The Chart Project: Part 1

Part one is only brief. Later editions will contain 10-50 reviews at a time.


#460.
Don McLean, 'Crying'
1984.
The least-known of Canadian crooner McLean's 'big three' is a cover of the timeless large-spectacled one known as Roy Orbison. For half of its duration it is doggedly faithful to the original, a forlorn lament in which the song's protagonist leaks discharge from his eyes without cessation. McLean later goes off-piste a little with swelling strings and a goofily-overblown falsetto remniscent of the excellent and goofily-overblown songs of Robin Gibb, whom I always felt was held back by his be-bearded siblings in the Brothers Gibb, or 'Bee Gees'. There is simply not enough palpable vocal quivering in music.
(6)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lpQmrUxwiF8

#1009.
Tony Christie ft. Peter Kay, '(Is This The Way To) Amarillo?'
2005.

This is a joyful and sweet song. Christie was an excellent pop tenor of his era, which was much before the 2005 revival of this song for the UK charity Comic Relief. What it is not, however, is a comedy or 'novelty' song. This is the Peter Kay effect. His face, mugging along with various British celebrities, in accompaniment with this song has ensured an enduring legacy as novelty. Britain is now a visual culture, so the opening bars recall Kay (who does not perform on the record, only its promotional clip) and his gurning more than it does any anticipation of Christie's versatile performace. It seems churlish to quibble when this simple equation has raised money to aid domestic and internation charity projects though.
(4)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yqLLDZvbG-U

#1180.
Olly Murs, 'Dance With Me Tonight'
2011.
This desequencing of the chronology does not allow me to talk about The Mark Ronson Effect with adequate recourse to its creeping malignancy over prior years. Essentially it is a re-tooling of the signifiers of Motown and soul music: energetic mid-tempos, sharp suits, tight structures, & universal-sounding lyrics – but with none of the substance: the history of societal oppression and the performers who spent years paying dues. The digitisation of this music led to it becoming ersatz and reduceable to a mere pop trope that is audio shorthand 'party time'.

Mr. Murs appeared on the UK star-search format 'X Factor'. His 'thing' was that he was a local everyman with a winning smile and cheerily awful dance. His role in this song is practically incidental.
(3)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F3EG4olrFjY&ob

#1154
Bruno Mars, 'Grenade'
2011.
This song is about a man with the biggest martyr complex possible. In the opening verse he establishes that the dramatic subject, an errant female companion, has left. The signs were there from the start. The first time they kissed, her eyes were open. "Why were they open?!" asks Mars, not unreasonably, though perhaps not establishing why obstructed ocular organisms equate with a more sincere kiss. From this low start, Mars establishes a lengthy list of things that he would do for this girl: e.g. catch the titular grenade, take a bullet through the brain, jump in front of a train - and in a chilling denouement to this chorus - she will NOT do the same.

Well, Bruno, I am guessing that is because she is a fairly reasonable person. It seems that she simply was not that into you in the first instance. It wouldn't be remiss to presume that from your desire to pursue high levels of risk that you were probably a bit high pressure to begin with, so she strung you along a bit, hoping that you would go on tour so she could move on with her life. Mars' piety is accompanied by a very generic formulaic hi-gloss pop gronk and his superlative proclaimations are made in a shrill and unappealing whinny.
(3)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SR6iYWJxHqs&ob


#72
Vic Damone, 'On The Street Where You Live'
1958

Who among us has not had that stomach full of butterflies in the knowledge that the object of our affections is even only POSSIBLY nearby? It is a strange and abstract feeling and often its representation in art falls short. "And oh! The towering feeling / just to know somehow you are near / the overpowering feeling / that any second you may suddenly appear!" The temptation to read this as a stalker's manifesto must be resisted as Damone manages to simultaneously convey the sense of wonder and sensational overload at the THOUGHT of this love and the clumsy dry-mouthed reality of the love's appearance. This is a daffy little number that calls to mind a young Scott Walker somehow transplanted into the fantasy segment of Mary Poppins.
(7)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QNwlc8F7wOQ

Michael Gira's God Complex

I wrote a couple of articles for the University paper/website. After a couple of meetings and unreturned emails and responses that were unforthcoming, I can only assume that they've gone cold on my articles or me - or are simply snowed under with work. Anyway, here is something I wrote about Swans and Xiu Xiu. The tone is more for unfamiliar readers, but I can't be bothered changing it.

