Broken Social Scene · Grey Nicholson

“I Did Your Wife a Favour” (the 2008-01-11 Friday Fetch-it)

2008-01-11T22:32:00+00:00

Melancholy is a subtle mood. There are lots of songs I find uplifting and essentially happy, that other people think are morose, sad and a general downer. So, depending on which half of the glass you prefer to focus on, Winter Killing could go either way.

It begins abruptly—not “Decent Days And Nights” abruptly, but abruptly nonetheless: there's no intro (strictly, there are 1½ beats before Stina Nordenstam starts singing—hardly an intro) and the song arrives fully-formed.

The intimate electric guitar line (which acts as a bassline despite being much further up in the register) and percussive rhythm that form the song's backbone are present right from the start, as are Stina's vocals. Her vocals are distinctive: close-mic'ed, quiet and understated, with a breathiness and an accent that tend to knit the words together in a slur; her vocals are almost drawled.

When the chorus arrives for the first time, the accompaniment does little to acknowledge that this is actually the chorus; the few extra sparkles are subtle. It doesn't have to do much—the lyrics drop back and let the instruments take over, while still asserting themselves by their repetition.

The lyrics seem to speak warmly of togetherness: “you're safer with me here”. Then, after three of those affirmations and half a minute in that frame of mind, the punchline comes with a wry smile: “and you there”.

As understated as the chorus is, it's still a grooveable sing-, hum- and foot-tap-along, largely thanks to that percussive rhythm, which could easily be transplanted into an upbeat dance-pop tune. (In fact it's very reminiscent of the rhythm underpinning “5 Years” by Björk.)

The second verse retains most of the embellishments from the chorus, and has a bigger feel to it than the first verse. Conversely, though, it's only half as long before launching into another chorus. This second chorus is the song's fully-rounded “complete” sound that you'll be singing back to yourself next time you hear the first chorus—forgetting how restrained most of Winter Killing is.

As with much of the rest of the album, The World Is Saved (and “Parliament Square” is a particularly good example of this), it's the accompaniment's instrumental flourishes that really make the song—here a jazz-influenced, echo-y piano counter-melody most evident in the second chorus.

A modified, dampened third verse takes the place of a middle 8. When the chorus returns it too is subdued and adds a note of fragility: “I'm safer with me here”. The music does kick back in, but only fleetingly, and after the bulk of the words have passed.

Perhaps it's just the title, but Winter Killing does bring winter to my mind. Each piano note is a tiny white light peeking through the leaves of a tree; that percussive rhythm is the sound of snow cracking underfoot; the jangling bells are flurries of snow falling beneath a streetlight or, well, jangling bells. If there were a video for Winter Killing, Stina would be wearing a woolly hat and gloves, with her breath crystallising as she sings.

Throughout, it feels frosty and minimal—not in a white-cube zen–type way; more in that it sounds completely un-produced, or perhaps un-overproduced. There's no wall of sound, no pithy vocal effects and no overdubs. And there's certainly no big, celebratory, radio-friendly, stadium-rocking chorus repeat. In fact, there aren't even any backing vocals: perhaps that's what gives Winter Killing (and the rest of The World Is Saved) such an air of intimacy. There's nothing lacking, but equally nothing excessive. It's not laden with grandeur, pretension or ego.

It's as if she's taken the skeleton of a song and added individual notes, each glistening, until it's just beautiful enough. If you download one song this week, make it Winter Killing.

(How do you follow that? I'm still not really sure. It's the mood of “Hotel” by Broken Social Scene married to the rhythm of “5 Years” by Björk (plus a smattering of frost), so those two go well. “Leaving the City” by Róisín Murphy has lyrics that actually follow and make sense, and the style of Stina's vocals is even (sort-of) echoed in the breathiness of Róisín's. “Rewrite” by Sia also follows it nicely, as does “Waiting” by Cibelle.)

