Tag: Twee

Categories
Tunes

Best tunes of 2012: #6 Allo Darlin’ “Tallulah”

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Rather than my typical blathering about the band and song in question, I thought I’d instead present some sections of a short story I wrote close to a decade ago, words that were inspired by this particular song.* It’s a road trip story for a road trip song.

We’re on highway seventeen scarcely passed Wawa and its gigantic steel goose when Tallulah makes her third appearance that day. She’s a stark contrast to the blazing guns from the last song, which pushed the needle on the speedometer to a comfortable hum, hovering just over the 100 mark, and propelling the ten-year-old, borrowed PT Cruiser headlong into a horizon all streaked with reds and oranges.

The sun is low and yet the wind whipping through the cranked windows is hot and sticky, the humidity just aching to break. Still, humidity drenched wind is better than the useless AC. We have the stereo volume knob tuned to towering heights just to be able hear it and yet, neither the wind nor the music has disturbed the sleep of my friend Simon in the passenger seat. There’s been barely a stir since he conked out a few hours ago.

I turn the volume knob clockwise even more to try to bring out the majesty of the whispery ukulele strumming and the rough innocence of the soft female vocals. It’s not your typical driving tune and an odd choice for a mix created for a road trip. Indeed, it is the quietest tune on the CDR, the rest comprising of a mix of classic alt rock and hip new indie numbers, many of which I’ve never heard of. If I didn’t know Simon better, I would’ve assumed he was showing off the knowledge he’s amassed over the years and has him as the most popular radio DJ on Indie 88. But really, that’s not his style.

Simon had explained (when putting the disc on after we lost reception to “his station” a half hour outside of Toronto) that this was the song that inspired the idea of this road trip in the first place.

I had listened to the first innocuous strums and nodded. “Who is it?”
Simon’s face made an almost imperceptibly wistful expression as he watched the traffic on the highway ahead of him, an expression he had almost hidden but I had caught it. “Allo Darlin’.”

“It’s a sh*t name.”

“You were always more concerned with band names than I was, Rob, but I admit it’s not the best choice I’ve heard.” He paused, expecting more protests from my side of the car but getting none, he continued. “They’re pretty great though. They’re this English twee-pop influenced band with a folk edge, built around the song writing of the singer. I think her name is Elizabeth Morris.”

“You think?” This was sarcasm.

“The talk I originally heard was that the song title was a nod to influential C86 band Talulah Gosh but other sources have since cited the album ‘Tallulah’ by Australian alt-rock band, The Go-betweens. I prefer the former but think the latter more likely, given that the singer also hails from Australia.” He continued on in this vein, unloading all the trivial bits of information related to the band, the song, the album, and other music of similar sound, but I had begun to tune him out, getting lost in the spaces between the twinkling strums of the ukulele. The sound of this instrument always reminded me of grade six music class, when our eccentric teacher sprang ukuleles on the class, rather than the usual session on learning the recorder. It wasn’t long before some smartass in the class figured out the melody to the theme from Peter Gunn and had the whole class playing it.

I take off my now unnecessary sunglasses because I want to hear the song lyrics better. Lord knows, the volume knob won’t help anymore. The words are drenched in contemplative nostalgia and sung with a bright sadness and a time worn edge, telling a tale of a road trip, much like the one we’re on, except we are driving in rural, northern Ontario, not the east coast of Australia.

And this – the car, the tunes, the dog days of summer, the company, the kilometres behind us and the ones left ahead – suddenly makes sense, much more than anything did two weeks ago, when I had received that seemingly random email from Simon French.

***

But wait, there it was again. That line, or rather two, that had punctured something in me the first time I heard it this morning: “I’m wondering if I’ve already heard all the songs that will mean something. And I’m wondering if I’ve already met all the people that will mean something.”

*Obviously, any song that inspires me to write is a great one in my books.

For the rest of the Best tunes of 2012 list, click here.

Categories
Albums

Best albums of 2000: #5 Belle and Sebastian “Fold your hands child, you walk like a peasant”

Belle and Sebastian were never supposed to be anything more than a project, one that recorded and released a bunch of material in a short period and faded away into the night. They definitely weren’t supposed to be a successful indie pop group that amassed a rabid following on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean and were still releasing new work more than twenty five years in. They started off along the right track, releasing three albums and four EPs in the span of three years but then something happened that derailed their trajectory. I won’t formulate any theories or hazard any guesses but I will say that the result was the group’s fourth long player and everything that happened afterwards.

“Fold your hands child, you walk like a peasant” was my first experience with listening to a new Belle and Sebastian album just after it was released. I had gotten into the Scottish collective after had they released their third album, “The boy with the arab strap”, on suggestion from my university friend Darrell, who said you can’t go wrong with any of their releases, just pick one. I went with the green album cover and worked backwards from there. As it turned out, “Fold your hands child” was also the first of their albums that I didn’t take to right away.*

The fourth album’s title was taken from a piece of graffiti that frontman Stuart Murdoch had found scrawled in a university toilet. The front cover is a photo that he took of Icelandic twins, Gyða and Kristín Anna Valtýsdóttir (both from the band Múm), and the back cover is a deconstructed photo of the view from the window of a laundromat he frequented. The music on the album, though, was not all Stuart. Indeed, it furthered the trend first brokered on “The boy with the arab strap” of more collaboration within the group, shared songwriting and vocal duties. The recording sessions were difficult and took longer than previous ones, which Murdoch attributes to the darker tone and more complex arrangements and song structures. Murdoch has said the album reflects perfectly what the band’s life was like at that point in time and changed everything going forward. It was the last one that featured founding bassist Stuart David and the second last to feature Isobel Campbell.

