These two lines bookend the discography of mewithoutYou. One screamed out in anguish, in a voice furious at the world and itself, already resigned to a darker fate; one sung peacefully, almost with acceptance, as if the 16 years inbetween were just a pitstop on a lifelong journey of self-discovery. What a stop it was, though: crafty foxes and existential elephants, porcupines with threatening auras and spiders on leaves, apocalyptic prophecies and silly little fables. I could write for days and not begin to sift the multitudes mewithoutYou contained – truly, if any band has ever had cause to lay claim to being more than just the members it was comprised of, this was the one. Perhaps if I stick to their final night, I may find the words before the world ends.
mewithoutYou played their last show on August 20th 2022, and it’s hard to ask for a better setlist with which to say goodbye. Having burned through the big fan favourites on night one, the second night of the farewell tour was almost wall-to-wall deep cuts that would never get airtime within the confines of a normal tour. From their early rippers, receiving one final acknowledgement (god did “Bullet to Binary” go off though) to mid-career deep cuts that rank as some of the band’s best (“Nine Stories”, “The King Beetle on a Coconut Estate” and the bizarrely overlooked “Bethlehem, WV”) to a…
I feel a certain sort of pride in knowing that the country I came from produced an artist like Nick Cave. It’s a feeling invariably mixed in with a kind of disappointment towards a lot, though far from all, of the music we’ve produced otherwise, and borderline bewilderment at how a country composed (as Australia is) 95% of quiet rural towns where nothing ever happens and there’s nothing to do produced an artist like this. An artist who somehow drew together like-minded art students like himself to bang out some of the craziest post-punk ever put to record with The Birthday Party; an artist who adapted like a chameleon to the bluesier, folksier talents of Blixa Bargeld, Thomas Wydler and the dearly missed Conway Savage in the 90s to create stunning albums that many justifiably consider his greatest work; an artist who can give us the wounded, desperate baroque love songs of No More Shall We Part in the same decade he hammered out some dirty garage rock with Grinderman and Dig, Lazarus, Dig!!!. In short, sometimes I wonder if Nick Cave was a total fluke.
If so, I’m happy to number one of the greatest living songwriters as my country’s lucky dice roll; it’s a distinction I’d award not just for the sheer breadth and consistency of his back catalogue, but because of Cave’s peerless ability to conjure an entire world with his words. Cave’s worlds aren’t a dark mirror reflection of our society or any cliche like that.…
One of the very first things I remember loving was blink-182’s “The Rock Show”. Yeah, I was like five at the time, young as shit blah blah blah, but that put me right in the targets of blink’s music. I was the archetype of the demographic that found “The Rock Show” a refreshing change of pace from MTV’s usual fare, which at the turn of the millennium was Coldplay’s “Yellow”, Coldplay’s “Trouble”, a few spins of U2’s “Beautiful Day” and then “Yellow” again. “The Rock Show” was nothing if not a gear shift: it was short, brash and stupid, it demanded to get stuck in your head, Tom spat on the camera in the video. To me it was cool as all fuck.
I lead with this partly because “The Rock Show” is blink’s best single – one of the best singles of the 2000s, really – and partly because there’s no other way to broach the topic of Enema of the State than via what it means to the listener personally, subjectively. From the outside, it’s not hard to see why this is disposable, trashy music to some: pop-punk in general is the most maligned genre, outside of those that actually deserve it like fucking nu-metal. Pop-punk wants to get inside your head and stay there at any cost – the best pop-punk bands understood that it was a multi-approach task, pulling together not just the best hooks but the best production, the best instrumentals, and every now…
Nobody else alive can do what Childish Gambino is doing. It’s not a matter of outstanding talent in any one area: he’s far outranked at rapping by Earl, Danny and Vince, can’t dominate a singing feature like Anderson .Paak, hasn’t yet pulled together a concept album the likes of which make big waves in the scene nowadays. But the fact remains: that thing he does, that he did demonstrably, mesmerisingly, ridiculously at Coachella last weekend, is one of a kind.
I think his closest compatriot was actually Mac Miller – another rapper who, initially considered kinda embarrassing to listen to, pulled himself up through a scattershot spread of talent in basically every area. Up into something that looked from the ground like a genuine higher calling. Gambino’s mention of Mac’s name in the show’s quiet pause before an emotional “Riot” gives me hope that he thought the same. Or maybe he was just reading the room, feeling out that the crowd would be receptive to some tributes to fallen brothers – it’s hard to begrudge him that.