“Pour Salt into that Wound of Yours” (the 2007-08-31 Friday Fetch-it)

2007-08-31T17:53:00+00:00

I don't really know how to go about recommending Gentlemen Prefer Blondes by CC & the Spades (which partially explains the large gap since the last entry and why the following isn't my usual neatly-structured, eloquent prose)—I don't know why I like the song so much. I know that I do like it. And I think that's because it's damn good, but I can't be sure.

Incidentally, I don't usually recommend songs that I discovered on another music blog, my logic being that if I found it, you could too. But this was a full year ago, and the band still have well under five hundred listens on Last.fm. (They've now accrued 59 hits on Google, but 17 of them are me).

There are two versions (that I'm aware of): the original, rough demo version—which is what I'm mainly writing about—and a vastly tidied-up version, which uses a slightly different lyric and adds some extra guitar bits. (That one's presently on CC & the Spades' MySpace page.)

The song basically comprises vocals, guitar, bass and drums. It's fairly straightforward by my standards—there are no weird time signatures and no clever rhythms; it doesn't suddenly shift sideways; it's not less than a minute long and it's not seventeen minutes long; there are no wacky instruments and no macho guitar acrobatics. (I wouldn't recommend bringing it home to meet your grandma, though—it uses the “fuck” word.)

Where the tidier version finishes with a long-held strum, the demo version stops on a drumbeat, as abruptly as it started—its departure smacks you in the face as much as its arrival did. There's no particular melody or even rhythm to the vocals in the chorus—it's almost as if CC's improvising the vocals here.

In fact the whole song is very rough, unpolished and raw: a lot of the time the microphone can't quite contain CC's voice; the bass guitar (which plays up in almost the same register as the lead) is noticeably off-rhythm during the choruses and I think it hits the wrong note at the start of the instrumental towards the end.

It's this sort of coarse sincerity that defined punk. If you download one song this week, make it Gentlemen Prefer Blondes.

(That link is to the rough, demo version as an MP3; it was on their MySpace profile for a while, but the tidier version replaced it.)

(How do you follow that? Usually with the same song again... or 8 Hours (also by CC & the Spades; see eashfa to download that too). More usefully, perhaps: Swimmers by Broken Social Scene follows the demo version particularly nicely.)

“Under a Sinking Sun” (the 2007-06-22 Friday Fetch-it)

2007-06-22T11:19:00+00:00

One review of The Deep Blue claimed that Charlotte Hatherley does “a spot-on impersonation of the Sundays' Harriet Wheeler” in the first half of Roll Over (Let It Go). This isn't quite true; but she does do a spot-on impersonation of herself singing very nicely. (The way she sings “lover” and “harbour” makes me want to hump her.) Charlotte's usually better at angular (Lazy Use of a Popular Musical Adjective #1) guitar-pop-punk-rock than at lush dream-pop. Even in Roll Over her “sha-la-la”s and “ooh”s don't bed into the instrumentation fully enough to match up to the Sundays or the Cocteau Twins: however soft the vocals' surfaces are, they still have sharp edges.

Hidden tracks—meanwhile—are generally a bit rubbish: they're the recorded equivalent of leaving the stage for a minute or two, before returning to perform—surprise!—an encore. Supposedly “hidden” tracks are even easier to see coming: enter track length display. Nonetheless, there's the obligatory minute or two of silence after the last song-proper, to fool you into thinking the album's over... as well as to royally screw up shuffled playlists and mix discs. Only if you leave the thing alone, either by the serendipity of sheer laziness, or by taking keen notice of the fact that it's still playing, may you bask in the bounty of the hidden track. ...which is usually about half a minute long and fades out just as it starts to resemble a decent song. Not so on The Deep Blue.

The last track, Siberia, ends with an improv-y crescendo of guitar and piano that gives way to a final guitar loop; six iterations later, the loop drops abruptly to silence. It's a strong conclusion to an album that never loses momentum throughout, despite many changes of pace and mood.

Two minutes of silence ensue.

Two minutes—that's a long time.

It's probably taken you about that long to read this far.

The silence draws you in. It makes you listen more carefully, in case there's something quiet going on that you're otherwise missing.

