Songs of the week 12/08/2023
With the year already closing out, this week’s picks will be the last of 2023, because I’m not about to drop the next Songs of the Week Annual Review on January 4th… again. It may have taken me a year, but I’ve sort of learned to plan ahead, maybe. For now, you’re gonna want to stick around for this one—it has a surprise ending.
MAIN TITLE (THE SHINING) | Wendy Carlos & Rachel Elkind My god, what a way to start winter. Call me crazy, but this song makes me giddy-happy-ready to face the day, and I’m not even joking when I say I should really listen to it more often first thing in the morning. On-set nightmares aside, The Shining is easily one of my all-time favorite movies, scratching some undefined itch that only The Shining, Alien, Aliens, and The Thing can—a specific, hand-crafted, timbral horror made immaculate by its imperfections. It’s the sort of horror that can be both legitimately chilling and also a comfort film, and the fact that those can coexist is nothing short of magical in my eyes. While Kubrick is the visionary behind The Shining’s direction, it’s composer Wendy Carlos and producer Rachel Elkind—both pioneers in the early landscape of synth—that we all have to thank for the soundscape of this masterpiece. Trans icon and synth innovator Wendy Carlos lays down a dirge befitting a cathedral organ, muffled as though by the coming snow. These simple, plodding blasts of sound hold their own without repeating themselves for some time, earning listeners’ attention despite taking their foreboding time. Credit where credit is due, though, the real magic happens when the ambience kicks in. Often attributed to the vocals in Carlos’s work, I’m assuming Rachel Elkind is the mastermind behind the bone-chilling wails, whines, chirps, and cries that disintegrate from the synth drone. To me, these are the real signal to the audience that they’re really in for it these next two and a half hours—though most horror is easy to laugh at out of context, I’d be hard pressed to find someone who wouldn’t soil themselves if they heard these primal calls reverberating through the wilderness. Still, this signal is exactly what makes me love “Main Title” so much—from a place of safety, this song is not only delightfully creepy, but bottles what my brain often fills the winter silence with.
It appears Kubrick was well aware of this song’s standalone mastery, because for the first three minutes of the movie, he shines the spotlight solely on “Main Title,” only accompanied by garish, cyan credits and stark footage of the Torrance car driving towards their doom. Having both driven on Going to the Sun Road and boated across St. Mary Lake (known as “inside big water” or “blue banks” to the indigenous Blackfeet), this track to me perfectly captures the chilling sublimity of being amidst such massive, ragged mountains—beautiful, powerful, but in an instant, dangerous, as the Torrance family finds in isolation. It’s this isolation, in fact, that turns such gorgeous landscape sinister. The film’s very first moments show a sparse island sporting a Charlie Brown Tree just above the waterline, alone from multiple perspectives—first amidst the vast lake, and again amidst the nigh-impassable mountains. In this context, the song’s simple, low blasts and disturbing chirps sound like the distant howls of wind, wolves, or most likely scorned spirits echoing through the scarred rocks. No matter how far away they really are, these cries still shake pebbles from cliffsides miles away—always too close for comfort.
All that goth shit aside, though, this song’s unparalleled ominousness not only pairs with modern horror themes, but also, surprisingly, with a lot of blues-descended openings. My favorite find was that The Temptation’s “Papa Was A Rolling Stone” transitions near-seamlessly from this song thanks to its extended instrumental intro. Strangely (but maybe not), Tribe’s “Push It Along” also follows excellently thanks to its own wonderfully cacophonous intro, with crying babies and dissonant synth that leaves everyone I’ve ever played it for looking at me like, “what the fuck was that?!”
Pairs Well With: “American Horror Story Theme” (Cesar Davila-Irizarry & Charlie Clouser) “Papa Was a Rolling Stone” (The Temptations), “Push It Along” (A Tribe Called Quest)
POOR SKELETON STEPS OUT | XTC Being the sonic progenitor to so many bands I’ve gushed about—from They Might Be Giants, to Oingo Boingo, to Julian Cope, to even The Cure—I’m surprised I haven’t given XTC the same treatment. Worry not—their year is on the horizon, so let’s get hyped with “Poor Skeleton Steps Out.” She X on my T ‘til I C, or some such.
While not quite my favorite track from Oranges & Lemons, “Poor Skeleton Steps Out” has no right rocking as hard as it does alongside such goofy goober marimba. If you’re looking for XTC, this track has it all: psychedelic lyrics, even more psychedelic instrumentation, and a diabolically catchy melody worth stomping and head-banging to. If you’re not sold, here’s the premise from Andy Partridge himself:
“The last ethnic group to be liberated are skeletons. They're unfailing in their support of human beings but have to wait until we die to achieve their freedom. In the song, the skeleton gets a night out.”
It really is incredible what simultaneous range this song is able to achieve. I can’t get enough of that jangly, loose-string guitar at the beginning, like Shakey Graves’s foreboding blues “Not Everything Grows” or Jeff Tweedy’s “The Red Brick,” yet the tone changes immediately when the minor-key marimba clambers in. If my diction didn’t make it clear, this song sounds exactly like its subject matter, evoking rattling bones without tumbling too far into camp. “Poor Skeleton” gives me a genuine, Halloween glee that’s more difficult to achieve than it might seem—cartoony without losing its creepy edge. It’s the sort of niche expertise you’d expect from the folks behind the weirdo white boy band tradition that Will Wood, Jim Noir, and Dr. Steel still carry the torch for today. Love me some XTC.
