Ex-Tabula Rasa

Themesong - The Future

Rah Band - Clouds Across the Moon

I still believe the future will be like this, will an intergalactic telephone operator and violent asteroid belt storm conditions forcing lonely housewives to cut short their annual call to their husband on Mars.

Themesong - Where is my Mind?

Pulp - Sorted for E’s and Wizz

“You want to phone your Mother and say ‘Mother, I can never come home again, ‘cause I seem to have left an important part of my brain somewhere, somewhere in a field in Hampshire’”

Themesong - Ach Scottish

Idlewild - You Held the World in Your Arms

I feel like 90% of my the bands I got into in my late teens/early twenties were Scottish. There must have been something in the water. Mogwai, The Delgados, Belle and Sebastian, Idlewild - all of them are in my top ten all-time favourite acts. Ballboy, Franz Ferdinand, AC Acoustics, Dawn of the Replicants, Primal Scream, Snow Patrol (yeah, they’re Irish, but they formed in Scotland and were part of that scene) - all great acts that I listen to again and again. 

So it’s really hard to pick one song for this theme (not that I’ve been particularly good at themesonging or even Tumbling recently, but that’s by the by). Heck, it was hard to pick a single song by this band.

I decided to pick an Idlewild song, because of all the bands mentioned above, Idlewild and Mogwai are probably the only ones where I can play their entire catalogue from beginning to end and not get bored or skip anything. I think it’s because there’s a definite progression in their work. Idlewild started out as a bunch of teenagers shouting and playing three-minute punk pop songs. Then they learned ‘proper’ songwriting and by their third album tried to become REM. It was all brilliant.

Themesong - The Elements

Gintare - Earthless

Gintare is a Lithuanian singer whose style - I would say - is quite similar to Bjork mixed with Enya mixed with an opera diva. That’s pretty much how I described her music when I was given the album ‘Earthless’ to review for my student newspaper eleven or so years ago, and I still stand by it. I gave the album five stars in my review, and I still stand by that. There have been times when I’ve considered it my #1 favourite record, and while it may not be quite that high now, it’s definitely top five. Half of the songs on it still give me shivers.

After I wrote the review I sat and waited for simlarly gushing appraisals to appear in the music press (bearing in mind that at the time I bought almost every single music magazine I could find, from NME to Select to Q to Kerrang to Mojo). Nothing. Not even a footnote. Heck, I just had a look and it seems the album is no longer listed on Wikipedia, presumably not notable enough. So sad.

Themesong - Shake Yer Bootay

Run DMC Featuring Jason Nevins - It’s Like That

Man, I have shaken mah bootay to this song so many times. You have no idea how many times. Like, it’s at least six times. AT LEAST SIX TIMES. And not just mah bootay, either. Oh no. I have shaken all sorts of mah appendages to this song. Bootay, shouldahs, elbers, earloobs, to name but four of mah appendages that I have shaken to this song.

I would also like to add (and therefore am currently adding) that I have not just shaken mah bootay to this piece of music. I have also done the following things to mah bootay while this slice of aural Wooyay was within my earshot: wiggled, moved up and down to the beat, gone like this: “Ungh; Yeah! Ungh; Yeah!”, and velociraptored.

(The last one is a dance move of my own creation.)

Thank you all for listening. In summary, then: Fuiru for Toronto Mayor in ‘15. Godspeed.

Themesong: Guilty Pleasures

Orange Range - The Locolotion

The Locolotion was the first Japanese song that caught my ear after I moved there. I remember the moment well. I’d been in the country less than a week - not enough time to get over the jet lag - and my supervisor was driving me to lunch. The song came on and I was instantly confused. Isn’t that the opening to the godawful song ‘Trouble’ by godawful British pop duo Shampoo? Isn’t the chorus basically the song ‘The Loco-motion’ by Little Eva (and later Kylie)? What’s going on?

My supervisor knew nothing of the songs I was referring to; she told me that it was a song that had been popular a few months ago, and was still in its death throes of radio airplay. I was intrigued.

