It’s possible that over the past several weeks you’ve noticed the reviews slow to a trickle around these parts. We had our reasons! Cookies weren’t involved! Okay, maybe they were! All of us at Tripwire HQ are pleased to introduce to you today a new chapter in our “take” on music criticism—by handing over the keys. Starting this week and every Tuesday hereafter, we’ll be posting a full album to stream through our friends over at LaLa. What we’d like you to do is lend us your brainwaves and tweet us whatever crosses your mind while listening. Maybe there’s a riff you can’t get out of your head. A lyric? A moment? An image? If you’re feeling ambitious, spend your 124 characters reviewing the record as a whole. Just toss those tweets over to us at @thetripwire and by the end of the week, we’ll cobble together and share the beautiful mess of a madlib it creates. Or, if you’re a complete Luddite, you can just leave a review in the comments section. You’re the boss now. So without further adieu, we give you… Tweet Release.
This week’s album is Unmap, full-length debut from Volcano Choir, a gnarly new collaboration between Justin Vernon of Bon Iver and Collection of Colonies of Bees.
First, an apology, which is always a great way to start these articles: time has slipped away from me completely. I am only a month away from becoming a father, and to say it occupies my mind more than a musical obsession would be an understatement. The realization that I not only have to deal with another person’s sock drawer from scratch, but have to manage that sock drawer for close to a decade is one of the many small mind explosions which have crossed my path since last Christmas. So I haven’t been able to play, think about, or otherwise obsess over a single piece of music like a normal adult without a hint of epic responsibility. So that means this week’s entry lacks the subtle nuances I have treated “Smell Yo’ Dick” and the like. Nevertheless, I still have some thoughts on the song that has been rumbling around my soul for the last week, and I’ll treat you all to those now between laundry loads (you have to wash all the baby clothes before they can put them on because their skin is so sensitive, and you have to use a special detergent. How did children survive in the past?).
1. “God Only Knows” is one of the songs Paul McCartney lists as among his favorite, just as he names Pet Sounds his favorite album. This marks the semicolon of one of my favorite musical history lessons. The story goes that the Beatles wanted to make music that was more folksy than their usual rock ‘n’ roll, and they took a cue from the Beach Boys. The resulting album was “Rubber Soul.” Brian Wilson heard this album and felt the ante sufficiently upped in the musical texture department and pushed his group to create “Pet Sounds.” And THAT album showed such unity of artistic vision that the Beatles eventually retaliated with Sgt. Pepper’s. When this sort of incredible and enormous coincidence happens in movies (I’m looking at you, “Walk the Line”), it feels like the script is moving faster than reality. When it actually happens in reality, it feels like magic.
2. “God Only Knows” was our first dance at our wedding. It made my father-in-law tear up and it was agreed by all in attendance that it was a sweet, non-sappy, beautiful choice. However, when I think of the response to the song choice, I often think of a friend of mine criticizing us for picking a song that starts with the line “I may not always love you.” Yeah, because the song stops right there and doesn’t change a single thing. Some people need every line to be 110% positive on their own with no surrounding context at all, and others are willing to listen for more than 10 seconds to a single song. The lesson is: never criticize someone’s first dance song. At least not to their face. It’s just as bad an idea as asking if someone’s pregnant: it can only end poorly. These are lessons I will pass on to my child.
3. I haven’t been replaying the song in the traditional sense (as traditional as a guy with a 1-year-old iPod Shuffle can be). My wife and I have recently become infatuated with the show “Big Love,” and “God Only Knows” is used for their title sequence.
3.a Don’t have a title sequence that goes for ninety seconds. It’s a bad idea. One of the only special features on the Season One DVD set is a making-of featurette for this title sequence, and they talk about how HBO apparently asks a lot of their shows in the world of title sequences. But for the rest of the DVD-watching human race, you see it once, enjoy the song, get the point and then you always, always, always skip past it to get to the story.
