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Best tunes of 2003: #4 Elbow “Fugitive motel”

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I wrote about how I fell in love with Elbow and their first album, 2001’s “Asleep in the back”, in a couple posts about tracks that were amongst my favourites of that year*. Indeed, I became quite obsessed with the Manchester-based quintet, name checking them with all my friends, recommending their music at every chance I got, describing their sound as epic and bombastic. I’m sure my friends got sick of hearing about them and being who they were, took every advantage to rib me and poke fun. I didn’t care. I just pressed repeat.

When I heard a sophomore album was being released, I went out to the local HMV and purchased “Cast of thousands” on CD as soon as it was possible. I didn’t even consider there would be a letdown given my lofty expectations and thankfully, the album didn’t disappoint in the least. Titled for the idea that they enlisted and recorded the Glastonbury crowd singing the refrain of one of the album’s tracks but really evoking how the band doubled down on the followup to their successful debut. Listening to the album over and over again that first week, I came up with a new descriptor for them: beauty, personified.

I distinctly remember taking the CD with me on a trip down to Toronto to visit my friends, Discman company for the long Greyhound bus ride, there and back. I stayed with my friend Tim that weekend, whose birthday it was, if I correctly recall, sleeping on the pullout couch in his basement apartment. On one of the afternoons, a couple of other friends came over and we span tunes, drank beers, ate Pizza Pizza pizza, and played Axis and Allies** for hours. When it was my turn to select the tunes, I slipped on “Cast of thousands” much to the eye rolling of my friends and though I think they got more of an appreciation, I don’t think any of them were entirely sold or as enthusiastic about the album as I was. Maybe it was my fault for talking it up so much. Their loss.

“I blow you a kiss
It should reach you tomorrow
As it flies from the other side of the world”

The second single and track three on the album is “Fugitive motel”. It begins with the barking of dogs off in the distance, followed by sinister guitars, a brushing away at the drums, strings awash, and a lonely piano. Over it all is Guy Garvey’s plaintive vocals, a depth of tone, and a layer of guilt and hurt. His is a protagonist, disheveled and unshaven but unwavering in hope in the face of eternity. It is less a narrative than a feeling – lovelorn and lost and far away. Strong imagery, cinematic in scope, the cheap and seedy hotel room as a prison, a captive in a dream, the whole world desolate and forgotten. But still Guy waits.

*”Red” came in at number twelve and “Any day now” was the top song on the list.

**A strategy game, not unlike Risk but more involved, in which you redo WWII.

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

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Tunes

100 best covers: #30 Eddie Vedder “You’ve got to hide your love away”

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Well, we’re finally breaking into the top thirty on this list of my favourite ever covers and it’s Pearl Jam frontman doing The Beatles’ “You’ve got to hide your love away”.

This is the fourth cover of a Beatles song we’ve seen on the list so far* and the third track to be pulled from the “I am Sam” soundtrack. In the two previous such posts, I mentioned how the soundtrack for the 2001 film consists solely of Beatles covers, faithful in track length and time signatures, given the filmmakers were not granted the rights to include the originals and that the songs had already been selected for already filmed scenes. It was a brilliant save by the filmmakers and the result is probably a more interesting soundtrack than it might have been, as great as The Beatles’ originals of those seventeen songs were.

It’s no accident that I am timing this post to follow the one counting down albums ten through six in my Best film soundtrack series. If you’ve been following along, you’d know that “I am Sam” didn’t appear as one my honourable mentions back on February 1st, nor was it amongst the latter half of my top ten. And when I saw this particular post on radar to write, I thought I’d take the opportunity to clear the air before moving into the top five – “I am Sam” won’t be one of them. Great concept yes, and some of the renditions were quite successful, but I’d say that almost of half of them were less so, making the whole less than its parts. An uneven listen.

Eddie Vedder’s cover was another one of the bright spots. Faithful to the original, not only in sound but also in spirit, a playful wink of the eye.

