WEDNESDAY SHUFFLE

I've got no excuse.  Well, I do -- but I hate making excuses.  So sorry, and at least I got around to it this week!

1. Love Train / Keb' Mo'
From Big Wide Grin (1998)
One thing I love about Keb' Mo': his creative covers, always total reinterpretations of the original. Take this old O'Jays classic, subtract the sexy soul groove (sacrilege, right?), and add a ticking bluegrass tempo and some banjo picking -- and voila, you've got a surprisingly persuasive peace-and-love anthem. Suddenly I hear afresh lines like, "All of your brothers over in Africa / Tell all the folks in Egypt and Israel too" -- it's totally topical.

2. Hello? Oh... /  The Cribs
From The New Fellas (2005)
I like everything I've heard from this trio of brothers from Yorkshire. Crunchy guitars, loping beat, a casually raucous upbeat vibe -- addictively fun. 

3. Monday Monday / The Mamas and the Papas
From 16 Greatest Hits (compilation)
Bah dah, bah da-dah dah... Those dense a capella harmonies are just heavenly. And when Denny and Cass start to weave and overlap in the bridge -- "Every other day (every other day) every other day (every other day of) the week is /  Fine, (Fine) yeah!!)"  How could you not sing along?

4. Poor Little Fool / Ricky Nelson
From A Ricky Nelson Anthology (compilation)
I can just picture him singing this on Ozzie and Harriet:  One blink of those sincere blue eyes, one pout from that lower lip, and Elvis Presley was wiped off the planet for me. This smooth-as-buttermilk rockabilly stroll is quintessential Ricky, absolutely divine.

5. Happy Jack / The Who
From Happy Jack (1966)
Though my feelings about the Who are conflicted, I do love a good Pete Townshend comic turn -- and there's none better than this ditty about a simpleton vagrant on the Isle of Man. (In 1966, when this was all over the radio, I had no idea that was a real place.)  I love those chanting childlike harmonies, that stellar bass line, and -- best of all -- Moonie's absolutely insane bursts of drumming.

6. To the River / John Mellencamp
From Human Wheels (1993)
Would you buy a Chevy from this man?  I would. 

7.  Rollin' Like a Pebble in the Sand  / Alan Price & the Electric Blues Orchestra
From A Gigster's Life for Me (1995)
So what was Alan Price doing all those years when I'd lost track of him?  Enjoying himself, getting back into the blues and R&B idiom that the Animals first bonded over. This whole album is full of great covers, like this old Rudy Toombs song, sung with just the right weary creak in Alan's voice -- and wait for the barrelhouse piano in the middle eight!  

8. Where's My Everything? / Nick Lowe
From The Impossible Bird (1994)
From Nick Lowe's "lovable loser" category, a gently comic rockabilly plaint. He's ticking off a laundry list of things society "owes" him -- home and family, fame and happiness -- cluelessly wondering why they haven't just magically appeared.  But as always with Nick, it's got just enough of an edge, filtering all the bafflement and pain of a disappointed life.  The man's craft still astounds me.
  
9. Switchboard Susan / Nick Lowe
From Labour of Lust (1979)
Yeah, I know Mickey Jupp wrote this one -- but it might as well have been Nick himself, in his punning lyric prime. "When I'm with you, girl, I get an extension / And I don't mean Alexander Bell's invention" -- who else could pull off something that juvenile?  But this gives me a perfect opportunity to inform you (if you don't already know) that YepRoc is finally reissuing this classic album, Nick's second solo effort, which has for years been inexplicably out of print (I know!).


10. Heat Dies Down / The Kaiser Chiefs
From Yours Truly, Angry Mob (2007)
It's loud, it's fast, it's angry -- and that rollercoaster tempo is pretty hard to resist.

Bonus track (couldn't resist):
11. Up to Our Nex / Robyn Hitchcock & the Venus 3
From Goodnight Oslo (2009)
Featured on the soundtrack to the Jonathan Demme film Rachel Getting Married. (Robyn's even in the film, reason enough to Netflix the thing.)  The loose-limbed groove of this track is so seductive, you're drawn into its hazy, unfocused spell. "We're up to our necks in love / So bad / We're up to our necks in love / Blame Dad."  (Except Dad was played by Bill Irwin, and who could blame him?)  "Forgive yourself / And maybe / You'll forgive me" -- well, there's the movie for you in a nutshell.  Now go watch it.

"Love's Not a Competition (But I'm Winning)" / The Kaiser Chiefs

28 DAYS OF LOVE SONGS

Modern indie bands seem to avoid love like poison. I bet if you did a database search through the titles of songs written in the last 10 years (if you had nothing better to do with your time), you'd find an incredible drop-off in the use of the word "love." Even when they mention it, they seem all freaked out about it. Take this 2007 track by the Kaiser Chiefs, that industrious bunch of lads from Leeds. They’re paying lip service to the old ideas of romance, but what they’re dealing with is anything but.

