Tag: Talking Heads

Anatomy of an Earworm

Despite the title, this isn’t really about earworms as such – although they certainly have a place here – this is to do with the background music/soundtrack to your – or my – life. There are serious, life-changing conditions like ‘Musical Ear Syndrome” (kind of a musical tinnitus) where the sufferer constantly hears music and in the cases of artists like Kristin Hersh or Nile Rodgers, these kinds of phenomena (not that theirs are the same, as far as I know) can be part of what fuels their creativity. That isn’t me. What I – and I suspect many people – have, is songs I already know, playing ‘in the background’ more or less constantly.

I decided to try to keep track, for a day, of what those songs were. Not an easy task, as trying to remember them if one doesn’t make a note of it is extremely difficult, once the moment has passed – and also because it seems likely that focusing on that background noise might well alter the experience.

Be that as it may, I tried to make a note whenever I could throughout the day, of what was ‘playing’ – and it’s an odd mixture. Most surprising to me are how few of the songs are ones I would normally listen to, or like, or have listened to or heard (to my knowledge) recently. Also surprising is the segue from one to another, which happens mostly without noticing and which seems to have no logic to it that I can see. The medleys are even stranger. Also odd that events like conversations, concentrating on work, watching TV etc seem to have little or no impact on the flow of the music, it just gets quieter for a bit.

So here, with many gaps, and with a few notes and repeat offenders marked in red – is my internal playlist for today. It is still ongoing of course (currently James Taylor’s cover of Tom Waits’ Shiver Me Timbers). I don’t see any patterns, but I do notice that most of these songs are surprisingly cheerful given what I mostly listen to on purpose; so that’s nice.

The day began around 6am with a shower; a key place for earworms and related music, in my experience – without further ado…

  • Barbizon by Debz
  • Don’t You Want Me by The Human League (I have never liked this song)
  • Young Hearts Run Free by Candi Staton
  • What’s The Frequency, Kenneth, by R.E.M.
  • Keep on Running by The Spencer Davis Group (but with silly alternative lyrics relating to what I was doing at work at the time)
  • Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da by The Beatles (one of the few Beatles songs I really dislike)
  • Van der Valk theme tune (I have never seen Van der Valk, why do I know the theme tune??)
  • Save Your Love by Renée and Renato
  • Street Life by The Crusaders
  • I Wanna Be Your Boyfriend by The Ramones
  • Smokebelch I by The Sabres of Paradise (mainly just the bass)
  • Your Smiling Face by James Taylor
  • Orfeo ed Euridice – a particular bit from (I think) Act 1 of Gluck’s baroque opera
  • The Invisible Man by Elvis Costello
  • Knock Out Eileen by LL Cool J & Dexy’s Midnight Runners (strangely likeable mashup given my hatred of one of these songs – found on youtube)
  • Theme to Monty Python’s Flying Circus
  • Only Shallow by My Bloody Valentine (actually a non-existent, jaunty , squeaky synth-pop cover of the tune of the verse to this song, I’d like to really hear it)
  • jingle from a TV advert for Mitchell’s Self Drive c. 1981 (with the lyric that kids used to sing to it: ‘Mitchell’s Self Drive/Where people eat pies”)
  • I Only Want To Be With You by Dusty Springfield
  • It’s A Shame by Bilbo Baggins
  • Temples of Syrinx by Rush
  • Rockit by Herbie Hancock
  • NIB by Black Sabbath
  • Car Thief by The Beastie Boys
  • Hook It Up by The Donnas
  • How Deep Is Your Love by The Bee Gees (the verse of this song gets stuck in my head often)
  • Your Woman by White Town (genuine earworm that was stuck in my head for days, I had no memory of what it was, didn’t remember the lyrics and had to search for ages to discover what it was; irony – hated it then, hate it now)
  • The Eye of the Witch by King Diamond
  • Good Times, Bad Times by Led Zeppelin
  • Georgie Girl by The Seekers
  • Uh-Oh, Love Comes To Town by Talking Heads
  • Bergerac theme tune (not actually seen Bergerac since the mid 80s)
  • I’ve got a lovely bunch of coconuts (just the tune, but still!???)
  • The World In My Eyes by Depeche Mode
  • medley: You Can Call Me Al by Paul Simon & Down Under by Men At Work (had this bizarre medley playing in my head every morning for months; oddly when it’s not ‘playing’ I can’t work out where the segue happens)
  • The Neverending Story by Limahl
  • Good Times by Chic
  • Fascination by David Bowie
  • Lovely Day by the Pixies
  • Graceland by Paul Simon
  • Shiver Me Timbers… but that you know.

Hmm.