Much has been made of the fact that the John Lennon-penned “You’ve got to hide your love away” was his attempt at Bob Dylan. Successful or not, the fourth track on side one of 1965’s “Help” album is Lennon singing solo overtop a bed made of mostly acoustic guitars. Sure there’s a bit of percussion but it’s definitely before Dylan went electric and where Mr. Zimmerman would typically accompany himself with a harmonica, The Beatles opted for some flutes in its place.

Vedder opted for similar ethos with his cover. You can almost imagine him standing on a New York City street corner with a harmonica neck holder around his neck, a kick pedal attached to a high hat at his feet. The production even sounds dusty, DIY, and of a different time.

Lovely stuff indeed. Better than the original? Well…

Cover:

Original:

*The three previous posts were Rufus Wainwright’s “Across the universe” at #90, Cornershop’s “Norwegian wood (this bird has flown” at #69, and Sarah McLachlan’s “Blackbird” at #58.

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

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Tunes

Best tunes of 2020: #8 No Joy “Birthmark”

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It’s been just shy of four months since we last visited this series counting down my favourite tunes of 2020.

I don’t know that I’ve stayed away on purpose. I do have a few series on the go and the usual end of year festivities often take up lots of blog space. However, I admit that I’ve been finding 2020 an odd year to look back upon of late. Sure there was lots of great music being produced with all these musicians locked up with nothing else to do, but the rest of us were also locked up. It often feels like a lost year* and I’m sure I’m not alone with this feeling.

Indeed, every time I sat down to write this post, I found myself getting distracted by something else. Most recently, I went down the rabbit hole of looking at the timelines and the numbers of the COVID pandemic and it brought it all back. It’s perhaps easy to forget how bad things looked early on and all the fear and uncertainty. The numbers of the rates of infection, how quickly things spread, and how many deaths there were early on. Faced with the stats, it made me think how bad things could have gotten if it weren’t for the measures taken and for the mass roll outs of the vaccines worldwide. I remembered the empty grocery shelves, the low gas prices, the almost daily trips to Costco in search of toilet paper and disinfectant wipes. The stories of resilience, human nature winning out, images of deserted streets of some of the world’s biggest cities, and that video of Italian seniors singing together from the windows of each of their homes.

That last reminded me about all the stories coming out of the seniors facilities during the lockdowns. Hearing how the virus ran rampant through each of them, despite the valiant efforts of staff. How it hit certain residents hard, given their age and in some cases, already poor health, how the mortality rate was even higher. How the isolation made things even harder for loved ones to check in on family members in these homes. The word was that some were terribly frightened, remembering the previous pandemic of their youth, and some were not really understanding what was going on and feeling abandoned. And though I’m sure things are quite different and much improved in these facilities nowadays, I met and spoke to a few seniors when I was in the hospital last year and heard some stories and got a different perspective. Imagine, preferring to stay in the hospital than to return to your ‘home’.

Which brings me back to the real subject of today’s post. “Birthmark”, the number eight song on this list of my favourite tunes from 2020, was actually inspired by Jasamine White-Gluz, frontwoman and driving force behind Montreal’s No Joy, visiting a relative in senior living facility a few years before the pandemic. It’s not a protest song or a call to arms for seniors rights but it does shine a light on their humanity.

“Oh I braid your veins
Our old limbs are hard to break
No Matter when
Every lung has a line to trace”

As I wrote when No Joy’s fourth long player hit number four on my Best albums list at the end of 2020, the “opening track on the album and very first peek at the project’s first new album in five years hits like a ton of bricks. It’s the sound of 90s shoegaze gone 90s alternative dance. Think Chapterhouse’s second album “Blood music” or anything by Curve. Like the rest of the album, Jasamine White-Gluz had a lot of fun with this one in the studio, finding use for a set of bongos and apparently, a broken clarinet. The bongos are definitely front and centre and form the basis of a dance floor beckoning drum rhythm but I challenge you to point out the clarinet in the wall of sound she’s created in the loops and loops and loops.”

*There’s been a couple of those for me in the last five…

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