Category: Tunes

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Best tunes of 1991: #11 The Lowest of the Low “Rosy and grey”

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“I want to take a streetcar downtown
Read Henry Miller and wander around
And drink some Guinness from a tin
‘Cause my U.I. cheque has just come in”

And so starts The Lowest of the Low classic: “Rosy and grey”.

Oh, how many times have I sung along with those words? And how many times have I done something similar, at many different points in my life – a starving student, university graduate with a low wage job, call centre employee in a brand new city, new home owner in the suburbs, middle aged man revisiting the city of his youth and not recognizing it all? The sentiments are still the same, just heading out without purpose, maybe hitting a record shop, maybe hitting a pub, maybe a cafe, and both forgetting and thinking about everything. And for that one day, everything seems rosy and everything seems grey.

I’ve already mentioned how obsessed I was with this band’s debut album when The Lowest of the Low made an appearance on my Best Tunes of 2001 list with a tune they released after the first of their reunions. And really, their debut, “Shakespeare my butt”, is still my favourite of all their albums, with songs like this amongst their number, though they have written some fine songs since. The Lowest of the Low was formed by Ron Hawkins, Stephen Stanley, and David Alexander as a side project when it appeared their primary band at the time, Popular Front, was on the way out. Many of the songs on “Shakespeare my butt” were written by Hawkins and Stanley while still part of that other group so they were well formed and performed by the time the album was released. It’s no wonder to me at all that there is very little filler on such a long album. For an independent release, it sold very well, for a brief time holding the record for units sold by an indie (beaten shortly thereafter by the “Yellow tape”), and has appeared on a handful of best Canadian album ever lists over the years.

“Rosy and grey” is Ron Hawkins songwriting at its best. Jangle guitar and harmonica folk sound and punk rock angst and sensibilities, both literate and juvenile, juxtaposing references to writers (though Henry Miller has become Dostoevsky in recent years) with sexual double entendres (“I like it much better going down on you”). It’s a song for drinking alone or for clinking glasses with your best mates. It always brings a smile to my face, no matter how grey things may seem.

For the rest of the Best tunes of 1991 list, click here.

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Best tunes of 2011: #21 Peter Bjorn and John “Tomorrow has to wait”

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Much like Clap Your Hands Say Yeah’s “Hysterical” (whose title track appeared at number twenty-three on this list), Peter Bjorn and John’s “Gimme some” was something of a comeback album for me in 2011, even though neither band had ever really went away.

if you’re unaware of them, Peter Bjorn and John is a Swedish indie pop trio made up of Peter Morén, Björn Yttling, and John Eriksson (see what they did there?). They formed in 1999 but rose to international relevance in 2006 with their third album, “Writer’s block”, an excellent album that I love all the way through. However, many know it simply as the album that hosts the band’s best known song, “Young folks”, a great, great pop tune that if you don’t know, you should most definitely investigate. After their breakthrough, the three members took a bit of time to work on personal projects before coming back together to make a (mostly) instrumental album (“Seaside rock”) in 2008. They followed that up with “Living thing”, a darker experimental album, in 2009. These two albums, while interesting, weren’t my cup of tea. So when “Gimme some” was released a couple of years later, I checked it out without great expectations. Happily for me, though, it was a return to the quirky indie pop sound that caught the world’s ear a few years earlier.

And yes, this trio really does pop well. “Gimme some” opens with this tune, “Tomorrow has to wait”, an invigorating number that was not one of the three singles the band released from the album but it really could’ve been. It pounces on you with the tribal drumming right of the bat. Peter Morén plays the call and response game with his band mates on the verses but this reverts to a shout along fist pump by the chorus. This isn’t a song for watching the dance floor from the sidelines but one for which you could quite easily find yourself right in the middle of the fray, doing the pogo, something you swore you would never do, without knowing quite how you got there.

Yeah. It’s that type of song.

For the rest of the Best tunes of 2011 list, click here.

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Best tunes of 2001: #7 The Shins “New slang”

<< #8    |    #6 >>

Have you seen the film “Garden State”? Yes? No?

If yes, great. If not, you should check it out. Written and directed by and starring Zach Braff, it is a semi-autobiographical, semi-absurd film about an actor returning home after the death of his mother. It was an indie darling at the festivals, garnering positive reviews, and a cult following. I mention it here because music features heavily throughout the film. Braff chose the music for the soundtrack himself, winning a Grammy for it to go along with his directing awards, and as he has explained ad nauseum, he simply used the music he was listening to while writing the film.

There are two songs by The Shins that are featured in the film and soundtrack but the one that changed everything for the band was the placement of “New slang”. The morning after his mother’s funeral (and a particularly debaucherous night out with old friends), our protagonist goes to see a doctor and meets Natalie Portman’s character, a delightfully quirky soul, wearing headphones. He asks her what she is listening to and she responds “The Shins”. When he admits that he has never heard them, she literally gushes (with perhaps an ounce of hyperbole): “You gotta hear this one song. It’ll change your life, I swear.” He puts on the offered headphones and we all hear the song at number seven on my Best tunes of 2001 list.

Of course, I had already heard of The Shins by the time “Garden State” was released and I got to see it on DVD. The band had already been around for close to a decade, had released its sophomore album just the year before (my own introduction to the group), and all of a sudden, there was all this interest in the debut album, “Oh, inverted world”, especially two of its songs. Natalie Portman’s line definitely worked. After slipping on the headphones with Zach Braff, I, too, had to go back and check out the rest of the debut.

“New slang” was written by frontman James Mercer before The Shins were even a thing. It fades in gently, easing us all in to the acoustic finger picking, light tapping on the tambourine, and Mercer’s falsetto humming. He then sings the song all non committal, like he’s testing out the lyrics for the first time as the song is being recorded. Indeed, the vocals are set very low in the mix, deep beneath this whole pile of gentleness. The whole thing reeks of basement studio, stale cigarette butts and warm beer, and a very late night. Then, the song slips off into the same dark shadowy corner from which it sprang.

I don’t know if it’ll change your life, like it did that of James Mercer and The Shins, but “New slang” is a fine song to immerse yourself in for a while.

For the rest of the Best tunes of 2001 list, click here.