Nuggets of the Future (?)

Here’s the video for “Show Me Mary,” the second single from Catherine Wheel’s Chrome. The video documents a journey by taxi through vaguely exotic locales, taken both by the members of Catherine Wheel and a variety of other strange characters, including an Elvis impersonator and an entire class of excited schoolchildren. At some point, the members of Catherine Wheel are dropped off next to a wall that appears to be the outside border of a cemetery, and there, they play through a verse or so of the song. It’s a weird video that doesn’t really mean anything, but it’s fun to watch, so that’s gotta count for something.

“Show Me Mary,” the closing track on Chrome, is the most conventional track on the album and has very little of the reverbed-out ambience that characterizes the rest of the record. This plus its greatly increased poppiness, which comes through partly in its simplicity, makes it an ideal single, and probably an easier song to cover than anything else on this record. That said, it’s not a slight, tossed-off track by any means. There is real talent showcased here, just as much as shows up on the album’s longer, more complicated songs, and it proves that Catherine Wheel had more substance to offer than just a collection of effects pedals. They’d go to far greater lengths to prove that on later albums, and their success wasn’t always guaranteed. But Chrome is a shining moment for them, the apex of their career and a rewarding listen from beginning to end.

Catherine Wheel - Strange Fruit

It kind of blows my mind that this song wasn’t one of the three singles Catherine Wheel released from this album. “Crank” and “Show Me Mary,” the first two singles, are pretty great, but this song easily beats “The Nude” if you ask me. It’s based around a ringing guitar riff that incorporates some pretty great harmonic sounds, though I don’t understand enough music theory to explain it better than that. Whatever, the point is that the main riff juxtaposes chords in a way that resonates with me emotionally. It has a sort of wistful feel that combines extremely well with Rob Dickinson’s vocals. Dickinson’s vocals are always rather evocative, actually, and he’s got an extremely distinctive voice that I can always pick out the second I hear it. It sounds like what you’d get if a guy with a naturally low voice found a higher register in which he could somehow sing well. It’s like a baritone singing falsetto or something. Maybe that sounds like it’d be terrible, but one listen to the song should convince you otherwise.

“Strange Fruit” sounds like a verse-chorus-verse pop song at first, and in truth I never really noticed how complicated it is until attempting to write about it. There’s a lot going on here, though. Each verse is actually divided into two different riffs, the first being that same chiming chord sequence that introduces the song, only with a big break added into it where Dickinson sings the first two lines of each verse over ringing sustained chords. Then, for the second half of each verse, the band switches to a completely different riff that is more driving than the first. Over this riff, guitarist Brian Futter lays down a melodic lead with a strange but pleasant reverb effect on it that sounds almost like it’s being played underwater, or out in space, or something like that. The first two Catherine Wheel albums use a lot of that effect, in fact, and it’s probably this factor that got them associated with the shoegaze thing in the first place. It’s fitting that another song on Chrome is called “Ursa Major Space Station,” because this entire album (as well as its predecessor, Ferment) sound like space station music. These are pop songs for lonely astronauts.

“Strange Fruit“‘s chorus is also more complex than it initially sounds. Rather than just being a combination of two riffs that blend together into one, the chorus is one strangely constructed riff that turns into another one at certain points. It’s hard to even understand, let alone describe, and I pity any garage band who ever decides to try covering this song. There are weird changes in measure length and time signature, plus a point about halfway through the chorus where a completely different riff shows up once, after which the band returns to the original chorus riff as if it never went away. What’s great about all of this is how invisible it is—if you didn’t listen for the deceptively complicated chorus structure, all you would hear is Rob Dickinson singing the song’s title a few times. He layers his repetitions of the title over the chorus in such a way as to make it sound like a normally structured chorus, too, sometimes starting the line in the middle of a riff in order to make the beats match up, and the ultimate result is a piece of glowing pop perfection, regardless of the underlying structure.

Even at the most hard-hitting moment of this song, which comes during the abbreviated bridge leading up to the song’s solo, there’s still that spaced-out reverb effect on the guitars, so that everything still sounds gorgeous and vaguely ambient. But on that bridge, the guitars are actually strummed with quite a bit of ferocity, and right after Rob Dickinson sings, “This fever is so concentrated,” there’s a repetitive chugging that is straight out of a hardcore breakdown. Catherine Wheel had covered Husker Du’s “Don’t Wanna Know If You Are Lonely” on an interim EP between their first and second albums, and the influence of guitar-oriented post-hardcore bands like the mid-period Huskers is clear in their music if you know where to look.