Donald Glover the man is brilliant because it seems like he can do everything, but Childish Gambino the artist is incredible because at any moment he might do anything. For example, he can debut a new song at Coachella with no words in English, a primitive tribal ritual which whips the crowd and striking team of backup dancers into a circle pit that feels seconds away from either transcending music entirely or…
“Untitled” wouldn’t just have improved Noonday Dream if it had been recorded for the album, it’s downright essential to its entire tapestry. The song ties together an astonishing amount of this dreamy, impressionistic LP – clarifying “Towing the Line”‘s rookery-as-metaphor, contrasting the closing of “Murmurations” with its celebration of sight, unnervingly foreshadowing the ‘something in the canopy’ in “The Defeat” which makes Ben ruminate on death like the birch tree in “Untitled”. There’s actually something weirdly fitting about the thematic, like, key? to an album this distant and unaccommodating being impossible to find outside of a couple YouTube live vids, which makes you wonder if it was sidelined for giving away too much of the album’s thematic tissue. Then again, this is the dude who never released “Keiko”, so chances are he’s just fucking insane with this ‘dropping his best music’ stuff.
The definitive version of “Untitled” thus far, in this writer’s opinion.
Whatever. “Untitled” is a gorgeous piece of work, often played as an intro to “The Defeat” in live shows as above. It’s almost more powerful to read it poetically than it is to hear the words sung out loud. Birch tree lost its branch one day in violent winter / I said it was grieving, you said ‘it don’t feel nothing / I bet you think everything’s in its rightful place – that sentiment is man’s disgrace’. Howard’s lineage of imagistic lyrical masters in the folk scene – Cohen, Dylan, Drake – is…
I used to be so sure “I Could Be Anywhere in the World” was the one. I mean, who wasn’t, right? As far as stadium-ready, skyscraper-chorus bangers go it’s downright flawless, and George Petit’s trapped-animal screeches never ceded more gracefully to Dallas Green’s highschool-fantasy of a voice. I also nearly gave the spot to “Boiled Frogs”, putting aside for the moment that Crisis is borderline perfect and any song could have made it. But “Rough Hands” has its praises sung less frequently than those songs despite arguably deserving more.
First off, it’s as perfect a closer as you could ask for on Alexisonfire’s most balanced album. Unlike “Happiness by the Kilowatt”, which is basically Petit featuring on the first City and Colour song, “Rough Hands” sees the whole band getting in on the fun. Within the first few seconds, a gentle piano tinkle gives way to a brooding guitar which chugs underneath the whole song, though the keys return to accompany Green as he establishes the scene. Petit’s entrance in the second verse is a downright heartstopper – partially thanks to the lyrics which I’ll address in a minute – but once again Alexisonfire go all out on a hook with all three vocalists jostling for attention. It’s like a well-scripted and extremely yellable play: Green, our honey-throated voice of reason, desperately explains how his heart’s been sealed with rust while the gravel-and-whiskey-stained tones of Wade provide a balanced, harshly objective assessment of the situation – “two people too…
I don’t really know what the impetus for writing this was, but in case you were at all curious: one of my favourite late-era Weezer tracks sounds like Rivers Cuomo spent a couple hours dissecting millennial tumblr blogs then tried to write a Killers song. If that sounds like a recipe for absolute trash, well, fair enough – and “Trainwrecks” hails from the much-maligned (and half-great) Hurley, which means I’m starting off on the defensive here. But, like all great late-era Weezer songs, “Trainwrecks” isn’t hobbled by it’s potentially bad aspects but all the better for rising above them.
A stomping one-two rhythm section sees Pat Wilson and Scott Shriner largely out of the limelight, and while Brian Bell keeps the guitar-work simple, he supplements it with a fantastic warbling synth that’s less “Take On Me” than mid-era Cure. But it’s a genuinely great Rivers vocal sells the whole thing; he snarls “you don’t keep house and I’m a slob / you’re freakin’ out cos I can’t keep a job” with the vitriol of an actual 20-year-old, and sells the blink-and-you-miss-it joke – “we don’t update our blogs, we are trainwrecks” – with the deftness of a guy who’s been making jokes about being a dumbass kid most of his career.