“I won’t be the one to disappoint you / Anymore,” singer Ricky Wilson starts off, in his earnest and sincere register, set against some spacy synth riffs. The rhythm’s edgy, all off the beat, and the line jumps around in anxious diminished fourths and minor thirds. I usually think of Kaiser Chiefs as hard-punching rockers (“Ruby Ruby Ruby Ruby RUBY”), but this is sinuous run-on stuff--I can almost hear Morrissey singing this, or Style-Council-era Paul Weller. “I know, I’ve said all this and that you’ve heard it / All before,” he concedes, but he’s focused on gamesmanship: “The trick is getting you to think that all this was / Your idea.” Earnest and sincere he may sound-- but he's scheming too, planning his getaway.

The way he alternates long lines with short lines, it’s like we’re only hearing his side of the dialogue. I reckon she’s the one who's come up with this self-help platitude, something out of an advice column in Woman's Own, telling him “Love’s not a competition.” He obediently parrots that back to her, but he just has to add, “but I’m winning.” Which makes the whole thing moot.

“I’m not sure what’s truly altruistic / Anymore,” he says wearily in verse two; he'd like to be good-hearted and selfless, honest. But all her score-keeping and balance-weighing overshadows every move he makes. I’ve seen so many people – men as well as women – load this onto relationships; god, do I know how he feels. (That thing you said, or did, or didn't do, three days ago -- and you're still paying for it.) “Love’s not a competition but I’m winning,” he says again, but then he admits, “At least I thought I was, but there’s no way of knowing.” This couple has so much baggage, they can’t help but disappoint each other. Nothing’s holding them together but this fierce spirit of one-upsmanship.

Now, it's true that the rock singer gets the last word; he gets to tell his angle, and the woman is hung high and dry. I bet she has her side of the story too -- he could very well be an insensitive pain in the ass. But that's beside the point; the bottom line is, they're making each other miserable. So why are they still together? How can they call this "love"?

These guys have got human psychology down all right, but it's not exactly heart-warming information. I doubt this song is gonna get played a lot at wedding receptions.

Love's Not A Competition sample

“Oh My God” / Kaiser Chiefs

Sure, I like the Arctic Monkeys, I like Franz Ferdinand, but if you ask me which new UK band I like the most, I’d have to say The Kaiser Chiefs. They have a much wider range, which probably hasn’t helped them – you don’t hear a track and automatically think, “Oh, that’s the Kaiser Chiefs.” This song, for example, sounds a bit like Blur, with a similar layered coolness and hypnotic hooks. But the first time I heard this song, what I thought of was the Animals’ “We Gotta Get Out of This Place” – it’s got that same desperate quality, the longing to bust out of a drab provincial existence (in their case, Leeds). This album, Employment, came out in 2005, forty years after the Animals’ hit, but some things never change.

I wouldn’t say their lyrics are poetry, but the Chiefs get off some one-liners that make you realize the songwriter has actually thought about life. Take this first verse, which starts off with load of crap clichés (catch the reference to the Stones’ “Time Is On My Side”) and then smashes them with frustration: “Time on your side that will never end / The most beautiful thing you can ever spend / But you work in a shirt with your name tag on it / Drifting apart like a plate tectonic.” Maybe “tag on it” is a cheap rhyme with “tectonic” -- still, it’s a perfect phrase to describe the sort of belittling job you fall into at a certain age, and when you add the seismic force rumbling underneath, it sets up the conflict with wonderful economy. That’s songwriting.

Then he describes how he relates to his girlfriend, another bogged-down situation: “Too much time spent dragging the past up / I didn't see you not looking when I messed up.” (Love the paranoia of him watching her watching him blunder around.) At least in the Animals song, the guy and his girl were in it together – “Girl there’s a better life for me and you”; for the Kaiser Chiefs, the draggy girlfriend is strike two against him. But in the third verse, he reminds us that he’s got youth’s resilience: “Knock me down I'll get right back up again / I'll come back stronger than a powered up Pac-Man.” Goofy image, okay, but considering the minor key, the sullen vocals, and the lock-step rhythms, it doesn’t come off as comic – it’s just the kind of magical thinking a young slacker needs to survive.

His voice lifts tentatively into another modal key at the end of each verse, claiming (I picture his defiant shrug, jaw jutting forward): “It don't matter to me / 'Cos all I wanted to be / Was a million miles from here / Somewhere more familiar.” Yeah, that’s authentic too, that feeling of not belonging (the Animals echo again) and knowing there’s another place that will feel right.

Heading into the chorus, the doubled vocal “oh’s” swoop menacingly up a long scale, building in volume, until all his suppressed rage and determination break out: “Oh my god I can't believe it / I've never been this far away from home” wailed over and over, a wall-pounding mantra that doesn’t go anywhere. How can it? This song isn’t about a solution, it’s about a feeling. You may feel this way even without a name-tag on your shirt. Well, next time you need to beat your fists against the sky . . . here’s the song for you.