Archives for September 2018

Certain Songs #1325: New York Dolls – “Personality Crisis”

September 19, 2018 by Jim Connelly

Album: New York Dolls
Year: 1973

I’m not really sure what it means that there were only a handful of bands in the early 1970s willing to take on the Rolling Stones in the ragged-but-rough roots rock category. The Faces, of course. Aerosmith, maybe. And, of course, the New York Dolls, whose debut album was a critical link between the Stones and the punk rock that followed.

Like all of the aforementioned bands, the Dolls were built upon the tension between the flashy lead singer who wanted everybody to love them and the crack guitarist who provided licks, riffs and occasional vocals, to boot.

Certain Songs #1324: The New Pornographers – “Brill Bruisers”

September 18, 2018 by Jim Connelly

Album: Brill Bruisers
Year: 2014

And so, every few years The New Pornographers would gather together and release a new album of weird-ass indie pop music, some of which I liked more than others, and as the first decade of the century gave way to the second, I kind of figured that I’d probably never like another one of their songs as much as I did “Letter From an Occupant,” “The Bleeding Heart Show” or even “The Laws Have Changed.”

And then I heard the title track from 2014’s Brill Bruisers on The Late Show With David Letterman, and it blew me away from the opening notes, a full-group chant that goes a little something like this:

Certain Songs #1323: The New Pornographers – “The Bleeding Heart Show”

September 17, 2018 by Jim Connelly

Album: Twin Cinema
Year: 2005

So, a little bit of inside baseball. A massive project like Certain Songs obviously needs some kind of process: as you can probably imagine, I don’t just wake up every morning and decide which song to post about that day. When things are going well, there’s usually at least a week or two between when I write a post and when you see it.

But even before that, there’s research: nearly every morning I’m watching videos of potential future songs in order to figure out what might make the cut. So for example, while I’m writing about “The Bleeding Heart Show” on September 7th, what was actually posted on September 7th was New Order’s “Your Silent Face,” and this morning I was watching videos by Oasis, even though you won’t see any Oasis posts for at least a month. And so it goes.

Certain Songs #1322: The New Pornographers – “Letter From an Occupant”

September 16, 2018 by Jim Connelly

Album: Mass Romantic
Year: 2000

It always cracked me up when The New Pornographers were referred to as a “Canadian Indie Rock Supergroup,” as if that phrase wasn’t a complete oxymoron. It might have been less funny when Mass Romantic came out in 2000, but with the exception of Neko Case, it’s not like any of these people have carved out a huge career outside of the context of The New Pornographers, which might be part of the reason that they’re still putting out albums every few years.

In any event, Mass Romantic was incredibly well-received by critics when it came out, as the pop-music stew that head pornos Carl Newman & Dan Bejar came up with was truly unique, chalk full of musical asides, layered vocals, shifting tempos and hook after hook after hook.

Certain Songs #1321: New Order – “Slow Jam”

September 15, 2018 by Jim Connelly

Album: Get Ready
Year: 2001

Because Get Ready came out on August 27, 2001, it probably got kinda lost for me. I’d been unemployed since April and spent the first three weeks of September crashing on couches in Los Angeles while working a temp job for the Star Trek website (thanks Tim!) and interviewing at IndyMac Bank for the job that within a couple of months would have Rox & I packing up our Bay Area lives and starting our L.A. lives. All of this, of course, in the wake of the destruction of the twin towers in New York.

And yet, I was still somehow able to crank out a positive review of Get Ready for Neumu, a website started by Michael Goldberg after his pioneering Addicted to Noise site ended. Probably because I had plenty of time to listen to it during my purgatory at the Extended Stay America in Monrovia, the less said about, the better.

Certain Songs #1320: New Order – “Run”

September 14, 2018 by Jim Connelly

Album: Technique
Year: 1989

And then, three long years between Brotherhood and Technique, an uncharacteristic thing for a band that — if you counted Joy Divsion & the singles comps (fair, because they collected non-album songs) — had released 10 albums worth of studio material in their first decade.

Incredibly prolific. Until they weren’t. Which is normally how it happens, I guess. I mean, except for Robert Pollard, of course. The irony is that — because of the success of 1987’s Substance singles comp, as well as their ongoing onslaught of singles — New Order was getting ever more successful even as their music-making was slowing down.

Certain Songs #1319: New Order – “Every Little Counts”

September 13, 2018 by Jim Connelly

Album: Brotherhood
Year: 1986

The closing track on Brotherhood was as close to a ballad as New Order was ever going to get, and was also perhaps the silliest, most light-hearted track that they ever did: not only does Bernard Sumner crack himself up during the opening verse — not quite to the level that Bob Dylan did on “Bob Dylan’s 115th Dream” — because he was very aware of the silliness.

And of course, none of this mattered because “Every Second Counts” was a near-perfect closing track for Brotherhood, one more comedown after the near-psychedelic coda of “Angel Dust,” and also closing the “disco” side of the record with a slow dance song.

Certain Songs #1318: New Order – “All Day Long”

September 12, 2018 by Jim Connelly

Album: Brotherhood
Year: 1986

My favorite song on Brotherhood starts off as a drum-machine driven chill pill after the frenzy of “Bizarre Love Triangle” and buries its lyrical darkness in a combination of mumbled lyrics and a very very long instrumental section.

And in fact, it does such a good job hiding that lyrical darkness that I literally had no idea how dark it truly was until I read Peter Hook’s description of it as “the only song about child abuse you can dance to.” And even though I’d been listening to it for 30 years, I had no idea. But it’s all right there:

Certain Songs #1317: New Order – “Broken Promise”

September 11, 2018 by Jim Connelly

Album: Brotherhood
Year: 1986

Despite not quite having the highs of the previous two albums, Brotherhood turned out to be my favorite New Order album, maybe because it took the step of dividing the sides up so that side one was the “rock” side and side two was the “disco” side.

And so while you’d think that my favorite songs would all be on the “rock” side, what made Brotherhood great was that while side one was incredibly consistent, side two had my favorite songs, which we’ll talk about in the next couple of days.

Certain Songs #1316: New Order – “Face Up”

September 10, 2018 by Jim Connelly

Album: Low-Life
Year: 1985

By now, it has probably become obvious that none of my favorite New Order songs post-“Temptation” were actually singles, and so my personal history with this band completely deviates from the masses. Which was not my intention — anybody who has paid attention knows that I generally gravitate towards singles, even with my favorite artists — but New Order was the rare great singles band where I preferred the album cuts to the singles.

What is my intention, however, is to point out that to limit your knowledge of New Order to just the singles isn’t the way to go, not just because you miss out on songs that woulda been singles for a lesser band — your “Age of Consent” or “Love Vigilantes” — but also deeper cuts like “Face-Up,” which ended Low-Life on a real up.