Working from home, and free from your work colleagues, has inevitably resulted in the slackening of the rules around acceptable behaviour during the working day. For some this will mean having your work space festooned with mugs, glasses, plates and bowls from the increased number of breaks that somehow (*cough) materialised during lockdown. The frowned-upon activity that’s arisen over the last year, that definitely would have resulted in some sort of written/verbal warning if I was still the office, has been the playing of music and podcasts out loud through the speakers of my mobile phone whilst I work.
I’ve basically become a stay-at-home version of those annoying teenagers you encounter on the bus, train or street playing “music” through their tinny speakers, whilst the grownups look on disapprovingly. Seeing as lockdown has deprived me of a large amount of grownups to annoy (just an exasperated housemate and a couple of neighbours), I’ve decided to spam my blog with some of the things I’ve been listening to lately. Please feel free to send me your disapproving looks and opinions to add to the authenticity of this scenario.
The Strokes – The Adults Are Talking
You’re going to be disappointed if you’re looking for recommendations for new and inspiring band or artists in this list. Even when I was younger and supposed to be out expanding my horizons, I found myself keeping to the bands that would routinely find themselves popular in the charts and the population as a whole. So…The Strokes end up on this list for basically being a band that was pretty popular, and admittedly quite cool, when I was at University.
Absorbing new music these days invariably involves taking the same artists you used to listen to when you were growing up, This can take the form of finally getting round to listening to the songs you never listened to from their old albums, or listening to the artists latest album.
The Adults Are Talking definitely utilised the latter approach, coming from the bands sixth album – The New Abnormal – released last year, and it basically follows the usual Strokes playbook. Julian Casablancas’ rapid and witty vocals over a hypnotic and familiar-sounding riff just make this a comforting, catchy song that you (and my neighbours) will hear over and over again.
The video, with its depiction of the band playing baseball against robots, is also memorable for a couple of reasons. Firstly, the robots themselves remind me of the sentinels from the very good X-Men: Days Of Future Past film. The plot of the video, however, reminds me of an enjoyable episode of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine that saw the crew playing and losing in a game of baseball to a team of physically and mentally stronger Vulcans.
In The Adults Are Talking we see the band celebrating scoring a single run against the dominant robots (in place of the robotic vulcans). I’m not sure if the Deep Space Nine episode was an actual inspiration but I choose to believe that it was.
Royal Blood – Typhoons
If the riff in The Strokes song was a comforting and familiar reminder of the good times that put its arms around you reassuring you that everything is all right (it’s been a very loooong lockdown), then the riff in Royal Blood will smack you round the head and tell you to “face reality, coward!”
Royal Blood in this instance are the two piece band (think White Stripes) from Brighton and not, as we’re all thinking, something that caused the fight between Meghan/Harry and the Windsors to be stopped early for the Royal family’s own well-being! Typhoons is the new single from Royal Blood’s upcoming third album of the same name, and it shows a band that just gets better with every new album.
The riff is king amongst Royal Blood’s biggest hits and Typhoon is no exception. Matt Kerr’s bass…yes, bass….cranks out a rhythm for the chorus that makes you ignore the somewhat forgettable lyrics. You come out of it thinking ‘I don’t know what that song was about, but I’ve hit repeat and I’m turning the volume up.’ Old Muse (before their okay-ish exploration of a 80’s sci-fi world) would be the obvious (and probably cliched) comparison – riff and so-so lyrics wise – and ultimately probably explains my love for them and this song in particular.
I keep coming back to the bass guitar thing and found myself wondering how he makes the unique sound from a single player. The answer seems to be a mixture of effects pedals and multiple amps (thank you Wikipedia), and there a fascinating video on YouTube that shows how you can replicate their sound. I can’t wait for April to roll around to see if the rest of the album is as promising as this single.
Daft Punk – Veridis Quo
Daft Punk are no more! The French electronic music duo and robot-fetishists (I sense a theme here – do I have robot fetish?) have announced their disbandment in fairly unique circumstances. I like to think we would all benefit from celebrities (especially reality TV ones) and politicians announcing their retirement by walking into the desert and exploding.
The last week has inevitably seen people coming to terms with this news by streaming the albums and singles of the pioneering dance group. Veridis Quo has surprisingly become the song that I’ve found myself retuning to over the past week. I say surprisingly because its undoubtedly not the banger for which Daft Punk will go down in history (Da Funk, Around The World, One More Time, Get Lucky), nor is it a track that roped in a music icon (Paul Williams, Julian Casablancas, Nile Rodgers and Giorgio Morodor appear on Random Access Memories alone), and I’ve not even gone for a track that collaborated successfully with the French duo (Kanye West – Stranger; Starboy – The Weeknd).
Veridis Quo captures the unique sound that Daft Punk were able to infuse into a relatively simple track. They could take fairly simple repeating theme and imbue it with a futuristic, otherworldly quality that made it instantly recognisable as a Daft Punk song or score. This was similarly captured in their soundtrack work for the Tron: Legacy film that, along with the impressive visual components, elevated a fairly mundane sequel into something that is remembered more fondly than it deserves to be.
We’ll have to wait and see what form Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo and Thomas Bangalter take in their future endeavours, but they’ll be doing well if they capture even a quarter of the impact that their original guise.
Arctic Monkeys – Knee Socks
Knee Socks fits in with the revisiting an old album approach to ‘new’ music. AM came out in 2013 and I remember thinking that it was a fairly good album at the time. It’s not quite up there with their debut that stormed the charts way back at the start of the 2000’s, but the Arctic Monkeys themselves would probably admit that the circumstances that made that moment so dynamic and refreshing would be impossible to bottle again in this day and age.
I considered AM a return to form for a band that seemed to lose its way in the three albums that proceeded it. They were largely forgettable affairs that seemed to show a band struggling to recreate the formula for success that came from having the fastest selling debut album of all time in British music history.
The singles were catchy again with fun titles. ‘R U Mine?’ and ‘Why’d You Only Call Me When You’re High?’ offer highlights, but the best song on the album could be found in the first track ‘Do I Wanna Know?’. Right out the gate you’ve got a absolute classic that is absolutely amazing live.
I tended to listen to these singles and, like most albums, ignored some of the songs that came at the end of the album. Knee Socks was overlooked. That is until recently when it popped up in a auto-generate playlist on YouTube music on my phone. It’s a fantastic song that captures some of the familiar Alex Turner lyrical observations in a more mature sounding shell. It also features a haunting cameo from Queens of the Stone Age frontman Josh Homme. The song in fact feels like a something that would feel right at home amongst some of the Desert Sessions tracks.
I’ve ignored the album that followed AM, but I’m sure I’ll get around to it at some point. I’m still enjoying the fruits that came from their fifth album that showed a band finally coming to terms with their new and old selves. A band managing to recapture the familiar cheeky exuberance with the English language whilst inhabiting the new cool look and sound that they had worked to establish since crashing on the scene. More of this please.