The Strictly Playlist #4
The Strictly Playlist returns for it’s fourth edition and this time it’s album reviewer extraordinaire Joe Hill’s turn to create his own perfect Reading and Leeds playlist.
If you want to hear the playlist it’s simple, all the song names are Youtube Links, we have a Grooveshark Player on the side of the page, and we have a giant Spotify link right here:
The Strictly Playlist #4 (Spotify Link)
It’s rare that moaning makes for such an uplifting experience. Christopher Owens’s spends two minutes listing the things he wishes he had (eg. a boyfriend, a father, a pizza etc.) but instead of making you want to tell him to get over himself, you just want to join in. It’s a song that celebrates what we haven’t got rather than what we have got, with a shrug of the shoulders and an invitation to enjoy the fact that we’re all as lost as each other.
2. Foo Fighters – “All My Life”
Dave Ghrol’s taut whisper and shredding yells have rarely sounded so dangerous. He sounds like a possessive ex-lover caught between pleading and making a threat, while the cardiac guitars pound harder and harder before they finally dissipate and collapse. Easily one of Foo Fighters’ heaviest singles, it still struck a chord with the public, to the surprise of Ghrol who thought that people would be turned off. For once, he was wrong.
3. The Dandy Warhols – “Not If You Were The Last Junkie On Earth”
One of the most underrated bands to ever achieve commercial success, The Dandy Warhols have far more to them than most people think. The most obvious single cut from their magnificent second album ‘…Come Down’, ‘Not If You Were The Last Junkie On Earth’ rolls its eyes at the scene-conscious posers who tried heroin because they thought it would make them cool while the music itself blurs the line between 60s psychedelica and 90s alt. rock.
4. Flying Lotus – “Do The Astral Plane”
The trouble with jazz is that it’s fairly difficult to make something new and challenging. John Coltrane’s ‘A Love Supreme’, for instance, is still great and it probably always will be, but it is most certainly of its time. Decades later and Coltrane’s great nephew has done his family proud. This song from Flying Lotus’s (aka Steven Ellison) latest LP ‘Cosmogramma’ seamlessly blends wonky-but-tight electronica, cinematic Bollywood-esque strings, buried with synthy squelches, trumpets and feverish jazz overtones. It’s uncompromising, challenging, effortlessly enjoyable and strangely danceable despite its irregularity. While it may sound of its time like ‘A Love Supreme’, ‘Cosmogramma’ will still sound great in 50 years.
If I might be personal for a moment, while I was fairly underwhelmed by the category-resistant Deerhunter’s ‘Halcyon Digest’ on the first few listens, I persevered and now there are very few records I am as hopelessly attached to as this one: a perfect LP. I had no choice but to pre-order it after hearing ‘Helicopter’, this achingly beautiful hymn to helplessness and vulnerability. When the album came through the post and I read the sleevenotes, I was shocked to find that it was inspired by an almost unrealistically tragic (but true) article about a Russian boy destroyed by the sex industry. ‘Helicopter’s triumph however, is that it’s still extraordinarily moving even when you don’t know its back-story.
6. The Black Angels – “Phosphene Dream”
While my parents were growing up, they were living in the shadow of “the bomb”. However, this was a time when the people “took to the streets”, wore lurid tie-dyed shirts and thought they could change the world with their can-do attitude. If the great underground bands of that era had a bit more of the hopelessness that we in the 21st century know so well, they might have sounded like The Black Angels. Their third LP ‘Phosphene Dream’ shows a huge, but subtle, progression. Their psychedelic drone-rock remains similar, but there are more ideas, a slightly less messy structure and – most importantly – brilliant songs. This title track seems to be sung by a soldier (think ‘Apocalypse Now’), but while Alex Maas shouts “I don’t need no drugs to kill, raise the rifle” the over-riding tone is of resignation rather than hatred.
7. PJ Harvey – “The Last Living Rose“
I’m writing this just after I’ve seen PJ Harvey accept her Mercury Music Prize for ‘Let England Shake’, but I would have chosen a song from this album anyway. It’s an album that refuses to get old, one as accessible as it is complex and one where each song has the atmosphere and vision of a great novel. ‘The Last Living Rose’, like the rest of the album, embraces England in all its flaws, painting squalid pictures of drunken fights in dingy alleys and making them seem like a safe-haven.
With Rihanna and Britney Spears constantly dancing provocatively in clothes that would make their mothers faint, Janelle Monae is in a tuxedo singing with such passion and writing songs of such musical finesse that neither of the former could hope to match up… this album peaked at number 51 in the UK. How is anyone’s guess, especially with songs like ‘Cold War’ which matches its own feverish energy with blinding, determined emotion. The album, ‘The ArchAndroid’, which is where this song comes from, is a sci-fi concept album which suits her ambition very neatly indeed.
9. The Czars – “Pressure”
The Czars’ difficult first album ‘Before…But Longer’ reveals itself very slowly. It seems impenetrable, but patience is a virtue and it eventually becomes spellbinding. Each strangely irregular and curious melody seems to bloom and die equally slowly. Singer John Grant only alludes to his demons tentatively throughout but they’re nonetheless omnipresent and his pain is captured in all its confusion in his beautiful voice. Here on ‘Pressure’, the hushed instrumentation seems to drift in and out of focus while Grant bargains with his own sadness.
Mogwai on record are impressive enough, but live they’re about as close to a spiritual experience as it is to get without breaking substance abuse laws. This layer-by-layer build-up from a chainsaw guitar buzz ranks as one of the highpoints of their latest album; a chorus of guitars humming that glorious tune while pyrotechnics seem to explode in their midst. I saw them at my local venue, Bexhill’s De La Warr Pavilion and fellow Strictly contributor and Mogwai fan Kyle Prangnell was working there that night and watching from the back. After this song had finished, he sent me a text message: “I think I’ve just been violated… but how good does this feel!”
I’m amazed at how many miserable albums are used to soundtrack dinner parties. The latest victim of this trend is The XX whose self-titled album sounds far too private, intimate and thoughtful to use in such a scenario. Its most cheerful moment is probably ‘VCR’, a fleeting image of a couple talking and watching old films long into the night. While it doesn’t say too much explicitly, what it suggests is far more lasting. It’s a love song that hardly mentions love at all; what it leaves you with is the impression that these two people really belong together and need each other, no matter how difficult they find it to put it into words.
12. New Radicals – “Mother We Just Can’t Get Enough”
While he only exploded into the public eye for a moment with the rousing anthem ‘You Get What You Give’, Gregg Alexander of the New Radicals is a well-kept secret. His early lo-fi solo albums under his own name were adored by Weezer’s Rivers Cuomo who named them a significant influence. Alexander then formed New Radicals and released a really great power-pop album which had its fair share of hugely rewarding oddities and instant hits, all with a slight tonuge-in-cheek sheen. Of the latter category was this opening track, which has a chorus that easily beats Kings of Leon’s ‘Sex on Fire’ for euphoria. Look closer though and you’ll notice that the lyrics, despite the music’s blindingly sunny exterior, seem to hint at heroin addiction and anxiety of hitting the ground in a crumpled heap. Pop rarely takes such risks as that.
Tags: Foo Fighters, Joe Hill, PJ Harvey, Strictly Playlist, the xx