Orange Range are a 5-member Okinawan rap-rock group. They were utterly huge while I was in Japan (and may still be, for all I know). The album Musiq, which came out in 2004 and I bought for this song, contained both Locolotion and their biggest hit, ‘Hana’, which is absolutely amazing, one of the most-played songs on my iPod, and one of the songs my wife and I put on our welcome CD for people who came to our wedding in Hawaii.

But Locolotion? It’s utter cheese. It’s several stolen songs with bad Japanese rapping over the top. It has a video in which a black man dressed as a sun lotion container spurts sunblock out of his head while women dance around him. The women in the video appear to have been found via an advert that said ‘Wanted: vaguely semi-attractive (from a distance) non-Japanese women who look really awkward when trying to dance in front of a camera’. One of the lines in the song is “Majide nice body” which translates as “Really nice body”, sung in two languages for no reason that I can think of.

And yet…I love it. It’s awful, but I love it. It’s the first song that I really noticed when I moved to the other side of the world, and it’ll stay with me forever, despite how terrible it is. It takes me back to a place where I was far away, all on my own, and just embarking on an adventure that would take me to other continents and into married life.

And try as I might, I can’t seem to jettison the painful memory of trying to do it in karaoke while drunk with an English friend and a Japanese English teacher.

Themesong: I Love Myself and I Want to Live

Divinyls - I Touch Myself

I haven’t seen this posted yet for today’s Themesong, but apologies if it has. I think it’s kind of apt, both in song content and the way it brings out the freaks in karaoke.

Also, it give me an opportunity to reblog one of my favourite posts, from July 2009:

One of my favourite song lyrics is the line in I Touch Myself by the Divinyls when it’s near the end of the song and she’s repeatedly telling us that when she thinks about us she touches herself and then at the end of the line she goes “I honestly do”. It’s so good, it makes me feel so happy inside.

Whenever I listen to that song I find myself thinking, “Does she really touch herself when she thinks about me? Is this for real? Or is she just exagerrating for the purpose of song?” It wouldn’t be the first time.* But then she assures us towards the end that the things she says are valid in the extreme and, given that she’s singing about us - and therefore thinking about us - she must be touching herself right at that moment.

I would like to take a moment and request that all songwriters use this technique for assuring their listening public that their sentiments are completely truthful and that they are not having us on like a bunch of idiot monkeys listening to a charlatan.

*For other examples, see Midler et al, Wind Beneath My Wings. That song is full of lies.

Themesong - International

 何度でも (Nando Demo) by Dreams Come True

Aimee already posted something by the wonderful Utada, so here’s my favourite Japanese song that’s not by Ms Hikaru. From what few parts of the song I can translate, I believe it’s about not giving up, today is the number one day, even when you can’t see a way out, fighto fighto, etc.

Themesong - Friday I’m in Love

Bloc Party - So Here We Are

After we left Japan for our own countries in the summer of 2006, my plan was to get a one-year working holiday visa so I could stay and work in Canada with Mrs Fuiru while applying for my full visa. There are a limited number of them available each year, and by August they had run out. I could apply for one in December, and had to be in England to do it. After that, it would take three months to process. I didn’t want to spend that much time away from my then-girlfriend.

So, for the three months between September and November, I lived as a visitor in Victoria with Mrs Fuiru, trying to get articles published in magazines and starting what turned out to be quite possibly the most awful novel ever envisioned, about a plumber with a magic spanner. She was studying, and we lived off savings and a Japanese tax refund.

It was one Friday night while living in this small basement apartment, when we were snuggled together on our couch watching terrible Friday night television, when I realised that this was utter heaven. This really was the girl I wanted to spend the rest of my life with.

The thought coincided with a car commercial featuring the opening guitar part from So Here we are by Bloc Party.

Not long later, I had to go back to England to get the visa that would let me work in Canada, albeit temporarily. It was three months before I would return. And the song I listened to the most while I was there was this one, to remind myself of perfect Friday nights, doing absolutely nothing, and being filled with utter joy.