The power of the song, however, carries through and lingers with me for a couple reasons (not the least of which is the sentimental reason listed in #2). They only play 90 seconds of the song, cutting out the instrumental bridge and the repeated last verse. This sticks the song even further into my conscious brain. If you’re gonna go for 90 seconds already, it feels like you might as well play the whole damn song. Maybe it speaks to the quality of the entertainment I watch, but many times when songs I enjoy appear on movies and TV shows, many times I just wish the story would stop and we’d all listen to the music. And while the lyrics of “God Only Knows” are certainly one of its top qualities, you cannot discount the Beach-Boys-y-ness of the production, which is that wonderful mix of Christmas carol and melancholy. I imagine every band after 1965 being created in the “Bump-a-bump-a-bum-bum…” section, and it’s all lost in the actual opening for “Big Love.
4. I don’t know if “God Only Knows” is my favorite Beach Boys song, or even a song I’ve ever turned up to hear better, but I always listen to it top to bottom. Enjoy.
I guess I’m a little off in my timing, listening to a song about the beginning of school during the time of year when school is letting out. Like listening to Christmas songs in August, my obsession has more to do with my fixation on the Hives themselves and their weird logical leaps than with actual calendar-backed facts. Even though I am married to a teacher, have retired teachers for parents and I hang around schools many times during the year (not like that), I still find that this point in time most perfectly suits “Fall Is Just Something Grownups Invented.” Even though the message of the song is — on the surface — anger at returning to school, the mood of the song is joyful, and what’s more joyful than the beginning of summer? Paradox? Sure, but it works.
I have no excuse for loving the Hives as much as I do, and I therefore offer little apology. They are like a hybrid of my two favorite bands, wedding the Ramones’ style and humor to a Mick Jagger-like front man. I never stood a chance at resisting, but I doubt I would have fallen as hard in love with the band if not for the strange underlying insanity that is the Hives’ artistic voice. This voice could be simply chalked up to their mishandling of the English language (”The Hives are law! You are crime!”) along with their reckless abandon with which they use their second language. But as I’ve dug deeper and deeper into their catalog — yes, there’s room to dig — I’ve become more convinced that they’re either so smart they’re dumb or so dumb they’re smart and then dumb again. If you followed that, you have my pity. Your world will soon be consumed by another paradox of Hives logic, heretofore known as “logic,” with sarcastic quotation marks in tact.
“Fall” was written for Cartoon Network, presumably as a kids’ song for their commercial tags. Outside of just making a cool song for a cool commercial, I’m not sure what the marketing scheme was behind this decision. Was Cartoon Network selling Fall? It’s not unheard of, as Fall is the time for traditional premieres of new shows. But the sentiment of the song implies that we should be upset it’s Fall (or, in the present, will be some day). Unless you’re MTV, you have a hard time selling something while telling people they should hate it. Fortunately, MTV and Cartoon Network are owned under the same company, so maybe this works. However, it raises the very core idea that makes the song problematic and charming: the idea of fighting an idea.
It makes “Fall” a perfect kind of kids’ song, dealing with abstract ideas which are crystal clear, yet fall apart under the slightest scrutiny. Of course the idea of inventing a season is as ludicrous as launching a war against the feeling of terror, but it’s a fun idea. In a way, the Hives have provided children with a safe kind of conspiracy. Normally the Swedes sing about how giant corporations are programming us into consumer robots who don’t think for themselves. To a kid, the biggest corporation around is adults, so to vilify them is not only easy, but essential.
The fun part of the song comes in the fact that singing along removes yourself from the titular group, even if you’re a 33-year-old grownup father-to-be 15 years out of high-school. With this song, you (who are we kidding here–I) can still be pissed at the adults who made up time period of every year I most hated. I hated school. I loved college, but something about the organization of education always rubbed me the wrong way. I think I was scared of teachers because my parents were teachers (I had my own mother for not just one but TWO English classes throughout my high school career). I knew what my parents were capable of, and I assumed the same powers upon other teachers no matter how incapable they were. We had some pretty ridiculous teachers at my high school; some were as oblivious to mischief as Elmer Fudd during Duck Season. Yet I never misbehaved. It would come back and bite me in the ass eventually. I couldn’t fight City Hall. My problems wouldn’t be solved by messing with this one teacher. I needed an entire system to change.
