston.

It helps, of course, that both mixtures are great tastes that taste great together. Brass and bass, together at last since the 1970s. It also helps that Dickey Barrett has one of the most distinctive voices in music. Dude sounds like a chain-smoking badger who just found out his badger wife is cheating on him. And while I'm not really qualified to talk about Boston in general, the inciting incident that this song is based around is a perfect fit for one of the least ska-tinged rock-with-ska songs the band has ever done. The horns here are more seasoning than they are component, not even sounding until the track is almost a minute in. The song is predominantly carried by a propulsive, headlong guitar attack, Barrett's exhausted rage, and drums like a horrified heartbeat. Images flash by, each one more desperate than the last, like the view from a commuter train bound for hell.

On the 2nd October, 1973, 24 year-old Evelyn Wagner ran out of petrol in the Dorchester neighbourhood in Boston. She walked to the nearest gas station and bought herself a cannister of fuel. On the way back to her car, she was accosted by six teenagers, who forced her into an alley. There she was made to pour the petrol over herself, after which the teens set her on fire. She died in hospital four hours later.

"A Jackknife To A Swan" can be meant in two ways. There's the reference to moves made in diving, and the idea of violently killing something beautiful. It's clearly the latter which is meant here, but both meanings share the concepts of a rapid descent toward finality, w. Whether it be the diver entering the water, or a human being existing the world, the direction is always down. It still matters when the velocity changes.

The final moments of Walter, the song's protagonist, are drenched in the fear (ultimately realised) that he's about to die. He's watched the slow descent of his hometown for three decades, and suddenly he's terrified the final fall will come all at once. A lighter, flashing into a puff of smoke. This is a desperately bleak song about the moments of existential terror that punctuate the slow collapse of our lives. About a man whose only hope is that he's home from his night shift in time to see his family wake up in the morning, forced into a situation where he might not even get that. The fact he's ultimately killed by the same trains he's been riding to and from work his whole life twists the long-buried knife still deeper. A jackknife to a swan, and he was gone.

Various places on the internet site Evelyn's murder as indicative of the rising racial tensions of '70s Boston. The band deliberately ignores this angle (perhaps fortuitously, given their paeans to racial harmony tend to be well-meaning but clunky), focusing instead on the way anyone's life can be upended and ended in the time it takes to unfold a pocket knife.

I remember the first time I heard this song. It was early/mid 2002. I'd just said goodbye to a friend I no longer remember, and gotten off the bus to walk home. I stuck my newly-bought copy of "...To A Swan" into the portable CD player that would be stolen at my first real job two years later. It was the middle of the day, and home was barely five minutes walk away. My hometown sees fewer murders in a year than Boston does in a week.

This track still connected. Implausibly, even ridiculously, it drilled straight into whichever part of the human brain worries that something is going to get you as you make your way home. That there only needs to be one bad split-second, and that that bad split-second's coming around, waiting for you to walk into it.

A jackknife to a swan, and you'll be gone.

B side

D CDs #471: Nowt So Queer As Folk

This one was a bastard to write. I just don't get folk. 

Wait, no; that's not it.

I don't get my reactions to folk.

Part of this is the variance. The best folk is transcendent - a perfect alloy of history, politics and raw emotion so strong, you can fully believe what Woody Guthrie's guitar kept telling people. Bad folk is revanchist, ramshackle nonsense, endless self-indulgent variations of saying absolutely nothing. White people's jazz.

That the gap between best and worst can be measured in (bright) light years is true of every musical genre, naturally. What make folk unusual is how completely I can't get a handle on what makes the difference.

It's tempting to say a lot of it is just sticking "rock" on the end. In practice, though, that just seems to mean "a plug is involved". Which does help, yes, and it's vaguely amusing to me that it turns out I'd discounted the Newport Folk Festival hecklers as demonstrable fucking idiots years before knowing the details of who they were. That doesn't really get us anywhere, though; not when artists as diverse* as Dylan, Simon and Garfunkel, Leonard Cohen, and (as a protean form) the Beach Boys all got to claim the term.

