Tag: 2003

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Tunes

Best tunes of 2003: #11 The Decemberists “Los Angeles, I’m yours”

<< #12    |    #10 >>

I’ve spilled plenty of virtual ink already on the Portland, Oregon based indie-folk quintet led by Colin Meloy. However, the band keeps coming up on these lists of mine because I love them so much, so I might as well spill a little bit more.

“Los Angeles, I’m yours” is a track off The Decemberists’ second album, “Her majesty The Decemberists”. As I’ve already shared, I first heard this album, along with the debut, a year after its release and promptly fell for the literate tales* that frontman Colin Meloy spins into his globalized and folkloric indie rock. Apparently, he wrote this track after his band’s first visit to the great metropolis on the west coast and found that he hated it. The song is a hilarious number where he pokes fun at its denizens and their collective fashion sense**, the sights and the smells, and likens the entirety of it all to vomit from the Pacific Ocean.

“It’s streets and boulevards
Orphans and oligarchs are here
A plaintive melody
Truncated symphony
An ocean’s garbled vomit on the shore”

In true Decemberists fashion, though, the song is not a straight-ahead diss track. The music tells a completely different story, giving the feel of an answer to Sinatra’s “New York, New York”. The melody is at times joyful and wistful but always upbeat. There’s an aggressive strum on the acoustic that sets the mark and the tone. There’s strings. There’s a harmonica. You can almost hear birds chirping at one point… but maybe that would be too much.

As a post script to this entire thing, it’s worth noting Meloy’s story about the first time The Decemberists played this song live in LA after it was released into the world. He had been half expecting to be pelted by tomatoes by the crowd. Instead, the crowd all happily sang along, loudly and proudly, and this changed Mr. Meloy’s mind about the city and its people.

Happy endings all around.

*It was no big surprise to me when Meloy started publishing works of fiction, all of which are great. I just finished “The stars did wander darkling”.

**The women with their underwear straps showing about the waist of their pants and the men with their pants hanging off of them, well below their bottoms.

For the rest of the Best tunes of 2003 list, click here.

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Tunes

Best tunes of 2003: #12 Coldplay “Clocks”

<< #13    |    #11 >>

There are times while making and posting all these lists of my favourite tunes and albums of each year, times that I err and omit an important (to me) work of music. Indeed, I don’t have a perfect system and my memory is not at all what it used to be.

And so it was, that while counting down my favourite tunes of 2002, I somehow forgot to include “The scientist”, one of my favourite Coldplay songs. However, I can’t very well go back when redo the list at this point so I decided to right this wrong by fudging this new series a bit. “Clocks” appeared on “A rush of blood to the head”, the same 2002 album as “The scientist”, and was released as a single in the US in November 2002. Nevertheless, given that was released in the UK a few months later in 2003, I decided to bend my admittedly malleable rules of inclusion and insert “Clocks” here, a year late, as a sort of reparation for the earlier error. Besides, “Clocks” is a great tune in its own right.

I’ve already shared a few times on these pages about my intro to Coldplay via “Yellow“and ultimately, their debut album “Parachutes“. By 2002, we were all champing at the bit for new music but as it turns out, the group weren’t at all happy with their efforts on the recording sessions for their sophomore record. It was delayed a number of times. In fact, after putting it off, they went out on a world tour and started recording their third album. And it was during these sessions that “Clocks” came out of the woodwork and would go on to save “A rush of blood to the head”.

“Clocks” begins and ends with that piano riff that is instantly recognizable, has been used and sampled by other artists, and is nearly impossible to evacuate from your head once it’s lodged there. The song was built around this riff and despite “Clocks” being planned for a later album, it became imperative to include on the gestating sophomore release.

“The lights go out and I can’t be saved
Tides that I tried to swim against
Have brought me down upon my knees
Oh, I beg, I beg and plead”

The lyrics are unclear in literal meaning but they give a certain impression that is unmistakable. An emotion. An energy. And paired with that intense piano riff and the relentless drum beat, it all spells an immediacy. A sense that you are in the eye of the storm, feeling in slow motion while everything and everyone else is whipping around you triple time fast forward speed. This is life. This is the dream. And Coldplay is soundtracking it.

It’s a beautiful thing and no amount of radio overkill can dull the bright colours and rosy fragrance.

For the rest of the Best tunes of 2003 list, click here.

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Tunes

Best tunes of 2003: #13 Snow Patrol “Spitting games”

<< #14    |    #12 >>

Snow Patrol got started in Dundee, Scotland way back in 1994 when Gary Lightbody formed a band with university friends Mark McClelland and Michael Morrison. Of course, they went through a few name changes and struggled mightily before settling on the moniker we now know and signing to indie label Jeepster, original home to another Scottish indie band we love*. Unfortunately, the struggles didn’t end there, seeing an almost complete turnover in personnel and middling sales and critical reception of their first two records. They were dropped by Jeepster in 2001 but it turned out to be the best thing to happen to them, because they were signed to Fiction less than two years later and sent to the studio to record their major label debut.

“Final straw”, Snow Patrol’s third record, was where I came in. I don’t remember now exactly how I heard about the group or the record, but I definitely remember that it was never a grower. I was hooked to the sound of the album right away. I bought the album on CD**, something I wasn’t doing a lot of at the time, given my lack of disposable income. And when I went back to sample the music of the previous two albums, I didn’t find them nearly as compelling. So something truly clicked here.

“It’s not as if I need the extra weight
Confused enough by life so thanks a lot”

“Spitting games” was the first of five singles to be released off the record. It was and still is my favourite of the bunch. At just shy of four minutes, it is one of the longer tracks, especially on the first side but it is no less driving, nor hard-hitting for all that. It is brash and breathless, starting off all guns ablaze, a punishing drum beat and raging guitars, and it never really lets up. The verses all have the same energy as the non-chorus, where Lightbody just lends his voice to a raging wordless melody. It all leads to the feeling of nervousness and anxiety of someone that has feelings that he doesn’t know what to do with, the confusion of youth and the uncertainties of love.

“Spitting games” is a track, much like the rest of the album, that is raw and passionate and hints at the success that the band will find a few years later.

*Um, Belle & Sebastian.

**And I’ve since replaced that with a copy on vinyl.

For the rest of the Best tunes of 2003 list, click here.