 

 

Album Review: Rachel Mason – Das Ram

 Rachel Mason

‘Das Ram’

Matthew Spiegelman

Cleopatra Records (LP) / Practical Records (cassette)

Release date: 18 November 2016

Rachel Mason has done so much work in so many fields (performance art/non-performance art/filmmaking/music/etc/etc – check out her website for a cross-section) that it’s easy to immerse oneself in her work. In music alone she has amassed a vast and varied discography within just a few years.

Where her earlier albums like the couldn’t-be-more-my-cup-of-tea work of towering genius Gayley Manor Songs (2015) were simple, home-made, stark, and direct and the conceptual The Lives of Hamilton Fish (also a film) was sprawling and dramatic, Das Ram is a full-blown modern pop-rock album, full of catchy songs with a flamboyant, very New York flavour, reminiscent at times of the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Talking Heads or even (at its most pop) Lady Gaga.

rachel-mason-1-credit-chris-carlone

photo by Chris Carlone

Opening track ‘Roses’ launches the album with a dramatic, lilting and atmospheric intro before kicking into gear with new wave-ish guitars and a rock/dance beat. It’s catchy and full of pop hooks, but Mason’s excellent vocal perfectly delivers the troubled, even mournful lyric (‘I sometimes think that life is evil/it’s just something that fills me with dread’) that uses the rose as a symbol not only of beauty and romance, but also of the pain and transience of life. As a lyric, it’s perfectly judged; as densely layered as poetry, while as simple and direct as the best pop music. ‘Heart Explodes’ by contrast feels less spontaneous, carrying on with the metaphysical preoccupations in a more theatrical, almost Kate Bush-like way, Mason’s expressive voice(s) bringing the song to a chorus that is a peculiar crescendo made from conventional romantic language, genuine wonder, exultation and distress.

Mason’s voice is again at its most powerful on the less-straightforwardly-satisfying ‘Sandstorm’ on which she winds together enigmatic images of miscommunication (‘I believe in lies about the world’) with escalating intensity  over a prowling skeletal electronic funk that wouldn’t be out of place on a Grace Jones record, building tension but never quite releasing it. For a sense of release, the strutting electro-pop/funk cabaret fantasy of single ‘Tigers In The Dark’ follows; a kind of Talking Heads/Franz Ferdinand/Lady Gaga hybrid that, unlike her earlier folk/acoustic work feels 100% the work of a performance artist; the song is great, but the delivery, the theatricality is everything. As with Bowie (among others), the artificiality expresses the soul of the performer/character far more than something more apparently earnest would.

https://youtu.be/-Uw4oC9iouc

By comparison, the pulsating electro-pop of ‘Marry Me’ feels more like a vehicle for its complicated, beautifully detailed lyric and less an embodiment of it, although the contrast between the long, passing-of-time-obsessed verses and the simple, plaintive chorus (‘marry me/carry me over the hearth where a lost soul can hide’) grows more poignant as the song wends towards its end. A highlight of the album, it makes up in naked vulnerability what it loses to ‘Tigers…’ in glitzy disco-ness. ‘Queen Bee’ is one of the more penetrable lyrics on the album, using the image of the queen bee as a straightforward metaphor for loneliness, alienation and dependency (‘those friends were never real friends’) and the music captures the lyric in its stolid, regimented plod, with some very effective buzzing textures to reinforce the central image and some folk-inflected singing from Mason.

For a few dissonant seconds, ‘Cancer’ seems set to be the album’s darkest track, but then it unexpectedly breaks into a kind of rockabilly trot, albeit one spattered with peculiar squelches, squeaks and sound effects. Although not as grim as expected, it’s not the easiest-on-the-ear song on the album, sounding at times like two or three songs being played at once, and its chant-like vocal and slightly atonal chorus make it one of the more nerve-jangling songs in her catalogue.

Das Ram ends on a relatively more harmonious, if abrupt note with the angular funk verse/sweeping chorus of ‘Heaven’, which has a kind of early 80s, Ippu-do feel, before ending suddenly after the somewhat expected hedonistic refrain of ‘you and I are getting high.’

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photo by Kerwin Williamson

Taken as a whole, Das Ram, is a bold, exciting and accessible album, utterly different from the acoustic/folk rock textures of Mason’s earlier works like Hamilton Fish…, Turtles or indeed the raw, homemade quality of Gayley Manor Songs.  In fact it’s not like any Rachel Mason album I’ve heard (though I haven’t heard them all). Only a handful of artists have convincingly made a gesamstkunstwerk in the idiom of popular music without falling into the trap of overblown pretension – and most of those have spread from the music world outwards. With the confident, powerful Das Ram, Rachel Mason has become one of an even more select group – an artist who has learned to express herself with equal authority in whatever medium she chooses – and who seems to have fun doing it.