I want to take I Want To See The Bright Lights Tonight as a case study. See if it can get us to a unified theory of good folk. It seems pretty clearly in the upper tiers of the genre, after all. Perhaps we can establish a yardstick here, and use it to beat the fash-loving banjo botherers unaccountably allowed to get famous on folk’s farthing.

So: reasons …Lights Tonight folk rocks.

• It knows the past was awful.

Nostalgia is a disease, and not one that only hurts those infected. Fuck folk that focuses its gaze at our great-grandfathers’ navels. …Bright Lights seems to make this mistake, on a surface reading, with the protagonist of  “End Of The Rainbow” lamenting the state of today’s world, compared to his childhood. The point though is that the narrator is obviously pathetic, unable to distinguish his own problems from that of a newborn baby. Bad news for you between breast sessions, mate; your sister’s a whore. Try not to find that too hideous a revelation.

No. This album’s soul resides not with an imagined dead rainbow, but with the poor little beggar girl, forced to make her money briefly distracting the rich dickheads she holds in contempt. 

If there's a romance to the past here, it's only in the sense we all know it; we didn't always know just how difficult it is to get through the years.

Speaking of which...

• It knows the present is awful.

Tossing coins to disabled beggars dancing in the street isn't something we see much of any more, but it's not like abasement to the rich as a survival mechanism has gone away.  Capitalism still kills us all by inches, until it chooses to kill us outright. Fascism escaped its just garrotting by Guthrie's guitar strings. "Withered And Died" tackles this head on; we emerge butterfly-like from our teenage years, and like butterflies, we're all too easily crushed.

But there's hope here, too. It's a canny move to follow "Withered And Died" with "I Want To See The Bright Lights Tonight". We switch gears from the misery of what life has taught us, to how we might be able to set it aside. Yes, a night on the town is just a temporary solution, but they're all just temporary solutions.

This tug-of-war between existential melancholy and finding hope in revelry is critical to the first half of the album. It's right there in the opening track; "When I Get To The Border" suggests that if you can't go down fighting, the next best thing is to go down drinking while on the run. If the album seems balanced between its twin concerns, well, just remember which song got to be the title track.

• It’s clear-eyed about getting blurry-eyed.

Alcohol is a recurring concern of ...Lights Tonight, operating at various times as both an accompaniment to misery, and a way of warding it away. The narrator of the title track can't wait to enjoy "drunken nights rolling on the floor", while that of "...Border" tells the friends he's leaving behind that, when he eventually dies, they can basically assume it was drink that did it. 

Folk feels intimately connected with alcohol. Hang around any pub that prides itself on its collection of real ales (fake ales continuing to be one of the greatest crises Britain must face), and you run the constant risk someone will pull out a concealed mandolin, to fire crotchets at you without consent. I'm not sure what the link is between self-indulgent jam sessions, songs about hills, and people who get ludicrously snooty about their dipsomania, but it's definitely there.

...Lights Tonight touches on this as it closes out its first half. Once again, this is impeccable sequencing. "Down Where The Drunkards Roll" doesn't just round off the loose but undeniable thematic cohesion on Side A**. It follows directly from "...Lights Tonight" itself, showing us that song's narrator, and those like her, through the eyes of others. Kids looking grand until they get themselves fucked up. Lonely people who find comfort in the bottle because it eluded them everywhere else. People who crave the delusions drink delivers. There's no condemnation here, though. No simple desultory philippic, this. All we find is sympathy. An awareness of shared sadness; of wine that runs thicker than blood. They're all just temporary solutions. The lies come so easily because the truth is so terrible.

• It doesn't outstay its welcome.

This is a zippy platter (certainly, it's far less self-indulgent than this essay). Ten songs in barely thirty-five minutes. There's a tightness here that counts for a lot; the sprawling cycles of irrelevant variation that mars so much self-indulgent folk is nowhere to be found. It doesn't hurt of course that, the one time the album feels like it's sliding into jamland, it's with the sublime melee of solos that carries the opening track into the distance. 

The slimness of it all also helps with the one real criticism worth making here: it's a pretty front-loaded disc. None of the offerings in its back half are actually bad - "The Little Beggar Girl" in particular cuts plenty deep enough. Still, there's a noticeable slackening of momentum past the halfway mark, as a determined march through hope and horror slows and stumbles. You can feel the album bleeding its last energy out as it topples to the dirt just beside the finish post.