Once the chugging bridge is past, the band charges into a moment more reminiscent of ubiquitous shoegaze influence Dinosaur Jr, in which Brian Futter and Rob Dickinson both kick in maximum distortion and launch straight into the stratosphere. Rather than an actual solo, this is basically a building avalanche of noise, with the notes climbing steadily higher and higher until reaching a crescendo with the chord that opens the verse. When they let that chord ring and Dickinson begins singing the song’s final verse, the crescendo is both dramatic and understated, as all of the built up energy of the previous part, which seems primed to explode, instead dissipates into the soundless vacuum of space. “Climb the tree and shake this passion down,” Dickinson sings. “But this fruit won’t even kiss the ground.” Even with his metaphorical allusions to the impossibility of love—which is my best guess as to the subject of this ethereal song—he makes subtle references to the weightlessness of space. More than anything, this is what “Strange Fruit” evokes, and it does so with through gorgeously distorted melodies that are ultimately timeless.

Here’s Urge Overkill’s buzz clip for “Sister Havana,” in which the band members, sporting white suits, huge gold medallions and wraparound shades, cavort around what certainly appears to be a Cuban resort town in a 50s-era white Cadillac convertible. This clip makes me think of a secret agent movie or TV show, like an American James Bond mixed with the sleazier, more rundown depictions of law enforcement that dominated the 70s—think The French Connection, or alternately, the sort of TV shows that the Beastie Boys were parodying with their “Sabotage” video. The nighttime shots towards the end of the video in which the band stagger around town looking like sweaty, rumpled fugitives from a Hunter S. Thompson novel are very appropriate, as is the fact that Blackie O gets busted at the end of the video. Talk about life imitating art.

It’s funny—this clip is basically tattooed on my brain. There are images in it that I remembered perfectly even though, before tonight, I hadn’t seen it in probably 15 years. But I realize that for a great many of my younger readers (and by “younger,” I mean “those under 30,” which I am fully aware is almost all of you), this clip will be completely unfamiliar. I’m reminded here of something Chuck Klosterman wrote, in Fargo Rock City if memory serves, about how music videos had no shelf life at all, how they completely disappeared once their initial run in the rotation was done. Of course, he was writing before the existence of youtube, but really, it’s much the same now, because if people don’t know to go looking for these videos, they never see them. Why would any 25 year old hunt down an Urge Overkill video?

I say all of this because my tendency when I started working on this series of posts about Urge Overkill, my first thought was, “God, better not post the ‘Sister Havana’ video, that shit got so played out back then.” It didn’t even occur to me at first that most of you would have completely missed the era in which MTV played this video constantly. Hell, some of the youngest among you probably completely missed the era in which MTV played videos AT ALL. These days it seems more like RTV (Reality Television) than anything else. But that’s another complaint for another time. My point here is that I’m working with an entirely different frame of reference than most of my audience, and sometimes I’m surprised by things that should have been perfectly obvious.

But whatever. Enjoy the video.

Oh, and by the way, Saturation is out of print, but used copies of it go for just over 50 cents on Amazon, so you should all do yourselves a favor and pick it up if you don’t own it already. Some of the albums I feature are inconsistent, but this one is a classic from beginning to end, and you need it in your life.

Urge Overkill - Positive Bleeding

Urge Overkill’s music is a fascinating pastiche of many different flavors that all scream “the 70s.” In fact, Urge are one of those bands that pick up so well on a departed cultural zeitgeist that they synthesize it better than any of the bands from the time they’re emulating ever did. What I’m trying to say is: there are no bands from the 70s that sound as much like a band from the 70s as Urge Overkill did 20 years later. All of Saturation stands as some measure of proof, but “Positive Bleeding” is particularly indicative of what I’m talking about. That stop-start guitar riff that begins the track is a good example. It combines Isaac Hayes funk and the dirty rock n’ roll of Sticky Fingers-era Rolling Stones more effectively than “Can’t You Hear Me Knockin’” ever did, and in 10 seconds rather than 7 minutes. Urge Overkill are able to generate some powerful electric guitar crunch, but they don’t do it with the distortion pedals that were in fashion in 1993. Instead, they use good old-fashioned overdrive, cranking the gain knobs on their amps until their speakers shudder and playing quality vintage guitars to get that solid-body humbucker crunch that Angus Young has always favored.

For all that, Urge also have a very well-developed melodic sense, and they show that off by the tenth second of “Positive Bleeding,” when they turn down the electric guitars in favor of single-note melodies picked out on acoustic guitars and what sounds like a sitar. Nash Kato’s dark, sensual baritone comes in at the front of the mix, and regardless of what Albini might think about Urge’s instrumental capability, one thing is never in doubt: this guy can sing. His lyrics don’t often mean all that much, but “Positive Bleeding” just might be an exception, though your answer to that question will depend on how much leeway for interpretation you’re willing to allow. “Hey, look around today,” Kato begins. “Everything don’t need to be the same.”