“Fold your hands child, you walk like a peasant” still isn’t my favourite album by the group but that doesn’t make it bad at all. In fact, I have grown to appreciate it and it now holds a very special place in my heart. Each of its eleven songs brings back a flood of memories, especially the three I have picked for you to sample.

”The chalet lines”: Talk about dark. Songs don’t get much more depressing than this one, nor can you find opening lines more attention grabbing than: “He raped me in the chalet lines”. Stuart Murdoch’s voice and the soft way he uses it to say those words and of course, the tentative piano notes in the opening, pretty much set the tone and signal this to be a real feel bad story. It was inspired by the experiences of an acquaintance of Murdoch’s at a type of holiday camp where the “chalets” are laid out in a row, the very same type of which was where he met the Icelandic twin sisters that grace the album’s cover during a music festival party. The protagonist was raped during such a party at the camp where she worked and she struggles with feeling different now than her friends, not being understood, not reporting the offence, and worrying that she had gotten pregnant. The minimalism – voice, piano, and plaintive cello – and the imagery (“Her face was just a smear on the pane”) do plenty to keep the two and a half minute dirge from taking a detour into sentimentality.

”The model”: Track two on the album is a real danceable number, the kind where you close your eyes and flail about with abandon and a lack of grace. In this way, it reminds me of my favourite B&S number, the title track off the previous album, and much like that one, the words are a litany, a stream of consciousness, a story within a story within a story. But here, in amongst the harpsichord backbone and flute and horn flourishes, one may find slightly more complexities and melodies and tighter pop sensibilities. On vocals, Murdoch relinquishes total control, allowing Stevie Jackson to voice four of the forty lines, the sixth line of every stanza. This jogs the head a bit, suggesting a different point or interjection, playing with the reliability of the confession. Perhaps it’s not just a simple pop song, then? With this lot, it never is. “But you wouldn’t laugh at all and I wonder what the boy was thinking. The picture was an old collage of something classical, the model with a tragic air.”

”I fought in a war”: My final pick for you is the opening track on the album, a song, in my opinion, which is the one with the closest resemblance to the work on their earlier albums. And given that it was the first song I heard upon my first go through the album, it was instantly recognizable and in this way, feels like the group’s technique of weening its fans from everything that came before. But even here, the subject matter is darker, the tone heavy, a weight on the breezy melody and the bright horn blares. Beware, though, don’t get taken in by the title and lyrics and fall into the open trap left by Murdoch into thinking this a protest song. He has said that it is in fact inspired by a Salinger story, “For Esmé – with love and squalor”, one that I read ages by sadly, don’t exactly remember so I may have to re-read. I imagine though it might be about a lost love, given the metaphorical imagery of the song. “And I reminded myself of the looks you gave when we were getting on, and I bet you’re making shells back home for a steady man to wear round his neck, well it won’t hurt to think of you as if you’re waiting for this letter to arrive because I’ll be here quite a while.” Lovely stuff.

*And from what I’ve read by the critics and the like, I don’t think I was the only one.

Check back two Thursdays from today for album #4. In the meantime, here are the previous albums in this list:

10. Richard Ashcroft “Alone with everybody”
9. The New Pornographers “Mass romantic”
8. The Cure  “Bloodflowers”
7. The Weakerthans “Left and leaving”
6. The Clientele “Suburban light”

You can also check out my Best Albums page here if you’re interested in my other favourite albums lists.

Categories
Vinyl

Vinyl love: Camera Obscura “Desire lines”

(Vinyl Love is a series of posts that quite simply lists, describes, and displays the pieces in my growing vinyl collection. You can bet that each record was given a spin during the drafting of each corresponding post.)

Artist: Camera Obscura
Album Title: Desire lines
Year released: 2013
Details: Black vinyl, gatefold sleeve

The skinny: The fifth and final album (so far) by Camera Obscura was the first by the band to be purchased for my collection. In fact, it was a part of a good handful of discs to be sitting on my shelves before I even got around to purchasing a turntable. I had started collecting the previous spring and given that most new releases at the time were coming with download cards for digital versions of the album, it just made sense to go this route. I distinctly remember driving downtown on a Sunday afternoon and going to the now closed Compact Music location on Bank street and finding it right there on the new releases display rack. It felt so great in my hands. Of course, I didn’t know then that this would be their last album with keyboardist Carey Lander. After she died of osteosarcoma in 2015, the band went on an extended hiatus. They were just getting a tour organized and starting to think about new material when COVID-19 put a stop to everything last spring. Here’s hoping the band gets back to it soon. We could use a bit of sunshine.

Standout track: “Fifth in line to the throne”