Still, I could never get endings right either. And another way to say ...Lights Tonight collapses in the final seconds is to say it left everything out on England's green fields.

Surely that's the capstone of the structure holding all this together. Surely that's folk as fuck.

Seven and a half tentacles.

*Within the already established narrow ethnic corridor, that is.

** Only "Calvary Cross" feels somewhat out of place here, though this could well be at least partially related to the extremely strong association I have with that song.

No Apologies For The Infinite Radness 1.2.18 - "F.O.D. " (Green Day)

Ah, quiet/loud/quiet/loud. Where have we heard me talk about hearing that before?

I can’t claim I planned it, but the one-two quiet-loud pinch-punch of these last two songs makes for a nice sign off to a playlist defined by the border between misery and anger. It’s a long border, of course, covering a wide range of terrain. “The Quiet Things…” is a multilayered mapping of cross-currents and riptides, swirling just between the surface. “F.O.D” is a man telling his about-to-be-ex to fuck off and die.

There’s a power in simplicity – “F.O.D.” doesn’t even bother to go quiet again. The sheer broadness makes the song feel like it belongs to you alone, and does the same for everyone. The steps may have been different for all of us, but we’ve almost all seen a long, juddering dance lead us here. The last thread snaps, and you're left with only the layers of Sellotape and rows of safety pins you'd put in place to hold everything together. Just the outline of what used to be there.

When that happens, there’s nothing to do but take that last snapped strand, that final frayed straw, and burn it to ash in front of your new/old enemy’s face. You can’t even explain why this time was different; it just completely, obviously, is. You want a justification? Justifications are for the people I can still respect. Just fuck off and die. 

One thing that I love about this song is how the chord progression actually gets more complicated as the narrator lets his fury slip its mooring. The obvious thing to do would be to go the other way; to lose complexity along with composure. Inverting this makes it clear how much this guy has been holding back. How careful he’s been to present only a part of himself. It's not so much a switch as an expansion, hence the repetition of the need to destroy the bridge between them past hope of repair. Besides, we often repeat ourselves, when we're that angry. When someone has made us that angry. Just fuck off and die. 

I listened to "F.O.D." while driving across an actual bridge once, belting out the words to myself, the river, and the night. I remember that every time I hear this song, even though I don’t remember which bridge it was, or which river. I can't even remember the car. The association remains, but not what lay on the other side of it. Just the outline of what used to be there. 

I can’t remember whose face was in my mind I as I sang along, either. Who was it I had so completely had enough of their daring to be in my life? Who was I so desperate to have gone, hat the memory of my exhausted, burning rage has so outlasted the name of whomever I'd directed it towards?

Just the outline of what used to be there. Just fuck off and DIE.

No Apologies For The Infinite Radness 1.2: Louder Now

B-Side:

I don't like to go negative with my music posts, but you just gotta stand back and marvel at how completely this cover misses the point of the original song, on every conceivable level.

No Apologies For The Infinite Radness 1.2.17 - "The Quiet Things That No-one Ever Knows " (Brand New)

Ah, quiet/loud/quiet/loud. Where have we heard that before?

Brand New were an interesting band more than they were an enjoyable one. Or at least, they were after their delightfully unselfconscious debut Your Favorite Weapon. Twelve tracks of charismatic emo so strong, it felt like a capstone for the whole damn musical movement. Or maybe a gravestone is the better metaphor. Brand New had dealt a slow-bleeding but ultimately mortal wound, inflicted ironically yet surgically by a band being feted as the big (brand) new thing. So this is how emo dies; to thunderous applause. 

But when you've mounted the summit of the terrain you're exploring, there's nowhere (brand) new to go, except down. Not in terms of quality; in terms of geography. Deja Entendu goes subterranean, almost daring the listener to enjoy its dark, stagnant pools and echoing darkness. "Charismatic" was now entirely off the table.