Obviously, I’ve hung onto these feelings for quite a while. It’s a strange brand of nostalgia where you allow pissy feelings to linger so much that you’re happy you have a way to let them go two decades after the fact. That’s probably just the power of music in a nutshell; I haven’t thought about these feelings for years, but once I’ve been allowed to feel this way again by way of a song I love, here they are again, not only resurfacing but being spit on. This justifies loving a “kids” song containing the phrase “Halloween is the ass” and not getting upset. While the content may not be 100% kid friendly, the spirit feels kid inspired.
Even though it’s a technique they’ve used more and more as of late, I love the way “Fall” starts with the slow lamenting tune about how we’ll all be returning to school again. “We?” asks the older fan, feeling threatened. As an answer by way of changing the subject, the song picks up the pace while Pelle Almquist “teaches us” about the truth of the matter while borrowing from the most rock ‘n’ roll line ever: “So I better do it now before I grow old.” The rest of the band kicks in for the first half of the chorus, then drops off for the punchline, and I use that term specifically. This is a joke in execution, not just material. It’s not enough to simply say that Fall was invented by devilish, fun-hating grownups; The Hives make it a full on kid-sized conspiracy. And that, to me, is even funnier. Children don’t enjoy many conspiracies of their own, so to not only deliver one but deliver one on par with a fake moon landing feels huge enough to reach comic proportions.
This is what the Hives do better than any other band. They aim high and then reach even higher and pretend they want to go even higher than that. Any reasonable person will tell you that a rock band, no matter how powerful, cannot change the world, yet we like to believe it’s possible. The Hives play on that mentality. They act like they’re enormous stars even though most people don’t take them seriously or know they exist. They take that B-List status and carry themselves like the Dukes of Music. THEN they act like they — the royalty of rock — will survive nuclear explosions and impending global catastrophes by way of their ability to play really loud. They get more ridiculous, and then more serious, and then more serious, which becomes even more ridiculous. They are then free to make wild declarations like “Fall Is Just Something Grownups Invented.”
THE POINT OF ALL THAT IS… the title and chorus are a punchline. When we hear it, the music and “Oh’s!” hit us in full glorious effect. Out of the silence comes the tidal wave of punk rock with a snicker behind it. That riff feels like a crowd laughing with an insult comic. They just told a line on someone’s mom, and the crowd responds. I respond. By the end, I chant along with their chorus chants, wishing that I had something to rebel against for real but not really.
Dedicated to those songs that I can’t stop playing, humming, or thinking about; the 4+ minutes you fall head-over-heels in love with. Past instances have included CCR’s “Ramble Tamble,” Beethoven’s “Pathetique,” and The Electric Six’s “Improper Dancing.”
I think I’m here because of nostalgia. I have no other explanation for the feeling I woke up to a few days ago when I thought to myself, “You know what song I’d like to hear today? ‘No Man’s Woman’ by Sinead O’Connor.” I haven’t heard the song in years and years, and probably would have never heard it in the first place if a friend of my wife hadn’t given her — not me — a copy of “Faith and Courage.”
She is more famous for doing crazy things than she is for her songs. I would imagine people 20 years from now will be surprised to learn she was a singer primarily and not just some upstart. If you think about it, the only two songs anybody ever thinks of when they think of Sinead is “Nothing Compares To You” and “The Song She Sang On SNL That Nobody Actually Remembers Because She Tore Up A Picture Of The Pope.” That was Bob Marley’s “War.”
I feel like I know way more about O’Connor’s personal life than her musical career, and that might be to her benefit. It’s like “Plastic Ono Band,” an album that only works emotionally if you know who John Lennon is and what band he was in, but who doesn’t know that? Even if you can’t list off the specifics of O’Connor’s life, you can ballpark the whole thing into one lumpy “she’s often emotional and upset” bag. Off the top of my head and with no research, I want to say that she fought to become a Catholic priest and was a lesbian for a stint, but I might be way off. What I do know is that she had a bald head for a while, and that was the first straw in herf controversy barn. Whether my facts are straight or not, the real truth is that I hang onto them, and they make her career more vivid in my imagination.
