Ladies with gentle hands, boys with curls, taxmen and bureaucrats, we’ve arrived at the end of August. That means it’s my time to share what music, and which musicians have been permitted to occupy my head for the last month.
This isn’t an objective list. Objectivity in music is mostly what people claim to have when they want their opinion to sound as though it was issued by the government. These are the records and artists I kept returning to, for reasons that were sometimes musical and sometimes completely inexplicable. That seems a better basis for an award than pretending I have been appointed chairman of the International Committee for Determining Good Songs.
I also decided there should be seven of everything. Seven is a respectable number. Six feels unfinished and ten is what you get when nobody can bring themselves to cut anything.
So. Seven bands.
Top 7 bands of August
7. The Doors
The Doors are an odd proposition. Half the time they sound like a genuinely formidable rock band; the other half they sound as though Jim Morrison has wandered into the rehearsal room wearing a velvet curtain and decided that civilisation’s a temporary arrangement.
The good news is that the music underneath him is excellent. Ray Manzarek in particular gives the band a peculiar identity. Without a conventional bass player, the keyboard has to do far more than accompany the guitar, and it gives the whole thing that slightly crooked shape. The songs never sit quite where you expect them to.
Morrison, meanwhile, understood that being a frontman was partly a matter of deciding how much of yourself to reveal and how much to turn into theatre. Sometimes he gets carried away. Sometimes you do too.
6. Joy Division
Joy Division sound as though they’ve removed everything from the song that wasn’t absolutely necessary and then discovered that what remained was considerably more frightening.
Peter Hook’s bass is allowed to roam around at the front of the music, Bernard Sumner’s guitar rarely behaves like traditional rock guitar, and Stephen Morris seems less interested in keeping a beat than establishing an atmosphere with one. It leaves Ian Curtis with very little space in which to hide.
That restraint is why the records still work. They aren’t trying to frighten you. They simply refuse to make themselves pleasant.
5. The Specials
The Specials had an unusual talent for making dreadful things sound entertaining without making them any less dreadful.
The rhythm keeps the songs moving while the lyrics deal in unemployment, boredom, racial tension, bad decisions and the general business of being British when Britain isn’t looking particularly impressive. It is all presented with enough wit to stop the songs turning into pamphlets.
“Rat Race” in particular sounds like an argument conducted while walking quickly.
I like that.
4. Bob Dylan
Bob Dylan is probably the only songwriter who can make a sentence seem as though it’s been borrowed from three different conversations and somehow improve all three.
His best writing isn’t merely clever. It has that strange quality where the words feel inevitable after you have heard them, although you cannot imagine arriving at them yourself. He can be obscure without becoming precious, funny without stopping for the joke, and conversational without sounding ordinary.
You listen to Dylan and realise how much songwriting depends on knowing which words to leave alone.
3. The Kinks
The Kinks are my number three because they noticed Britain.
Not Britain as a flag on a mug, not Britain as a collection of famous landmarks, but Britain as the woman at the bus stop, the bloke in the pub, the house with the badly kept garden and the peculiar little habits people develop without noticing them.
Ray Davies had an eye for people. He could take a tiny social detail and build an entire song around it without making the subject sound important. That’s harder than it appears. Most writers would take an ordinary afternoon and insist on turning it into a statement about the human condition.
Davies would probably just tell you who was standing there.
2. The Beatles
The Beatles have been discussed to death, which is unfortunate because the records themselves haven’t become any less strange.
Listen past the famous songs and you keep finding little decisions that shouldn’t work as neatly as they do. A chord arrives at the wrong moment. A vocal is doubled in an unexpected place. The arrangement turns a straightforward tune into something oddly elaborate. Then the song finishes and you realise none of it felt complicated while you were listening.
That was their real trick. They made invention look normal.
1. Pink Floyd
Pink Floyd get number one because they understand proportion.
A guitar can occupy twenty seconds without needing to become a solo. A drum pattern can sit quietly underneath something else. A synthesiser can do the musical equivalent of opening a door and then leave you alone with the room.
Their records are carefully built, but you rarely hear the construction. That’s important. Plenty of progressive rock is fascinated by the machinery of its own cleverness. Pink Floyd, at their best, were clever enough to hide the machinery.
August belonged to them.
Top 7 tracks of August
7. “Rat Race” — The Specials
The title tells you almost everything.
It isn’t a song about escaping modern life. It’s a song about noticing the absurdity of modern life while continuing to walk through it because you’ve got somewhere to be.
The music is wonderfully impatient. You can practically hear people checking the clock.
6. “Sunny Afternoon” — The Kinks
A song about financial collapse shouldn’t sound this relaxed.
That’s precisely why it works. The narrator is losing things that most people spend their lives trying to acquire, yet the performance has the strange calmness of someone who has already accepted the absurdity of the situation.
The tune almost floats. The lyrics don’t.
5. “Mr. Tambourine Man” — Bob Dylan
This is Dylan at his most elusive without becoming inaccessible.
The images keep changing, but the song never feels like a pile of poetry exercises. There’s a sense of somebody wanting to get out of his own head for a while and being unable to describe exactly where he wants to go.
The mystery isn’t the point. The movement is.
4. “Holiday in Cambodia” — Dead Kennedys
Subtlety has never been accused of entering this song.
The music is frantic, ugly and funny in the most unpleasant possible way, which is exactly what the subject requires. Jello Biafra’s performance leaves very little room for the listener to sit comfortably and congratulate themselves on understanding the joke.
It’s satire with its sleeves rolled up.
3. “Longview” — Green Day
The bassline does most of the introduction.
Then the song becomes a remarkably accurate account of doing absolutely nothing and somehow finding the experience exhausting.