The band's masterstroke was to pair this quest for the deepest recesses of their genre and their psyches with an attempt to find a (brand) new spin on the first post-fame album. If standard emo can be summed up as "You WILL recognise my pain!", Deja Entendu explores the pain of being recognised. The fear of it is a central theme, too, whether it be at the hands of a para-social fanbase ("I Will Play My Game Beneath The Spin Light"), a burned lover ("The Boy Who Blocked His Own Shot"), or your own horrified conscience (the previously-covered "Me Vs Maradona Vs Elvis").

"The Quiet Things That No-One Ever Knows" is the central chamber in the cave system Brand New carved out here, with their teeth and nails and bile. The croon/yell formula is repurposed to brilliant effect, pressed into a parallel of the calm exterior of a man desperate to tell the truth to his partner, but knowing doing so will torpedo the relationship beyond hope of it staying afloat. "I lie for you, and I lie well". He knows they're doomed - indeed, he knows sooner or later she'll figure out he's been cheating on her - but he can't bring himself to pull the trigger. Their love is dying, but he doesn't want it to die just yet. He looks out at the glory of the Pacific, and all he can think about is the hospitals. The places we delay the inevitable.

Mixed in with all this is the stress of touring - so much sacrificed for the sake of empty hotels. "If today's the day it get's tired/today's the day we drop out". Sure, mate. His partner isn't the only one he's lying to. Which of course means he's even lying about who he's lying to. Meta-mendacity.

When this song dropped as the first single from the album, there were people who complained its traditional structure - quiet/loud/quiet/loud, where have we heard that before? - was a poor advertisement for the desperate sandpaper leers and expansive hollow dankness of the parent album. That after trying so hard to be brand new, Brand New had let themselves down here.

This was and is bullshit. "The Quiet Things..." was the final cut, the coup de grace for an entire genre they'd left bleeding on the floor. Having slammed the door, they came back to burn the building. You can't head somewhere (brand) new until you've left some other place behind, and the whole fucking point of the elevator into Hell is that it starts at the top (listen to that guitar shifting downward as we head into each verse; these lads knew what they were doing).

Where the elevator ended up is a tale for another time. All that matters here is the soundtrack on the way down. 

You'd struggle to do any better than this.

B-side

Bonus B-side (ignore the shaky first couple lines)

No Apologies For The Infinite Radness 1.2.16 - "Leif Erikson " (Interpol)

The thing about Interpol’s debut is that it sounded so much like Joy Division. The thing about Joy Division is that I only really liked them when they weren’t sounding like Joy Division.

You can see the problem.

Sure, points for honesty. The brief, tyrannical reign of New Wave 2.0 was always about extrapolating what could have come after the 1989, had the music industry not chosen instead to wholesale recycle the Seventies with far worse fashion. If we hadn’t had the gall to mock trousers that were needlessly wide at the ankles while wearing T-shirts that changed fucking colour. If you goal was a do-over, who better to base that on than one of the greatest what-ifs of the eighties or any other decade? Let other bands hide their guiding lights under a bushel. As their first album declared, Interpol was letting you know exactly where the flame spilled out from.

Not that light is in evidence here. Even the night is blind here, finding what might be pinpricks of illumination through heat alone. The one mode that Prelimterpol tended to get right for me, as we’ve discussed, was the cavernous soundscape. The alien world described over a distorted connection by a feverish, dying astronaut. “Leif Erikson” nails that mode perfectly, from the title outwards; an insomniac always on the verge of falling asleep, experiencing the flow of time as a moonless sail across an infinite, glass-flat sea. Trapped in the liminal prison where everything thought circles, ripping your skin with each rotation. What was it she said about me? What if she shows up early? What if I’m as dead as she thinks I am? Everything repeats, everything hurts, nothing resolves, nothing heals.

There are songs you should only listen to at night, and songs you mustn't listen to at night. This is both. A hymn for the gloaming. A warning of what’s coming, on those nights where sleep is an ocean away.

