Do You Remember The First Time? #4 Grandaddy - Jed's Other Poem

In my review of Mercury Rev's performance of Deserters Songs at the Roundhouse a few months ago, I was initially sceptical of the album's place in the pantheon of modern Americana classics, alongside the likes of the Flaming Lips' The Soft Bulletin, Wilco's Yankee Hotel Foxtrot and Grandaddy's Under The Western Freeway. But in truth, when anyone compiles such a list, it's inevitably Grandaddy that gets missed out. That was the story of their career in a nutshell; perenially underloved and under the radar, their eventual dissolution in 2006 nonetheless caused considerable mourning amongst their followers, and an outcry for this band to be acknowldeged by a wider audience.

Their call has, in part, been answered by this coming Monday's release of the deluxe edition of 2000's The Sophtware Slump. Every bit as good as debut Under The Western Freeway, it consolidated the band's knack for odd, yet deceptively simple and strangely affecting indie-rock songwriting, underscored by the sadsack voice of front man and chief creative talent Jason Lytle. On its release, The Sophtware Slump gained, with some justification, comparisons with Radiohead's OK Computer for its similar underlying themes of extraterrestrialism, loneliness, and man's struggles with technology. But in contrast with Thom Yorke's cut-and-paste lyrical vagaries, Lytle's words give us a strong visual image and carry real emotional resonance, no matter how strange the circumstances. Broken Household Appliance National Forest for instance, simultaneously draws anger at man's wastefulness and lack of regard for natural habitat, and yet we are able to draw a warm feeling of satisfaction from the deers, frogs and other woodland critters that contentedly make their home amongst the deserted refridgerators and air condition units. Then there's the poor soul in Miner At The Dial-A-View (what is the Dial-A-View exactly? Some kind of pay-per-view precursor of Google Earth perhaps?) looking at images of his home and longing for his return. It's a fine distillation of the feelings of loneliness and re-kindling of long-distant memories (both in terms of time and physical distance) that the band first touched upon on Under The Western Freeway's Everything Beautiful Is Far Away.

Perhaps the strongest recurring theme within The Sophtware Slump is one of obscelescence. There's the astronaut who touches back down to Earth on He's Simple, He's Dumb, He's The Pilot to find a planet which has moved on without him (possibly the same character who makes his weary getaway on the album's final song So You'll Aim Toward The Sky). And then there's the sorry story of Jed The Humanoid who, on becoming despondant after his neglect by his creators as they go on to devise more advanced creations, goes off the rails and ends up meeting an early robot grave. Perhaps the album's most stirring moment is Jed's Other Poem, a reprise of the story which unearths a hitherto undiscovered poem,written by the humanoid  himself, recording his own downfall. It delivers what is both the album's most humourous and devestating passage ("I try to sing it funny like Beck but it's bringing me down/Lower than ground/Beautiful Ground") before fading into the ether over a rippling piano. Listen to it below and then, if you haven't already, go out and get The Sophtware Slump and give this band some posthumous credit.

Do You Remember The First Time? #3 Grizzly Bear - On A Neck, On A Spit

Most music critics and their dogs will have you believe that 2009's Veckatimest was Grizzly Bear's masterpiece-to-date, the album we'd been waiting for them to deliver. They're wrong. Whilst there's plenty to admire about the meticulously arranged avante-pop of Veckatimest, it was distinctly lacking in the atmosphere that was dripping from their preceding album, Yellow House. Possibly my favourite album of 2006, Yellow House was a haunting set of songs; enticing you in with the wispy flutes of Easier, the album guided you by the hand through what felt like a rich undergrowth; songs like Little Brother chitter with wildlife. But that warm welcome is quickly withdrawn and a feeling of unease sets in, as supicious voices whisper incoherently around you. Guitars creak and roar into life like tree branches moving in the wind. Ghostly ballads like Plans and Marla give a genuine sense of the creeps. By the time the album's brooding closer Colorado comes to an end you feel like you've come through an ordeal, and yet as you look back and see the sun peeking through the foliage, you can't help but want to wander in again.

I was introduced to Grizzly Bear via its centrepiece On A Neck, On A Spit, and it remains my favourite song of theirs. In many ways, it encapsulates everything that is so great about Grizzly Bear, both then and now. The song's first half is hushed and rustic, threatening to burst into life with thick stabs of acoustic guitar  and rumbling guitars before withdrawing once more. Then a rich, nimble acoustic guitar line threads its way in and the song steadily picks up momentum, leading to the kind of barnstorming climax that the band have perhaps become just a little too over-reliant on ever since. But here it feels like rich reward for riding with the song's highs and lows.