There’s no grand teenage revelation here. Just boredom, laziness, television, sex and the peculiar irritation of having an entire afternoon available and no sensible use for it.
That honesty gives the song its charm.
2. “Nowhere Man” — The Beatles
The character in “Nowhere Man” has managed to become strangely invisible while still occupying an entire song.
Paul and John sing it with an almost cheerful neatness, which makes the subject more uncomfortable. Nobody sounds particularly alarmed by this man’s existence. He simply sits there, having apparently misplaced the part of himself that was meant to be doing something.
It’s one of the Beatles’ quieter observations and one of their sharpest.
1. “Nutshell” — Alice in Chains
“Nutshell” doesn’t need much decoration.
The guitar’s spare. The arrangement knows when to stop. Staley sings as though he has lost patience with the idea of dressing the thing up for public consumption.
That’s why it hits.
There isn’t a dramatic speech buried inside the song. There isn’t a great symbolic ending waiting to explain everything. A person has reached a point where honesty is easier than performance, and four minutes are made out of that fact.
I kept playing it and that’s usually the most reliable review I can give a song.
The Albums of August
The album section’s harder because records aren’t collections of individual songs. They have pacing, sequencing, habits and moods. A good album can make a song you would barely notice on its own suddenly seem necessary because of what happened three tracks earlier.
These were my seven.
7. Salad Days — Mac DeMarco
Mac DeMarco has perfected the sound of somebody who has absolutely no interest in impressing you.
The guitars are loose, the singing’s deliberately unremarkable and the production never seems particularly concerned with standing to attention. Yet the songwriting underneath is very good.
That’s the trick with DeMarco. The music looks scruffy until you try to take it apart.
6. Unknown Pleasures — Joy Division
There are records where the production sits behind the songs.
Here, the production practically becomes one of the instruments.
Every part has been given enough space to sound strange. The bass isn’t tucked away. The drums don’t simply keep time. The guitar appears, disappears and reappears in places that make the songs feel larger than their actual arrangements.
It’s a remarkably severe record and it doesn’t apologise for that.
5. The Doors — The Doors
The debut is full of very good ideas and at least one man who has decided he ought to be allowed considerably more dramatic freedom than most people would have permitted him.
Luckily, the music is strong enough to support it.
The keyboard work gives the songs a distinctive character, and the band can move from blues to psychedelia to something almost cabaret like without sounding as though they’ve changed groups halfway through.
It’s a slightly mad record and that suits them.
4. The Kinks Are the Village Green Preservation Society — The Kinks
This might be the most British record on the list without needing to tell you that it’s British.
The songs are full of little observations rather than grand declarations. The past’s treated with affection, suspicion and a certain amount of mockery. Nobody gets to behave like a symbol for very long before being reduced to an ordinary person again.
It’s wonderfully specific.
Specificity is one of the great luxuries in songwriting.
3. Bringing It All Back Home — Bob Dylan
Dylan sounds as though he’s become bored with being understandable.
The acoustic side has the familiar precision of his songwriting, while the electric material feels like the beginning of an argument about what folk music is actually supposed to be doing. The lyrics become stranger, the arrangements become louder and Dylan seems entirely unconcerned with whether anyone approves.
A very useful quality in an artist.
2. Abbey Road — The Beatles
The remarkable thing about Abbey Road is that it sounds finished without sounding embalmed.
The Beatles were reaching the end of their time together, yet the record doesn’t spend its time announcing its own importance. It gets on with the business of writing songs. The production’s immaculate, but little details keep the record alive.
And then there’s the second side, which is practically an argument for the album as a form in itself.
Fragments are allowed to connect.
Songs become parts of something larger.
Nobody needs to explain it.
1. Wish You Were Here — Pink Floyd
The strange achievement of Wish You Were Here is that it’s a very carefully constructed record which often sounds as though it has happened naturally.
The guitars arrive when they need to. The keyboards fill spaces rather than decorating them. The production gives everything room without making the record feel vacant.
And underneath all of that is a rather unpleasant subject: absence.
People disappear. Friendships change. Industries turn people into commodities. A band can lose somebody while he’s still technically there.
The album never needs to spell all of this out in capital letters.
It trusts the listener to notice.
That patience is probably why I kept returning to it through August. It isn’t in a hurry to tell you what it means.
It just lets the evidence accumulate.
Album of the Month
Wish You Were Here — Pink Floyd
There are albums you put on because you remember a song.
Then there are albums you play because you remember the album.
Wish You Were Here is the second sort.
The sequencing matters. The gaps matter. The length of the instrumental passages matters. The fact that the record doesn’t constantly attempt to win your attention matters.
It feels composed rather than assembled.
That’s what separated it from the rest of this month’s listening for me. Dylan had the words, the Beatles had the invention, the Kinks had the observation, Joy Division had the atmosphere, the Doors had the theatre and the Specials had the nerve.
Pink Floyd had the room and created a masterpiece.
I’ll definitely revisit this album for it’s own review.
The Final Verdict
August was an oddly well balanced month of listening.
The Beatles kept making complicated things appear simple. Dylan kept making simple things feel impossible to have written. The Kinks were busy noticing people. The Specials were annoyed about society. Joy Division made the bass louder than the guitar, which remains a very good decision. The Doors continued behaving as though somebody had given them a stage without giving them any instructions.
Pink Floyd won.
Alice in Chains supplied the song of the month and then went home before anybody could ask them to explain themselves.
So that’s August complete. Seven bands. Seven tracks. And seven albums.
And enough music listened to that I can now recognise several of the opening two seconds of songs that I absolutely didn’t know existed thirty days ago.
A useful month, really.
More of my musical content and reviews can be found here.
