In case you aren’t aware, here’s your PSA: Mogwai is sick. If this jam doesn’t please you, nothin’ will. I’m a gigantic fan of music that builds on repeated melodies and gradually crescendos to become not only more forceful, but also more complex rhythmically. This is a textbook example of that, or rather, it takes a giant missile to the textbook example and blows it up. It’s that good. Take my word for it creative people, listen to this and just TRY not to get a mighty idea in your head.
This song literally only repeats the phrase “because we are your friends/you’ll never be alone again/well, come on” and for some reason the singer’s changing inflection and the comfortable, dancey, sorta-reverb make me feel a melange of sadness and hopefulness. Like, yeah, you are my friends, you’d never leave me! Giant Hayao Miyazakian tears well up in eyes, rides dragon into the sunset.
Ratatat has this really clean urban smartness that pervades all of their music. The way they construct rhythm and then alter it throughout the course of the song to present different moods, often rising in complexity and intensity, is just really satisfying. That’s the best way I can describe their music: wholly satisfying.
I know I’ve thrown some of their stuff up on my blog before, but it really inspires me and I just want to share it with everyone. It’s great to draw to, to write to, to think to.
Let me be pretty overt here and say that I love the tone Nick Thorburn infuses into all of his music. There’s this overwhelming slyness to the vocals and the subject matter is usually pretty dark. The music itself isn’t dark, though—in fact it’s always really cheeky and casual, which credit to him, I think is a very difficult balance to strike. So in other words, this is a choice cover of an already striking Sinead O’Connor song.
Radiohead was the first band I really connected to on a personal level. I remember listening to this song on my mp3 player while sitting on the roof and sighing longingly at nothing in particular. The watery guitar throughout, the weary resignation of just being ‘uptight’ at the end, it all gets me real good.
I happen to really like the lack of hope in this song. It’s a special kind of “lack of hope”—not necessarily depressing—where you get the feeling from the lyrics that it’s both self-inflicted and self-perpetuated. The song has a very peculiar character, especially with the melodramatic “tragic” lilt at the end. The guitars have a nice, clean sound, too.