In recent performances, the band have done away with the song's first half and cut straight to the chase, which says a lot about the band's subsequent musical trajectory. Here it is in full, as it should be heard:

Do You Remember The First Time? #2: The Replacements - Sixteen Blue

The Replacements did more than their fair share of jerking around on and off stage as well as on record, but they nonetheless had an innate ability to write a song that really connected with disaffected teens in a more earnest way than the likes of Nirvana et al ever could or would some 5-10 years later. Singer/songwriter Paul Westerberg's sensitive side is something which came through more and more with each Replacements release, but even as early as Johnny's Gonna Die from 1981 debut Sorry Ma, Forgot To Take Out The Trash!, Westerberg had a way with an affecting lyric.

The Replacements song that I adore above all others is Sixteen Blue from their undisputed classic album, 1984's Let It Be, a song about the sexual confusion and frustration which comes with being a teenager. To be truthful, it's a song I didn't listen to until I was 24, so I can't claim to be the song's target market, but such is the song's power, it almost makes me want to be sixteen again, just so I can connect with it that more resonantly. I love the way Westerberg takes on the role of a kind of sympathetic older sibling who puts his arm round you as the rest of the world seems to be mocking you ("You're looking funny/you ain't laughing are you?"). He's lived through it all, and throughout the song it's like you're confiding in him; "Your age is the hardest age/everything drags and drags" he tells you. The problem faced by the pained teen of Sixteen Blue isn't even as simple as getting the girl; "A girl and a man/a boy and a man/everything's sexually vague/now you're wondering to yourself if you might be gay". Nonetheless, there's a sweet naivety to the song ("You don't understand anything sexual") that no longer quite rings true in a time when teenage pregnancies seem to be ever on the rise.

The song  closes with Westerberg howling as the late, great  Bob Stinson delivers one of his most soaring guitar solos. Along with Unsatisfied (which, as the title suggests, is the Replacements' own  anthem of (I Can't Get No) Satisfaction proportions) and Answering Machine (whose line "how can I say I miss you to an answering machine?" depicts the breakdown of one-to-one communication before the days of social networking), Sixteen Blue forms the heart of Let It Be, one which beats just as hard and heavy as it did in 1984.

Listen to Sixteen Blue by The Replacements for a limited time on the Hear The Secret player!

Do You Remember The First Time? The Dismemberment Plan - The City

In this semi-regular feature, I reminisce on the song which, if not introducing me to an artist for the first time, made some kind of indelible and irreversible impact on me.

For this first entry, I have decided to coincide it with the news of the reunion of The Dismemberment Plan. The Washington DC band have announced they will be playing together for the first time since their brief 2007 reunion for selected dates across the U.S., but have hinted that there may be more to come from them. Here's a full list:

(all in Jan 2011)

21/01 Washington, DC - Black Cat
22/01 Washington, DC - 9:30 Club
27/01 Philadelphia, PA - Starlight Ballroom
28/01 Boston, MA - Paradise
29/01 New York, NY - Webster Hall

30/01 New York, NY - Webster Hall

I have to admit, my first experience with the D-Plan was not an entirely enjoyable one. Listening to 1999’s Emergency & I  (to be reissued next January) for the first time, there was no question that there was something a bit different about them, but their mixture of gurgling keyboards, perplexing time signatures, emo vocals and nagging guitars just didn’t gel with me initially. But The City, the album’s anthem and centrepiece, was a song I could instantly take to: it’s whirring synths, steady stabs of guitar, the pattering drums  all the while building up to that moment of release when Travis Morrision screams “since you’ve been goooooooone”.

It was enough to make me return to the album a year or two later, and sure enough everything made much more sense second time around. Sure, Morrison’s vocals may be “emo”, but they’re without that irritating nasal tone one associates with the genre, and he possesses a vocal range and versatility that left most of his contemporaries standing. Lyrically too, he was streets ahead; “I’ve lost my membership card to the human race/so don’t forget the face/’cus I know that I do belong here” he sings monotonically on What Do You Want Me To Say. This versatility can be applied to the record as a whole too; from the rollercoaster choruses of Gyroscope and 8 1/2 Minutes, to the deranged likes of Girl O' Clock and I Love A Magician, and the unnerving atmospherics of The Jitters, Emergency & I is a stellar collection of songs. Now with the D-Plan's re-union, I feel added impetus to add to that sole entry in my collection.

Listen to This City by The Dismemberment Plan on the "Hear The Secret" music player!