Tag: Alternative Rock

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Eighties’ best 100 redux: #90 U2 “With or without you” (1987)

<< #91    |    #89 >>

The band responsible for track #90 on my “Eighties best 100” redux needs no introduction nor historical context. Ever since their near legendary performance at Live Aid in 1985, they’ve been a global act, fitting the bill of “biggest band in the world” for many of the intervening years.

Personally, I’ve never been able to call myself a big U2 fan but I am well aware of their contribution to music, especially that of their seminal 1987 album “The Joshua tree”. Even still, I gave away this very same compact disc to an acquaintance in university because I never listened to it. Despite all this, when Bono was convinced in 2005 by “friend” and then Prime Minister of Canada, Paul Martin, to add Ottawa as a stop on their monolithic world tour of the day, I purchased tickets to see them at the Corel Centre (now the Canadian Tire Centre) for me and my wife. The fact that a hot new band called Arcade Fire opened the concert for U2 certainly sweetened the deal for me but I can freely admit that Bono, The Edge, and the rest of their company put on an excellent live show. By that point, however, they’d been at the game for close to thirty years so I would have been more surprised had the show been a snoozer.

Back in 1986, they were still young bucks, riding a high off their aforementioned Live Aid performance and the success of their previous album, 1984’s “The unforgettable fire.” U2 once again enlisted the production team of wunderkind, Brian Eno, and Canadian guitarist, Daniel Lanois, to work on what would become “The Joshua tree”, arguably the band’s best work. The trilogy of songs that lead off the album (“Where the streets have no name”, “I still haven’t found what I’m looking for”, and “Without or without you”) delivers a three punch knockout of beautifully textured music, with Edge’s trademark guitar sound at the forefront. The problem for me was that I rarely got past those first three tracks.

“With or without you”, the song that just builds and builds and builds, is easily one of my favourite tracks that U2 has produced but much of it is due to nostalgia. It just screams the eighties to me… That and high school dances.

Original Eighties best 100 position: #90

Favourite lyric: My hands are tied / My body bruised, she’s got me with / Nothing to win and / Nothing left to lose.” But nobody can really sing it like Bono.

Where are they now?: Still at it, of course. In fact, they’d been at the top of the world so long that when I was telling my wife about their current residency opening the Sphere in Las Vegas and she asked how relevant they were, I was dumbfounded. But it did have me pondering the same question.

For the rest of the Eighties’ best 100 redux list, click here.

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Best tunes of 1993: #7 Radiohead “Creep”

<< #8    |    #6 >>

“When you were here before
Couldn’t look you in the eye
You’re just like an angel
Your skin makes me cry
You float like a feather
In a beautiful world
I wish I was special
You’re so f*ckin’ special
But I’m a creep”

I’d say most, if not all English alternative/indie/rock fans, especially those of a certain age, know these words well and in fact, see in them a reflection of a certain time and place and feeling. Ah, yes, Radiohead’s first big hit, “Creep”.

Incredibly, there’s only been two posts* on these pages thus far dedicated to the well-known quintet from Oxford, England. One might think that yours truly was not really a Radiohead fan, but this is not the case. It just so happens that the series that I’ve been posting since this blog’s inception have not necessarily fallen in line with the years in which I feel that the group produced its best work. However, here we are in 1993 and this is where we find the song that introduced me and likely 99% of the world to their sound.

“Creep” is notable for being Radiohead’s very first single. It was originally released in 1992, almost seven months in advance of “Pablo honey”, the group’s debut album, upon which the single appeared. It didn’t immediately gain the traction that their label was expecting when it was hand-picked from some of their early studio sessions. It only first started to see success on Israeli radio, of all places, before finding regular slots in MTV music video rotation stateside. The label had to convince the band to reissue the single in 1993** and this is when it became the massive hit that was originally predicted.

In fact, “Creep” is still Radiohead’s most successful and most recognizable song, despite the fact that it is generally accepted that pretty much everything they released afterwards is more original and higher quality in songwriting and musicianship. This is why, for years, Thom Yorke and company had refused to include it on their live set lists, despite their fans’ unending calls for it. They have, however, softened their attitudes towards it in recent years, even pulling it out for random shows to everyone’s surprise and delight.

“Creep” had many of the hallmarks of 90s alt-rock – the crunchy guitars, the loud-soft-loud structure – but it also sounded fresh, especially to my ears. In spite of the band’s assertion that it is about an experience where Thom Yorke found himself following a woman he did not know, hence, “creep”, the sound became an angsty anthem for the disenfranchised gen X youth, kind of like a certain song by a particular band from Seattle. And I wasn’t at all immune to its charms and was often pulled to sing along with its lyrics wherever I was when I heard it played. It left a mark on many of us and ensured we took note of the band’s name so that our ears would be lubricated for their next release.

*A best albums post for 1997 and an appearance on my best tunes of 2000 list.

**Which is why I’ve included the song on this list rather than that of for 1992.

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

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Best tunes of 2020: #18 Bright Eyes “Mariana trench”

<< #19    |    #17 >>

Conor Oberst started out releasing music under the Bright Eyes name way back in 1998, a year after his previous band, Commander Venus, disbanded. It really all began as a solo project, with Oberst bringing in different musicians to help out with recording and live performances, but a trio eventually coalesced, with multi-instrumentalists, Mike Mogis and Nate Walcott rounding things out. They were quite prolific in 2000s, releasing eight studio albums through to the end of that decade, including two (plus a live album) in 2005 alone. After one more album in 2011, the group went on hiatus for nine years before releasing the “Down in the weeds, where the world once was”, the album on which this song appears, in August 2020.

I was quite aware of Bright Eyes and their music throughout most of their pre-hiatus period and even saw them once (perhaps twice, if you count Conor Oberst solo). And though I tried a few times, I could never really get into them. But as I wrote when this last album appeared at number eight on my Best albums of 2020 list, I found a connection here that I didn’t have with Bright Eyes’s previous work. I still haven’t made the time to go back through their previous work to see if I had been wrong about it all along or if it would just be this one album for me. However, I can say that the sentiments with “Down in the weeds” matched my mood and that generality that I witnessed with the few people I was able to relate with in the early days of the pandemic.

“Well, they better save some space for me
In that growing cottage industry
Where selfishness is currency
People spend more than they make”

These are the words that kickstart track four and the fourth single to be released in advance of the album. It’s equally a commentary on the state of things, our commentator’s acknowledgement of his place in it all, and how he’s contributed to it. And yet, as meagre as the words are, the music travels in the other direction, looking instead to raise spirits rather than dampen them. It’s upbeat and catchy, the drums chug along and the bassline dances all around it, and Jessca Hoop’s appearance on backup vocals serves to lighten Oberst’s tone with her harmonies. And I just love the singalong chorus and the way it makes you look at you and me with a knowing smile and a questioning glance.

For the rest of the Best tunes of 2020 list, click here.