Silence is far more potent than leaving a large break in text—you can just read faster, skip over a blank page in the space of a second or two.

It makes you wonder: when will the silence be broken? And by what? And when it is broken, it makes the sound that breaks it that much more profound.

Two minutes of silence.

After two minutes, Siberia and the rest of the album are a fond memory rather than a present experience, and what follows stands separately from the album.

All momentum has now ceased.

Out of the silence springs a quiet guitar, at times reverberating like a sonar pulse; accompanied by a slow, almost occasional, soft drumbeat. By this point it sounds like it could be your heartbeat. After a little while a deep, resonating, warm acoustic guitar joins; and then Charlotte's singing.

Those sharp edges in her voice are entirely engulfed by the rich, expansive acoustic guitar and the other sonance swirling around her. There's the occasional glugging sound, probably produced on a xylophone, but sounding more like air escaping from an underwater cove, or a seahorse scarpering as a pebble falls towards it.

Three minutes in, although it feels like about half that, the rich swirls of sound die down, returning to the more minimal arrangement of the intro. It's at this point—if not before—that lesser hidden tracks would just have faded out, and you half-expect this intro arrangement to be the song's conclusion.

Instead, the same intro riff acquires the accompaniment of the deep acoustic guitar and a violin, which plays a legato, swaying, floating line. The violin stays around while the main, warm riff resumes and Charlotte sings another chorus.

Again, she's accompanied by the same swirling sonance, with the addition of the reverberating whooshes of a couple of passing space-dolphins. (Lost In Time could be described as the musical analogue to Ecco the Dolphin 2: The Tides of Time on the Mega-Drive.)

The guitar riff from the intro concludes the song with the full resonant lushness of the song's body, and the acoustic guitar resonates into silence.

This is dream-pop. If you download one song this week, make it Lost In Time.

(How do you follow that? With ~~Death Cock by Broken Social Scene~~ Hjertebarn by Under byen. Or, preferably, another two minutes of silence.)

“But You've Gotta Know Their Lies” (the 2006-05-12 Friday Fetch-it)

2006-05-12T19:41:00+00:00

Since I actually physically own this week's song as a single on a compact disc (I bought it on Wednesday), I'm gonna write a little bit about its B-sides first.

Stars And Spit sounds like it was recorded in the middle of a busy street, while the microphone was drunk. It has the same sort of wooziness as a lot of Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots, particularly in its vocals.

Death Cock is really chilled. Stars and Spit was chilled, but this is catatonic. And it's a waltz. Waltzes are good. Part way through, the music comes to a coda and someone says “That's it”, but the song starts up again and carries on for another few minutes. Maybe they only eventually stopped because their instruments got too dusty.

I always like songs in unusual time signatures. I especially like that Broken Social Scene haven't bothered trying to be cool about it – they even named 7/4 (Shoreline) after its time signature. And parenthesised subtitles are always good.

Like its first B-side, Shoreline is a mid-tempo light-rock-stylee driving song, great for cycling through York in the summer. Each vocal line starts half-way through a bar, so it flows into the next one; the whole thing progresses smoothly. There's even a car's interior in the video – what more could you want from a driving song?

Since it's driven by the rhythm section, it sounds far worse on speakers with crap bass. The melody, however, is held solely by the vocals, led by Feist, accompanied by one of the other fifteen band-members ...a male one. You can tell from the video. The sort of richness in sound you'd expect from a song performed by sixteen people is there; it'd be inaccurate to call Shoreline's sound “layered” – it's more like spaghetti than lasagne.

Nonetheless, there are several reasonably-well-defined categories of noise present: the rhythm section (comprising the driving bass and drums); the vocals; several lead guitars and other guitarage; and lots of miscellaneous other sounds. Most of the noise lives in those last two layers, with the first two holding the song together.

Feist's vocals make the song. It'd be a great song with someone else singing her bits, but her performance adds that extra embellishment that makes it a classic.

And she doesn't even sound like The Pipettes. If you download one track this week, make it Shoreline.

(The other (male) band member is probably Kevin Drew.)