This is what I’ve longed to cling to all week. To be perfectly honest, the GSATM’s recently have fallen off my obsession radar, and that might have more to do with my own personal distractions than the quality of the music (”Smash You” deserves the title, for example, just as the Houston Rockets deserve to be NBA champs during those two years Michael Jordan wasn’t playing; just because the NBA wasn’t as interesting or as competetive doesn’t mean the winning team shouldn’t win–though I have probably argued for an asterisk). I’m hustling for work, turning down horrible looking jobs (yes, they still make jobs where you drive for an hour plus to sit in a windowless room smelling like old paper only to TEST for the job to see if you QUALIFY for an interview. An interview that won’t happen until the next day, by which time you will have realized you won’t take it even if they upped the offer to–get ready for it–$13 an hour), and preparing for our family’s first baby. I’ve got a lot on my mind, and the brain space that would normally be dedicated to repeat play dissection and obsession has to figure out where to get a will made and how to build a dresser with a changing table. So I need something more than just music. I need power.
Which brings us to “No Man’s Woman,” a the sonic equivalent of victory and the 1990’s. It’s the song I need at this moment, even if the context of the lyrics don’t relate to me/call into question my sexuality. “No Man’s” was clearly made in the post Alanis period of angry-musical-women production, but it happens to come with the context that has plagued and actually helps O’Connor’s career. Like I said earlier without any research, O’Connor has tried to become a priest. She’s a very spiritual person, and the song appears to be about her relationship with God. By the end.
Before the end, we get a trip down production memory lane, where sort-of dance beats walk us into the declaration that Sinead doesn’t wanna be no man’s woman. She’s giving up on guys. I don’t blame her. The lyrics border on hacky but stay just short of that perjorative by ringing true. What made “Nothing Compares To You” such a hit was that tear she cried during the video. It’s a sad song (or, at least, a sad sounding song), and that tear was validation. O’Connor’s career has been largely in support of that tear–seeing her protest the Catholic church, and speak out about any atrocity she wants to has all proven what we believed from that video: this girl takes it seriously. She can sing the hell out of these songs because she believes them.
This might technically qualify her as crazy if she weren’t a celebrity. Since we know who she is, this makes her a serious artist, one with little tolerance for compromise. As Viv Savage says, without a stage to perform on Sinead might get a bit stupid and go crazy. As it is, she’s a one-hit wonder everyone knows with a fantastic singing voice.
More on the relationship with God: maybe this is how the song transcends being weird that a straight guy like me would enjoy it so much. The song really about a person who’s sick of being betrayed and depressed (I get that) and finding the one thing that makes her feel great (I’d love that). It’s not that she doesn’t want a mate; it’s that she only wants to be her own person, which is pretty much the whole of O’Connor’s career.
I’m an emotional listener when it comes to songs like this: if the music and singing sounds like triumph, then I feel triumphant, forgiving all betraying lyrics there might be. This song starts kind of down and bitter. Just by having “No” in there, I get the negativity and I don’t think I’m wrong. By the end, O’Connor has used this title to describe what she wants to be by way of defining what she never wants to be. I really get this. I struggle with what I want to accomplish, but I know exactly what I don’t want to do. This is because I’m a negative, suspicious person. I must have hope that there’s hope for people like me, and the musicality of “No Man’s” provides it. Around the 1:45 mark, we get the first truly joyous synergy of Sinead’s voice and the instruments, when she describes the one who “Never does me harm/Never treats me bad” (implying there have been others who HAVE treated her bad and done her harm). We get one more half-chorus until we return to the final beautiful chorus-mantra. The production kicks in strings and drums and becomes everything “Rent” wanted to be without the Broadway shmaltz. O’Connor could have described the song’s that way: “I don’t know what it is, but it’s not ‘Rent.’”
Featuring music from: North American Halloween Prevention Initiative, Maserati, North Atlantic Oscillation, Yeasayer, Deluka, Division Day, Logan Lynn, Donkeyboy, Chromeo, Woolfy, Neon Indian, Vampire Weekend, The Yearbooks, Fanfarlo, Frightened Rabbit, Middle Distance Runner, Headlights, The Very Foundation, Bloc Party, The Soft Pack, Wolfmother, A Mountain Of One, Field Music, and Yo Majesty
