Sunday Songs: 1/21/24

Happy Sunday, bibliophiles! I hope this week has treated you well.

The fact that all of January’s color schemes have been somewhat dreary is a complete coincidence, but it fits with all the dead foliage, snow, and misery outside. One of the suckiest months, without a doubt. But this week is more fun, at least: throwbacks of all kinds, British Invasion remnants, and my 6th grade hyperfixations coming back to haunt me.

Enjoy this week’s songs!

SUNDAY SONGS: 1/21/24

“Rattlesnake” – St. Vincent

Last week, I was overcome by the urge to re-listen to several of my favorite albums. The urge was mostly just me going through Hunky Dory and part of Aladdin Sane on David Bowie’s birthday (happy 77th, wherever you are on Mars), but I decided to put off the first new-to-me album until I got back to school. (More on that next week.) So, for the first time since…oh, probably middle school, I listened to St. Vincent’s self-titled album in full—my third favorite album of all time, only beaten out by OK Computer and Hunky Dory in my book. I have no doubt that I’d give it the same praise had it not been this way, but St. Vincent is just one of those albums that’s been such an unmistakable part of my life that it’s practically embedded in my genetic material. I played this album into oblivion back in middle school, and it’s impossible to pull out a single memory I have tied to it, since it’s painted the landscape of the time when I was 11 to when I was about 13 so distinctly. Car rides, plane trips, afternoons clutching my iPod—Annie Clark was always there. Somehow, I also used to be able to listen to music while playing minecraft, and that album (along with Hunky Dory) was the soundtrack to many a sloppy house dug into the side of a hill. But now, after so many years of growth, this album remains as truly glorious as my younger self thought it was. Not a single hair out of place, and not a single note that isn’t pumped with energy and fervor. Every soaring, jerking guitar solo still sends me into the stratosphere, and every bloody-lipped turn of phrase never fails to light up my brain. There’s just a sheer power that shakes the earth with every song; even in the quieter moments, you can’t help but be hypnotized by the chrome world that Clark created. The robed, silver-haired persona that Clark took on during this era was self-described as a “near-future cult leader,” and I’ve always liked that aspect, but I can’t help but fully understand now. I usually think I’m a levelheaded person, but I’d join that cult, no questions asked. This brand of exhilarating power puts me under a spell every single time. It’s still crazy to me that there were a whopping five bonus tracks beyond the initial 11. They must’ve had to physically restrain her from creating the most masterful pieces of music and throwing them all on the album on the first go. We weren’t ready.

Way back in 2014, “Rattlesnake” was the first song off of this album that captured me. (“Birth in Reverse” came soon after, and for some reason, it took me longer to grow on “Digital Witness,” but now I adore it to death as much as the others.) At this point, I’d gone all the way into clinging onto St. Vincent’s music like a leech. For this song in particular, it was in no small part due to the fact that it clicked into my middle school WondLa hyperfixation perfectly (see below), and at age 12, there was no higher praise that I could give a song, however abysmally I misinterpreted it. There have been many such songs over the years, but for once, my analysis of this one wasn’t all bad—the comparison still works. “Rattlesnake,” like its namesake, is prickly all over; from the opening synths to the burning, angular guitar riff towards the end, which was apparently so intense that she sliced her finger while recording it in the studio. It’s jagged like lightning—if you could touch this song, it would snap back at you with a jolt of electricity. And as Annie Clark recounts an autobiographical experience of a “commune with nature” in the middle of the desert, her breathless verses brim with beads of sweat and uncertainty as she turns tail: “Running, running, running, rattle behind me/Running, running, running, no one will find me.” In between the heatstroked repetitions, Clark hides one of the many golden lines on this album: “I see the snake holes dotted in the sand/As if Seurat painted the Rio Grande.” God, if that isn’t a stellar image. Like a feral cat, “Rattlesnake” brims with fear and flexing claws, skittish and ready to bolt at the slightest wrong move. It’s a song that palpably crackles with unbridled energy, unleashed from desperation and the desert heat.

…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:

“You’ve Got To Hide Your Love Away” – The Beatles

I’ve always wondered what the Help! album cover is supposed to mean—if I squinted, I thought they were spelling out the letters to “help” (Paul’s pose does look a bit like an L, but none of the others look like the right letters…); as it turns out, Robert Freeman, the photographer for the album cover, originally intended for them make the positions for spelling out “H-E-L-P” in flag semaphore, but he scrapped the idea since he thought that the Fab Four were distinctive enough no matter what pose they were striking, so he just had them…spell out gibberish in flag semaphore. The more you know.

Everything written about the versatility of the Beatles can’t be understated, but the more I listen to some of their earlier music, it’s clear that the kind of wild creativity that defined them was already gestating before they started getting into their more experimental period. Even if this is more of a tribute to Bob Dylan’s highly influential style than anything, they’ve still managed to make it so unmistakable Beatles. It’s one thing to be able to create a nice, downtempo folk tune with some scattered flutes and tambourine here and there, but even in such early days, the rhythm of “You’ve Got To Hide Your Love Away” is so salient that you can’t help but be bobbed by it like a bottle floating over the sea. The whole song has the sway of a flimsy wooden boat on the ocean, gently pitched up and down by the waves with every strum of the guitar. John Lennon’s wavering, raspy inflections are jutting and precise in all the strangest places, but that’s part of what makes this so memorable—it’d be easy to record a cover of this with a flat voice inflected with enough melancholy to sell it, but there’s an enchanting storyteller’s waver in every word. It’s the kind of song that could draw a crowd through the woods—added with the image of the four Beatles standing shoulder, I imagine a slowly expanding crowd circling around them as Lennon sings “Gather ’round, all you clowns/Let me hear you say/Hey! You’ve got to hide your love away…”

…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:

“Come Lie Down With Me (And Sing My Song)” – Elf Power

We regret to inform you that I’m still riding the Elephant 6 high, even though I haven’t even seen the documentary yet. I’ll get to it eventually.