As the song goes on, Kato mixes themes of being yourself and marching to a different drummer with references to blood. When the chorus hits, those crunchy, overdriven guitars from the song’s brief intro are back in a big way, rolling through an incredibly catchy series of riffs that hit some very triumphant high notes. Kato follows them with his voice, showcasing his range as he sings, “I can bleed when I want to bleed,” and then encourages his audience to bleed with him. Were this another singer in another band singing, “You can bleed when you want to bleed,” I’d feel a lot safer interpreting this encouragement as a call to passion, to put everything you have into your art, or whatever it is you want to do with your life. From Urge, though, a band who are typically devoted to exultation of the good life, wearing flashy vintage fashions, and doing plenty of chemically-enhanced partying, it can be a bit harder to imagine that something that sounds like an exhortation in favor of passion and sincerity really is what it seems. On the other hand, there are several other moments on Saturation in which serious emotions, especially about relationships, are laid bare. Perhaps all of the flashy 70s glamour imagery was just a bit of misdirection, a feint to keep us from looking directly at the boys in the band when they were baring their souls. Maybe that’s why they always wore sunglasses.

There’s a bit of a bridge between the first chorus and the second verse, a bridge in which the chunky, overdriven chorus riff, complete with overdubbed mini-solos, switches back and forth with a reprise of the acoustic verse. This transitional section of the song indicates that Urge Overkill’s songwriting skills were beyond the level on which most of their peers operated. While the standard verse-chorus-verse arrangement is never a bad structure to use, it’s always better for bands to vary it up, and by adding in this four-bar transition, Urge Overkill go above and beyond the power-pop call of duty, giving “Positive Bleeding” a surprising depth. In similar fashion, the second verse has a drawn-out ending, with the overdriven guitars chugging and ringing out at the beginning of the last two lines, then hanging back an extra bar as Kato stretches out the verse with an added final line: “Baby, I’m a rolling stone,” he sings, sounding almost pensive over relatively quiet acoustic guitar picking. Then the electric guitars come storming back in, and the last 90 or so seconds of the song is one long, stretched-out chorus. It’s the kind of thing that radio programmers would fade out on, and fade-out endings were very popular in the 70s, but Urge take a long time to get there, in the meantime bringing back the sitar from the acoustic verses, which holds its own underneath the electic guitars, as do some bongo drums that show up at the very end. The last minute of the song sounds like one big party, but it’s a party in celebration of being sincere. In a time when so many bands sang about their difference from the mainstream in a way that made it sound like a burden, maybe an upbeat party song about being yourself, one that made being apart from the crowd seem like something to celebrate, was just what we needed. Maybe it still is.

sweatonthelawn:

perpetua:

Charlotte Hatherley
“White”

First off, let me direct your attention to my review of Charlotte Hatherley’s brilliant third album New Worlds, which is on Pitchfork today. It’s an 8.0, but not Best New Music, but that distinction doesn’t matter to you, right? Right?

Second, this marks the first in a series of posts here in December spotlighting top-quality videos from 2009. This clip, directed by Elliot Manches, makes the best of Charlotte’s obsession with color, and the result is a striking and simple video that was actually shot in a single take without the use of CGI or a green screen. As a YouTube commenter puts it, it looks like “technicolor bukkake.” Well, technicolor bukkake in reverse.

Hey, guys—what’s that initial guitar riff remind you of? I’m not sure myself, but it’s wonderful, whatever it is. If anyone can place it, I’ll be in quite a sated state.

 No clue on that, but I am very impressed with this song. I was first made aware of Charlotte Hatherley when she joined (and noticeably improved) Ash back in the late 90s (Nuggets Of The Future post involving their Nu-Clear Sounds album almost certainly forthcoming). I really liked the three Ash albums she played on, but I wasn’t as keen on her first solo record, Grey Will Fade, and figured that maybe she needed Tim Wheeler as a collaborator to really shine. This song makes me completely reconsider that. The disco-beat chorus is something Ash would never do in a million years, but it’s extremely catchy and maybe even the best part of the song. Of course, the verse riff is pretty great in itself, and really, it makes me want to check out her latest album and see if she can maintain the standard this song sets throughout. If so, it might very well be one of my top albums of the year.

Also, it took me about half the video to realize why her lip-syncing was occasionally so badly aligned with the track. Spoiler: the whole video is running backwards. For the first half or so of it, the paint flying backwards off of her just looked like more paint splattering on. I figured it out when the paint on the walls started running upwards. And by the way, she’s hardcore for being able to sing and play guitar backwards for the entirety of a four-minute song, not to mention that there’s also paint in her mouth, coating her teeth. Bleh. She’s lucky she didn’t get any in her eye right at the beginning of the video. There would have been a second take if that had happened, I guarantee.

Here’s the video for No Knife’s “The Red Bedroom,” which is actually from their fourth album, 2002’s Riot For Romance. If there were any videos from Fire In The City Of Automatons out there, rest assured I’d use them, but I couldn’t find any, so we’ll have to stick with this one. Fortunately, this is a pretty outstanding song, though it has a bit more of a space-rock influence than anything on Fire (which is true for pretty much all of Riot For Romance). Personally, I’m in favor of the many shots focusing on the drummer, as I’ve always thought that drummers were the most interesting thing to watch in a band. Both Chris Prescott and his predecessor, Ike Zaremba, who drummed on the first two No Knife albums, deserve credit, as No Knife was never lacking in the drumming department. The songs were pretty consistently great, too.