Five more tracks that stopped me in my… tracks.
6. Chromium – The Church: I didn’t meet The Church through ‘Under The Milky Way’ like most of the world. I met them when I was 17 and Pandora (which was in India at the time) played me a track called ‘Chromium’ which, I would later find out was not the original recording from After Everything Now This, but the acoustic version that appeared on El Momento Descuidado. I struggle to tell you what it was about this track that made me stop and listen and, once it was finished, rejig my radio station genres so it would play again. I could be as simple as the stripped down opening. It could also be the meaningfully meaningless lyrics (‘neo maniac in the cul-de-sac’ was my forum signature back in my Songfacts days). Maybe it was just the name of the song? Whatever it was, no other track by The Church – and I love every song they ever made – came close to doing for me what ‘Chromium’ still does.
7. Soul One/Mouthful of Cavities – Blind Melon: I still don’t know of a voice as emotive as Shannon Hoon’s. Blind Melon may be seen as one-hit wonders for ‘No Rain’, which is beautiful in its paradoxical pairing of uplifting melodies with lonely verses, but ‘Mouthful of Cavities’ and ‘Soul One’ (and St. Andrew’s Fall/Walk) are more than just the best of Blind Melon. They’re among the best things to have ever happened to us.
I’ve never seen Shannon Hoon’s face on a t-shirt but I wept for him, for Nico and for the songs I would never get to hear, when I heard ‘Soul One.’ I cried for his bitter little heart (Inside – pain in my heart often made her cry. Outside, I cursed the birds and the sugar skies‘) for his childlike joy (‘you know it felt like she was the only one’) and for his unresolved grief (‘but I never – no I never got a chance to say goodbye.‘).
Like ‘Soul One’, it’s the devastation in lines like ‘see I haven’t seen him smile in a little while,‘ on ‘Mouthful of Cavities’ that breaks my heart. Hoon says the line twice, first with desolation (it’s almost a question with the lilt at the end of the sentence), and then with frustration. And when he says, sadly but matter-of-factly, ‘One of these days this will die – so will me and so will you,‘ you know it turned out of to be true.
The more I listen to Blind Melon, the more I fall in love with them – for their words, their music and their raw emotion. But today, I live in a world without Shannon Hoon and there’s no one to warble ‘Life Ain’t So Shitty’ into a tape recorder kept by the window of a hotel room and make it sound like a masterpiece.
8. You Look Fine – Pia Fraus: Let everything I say about ‘You Look Fine’ be as beautifully simple as it is. If I had ever done music theory, I would have used this track as a study on the significance of composition, of silence and of chaos, and propounded a corollary on the irrelevance of complexity. Pia Fraus don’t tell me anything beyond ‘you look fine’, but I believe them. Their musicianship isn’t masterful, but it’s exactly what I need to hear. And they throw in a wall of chaotic noise – why? I don’t know, but it was meant to be there. Walk down a busy street with this song in your headphones and let Pia Fraus be the voice in your head, your armour against interaction, and your boost of self-confidence.
9. Do You Feel Loved – U2: One day I will write a 12 page paper on how Pop is U2‘s best and most underrated album. Maybe it’s the natural successor to their experiments with Zooropa and Achtung Baby, but Pop is more innovative than both – nothing like its name suggests. I still wish they could have taken the maturity they showed on that album further. Instead they followed up with the palatable All That You Can’t Leave Behind, and got more and more formulaic with every successive release.
It took me a decade of listening to Pop to realise that ‘Do You Feel Loved’ was the standout track on the album because I would keep coming back to it. For the first and only time in my life I wished more people knew about this obscurity because it was made to be danced to with wild hair and wild arms and not an inch of space between two bodies (‘stick together man and woman‘*). ‘Do You Feel Loved’ is orgasmic, but it remains one of the many dog whistles on Pop, an album that most know for its most mediocre track – ‘Discotheque.’ Make love to ‘Do You Feel Loved’ or just dance to it with someone, or by yourself, or in your mind. You’ll find yourself transported out of this world.
*please ignore the heteronormativity this is 1999
10. Standing Outside a Broken Phone Booth with Money in my Hand – Primitive Radio Gods: I’m almost willing to go as far as to say that this song is meant to be listened to with someone else though, personally, I would never do such a thing. ‘Standing Outside a Broken Phone Booth with Money in my Hand’ is a quiet companion – reassuring in nothing but its presence. It’s rare I meet a song that paints such vivid images with nothing more than a few words and fewer sounds. You can see how ‘Moonlight spills on comic books and superstars in magazines.’ You can hear the plane take off from Baltimore and touch down on Bourbon Street. I think I hear coins dropping in a phonebooth when the song opens, but is that just a jukebox scratching a BB King record? Friends or more-than-friends talk about god and conspiracy theories into the night. ‘Phone Booth’ is the soundtrack to our solitary evening reflections. It’s profound, cynical and possibly meaningless – like most of us.
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