Songs of the Week Volume XI

Number 11! That's ten plus one! The universal set of symbols that represents the base plus one in any number system using arabic numerals. Please submit your songs! Here's this week's Spotify playlist, and here's the archival Spotify playlist.

Matt Smith:

Robbie Williams - Candy*

The latest song to get stuck in my head, Candy is just a really upbeat song sure to have you singing the opening for days (results may vary).

Never let it Die - Watsky

Haven't done a Watsky song yet so here it is. One of the first songs I found after finding Watsky, Never Let it Die.

Anonymous Reader:

Dexy's Midnight Runners - Come On Eileen

It's peppy and upbeat and a really good song to listen to loudly.

Connor Murphy:

The Mars Volta - The Widow

One of the tamer of this psychedelic/prog rock band's extensive lineup, this song is one that I feel is a good introductory piece to The Mars Volta. They are certainly not a band you can rush into and disregard. They need to be experienced, given a chance. They have a style I never expected to like initially, but the weird free-jazz-esque breakdowns in much of their catalog slowly grew on me. This song particularly is about someone young who lacks any form of true human connection, and fears he is becoming like someone he knows who lives a meaningless lonely existence revolving around addiction.

Fleet Foxes - Mykonos

This is a song about an intervention of some sort. The singer tells his friend to get help and his friend gets upset, so the speaker writes a song about what he wants to tell his friend now. It's a relatively simple concept, but it has beautiful lyricism and it has kind of a safe, friendly vibe to it, which really allows it to be interpreted as a kind of coping tool.

Maps & Atlases - Solid Ground

This is a song about going through a lot of tough times for the people you love. It's basically about how love isn't something that will always be easy to hold onto, but it's something that should always inspire you to get through the bad days.

Meeghan Bresnahan:

Andrew Lloyd Weber - The Point of No Return from Phantom of the Opera

I saw it when it came to Boston two summers ago. My friend and her family took me for my birthday gift. It was amazing, but I wasn't as into it then as I am now. I love this song, Sierra Boggess and Ramin Kairmloo's version in particular. I keep on singing Christine's (Sierra's) part although I am not really a soprano. I just really love this song and how passionate it is.

Sea of Darkness - The Word I Couldn't Keep*

This song is from a computer game. I have a massive love for this series. This game is the newest one and it's probably my favorite. The graphics are amazing. Such a shame that no one knows about these games.

The song is beautiful and it's actually incorporated into a puzzle in this game! I sing this song constantly. When it first came out, I listened to it endlessly and actually started sobbing. It gave me the feels. It's just so beautiful.

Edgar Castro:

PJ Harvey - On Battleship Hill

Like many of the other songs on Let England Shake, On Battleship Hill seems to be very anti-war: it discusses the futility of "cruel [human] nature" in the grand scheme of things, using the 1915 Battle of Chunuk Bair during World War I as a way to introduce the topic. The song starts with very soft drums and a guitar with some nice reverb that are very calming before fading a bit and leaving Harvey's falsetto voice that seems a little reminiscent of the voice of Thom Yorke of Radiohead center stage. They pick up again later in the song, being complemented by a piano. The whole song feels very light and fun despite the subject matter.

Boris - Flood*

This one is a doozy. Flood is a single, 70-minute song split into four movements. It's a very intriguing composition, and I haven't really heard anything similar to it before. I know I say that a lot, but it's true.

The first movement starts with some soft humming from what sounds like an everyday, household machine that is promptly shut off after building for a while as the electric guitar is introduced. What they did with the guitar is really interesting: it's a sequence of 7 notes that loops for the entire movement, but the looping runs on two different tracks, with one track being slightly faster than the other. It's not noticeable as first, but as the movement progresses, the difference becomes more and more apparent as one of the tracks continues to advance more and more ahead of the other. Around halfway, the first instance of the single, booming drum strike is introduced as the two tracks are about half a loop apart - one is loops while the other one is in the middle of being played. The drum has a very long echo that really emphasizes the whole spacey, desolate, and wandering nature of the movement and much of the later movements.

Now past the halfway point, that single drum recording heard earlier starts to propagate and layer on top of eachother, with each individual recording becoming harder and harder to distinguish until it sounds like a single contiguous sound, like the rumbling of construction equipment. Meanwhile, the two guitar tracks start to align again, but they are drowned out by the drums before you're given a chance to hear them unite. When taking the piece's title and album art into mind, it can be assumed that the movement is, itself, a metaphor for a very gradual flooding - the gradual, increasing disparity between the two guitar tracks can be seen as a buildup of water, or perhaps the ever more evident warning signs of the impending flood, and the booming drums could symbolize the increasing panic, chaos, and destruction that comes with any natural (or man-made) disaster.

The second movement is very different from the first: it has a cohesive, bluesy rhythm and melody, utilizing the same instruments heard in the first movement but in a less dissonant way. The piece sounds very muffled and watered-down (pun not intended; it was unavoidable); the chaotic part of the flood now appears to be over, leaving only large areas of land underwater. This movement is the one that sounds the most like a conventional post-rock song, sounding a bit like a mix between the calmer parts of Godspeed You! Black Emperor Songs and the abstinence from traditional stringed instruments of a Mogwai song. There is, however, an electronic instrument that sounds a bit like a theremin with a delivery similar to that of a violin.

Around halfway through the movement, a sharper, brighter electric guitar is introduced that departs from what was the mostly muffled sound of the movement. The guitar starts off repeating the same notes that were looped in the first movement, a sort of auditory motif that unifies this movement with the first in the absence of a similar structure. As the song draws closer to the end, the sharper guitar changes to a higher pitch for a while before the heavy, fuzzlike distortion typical of Boris songs is introduced and the notes become prominent and drawn-out.

After the solo is over, the song moves into its third movement. The guitar is initially the only instrument present, sounding a lot less watered down than in the previous movement. After a minute or two, the theremin-like instrument is reintroduced, and a voice - something not heard yet in the song - is also introduced for the first time. The person is speaking in Japanese, as Boris is a Japanese band, so I can't really comment on what he's saying, but it sounds very hypnotic. About a fourth of the way through, a fuzzy, barely audible guitar begins to gain in volume as the guitar that started the movement slowly fades out and the movement moves into its more energetic portion, which is probably the part that sounds most like a typical Boris song. In this segment, the faint Japanese voice heard earlier becomes a passionate singing voice over extremely fuzzy guitar notes and beating drums.

At about halfway, as was the case in the previous two movements, the movement changes direction as a sequence of 5 notes is repeated over now thumping drums and a single hit of a gong while a sharper guitar plays a solo over them. As the solo comes to an end, the drums and guitar become more muddled, as was the case at the end of the first movement, before the soloing guitar descends into background noise, the drums exit and the 5 notes repeat until the end of the song.

In the last movement, not a lot is going on. The 5-note loop heard in the last movement becomes again muddled, as if the song was submerged in water again. It's unclear exactly at what point it wasn't submerged in water - perhaps the part in the third movement when the brighter guitar was introduced. The repeating notes become more sparse over time and slowly fade away as a very soft and faint electric guitar takes over the movement, playing sparse notes until - you guessed it - the halfway point, at which point what sounds like random field recordings take over until the end of the song.

The whole thing is really a deeply immersive and hypnotic expereince, as is the case with much droney songs. The repetition, the empty space, and the very limited set of notes that dominate the song all contribute to a very unique and mesmerizing piece. It sounds like it would be boring, and it is at first, but once you get into it, you're locked into it and it becomes very, very enjoyable.

*Not present in the Spotify playlist because it is not on Spotify