When Rivers pushes up into to a scream, leading into an honestly moving climax of “that’s the story of our lives, we are trainwrecks”, it’s a forcible reminder that the man’s indomitable stream of crazy good melodies…
The first things which interest me on every play of this album are the parallels between Kids See Ghosts and Pusha T’s DAYTONA. Both albums begin with a slow, surgical verse from Pusha delivered nearly a cappella; both move to a foot-stomping Track 2 built around vintage-sounding guitars with a hint of psychedelia; both repurpose soundbites with positive intentions and turn them to their own twisted ends. (To that last point, “Come Back Baby”‘s flip of Mighty Hannibal’s anti-drug “The Truth Shall Make You Free” as an intro to, uh, a drug song is one of Kanye’s best black comedy moments, while “4th Dimension”’s creepy sample is where the album veers closest to its surreal cover art). This isn’t a direct one-to-one comparison, though, and it’s the divergences between the albums which colour them as much as their similarities. While DAYTONA doubles down on Pusha’s ice-cold raps in its second half, Kids See Ghosts starts to resemble a more complete ye in its emotionally vulnerable second half, when the two rappers begin an unexpected, touching reckoning with their insecurities and mistakes.
This is why a moment which many have justifiably rolled eyes at, namely Cudi’s extended repetition of the chorus at the end of “Reborn”, is to me the most important on the album. This more than anything is music of reclamation – “Freeee” reclaims a line 070 Shake introduced to the project as an ode to emotional numbness and turns it to joyous proclamation, “Cudi Montage” reclaims Cudi’s…
“Bit of a dark spiral with no end, I thought” – Algeria Touchshriek
For brevity’s sake, I’ll leave my thoughts on the first three decades of Bowie for another time, except to say that his 70s output is among the greatest run of any artist in history and his 80s output is… not. Even in his worst decade, the man remained a fascinating enigma, screaming his lungs out over Japanese spoken word and Robert Fripp’s angle grinder on one album, giving us “Let’s Dance” on the next. His tacky 80s pop set the stage for a massive comeback that wouldn’t really come until The Next Day or Blackstar, if it came at all; which leaves the 90s and 00s as somewhat stopgap decades, a time period most Bowie purists consider to be when he released stuff that was better than Never Let Me Down but worse than most of the rest. Conversely, though, this stopgap holds two of Bowie’s absolute best; and the first of the two sounds little like pretty much anything else.
So: Outside, or to be pedantic, 1. Outside. A frustrating listen from the outset, if you go in with the knowledge that it’s the first in a pentalogy that was never completed, one inspired by the fear of the upcoming millennium and built on a concept about art crime serial killings investigated by a noir detective who talks out of the side of the mouth. Even writing it makes it sound like a Blade Runner…
An astoundingly large portion of Pink Floyd’s back catalogue was unceremoniously released into the world in 2016. When I say ‘unceremoniously’, I mean a lavish multi-disc, Blu-ray and DVD boxset which extensively covered their first seven years of life; but when you consider this music one of life’s finer pleasures and these rarities as basically a wellspring of lost gold, the boxset feels a lot less than they deserved. In fact, the not-insignificant price tag of The Early Years would have undoubtedly turned some fans off from digging into material that should be in everyone’s collection.
I mean, just try some out for size – like the brilliantly loopy lost Syd Barrett cuts “Vegetable Man” and “Scream Thy Last Scream”. The former features some of the band’s all-time catchiest melodies against a disturbingly self-reflective lyric from Syd, reportedly blocked from A Saucerful of Secrets for being “too dark”, while the latter boasts Nick Mason belting out a rare lead vocal of surreal rhymes over chipmunk backing vocals ripped straight from your nightmares. Or maybe the half-hour long “John Latham” jam, an extended improvisational soundtrack to an early piece of British surrealism that makes “Interstellar Overdrive” sound pretty tame. Or, moving past the Syd years, you have The Man and the Journey, a legendary live show that combined musique concrete, pastoral folk and explosive psychedelia as the band tried to re-jig songs from their first four albums into an impressionistic concept piece involving pink jungles and temples of light. There are diamonds on…
Repeat this with me until it sinks in: there’s a new Glassjaw album. It’s written, it’s recorded, it will quite possibly release on schedule, and we’re (probably) not all collectively dreaming. Two songs have now been released, and contrary to instinct and logic, they also actually do exist. I know, right?
