Music Roundup 3
Crime of the Century
It’s difficult for me to talk here about anything other than Bloody Well Right. It starts off with a jazzy piano bit, builds up with some heavier guitars, and then someone in the studio just smashed the button marked SILLY. It suddenly bursts into a weird, British Right! (Right!) You're bloody well right. You've got a bloody right to say. It then tries to go back to being a normal song, but then smashes back into British silliness and, give me peace, goes into a sax solo to close out. Phew.
There’s some raging against (I presume boarding) school at the beginning, then we go into what I’ve discussed above. There’s a few tracks on there that didn’t make an enormous impression if I’m honest, I think I’ve heard Dreamer before, described by the guy who told me to listen to this album as “the most distracting” on there. And also that “There are two singers. One is annoying as hell and the other is so awesome it hurts”. I imaging he was referring to the former on this one.
Asylum is kind of fun, I do enjoy lend me 15p – I'm dying for a smoke!. Even Led Zeppelin were singing about dollars, so it’s nice and quaint for someone to reference pence.
The title track is actually pretty awesome. They get the cursory couple of verses out of the way early, and then it’s 2/3 outro, with a slick repeating piano, and every other instrument they have to hand. It even manages to include sax in a non-silly way, so mad points for that.
WHEN WE ALL FALL ASLEEP, WHERE DO WE GO
This won all the Grammys last night while I was considering what to write about it, so I guess it’s objectively good. And yeah, it was pretty good, though I have to say I did prefer my previous two new entries (FKA Twigs and Lana Del Rey). Nonetheless, it seems Bad Guy is the best song of 2019, and it does have an impact, being all BASS INTO YOUR FACE HOLE and whispery vocals. On that note, there’s very little actual, you know, singing on this thing. Twigs had a decent amount of the speak-singing, but then when she actually sang, it was phenomenal.
I didn’t foresee a strait-laced, anto-drugs track like Xanny, and it’s due to this experiment that I actually listened to it seven or eight times, and it’s really come out near the top of the pack for me. It’s more subtle.
There’s a few tracks on here that are kind of entry-level industrial with a dash of Amy Winehouse, not least of which is all the good girls go to hell, probably my favourite on the album. It’s about climate change! That’s nice, man is such a fool, why are we saving him?. Also a cute reference to God herself.
There’s a solid spine through the second half, starting with my strange addiction, which would probably be a better song if there weren’t random clips from The Office thrown in there to break things up. Looking into the background, her reasoning was “I like The Office”, so alright. bury a friend is in the same vein as bad guy and good girls, pretty sure it (at least) uses the same sample as Kanye’s Black Skinhead, although in a far, far less engergetic song.