B-side:

No Apologies For The Infinite Radness 1.2.15 - "Love Will Tear Us Apart " (Joy Division)

Roddy Woomble once said “Love Will Tear Us Apart” was Joy Division’s best single, if only because it’s the only one that captures the band’s live energy. I was four months when Ian Curtis killed himself, so I had to take Woomble’s word for it, but it certainly feels unusual – almost unique - within the band’s songs. This is one of those contrary takes wearying dickheads pretend are “unpopular”, or – heaven forfend! – “cancellable”, but I’ve never been able to get next to Joy Division. I don’t quibble with Peter Hook’s contention their music seemed to come from some other place. It just wasn’t a very enticing place, cold and distant and half-illuminated with polarised light. Extraordinary doesn’t have to mean engaging.

“Love Will Tear Us Apart”, together with equally late cuts “Atmosphere” and (so late Curtis was dead before it was recorded, and it came out as a New Order joint) “Ceremony”, represented the band moving into more interesting territory. Or, given the previous metaphor, perhaps I should say they represented a shift in how the band processed the territory they were already exploring. Songs about how it felt to traverse this strange, alien world, rather than terse reports about what it contained.

It’s not that this isn’t still minimalist (part of why it’s almost impossible to cover), though it wasn’t common to hear Curtis on guitar to free Sumner up for keys – the song is built around a D chord both because of its versatility and the ease with which Curtis could play it. But there’s an energy here that’s purposefully held back in the band’s two studio albums. A sense of release, as Curtis channels his disintegrating marriage, the stress of juggling new success and old commitments, and a recent epilepsy diagnosis into a piano-wire tight growl of exhausted desperation. The cliché contrast of how good/poor luck in life matters nothing compared to poor/good luck in love is rewritten to something much more interesting: “Everything is awful, but all that really matters is my marriage – which just so happens to 

also be fucked”.

There are all sorts of offensively self-centred ways to link Curtis’ last months with the quality of the song. All of them we shall ignore. No song is so good it is worth a human life, and no band is so good them losing one among their number is primarily sad because the music stops. Instead of inferences, then, let’s stick to the one certainty we have in this: “Love Will Tear Us Apart” is one of the greatest songs ever recorded. That should be - HAS to be - enough.

B-side:

D CDs #472: Things George Michael Has Gotta Have

Faith just isn't for me. I simply don't care what George Michael thinks about sex, or how George Michael wishes he were having more sex, or how getting more sex as George Michael can get complicated by the fact that George Michael is George Michael.  It's not Michael specifically; I'd put myself as a 9.8 at least on the horny/revenge scale of "Why make art"; horny songs just don't do it for me. It sounds like a cheap shot under the circumstances, but nevertheless, it all feels a little too much like listening to someone masturbating.

Michael's debut album isn't exclusively about sex, though after being bludgeoned by Michael's libido for fifteen solid minutes via "Father Figure" and "I Want Your Sex", it's hard to think about much else. There's a sense of vulnerability here which at least seasons the horndog panting. Which makes sense, given Michael a) had just torpedoed a band that had sold thirty million albums and - via a China tour - changed the international political landscape, and b) was trying to challenge Prince and Michael Jackson on territory they didn't so much own, as had sculpted from the planet's bedrock through sheer force of will. You can see why he'd be nervous - there must have been times while recording the album where Michael was wondering whether unseating Hu Yaobang would have been the easier job.

So it's not fair to call Faith one-note, though comparisons to Prince and Jackson do rather underline the album's lack of range. It's probably not helped by the fact Michael just completely, perfectly nails what he's aiming for on the opening track. "Faith" is glorious, as tight and bouncy a package as Michael's denim-sprayed arse in the accompanying video. A rollocking stab of lust and nervousness, set to a rhythm like the heartbeat of God. The vid even sees Michael sport a jacket emblazoned with the word "REVENGE" on the back, as though the guy gets what art should be after all. It's also the shortest song on the album by a minute and change.

Once you've heard it, though, do you really need the icky metaphors of "Father Figure", or the knackered randiness of "Hard Day", or, the fear Michael's own success is cock-blocking him in "Kissing A Fool", or etc. etc. Given Michael's later coming out of the closet, we can at least retrospectively cast "I Want Your Sex" as an attempt to literally sing the praises of gay sex, but even so - dude, it's nine minutes long.