Why am I doing this bit? Basically, it’s been a long time since we heard from Glassjaw: the band’s unique brew of satanic label nemeses, persistent health issues, and ironclad dedication to not talk to their fans if at all possible has left us holding hands across forums. A new Glassjaw full-length has been the Detox of the post-hardcore world for 15 years, and unlike that hip-hop myth told of only in whispers, Material Control is both real and also probably actually good. But if you’re planning on going into the new one blind, I’d take a second to reconsider; Glassjaw’s evolution over the years has been a fascinating one, and even at their most scattershot, their discography feels surprisingly like a complete package.
The early years and Silence – The story starts in the early 90s with the dissolution of straight-edge Jewish post-hardcore icons Sons of Abraham, of which Justin Beck and Todd Weinstock were both members. Glassjaw’s earliest incarnation, featured in demos only worth tracking down for the truly completist fan, sounds like a scrappy punk band made of your high school friends with a local legend/possible serial killer wailing over the top. It’s rough, but we…
I’ve always kinda liked U2. When I was growing up the songs I most frequently caught on the TV were catchy, distinctly not-classics “Beautiful Day” and “Elevation” (a personal favourite music video for my kiddy mind), along with the likes of Coldplay’s “Yellow” and “The Scientist”. I didn’t grow up in the 80s, but through my parents gradually allowing me to get their CDs I got a quick-and-dirty version of U2’s evolution: immature Cure-loving post-punkers, machine gun punks, soaring stadium rockers and country-fied Cash and Dylan wannabes. It’s a damn impressive evolution, regardless of your feelings on the band overall; the switch-up from Rattle and Hum to Achtung Baby easily ranks up with those of, say, Radiohead (disregarding that nothing else in the universe really sounds like Kid A). It’s the common narrative that U2 went off the rails after Achtung, if you ever thought they were on the rails at all. Allow me to try and set the record straight.
I still love this video, screw you all.
Following on from Zooropa – undeniably an EP’s worth of content stretched out into an album, but a weirdly compelling mess of ambient, soundtrack and electronic rock nonetheless – came Pop. A quite literally unfinished album full of dead ends, empty spaces where additional guitar or keys or noises were probably meant to go. A trashy, shallow, flashy album, as if Bono’s Fly glasses were transmuted into musical form. An album of dance-pop demo cuts, desperate to snatch…
For me, it was “In the End”. Hit play on that sampled piano riff and damn, I’m immediately lost inside a thousand memories; pretty much all of which consist of either trying (and failing) to rap the verses with my high school friends, or sitting in front of the MTV channel wide-eyed, annoying my parents while I waited for that one video with the awesome moving statues in it. Pretty much everyone will have a different jumping-on point, though: were you drawn in by “Faint”, and its hyper-cool video where we only saw the band’s silhouettes from behind? Or “Numb” with that absolute monster of a chorus, potentially even the Jay-Z-ified “Numb/Encore” remix for extra cred? Could be you’re an obsessive fan who trawls through the LPUnderground catalogue in their spare time and names “QWERTY” as their favourite Linkin Park song, or maybe you missed the train on them entirely and roll your eyes at the rest of us buying in on this cheesy rap-rock trend. Wherever inside that spectrum you land, it’s cool, because love them or hate them, it was pretty damn impossible to ignore Linkin Park at the beginning of the new millennium.
It started with Hybrid Theory in 2000, an album that somehow manages to sound fresh and vital despite coming from the heart of the most dated genre to ever exist. It’s all in the energy of the thing, of course – “By Myself” with those copper-wire metallic shrieks, “Papercut”…
Friends and neighbours, I’ve got a theory. My thinking is this: pop songs, when executed to such a high degree we can basically round up to saying they’re perfect, achieve a level of embedded, canonised love in the minds of the public that no other genre can really hope to accomplish, partly due to pop’s pre-established advantage of being ever-present on radios and TV. In other words: perfect pop songs are better (or at the very least, more effective) than perfect songs of other genres. Of course the very thing that gives good pop songs their boost is the same thing that makes bad ones so insufferable – the fact that radio will pound them into the ground for months after release, their seemingly simplistic or shallow arrangements, and the ability (if not explicit goal) to stay stuck in your head for days on end. Pop has maybe the largest gap of any genre between its good stuff and its “Shape Of You”‘s, and this dichotomy is what causes ‘pop’ to be a dirty word in the minds of many even in the year of our Lorde 2017. But when a tune is done perfectly, with respect to the form and real feeling, it can become a symbol to represent entire periods of time, feelings or entire sub-cultures of people in a way that puts other genres to shame. Go on and have a small list of perfect pop songs, then, and tell me how hard you disagree.
