THERE BUT FOR THE GRACE OF GOD GO NUMBERS FOUR AND THREE

FOUR OF ONE, ONE-THIRD OF A DOZEN OF THE OTHER
Havana Guns, "She Always Goes Down" (original writeup)

Contrary to popular belief, I'm frequently very much - and very shamelessly - the worst kind of critic of all: the kind who could just as easily be replaced by a book of Mad Libs with a picture of Kele Okereke on the cover. Seriously - next time you get (very very very very very) bored, go back through my archives and count up all the times I've written stuff structured to highlight how I used to not give a fuck about a band until they did something totally unconventional for them and I lost my shit about their entire ouevre, or alternately the number of times I've written in excess of two full pages of text about how I like a song despite it denying me any particular entry point. But if we're talking about my most spectacular bete noire for self-plagarism, I really can't imagine anyone holding a candle to the way I talk about the majestic and defunct-before-their-time Havana Guns, or more specifically their sky-illuminating indie-guitar-rock masterpiece "She Always Goes Down". There are times when I question whether I ever actually added a single unused word to the discourse (or what shamefully little of it exists, anyway) surrounding their music; the fact that I feel this way about a band way too tiny for even your Anglodorkiest friends to have heard about should tell you something about the limited options I'm faced with in describing it. Here, I'll rattle one off for you right now:

1. "OMG I SUCK AT PICKING HITS"
2. "OMG WHY ISN'T THIS A HIT"
3. "OMG THE BAND BROKE UP"
4. "OMG LIST OF INFLUENCES AND SIMILAR-SOUNDING BANDS"
5. "OMG HILARIOUS AND SELF-DEPRECATING INSIGHTS"
6. "OMG OMG OMG"
7. "OMG, DON'T FORGET I SUCK AT PICKING HITS"

I'm honestly tempted to leave my entire rewriteup of this song at that and move on to the next track. But really, the more I listen to it - and nearly a year after the fact, I'm still putting "She Always Goes Down" on mix CDs, a fact I can't attribute to thousands and thousands of arguably-better songs - the more it insists on itself: as the ideal indie modern guitar-rock song, as the archetypal "lost indie pop gem" of its age (if we've learned anything from the nightmare called the Pretenders, it's that female vocals of the richness and clarity on display on "She Always Goes Down" age like wine), as the best reason to tell the hemisphere of my brain that sits around going FUCK THIS ROCK AND/OR ROLL SHIT, LET'S GET TO THE FUCKING PRODUCTION ALREADY to shut the hell up (the rough edges here aren't some post-Libertines put-on - I get the feeling that if the Guns had had the opportunity to get the rhythm as rigid or the synths as lush as a Xenomania production, they woulda)...the list goes on and on.

But really, I find myself being most insisted upon simply by the song itself - the way you can hear the still-unknown-today lead singer's resolve hardening as the song moves inexorably towards the chorus, or the way that chorus doubles and redoubles over itself, or the way the lines have the tendency to end with a two-syllable triple-underlined Point Of Emphasis, Or Or Or. It's just that since none of these are particularly colossal achievements of music (especially not when you're listening to retardedly over-the-top stuff like "Crazy Boys" or "You're The Loser"), it's hard to find anything to say; praising this song for those three drum hits cueing you up for the chorus feels kinda like saying "Cheers" was a great show because they thought to put the bar downstairs. And consequently, I tend to overcompensate with all sorts of indie-rock navel-gazing, grinding away at trying to make connections with a song that stands alone like few other indie-rock songs from this decade, if not songs in general or ever. See? I'm doing it again right now, when really I should have just said this:

You need this song so bad. Right now.

(Click here to buy a copy of the "She Always Goes Down" directly from the record label - just click on "shop" to open the store. Also, if you'd like to hear more, the Guns have made the entirity of their tragically abbreviated career available for free online; visit their homepage to download more songs.)

ONE. ONE. TWO. THREE.
Flying Pickets, "Only You" (original writeup)

Yeah yeah yeah, but still - it should tell you something about the indelible effects of that movie on this song that I had no idea that it could have ever engender the kind of revulsion to which it seems to have a direct, wide-open expressway among a very specific, very vocal subset of music dorxxx. Nor, for that matter, would I ever have even tried to do so; Fallen Angels uses the Flying Pickets' cover of Yaz' "Only You" in the same world-erasing way (and arguably to even greater effect) that Goodfellas uses "Layla" or Crumb uses "Last Kind Words Blues", a way which has the effect of rendering any other context into which the song might be placed - say, as an inescapable number-one hit - nigh unto insulting, and to deconstruct it as a pop song divorced from the images with which I'd first encountered it seems spiteful. "Only You" felt as designed for Fallen Angels as Michelangelo's paintings seemed designed for the Sistine Chapel - the space it occupies is just that integral.

Having said that, of course I've listened to "Only You" outside of the movie - how could you not? It's gimmicky, yes, but it's gimmicky in a very respectful way (a rare breath of fresh air for a novelty song), and more importantly gimmicky in a very musical way; it's a lot easier to get past the level of HAY MAW, CUT OFF YR STO-REES, THEY'S SANGIN' AH-CAPELLER when you've got to wrangle with the kind of profoundly studied beauty inherent in all those little moments like the low end dropping in or the way the lead singer's voice quivers without ever struggling to hit a note. I mean, this isn't "Dreams" or "Things In Life"; Wong Kar-Wai had to do very, very little to make "Only You" as sweepingly cinematic as it ended up being. It's just a towering pop-music achievement - of appropriation, of execution, of creating a niche for yourself commercially - which also happens to be one of the most captivating things to listen to that I've certainly ever run across. As good as Fallen Angels itself actually is - and it's incredibly great, easily one of the five or six best movies of last decade - I'm not sure I'd rank it as an accomplishment next to what "Only You" managed to pull off. Lucky for me I can't be bothered to separate the two, huh? (Click here to buy The Best of the Flying Pickets, a greatest-hits compilation featuring both "Only You" and arguably the most hilariously ass-ugly cover ever, from Amazon.com)

ELSEWHERE
- OH SHIT DISCOBELLE, I apologize for pummelling your servers downloading, like, everything like I did recently. But fuck, man - what else am I supposed to do when you're throwing that blisteringly awesome new Justin Timberlake song all up in my face? I'm still trying to figure out what godawful buttshitty miserable POS "SexyBack" was doing as the first single when this was sitting readily at hand all along - decorum's just going to have to wait, OK?