Unlike bands like the Apples in Stereo and the Olivia Tremor Control, Elf Power’s music usually doesn’t grab me instantaneously; there’s no denying their creativity, but it doesn’t often click with me the way that the other Elephant 6 bands do. Typically, I’ll just like the song, listen to it two or three times, and forget about it. Next to the raucous energy and whimsy of their compatriots, they seem more reserved. Reserved isn’t always a bad thing for me, but with the company they’re in, it seemed like they would have had something brighter to offer. “Come Lie Down With Me (And Sing My Song)” is similarly reserved, but it has an atmosphere that most of the other Elf Power songs I’ve listened to lack. Even if there wasn’t a mention of “rain on the sea,” this song is one of the rainier songs I’ve ever heard, practically the distorted gray of a windowpane streaked with falling rain. The acoustic, folksier approach is steeped in a strange, distant melancholy; the lyrics feel innocent enough—invitations of love in hidden spaces—but I can’t help but feel a sense of unease lurking in the background. It has the same eery air that a lot of age-old folk standards have, like something passed along during the Great Depression and whispered on the biting wind. It gives me the same lingering unease of a Syd Barrett song, like it wanted to be whimsical and innocent, but couldn’t deny some hidden darkness. And even if I’m not fully on the Elf Power bandwagon, there’s no denying that this feeling is a difficult one to replicate and successfully pull off.

…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:

“All Nerve” – The Breeders

It’s always fascinating to see the exact ways that a talented singer’s voice changes as they age. The inevitable deepening, and often thickening, that comes for everybody, but just like how each of our voices are unique, each voice changes uniquely. There’s David Bowie’s voice expanding its horizons, deepening like an incomprehensible chasm until it began to quiver at the edges, the soft, sonorous rumble that’s slowly crept into Damon Albarn’s voice as he’s reached middle age, and the whispering rasp that laces the edge of Kate Bush’s voice in her most recent recordings.

For Kim Deal, it’s like some sort of invisible bottom has opened up, making her voice thicken like firm cake batter after a good round of stirring with a spatula. It feels strangely compressed, like most of the airiness has been squeezed out, leaving the back of the throat emotion to clamber through the crawlspace that’s been left behind. But what age never left behind for any of the Breeders was the youthful, reckless spirit that seems to have defined them. This could’ve easily been written back in the ’90s and been an alternative hit, but it works just as well as it worked six years ago. Age has not dulled the spitfire sensibilities of their songwriting—”All Nerve,” as both the title and the album suggest, is just as sparking and feral as much of their other catalogue. The stripped down instrumentation, mostly just bass, sparingly plucked guitar, and faint drums that linger at the corners of your eardrums, make the lust and desperation all the more lusty and desperate. The bare-bones feel of it all, for the first minute or so, at least, add to the feeling of gathering up all you have left—be it physical belongings or strength—to race across whatever wasteland lies ahead to see “you/Especially you.” And it’s just like the Breeders to add the song’s repeated sucker-punch of “I won’t stop” just as the guitars come crashing down like rocks on the highway.

…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:

“Sunny Afternoon” – The Kinks

Not to bring it back to Britpop, but I’m bringing it back to Britpop. The oft-quoted difference between Blur and Oasis was that Oasis aimed to be the next Beatles (which…even if their music was any good, that would still be presumptuous), but Blur was more interested in delving into the quirkier side of the British Invasion era, namely the Kinks. And even though I’ve been hearing The Kinks in the car from a young age, the more I listen to them, the more I realize just how much Blur gleaned from their lyrical style. The minute I heard “Sunny Afternoon,” I just realized that this was “Country House” before “Country House” was a thing. Chronologically, I guess it’d be the “Country House” sequel after the character’s dissatisfaction blows up and he loses everything. Also fits with “Charmless Man” quite well.

Setting aside my recent habit of listening to music with even the briefest mention of sunshine to get myself through the January doldrums, there’s such a unique texture to “Sunny Afternoon” that pervades in so many of the artists that they influenced, Blur included. There’s a lingering taste of the hottest days of the year, squinting your eyes through the sunlight as the warmth bakes your skin. Maybe a lingering taste of lemonade, something sweet…I guess an ice cold beer, in this case, but overshadowing the summer sweetness is the knowledge that this is all that the narrator has left, now that “The taxman’s taken all my dough/and left me in my stately home.” It’s not full melancholy, but a sarcastic imitation of it that’s only there to humor the narrator—enough to hammer in the point that…yeah, whoever this dude is, he probably had it coming, even if he did lose everything. Yeah, “All I’ve got’s this sunny afternoon,” but I suspect that whatever your (ex) girlfriend told her parents about that “drunkenness and cruelty” wasn’t entirely baseless. The whole song is just “awww, you poor baby, you can’t sail your yacht? Go cry about it.” “Sunny Afternoon” has a sly sort of playfulness, the kind that makes you imagine the narrator imagined as a cartoon character, moping onscreen as you pass The Kinks themselves. (The camera would pan over to Ray Davies, who’d do some kind of silly, exaggerated frown as this rich dude slips on a banana peel, or something.) And amidst all this, you’ve got some of the prettiest harmonies I’ve heard on a Kinks song in the chorus—”Lazing on a sunny afternoon” sounds like it’s misting away like droplets of water coming out of a sprinkler, gently dissolving in the heat.

…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:

Since this post consists entirely of songs, consider all of them to be today’s song.

That’s it for this week’s Sunday Songs! Have a wonderful rest of your day, and take care of yourselves!