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Best tunes of 2013: #21 Crocodiles “She splits me up”

<< #22    |    #20 >>

I’ve already told the story on these pages about how my friend Tim and I drove to Cambridge from Toronto one day over the Christmas break back in 2011. We headed there to meet up with one of Tim’s university friends Greg and his wife Wendy, and check out their books and records store, Millpond. We stayed for dinner before returning to Toronto in a snow storm but not before sharing laughs and memories and trading a few musical picks.

Greg’s contribution was Crocodiles, seconded by Wendy, and based on their raves and descriptions, I definitely took note to check them out when I returned home. Perhaps coincidentally, my own suggestion was Dum Dum Girls, whose sophomore record “Only in dreams” was hot on my repeat listen list and had placed on my favourite albums list that year. What’s funny is that Greg and Wendy hadn’t heard of Dum Dum Girls and I hadn’t heard of Crocodiles but at the time, the front persons and driving forces of each band, Brandon Welchez and Dee Dee Penny*, were married and had regularly contributed to each other’s musical projects.

I later learned that Crocodiles were formed in 2008** by Welchez and Charles Rowell in San Diego, California, after their previous, mostly punk-driven bands had broken up. Their psychedelic and retro noise pop sound was established right from the beginning and got them drawing buzz. I recognized and fell for it when I first listened to their sophomore album, “Sleep forever”, quickly making the connection with Black Rebel Motorcycle Club and The Jesus and Mary Chain, and of course, with Dum Dum Girls. I’ve continued to follow the group through the multiple lineup changes but the sound hasn’t veered too far off course, nor has the songwriting quality diminished, right up to last year’s excellent “Upside down in heaven”, the group’s 8th full length album.

In 2013, though, they released their 4th album, the Sune Rose Wagner (The Raveonettes) produced “Crimes of passion”. The neon colours of its album foreshadowed the technicolour sounds and garish and glam tinged ethos. Ten searing and cool tracks for turning up and rocking out alongside, my favourite of which was track six, “She splits me up”. With guitars that wail at the high end, dance harpsichord-like arpeggios, and gnarl and snarl at the robust bass line. Meanwhile, Welchez bemoans and lauds a member of the opposite sex and the hold she has on him.

“She dazzles on the streets beneath me but her love is never real. And the world outside is fading fast, and she’s so detached. She splits me up”

Yessssss.

*Funnily enough, this is the first post to focus on Crocodiles but Welchez has been mentioned a couple of times already in posts about Dum Dum Girls.

**Same year as Dum Dum Girls.

For the rest of the Best tunes of 2013 list, click here.

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Tunes

100 best covers: #42 Pop Will Eat Itself “Games without frontiers”

<< #43    |    #41 >>

So here’s a topsy-turvy, chicken and the egg kind of story.

I remember hearing “Games without frontiers” on AM radio as a pre-teen not really know who the artist was or what the song was about. I much later became a fan of Peter Gabriel when I picked up his “Shaking the tree” compilation on CD in the midst of my 80s retro kick in the late 1990s and there, reacquainted myself with the track. However, prior to that, in the early 1990s, I became a fan of Grebo jokesters Pop Will Eat Itself, mostly because of their relations with The Wonder Stuff and Ned’s Atomic Dustbin, bands of whom I was already a big fan. Years later, some time in the early 2000s, whilst exploring some of PWEI’s back catalogue that I had yet to consume, I came across this cover they did of “Games without frontiers” and with a bit more digging, found that it was their contribution to a fundraiser compilation supporting the peace efforts in Northern Ireland, called “Peace together”.

Peter Gabriel’s original version of the song was recorded for his self-titled third album, released in 1980. It features Kate Bush on backing vocals, plodding percussive and bass synths, a drum machine mimicking congos, whistling, and sinister guitar lines dancing along the minor key. It is oft-considered an anti-war song with a title referencing a well-known European game show and lyrics that equate politics with children games, rhyming off names of children from different cultures, all playing together.

So a good choice then for a band to cover for an album promoting peace. Pop Will Eat Itself’s cover is longer, predictably rage-filled, and rife with samples. Though its rhythm and its use of rhythm as melody is the same, the tone is indeed very different. It feels like they packaged it all up, Gabriel included, and shot it off into an apocalyptic future world similar to that found in “Tank girl”. Yeah, it’s fun in its angst.

Indeed, both versions are a gas and make you feel urbane as your happily singalong, but I think I may be siding with original in terms of preference, even as I replay the cover with the volume cranked.

Cover:

Original:

For the rest of the 100 best covers list, click here.

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Tunes

Best tunes of 1993: #3 Cracker “Euro-trash girl”

<< #4   |    #2 >>

Digital music has certainly changed the way we consume our favourite songs and albums*. First, with the mp3 and illegal downloading in the late 90s and early 2000s and then, with music streaming services in the late 2000s to present. I know a great many people who have stopped buying physical music altogether and some who have been offloading their collections in order to make room for other… stuff. Indeed, I am thinking that there may be some in the younger generations who have never owned a record, a cassette tape, or a compact disc. It’s these folks that I worry may never know the joys of physical music: album artwork, liner notes, gatefold and other foldout sleeves, and of course, the hidden track.

Yes… the hidden track.

For those who may not know of what I speak, hidden tracks are songs that were typically tacked on at the end of the official track listing on records, tapes, and CDs, the song titles weren’t listed on the sleeves and sometimes on CDs, would be “hidden” on tracks far later on in the disc. I personally have enjoyed a great many of these over the years** but I do believe my all-time favourite example would be Cracker’s “Euro-trash girl”. It appeared at track 69 of 99 on the CD version of the band’s sophomore album, “Kerosene hat”, and was apparently put on there by the band unbeknownst to the record company, who wanted them to keep it for a future release.

I had gotten into Cracker with their self-titled debut album and the hilarious debut single, “Teen angst (What the world needs now)” and when I started hearing new singles “Low” and “Get off this” on alternative radio, I recognized their country-twanged alt rock right away. But when I started hearing “Euro-trash girl” on the radio, I knew had to get the new album. Of course, when I first picked up the CD in the stores and didn’t see the song listed, I was quite disappointed but I picked it up anyway. And yet the story had a happy ending, unlike our protagonist in the song.

“Yeah, I’ll search the world over
For my angel in black
Yeah, I’ll search the world over
For a Euro-trash girl”

“Euro-trash girl” is a fan favourite at live shows that was as such before it was ever put to tape, which is reportedly why it ended up as a hidden track. It starts with a gentle strum and a forlorn electric guitar and it doesn’t really kick in to a higher gear than that, even when the drums join the fray and things get louder. It’s a lackadaisical eight minutes of meandering and reminiscing, David Lowery weaving a tale, true or no, of a backpacking trip through Europe, a search for European love and the misadventures that are found instead. It plays on all of our collective schadenfreude, amusing us to the point that we don’t want it to end, singing along with our narrator as he gets robbed, arrested, shaken down by border cops, is forced to sell his ‘plasma’ after his parents refuse to wire him money. And at the end, he is still searching for his “angel in black”.

*In fact, I’ve seen more than few writers posit whether the ‘album’ has seen its day.

**“Train in vain” by The Clash, “Blue flashing light” by Travis, and “All by myself” by Green Day are just a few fine examples.

For the rest of the Best tunes of 1993 list, click here.