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Best tunes of 2010: #13 Gorillaz “On melancholy hill”

<< #14    |    #12 >>

Anyone who’s been reading my words on music for a while now knows that I’ve been a pretty big Blur fan since the very beginning. But what about Damon Albarn’s other music projects? Well, I did enjoy me some of The Good, The Bad & The Queen’s only LP and his solo album, “Everyday robots” also had some very fine moments. Where Gorillaz are concerned, however, my thoughts are decidedly mixed.

I thought the concept was fantastic. A virtual band that was just as much a multimedia experiment as it was a serious musical project, throw in Albarn’s talents and those of Jamie Hewlett, one of the comic artists behind “Tank girl” and you have some serious potential. But given the heavy hip hop influence, especially on the first couple of albums, I didn’t find myself all that interested. There were exceptions, of course. I really liked the first single, “Clint Eastwood”, and also, “Hong Kong”, off the “Help: a day in the life” compilation and this track, “Up on melancholy hill”.

It appears on Gorillaz third album, “Plastic beach”, but I didn’t hear it there first. I blame AUX TV for this. For a while there back in 2010, I spent a lot of time watching that channel, or half-watching it, as the case may be. I was quite enthused to find a cable channel that actually played music videos again. And not just the popular music videos, but quite the mix of music, much of it new and hip. It became part of my early morning routine to switch AUX TV on and listen to tunes while I was making my lunch and brewing espresso for my wife’s and my morning lattes. I discovered a lot of music in this way that year and also rediscovered my love for watching music videos.

The video for “On melancholy hill” was played regularly on AUX in the summer of 2010 and it’s a great one too. Some pretty fantastic animation by Hewlett has band member Noodle gunning down some Korean War era planes before surviving a boat explosion in the open waters. Other fantastic adventures follow under the deep blue sea that include the other band members and some “superfast jellyfish” but you don’t need me to explain all that. You can just watch the video below.

And oh yeah, the song… well, it’s a catchy one. A real pop gem. It could have something to do with the time of year that I first heard it but it’s a real summer song for me. It’s sunshine and happy days. It’s not your typical danceable number but I think it would be a fun one to hear at a club nonetheless. Alternatively, it fits quite nicely in a lounge or playing on your boombox while you languish out by the pool. The melody is just so simple and laidback and Damon Albarn’s vocals are forefront, drifting lazily over the synths, like he’s there just singing you off to la la land. Beautiful.

For the rest of the Best tunes of 2010 list, click here.

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Tunes

Best tunes of 1990: #6 Inspiral Carpets “Commercial rain”

<< #7    |    #5 >>

From my last Best tunes of 1990 post to this one, it’s like I’m jumping from one dance floor to another. I finished up blathering about The Sisters Of Mercy’s “More” with a memory of dancing to it in my high school auditorium but I never did get to dance to Inspiral Carpets in those days. My friends and I discovered them a tad too late, though we did try. As I recall, my friend Andrew Rodriguez put in a request for “Dragging me down” at one of our final dances and the DJ just shook his head in disbelief. He thought Rodriguez was having him on because he had never heard of ‘Inspirational Carpets’.

However, leap forward two or three or four years and I was dancing to this particular track pretty much every Friday or Saturday night at the Dance Cave in Toronto. Released as a stand-alone single in the UK but released on the US version of “Life”, “Commercial rain” has no depth lyrically. It contains a handful of words, repeated over and over, the only ones of which I even understood before googling them this week were: “Ah, commercial rain.” But the words are of little import here, the song was built for the dance floor.

Inspiral Carpets came out of the same acid house scene as their greater Manchester neighbours, The Happy Mondays and The Stone Roses, though they never did go on to the same modicum of success as those other two. Their sound was well-defined by Craig Gill’s funky drumming, frontman Tom Hingley’s flat but distinctive vocals, and of course, Clint Boon’s whirling organ work. This last is definitely the focal point of “Commercial rain”. It bobs and weaves around the screeching guitars and the upbeat and reverberating rhythms laid down by Gill, all ephemeral, like the sun’s reflection off a watch face or a laser beam refracting off a disco ball. It fills you up with pure joy and begs to be expelled by the burning off of dance floor energy.

Being that this is the second appearance by the Inspiral Carpets on this list and that the words about “This is how it feels” (at #20) were written by my friend, the aforementioned Andrew Rodriguez, I feel it only right to finish off this post with his words here too:

Solid beat? Check. Hypnotising organ work? Check. Mesmerising reverb effects? Definitely a check. Nonsensical but somehow sensible lyrics? Check. 1990’s “Commercial rain” (or “Reign”, depending upon who you talk to) was one of the Inspiral Carpets’ first big songs. While their sound did vary, this one epitomises them at their manic best. As a song, it also encapsulates a time and place tidily – early 90s (Greater) Manchester, at the height of the ‘Madchester’ era. That said, danceability isnt confined by time and space… “Commercial rain” is an infectious groove – and you’ll get down with it wherever and whenever you hear it. As the old Inspirals t-shirt said: “Cool as fuck”.

For the rest of the Best tunes of 1990 list, click here.

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Tunes

Best tunes of 2001: #25 R.E.M. “Imitation of life”

#24 >>

And so here we are, all hallow’s eve, as good a time as any to start up a new series. You might have noticed that I finished up my Best of 2000 list a few weeks ago, and so now we’re on to 2001. This list is a bit longer than the one I did up for 2000 but I still haven’t quite gotten to thirty songs for the naughties decade (perhaps for 2002?). First up here, at song number twenty-five, is R.E.M. with their track “Imitation of life”.

As I’ve already mentioned already in this pages, I’ve been following Athens, Georgia’s finest since “Green” hit the charts when I was a teenie-bopper and would most definitely call myself a big fan. I recently endeavoured to narrow down my top five favourite tunes by R.E.M., a rough task, given their vast body of work, and posted the results on these pages. Looking back it at now, it’s noticeable that not one of the songs that made the final five were recorded after the end of the 90s. I personally found the early part of the 00s my least favourite period in R.E.M.’s catalogue, a period of albums that for the most part sounded like watered down versions of their best work, but still, there were some gems to be found.

One such example is “Imitation of life”, the first single off “Reveal”, buried deep in side two of the mix. It bears all the hallmarks of their sound. Peter Buck jangles and Michael Stipe hems and haws through half-nonsensical lyrics. Buck himself has admitted that the song feels like it is plagiarized from one of their early tracks. And yet, there’s something about it (isn’t there?) that begs for head bopping and singing along, especially at the bridge at the 2:40 mark when Buck and Mike Mills sit back, ease off on their instruments and let Stipe do his thing.

“This sugarcane
This lemonade
This hurricane, I’m not afraid
C’mon, c’mon no one can see me cry”

And lastly, if you haven’t seen it, have a gander at the neat-o video below. It’s the same twenty second shot played over and over, in forwards and reverse, simply focusing at different segments in the shot. Good stuff.

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