The album works best when it moves into different themes. "Hand To Mouth", a pulsing condemnation of the failures of the American dream built around a skeletal, looping keyboard riff and Spanish guitar, offers a breather from the heavy breathing. "Monkey" is a superior example of 80s Gabriel-tinted synth-funk, a desperate plea to a a friend to kick the drugs, and huge fun both as written and when you doggedly insist on taking the lyrics literally. 

Neither are fit to buff "Faith"'s leather jacket, of course. Nothing else here is. Faith both proved Michael could write and sing with the best of them, and that there was no guarantee he necessarily would. So I says, anyway. What do I know? The album and its many singles did absolutely ludicrous numbers, and netted Michael critical acclaim and multiple awards. All the cold water I can muster thirty-five years later isn't going to make a difference to what caught fire here. Michael's Faith had paid off.

Six tentacles.

No Apologies For The Infinite Radness 1.2.14 - "Not Up To You" (Stereophonics)

Last time this band appeared in these essays, I talked a little about how you have to accept that the acts you love will change. Some will change more than others, though. Some will age better.

In hindsight, my love affair with Stereophonics was doomed from the start. Their first album remains one of my favourite debuts I've heard, but it relies on an alchemical process almost impossible to repeat. The recipe is simple enough - two parts classic rock delivered by a frontman whose tonsils have the density and range of quasars, one part muddled melancholy as you watch the tiny community which offered you nothing as you grew up in it continue to die by degrees. 

The first trick is in actually mixing those ingredients. Sad-gossip-garage-rock? Are you, like, entirely fucking sure? But it works. Or at least, it did in the context of the '90s, when British mainstream rock was crying out for a band that was willing to look past their own dicks. Or, for that matter, to not steal all their good riffs (including a Stereophonics one, actually.)

The second trick, though, is even tougher. The problem isn't in identifying or combining your ingredients; it's in finding them. The band took a while to hit, but when they did, it was with the force of a collapsing coalmine. Catapulted into a world of stadium gigs, Tom Jones collaborations, and backstage shenanigans with Noel Gallagher (which he presumably went into wired for sound), Stereophonics found themselves in a situation where bittersweet songs about backwater bar dramas might be tough to sell, and, more critically, were impossible to source. The lead single from Word Gets Around was about a homeless man who remembers his past just well enough to seek it out, but not well enough to remember where to find it. The lead single from Performance And Cocktails was about a sly deal between a bartender watching who gets most drunk, and a thief who steals from those identified as least likely to notice. The lead single from Just Enough Education To Perform? A tuneless whine about how the music press had been mean to the band. It's almost too perfect that "Mr Writer" was (at the time) by some distance not just the worst Stereophonics single, but their worst recorded song.

Maybe you have to have a certain amount of bombastic self-regard in order to play the kind of stages the band suddenly graduated to. How would I know? All I can tell you is that without that strange, bittersweet taste of nostalgia for something you'd always resented, you may as well be listening to fucking Oasis anyway (though Jones' riffs are still better than Gallagher's).

"Not Up To You" isn't the best song on Word Gets Around, but it's likely the strongest distillation of what makes the album work so well (It's not quite true that there are more truly great songs on Word Gets Around than on their subsequent eleven albums, but I did have to crunch the numbers to check). It's too melodic to be a dirge, (just) too high-tempo to be mopey, but the song's simple structure and heavy haze still recalls shoegaze, only - and this is critical - we're staring at the shoes of other people. Kelly Jones is one of those musicians whose lyrical quality is inversely proportional to his lyrical precision, and "Not Up To You" is a triumph of smudged thumbnail sketches of lives no-one else was in a position to even notice. 

Maybe it's just that simple The songs on Word Gets Around are always about other people, even if Jones' memories are our way in. An accused paedophile, a wedding barely holding itself together, two - maybe three - suicides, one drunk high-functioning, one very much not. And the characters in "Not Up To You" don't even reach those levels of local notoriety. Not even stories, just butts of cruel jokes in low lighting. All they're doing is living and lying and loving and lusting in a village that, save for Stereophonics, we probably would never have heard of. Even though there's an unknown village in all of us.

"Who's to know", indeed. "Who's to know; whatever".

B-Side