web analytics

Pop Rock Nation

Category: Music

  • The Daily Awesome: Radiohead “Let Down” (1997)

    After an artist has been as highly-regarded for as long as Radiohead has been, it’s easy to forget what was so exciting about that artist in the first place. After sneaking out from under future-one-hit-wonder status to usurp the title of World’s Greatest Living Rock Band from U2 in the mid-90s with their albums The Bends and OK Computer, Radiohead channeled their renown into crafting two of the strangest, most dissonant and experimental records to ever top the American pop charts – Kid A and Amnesiac.

    In the last decade, with the single ascendant (due to the advent of iTunes and easy piracy), Radiohead have almost single-handedly kept the album relevant as a form. Which is why it was sort of disheartening, if not entirely surprising, to hear Thom Yorke talk about the band moving away from recording albums after the release of 2007’s In Rainbows. 15 years after The Bends, it’s easy to take for granted that Radiohead have been the greatest album band of their time; but it’s even easier to forget that the band first got our attention by just writing some really good songs (“Creep” among them, to my thinking). Tonight, I was taking the long way home from work because I just got a new car – one that I can plug my iPod into! I had it playing on shuffle and when I heard the shimmering opening notes of “Let Down”, I didn’t even recognize it. It was like I was hearing the song – which I had in heavy rotation on my Walkman in the summer of ’97 – for the very first time. The way Yorke sings the verses in gradually expanding ellipses of melody; the way his voice maintains a flatness and distance even as the music behind him grows grander and more urgent; the layers of shimmer and twinkle, delicately plucked arpeggios and folky strumming chords backing up lyrical images of disappointed people “clinging to bottles”. I’m not sure how serious Thom Yorke was about Radiohead focusing entirely on singles – and Radiohead have always been a band that thrive when they’re defying expectations, even the ones they’ve helped to perpetuate – but if, in fact, they never release another album, I have every reason to suspect that they’ll become the Greatest Living Singles Band in the World. Songs like this are why.

  • The Daily Awesome 8/25/10: Hot Chocolate “Love Is Life” (1970)

    Five years before they scored their biggest U.S. hit with “You Sexy Thing”, the band Hot Chocolate, after a brief fling with the Beatles’ Apple label (which put out a 45 of the group’s cover of “Give Peace a Chance”) made their first trip up the British charts with this single “Love Is Life”, a song that marks the intersections between R&B and bubblegum, the Carribean and the spaghetti Western, with its dramatic arrangements of winds and strings over a calypso-inflected beat. Though it became a top 10 hit for the group, they would have trouble following it up; and in the meantime their songs were becoming bigger hits on the other side of the Atlantic – only for other artists. Stories hit #1 with their cover of Hot Chocolate’s “Brother Louie” and Canadian hard rockers April Wine hit the Top 40 with “You Could Have Been a Lady”. So inconsistent was their singles performance that it wouldn’t be until 1974 that they released their first full-length album Cicero Park. In the last couple of years, the British 7ts label has put out some really wonderful reissues of the band’s heyday records. The reissue of Cicero Park includes a second disc compiling their early singles starting with “Love Is Life” (sadly – no “Give Peace a Chance”).

  • The Friday Morning Awesome: Kaleidoscope “Please” (1967)

    Most celebrated as the band that delivered the song “O Death” from the Stanley Brothers to Camper Van Beethoven, the L.A.-based quintet Kaleidoscope was formed in the mid-60s around singer-multi-instrumentalists David Lindley and Solomon Feldthouse, the former (who would go on to play in Jackson Browne’s band in the 70s) schooled in bluegrass, western swing and vaudeville, the latter in modal jazz, Middle Eastern and Balkan folk music. Over four years and four albums, Kaleidoscope dropped these two wide-ranging collections of influences into a vat of boiling South California acid folk with some often pretty fascinating results. But don’t let all that make you think the band made “difficult” music.

    Their debut single “Please” is an amiable, immediately ingratiating folk tune about a guy just learning to make his way in the world without undue (however well-meaning) outside interference. Feldthouse sings the verses with a talky matter-of-fact-ness. The lyrics are thoughtful and firm (“I know you mean to help… but don’t you realize you can’t live my life”), and the chorus is mostly just a single word – “Please” – which he holds solidly on a single note while harmonies shift and swirl all around him for nearly ten seconds. And finally, this simple request: Don’t say nothing at all. Just stand by me.