There is a danger in dissecting the single moments in songmost pregnant with beauty and meaning, particularly in stating the obvious. The purpose of this study is to isolate the unknown moments that help take a good song and make it extraordinary, not simply fellate an artist by pointing out the obvious.
For instance, one example that doesn't necessarily warrant an entire post is the Smashing Pumpkins' song "Day Dream" which is filled with novelty for the band's first album: it is sung by bassist D'arcy Wretzky, it features lush strings and an acoustic guitar riff. These all work to make the song so much more intimate and delicate than any others on the album, and there is a tiny moment that assists in the ultimate sonic landscape; near the end of the song, the cellist knocks the tip of the bow against the cello, making just a hollow wooden knack of a sound. Coming from a band so adored (hehe) for its penchant to perfectly polish in production, that very moment juts through to remind us that these are not robotic monsters performing these songs of 28 guitar tracks. These are people, one and all.
In general, the goal of this little feature is to document as many of these moments as possible; these little itty bitty things. However, that simply is not comprehensive enough. There are so many great moments in song that contain the full capacity to uplift, to sink, to destroy and to grow that we must be accepting of every single one, even if they do involve a level of stating the obvious. This very well could become somewhat tedious, evolving (or devolving) into the feature's equivalent of filing taxes. 'Could' is the gem of that sentence, because the inaugural such "duh" moment is true, pure magic. 
Artist: Rilo Kiley
Album: The Execution of All Things
Song: "A Better Son/Daughter"
Time:1:35
Type:Seismic
Greatness: Here's another fault of picking the 16-inch Chicago-style softball moments: there is not much to say once you've heard the song. The moment doesn't affect the song as much as it decimates it, completely dynamiting the soft, old-tyme radio stylings of Jenny Lewis' vocals into a massive, expansive Hollywood epic of a song. The slow waltz beat of the song matched with the steady beat of snare transports the song from the stylings of an indie rock group into a melancholy march of the dead. The lyrical sentiment being put forth agrees for the most part, more or less stating that life is nothing but a struggle to make everyone you know love and care for you and for you to appear as such. The second-person perspective adds to this misery, particularly because Lewis sings the beginning lyrics from the first person; the "you" never sounds convincing enough to be anyone but Lewis herself. She is striving to make these problems something of a universal history for the modern American human, yet no one is fooled enough to believe that she is singing to another person save her own reflection.
What is remarkable about this moment is that it is satisfying in two ways: 1) the simple bombast is pleasurable enough and 2)from the moment the song begins you know it's coming. The album this song is featured, the erratic The Execution of All Things, has so many rough and odd moments that it is almost welcome for such a thing to be telegraphed, much like the also-wonderful title track.
Friday, July 11, 2008
Momentary Greatness: Rilo Kiley
Monday, June 23, 2008
Momentary Greatness: The Pipettes
I like music. It's probably the most bland and impotent thing you could tell someone, but it's also one of the most true. It's akin to telling someone you like breathing, or candy. It's a trait that will be shared by most reasonable people (also, if they dont happen to like one of those things, it's an instant blaring siren telling you to evade). I would like to be as honest with the good people of the internet as possible. So, to clarify: I like music.
I also like minutiae. Details are very important in art for me. This is also not something terribly localized to myself, but it is also an important part of me. I love to stop movies at specific moments and rewatch them, just to catch the way certain lines are said or how a facial expression foreshadows an event. This is, by no means, to brag; watching a movie with me is generally not recommended, and I often lose some of the greater message forest through the trees of camera angles. However, i yam what I yam, and music is no different for me.
So, in a reoccurring feature on music (which I've been told by my mother is totally hip and edgy to do on the internet), I'm going to brush by artists, albums, and even songs. I'm going to talk about moments - those little sparks of sound that completely and utterly transcend the song itself. In a way, it's a much more universal way to look at music - though a song may be unbearable, it may still have some tiny moment of excellence. Here, we latch on to those. Although the first entry is not particularly bad, it is exceedingly small.
Artist: The Pipettes
Album: We are the Pipettes
Song: Your kisses are wasted on me
Time: 1:53
Type: Vocal
Moment: "You still don't know it!"
The Greatness: This is, in a way, the quintessential moment to start with, if not one of the more radical. It is subtle, swift, and executed with such surgical precision that it is the musical equivalent to a floating Johns Hopkins doctor performing a kidney transplant on a deaf and dumb person who has that disorder where they cannot feel pain. It's hard to notice, but it's noticeable enough.
What makes The Pipettes so wonderful is the falsity at work behind it. We aren't supposed to know the people singing, the musicians, the writers, anything. We're just supposed to listen and have fun. Because of that anonymity, the amount of bravado and callousness displayed in "Your kisses are wasted on me" comes off as fun and spunky, rather than a character fault. There is no connection to the characters, so it's just a fun song.
But fuck that, let's analyze the hell out of this bitch.
This song, like most of the faire on We Are The Pipettes, is repetition heavy, from the toy piano hook and the shout-along chorus to the first word of every verse being "Boy" said with an equal mix weariness, disaffection and disdain. The most effective example is during the pre-chrous, when the song drops from being bouncy pop to somewhat choral and melodramatic (helped along by the formally jaunty organ going into full-on Catholic church mode). The call-and-response during these sections offers a sort of voice of reason to the song; while the main lyrics seem to point to how hurt the male in this situation would be, the further-back response seems to say something more about the true nature of the speaker. (It helps if you imagine the voices of The Pipettes to be the various voices inside the head of one woman - I call her Phobe).
The very very very very last response is where this idea gets driven home. The response throughout the song is "and you don't know it" or "no, you don't know it." What this does is puts us in the present with this sort of relationship, the moment when the bond is being snapped. The entirety of the song has this feeling where the boy is just pathetic for his inability to recognize an ending. The effect of the final callback is excessively jarring to this understanding - by saying "you still don't know it", we now can assume that this is something that has happened in the past. Helped along by the increased octave by the main vocalist during that final pre-chorus, there is just a tinge of desperation from the woman that rings through, as though she has been trying to make herself believe that this is what the young man has been thinking/doing, yet there's no hint of that. She is left punching air.
In other news, hobbits use pipettes to get stoned and for plumbing.
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