Some people love a good lyric. They have them permanently inscribed on their bodies. They whisper them to loved ones in the dark of the night. They stand in for philosophical conceits, political persuasions, and often negotiate the complex space between real feeling and articulation. Me, I usually couldn't care less; it's often just arbitrary condensed syntax that really doesn't mean that much.

Occasionally, lines will snake around your heart, or somewhere a little more cerebral, to take hold. To wit:

“I work hard for everything I own. Everything I own chokes me when I'm asleep.”
“Out of your mind with whorishness, incredibly young, incredibly filthy.”
“Break into the children's hospital screaming 'don't fuck with me! Don't fuck with me!”
“Cut out the infection. Beat up the violator. Gag him, then screw him down.”
“The oil is black and it is thick. Sex is a void filled with plastic.”
“This is the worst vacation ever. I am going to cut open your head with a roofing shingle.”

No, they don't scream 'party' to me either. They're dark, concerned with the grotesque and the violent, attempting a frustrated, futile malediction against a clustering blackness. Against the backdrop of the radio and the overwhelming banality of UK indie's proud underachievers, these are simply words that stand out; be they good or bad.



In the back catalogues of their writers (respectively: Swans, Xiu Xiu, Xiu Xiu, Swans, Swans, Xiu Xiu) these are not necessarily the best, the most novel, or potent examples of their craft. Their words are repulsive because things are awful. This is the world we live in; not that Usher and his ilk Eurodancing their way to the club are not in the same world. It's just that while the world sees Justin Bieber performing 'Baby' inside to a rapt audience, Xiu Xiu's Jamie Stewart sees the barmaid molested in the back-room, the CCTV mysteriously malfunctioning for that day only, the music drowning out the cries. Tell me that it wouldn't happen. Tell me that it hasn't happened already.

In February, Xiu Xiu released their seventh LP, entitled Dear God, I Hate Myself. Fluttering, high drama vocalisms take centre stage against a shifting palette of cold synthesiser, unsympathetic mechanic percussion and abrasive string stabs. The tension is sometimes too much to take: Stewart's vocal tightrope-act balances every track in a state of unremitting drama, a house of cards awaiting the merest zephyr to break the tension. And it never comes. There is no catharsis.

September brought the twelfth LP by Swans, My Father Will Guide Me Up A Rope To The Sky, an audience-funded effort to kick Michael Gira's long-running project back into gear after a decade-long absence. Gira, a singular entity in a world of indiscernibles, would take to the stage in the early '80s and order the back door be bolted and the lights turned off but for a single spotlight. The band would unleash unmitigated chaos, deafening bass thrums and atonal guitars that have more in common with the scrapyard than the stage. As their 1990 live album recalls, Anonymous Bodies In An Empty Room, just before a period of mellowing.



My Father... attempts a clever balancing act between the remorselessness of the visceral and physical Swans and some more overtly melodic, sweeping styles, mostly pulled off to great aplomb. Where Jamie Stewart is a histrionic tenor, Michael Gira is a grave and impassive baritone. If most artists were to announce that a key track on their upcoming record was a seven-minute mini-epic about their daughter, it'd be time to line-up the sick bags. The first four minutes of 'Inside Madeline' batter the listener so thoroughly that the rays of sunshine peeking through at its conclusion are easy to miss.

What is signicant here, then? That these are two albums deep into each band's career whose lyrics reveal their treacly-black auteurs to be fundamentally moralist flaneurs: maybe not Christian by self-identfication, but certainly by de facto action. Those lyrics up there: they're not for kicks or to try and play to the kind of sicko who'd get off on them. Swans and Xiu Xiu have spat naked nihilism in their audience's faces for years now and some of them still don't get it, much like semi-racist Little Englanders don't get Alf Garnett. Now they're spelling it out for us. They inhabit the same moral sphere as Justin Bieber and his exhortations to just 'love you, girl', even though against the banality of the radio, you wouldn't quite notice.