Pairs Well With: “Six Different Ways” (The Cure), “Heard Somebody Cry” (Oingo Boingo,” “The Guitar (The Lion Sleeps Tonight)” (They Might Be Giants)
NEW AMSTERDAM | Elvis Costello & The Attractions When I was a kid, I couldn’t place what hit so sticky about “New Amsterdam”—was it the rolling rhythm, the repetitive rhymes, or Costello’s incongruously rich voice? Whatever it was, I think it made me agitated, because my first memories of this song’s wonderful wordplay make me wound up and whiny. I don’t know, maybe it was a sensory thing, or maybe there’s only so much poetry a guy can take. Like, do you guys ever read my abrasive, affected alliteration attacks and suddenly find your fist flung through the wall? Perhaps there’s just a time and a place for stimulating wordplay—so packed and thought-provoking that it demands an audience’s full attention. Since I spent so many listens curled up grumpy in my carseat, let’s finally give “New Amsterdam” the attentive audience it deserves.
Like Prince, Elvis Costello is clearly one of those artists I just don’t get (yet)—though I clearly see his creativity on display, I haven’t yet clicked with his distinct, nasally voice and bombastic synth. That’s not to say I haven’t found a handful of Elvis Costello songs to love (“Hurry Down Doomsday?” “Pump It Up?” The incredibly underrated “My Mood Swings,” courtesy of Lebowski? He’s very thorough), but as of now, I just can’t connect with his usual sound. Even so, I’d be hard-pressed to find a flaw with “New Amsterdam” these days, especially if my main childhood critique boils down to “it’s too good.” Seriously, the lyricism of this one is off the charts, every line more memorable than the last. Some stand out for their sound-play (“Till I step on the brake to get out of her clutches / Till I speak double dutch to a real double duchess”), others feature unforgettable imagery (“You're sending me tulips mistaken for lilies / You give me your lip after punching me silly”) and some are so stacked that there’s no single discernible trick to attribute without doing disservice to another (“Down on the mainspring, listen to the tick tock / Clock all the faces that move in on your block”). Obviously, this is poetry, but what makes it so punchy (aside from Costello’s bold delivery) is the expert simplicity of the smudged instrumentation—a few, strummed chords on acoustic guitar swimming amidst keyboard so muted, I never noticed where the sound was coming from. I’m always struck by how immersive this background can be, and even more so by how it highlight the lyrics. Though nothing really changes until the lighter bridge, something intense and untraceable shifts as Costello returns to the steady body with “Somehow I found myself down at the dockside.”
There’s an amazing momentum here that I don’t fully understand, and it’s no wonder that this piece has seemed to capture fans. Today, I found out there are conspiracies abound attempting to unravel these triple-knotted lyrics, which might as well be speaking double dutch themselves. Though I’ve yet to discover any real substantiation in its favor, the most prominent interpretation of “New Amsterdam” is that it chronicles Costello’s guilt at the end of an extramarital affair with an American groupie, which reportedly took place on his visits from London to New York. This would certainly lend credence to why Costello often transitions “New Amsterdam” into a cover of The Beatles’s “You’ve Got to Hide Your Love Away” live since his Woodstock ‘99 performance. That would be pretty icky, and certainly wouldn’t push me further towards liking Elvis Costello, but there are so many meanings imbedded here that for once, it doesn’t ruin the song for me. While so many songs can be overplayed, I think I’ll only appreciate “New Amsterdam” even more the more I hear it—unless, I guess, I’m tired and cranky and it’s dark and the car is too loud and I just want to go home and sleep because I’m just a little baby guy.
Pairs Well With: “Berlin Got Blurry” (Parquet Courts), “Key of C” (Jim Noir), “Angel” (Gavin Friday)
SAN JACINTO | Peter Gabriel To the tune of “Despacito,” anyone? Wait, guys, I just read the lyrics, this is so not the time.
Take two: if you’ve listened to his soul-wringing “Biko,” then you know Peter Gabriel has always uplifted the perspectives and stories of the oppressed, balancing his heady spirituality with grounded, political protests. If you’ve listened to his soul-wringing “Biko,” then you might also know Peter Gabriel hasn’t always been comfortable telling minorities’ stories, afraid even in the eighties of being a white savior (it was Brian Eno, in fact, who convinced him to tell Steve Biko Bantu’s story)—a humbleness that, if anything, qualifies him to use his position of privilege to raise awareness. Just one album later, “San Jacinto” walks the same snake-bitten path, though not nearly as heavily. In fact, from the instrumentation, this song sounds wildly Björky—specifically, this one might as well be a sequel to “Frosti” with its sugar plum fairy glockenspiel (or whatever’s making that noise—that’s just my best guess). To me, these delicate, frosted sounds are a bit like the bagpipes of “Biko”—culturally out of place, but a perfect fit nonetheless. Clearly, there’s also something beneath the surface, as indicated by the phlegmy, Annihilation synth that rumbles like an eardrum (or like the syphon-derived resonation chamber of a Megasquid two hundred million years in the future. You wouldn’t understand). However, this song’s emotional core is its lyrics, sung so full of heartbroken resolution by Gabriel—after all, despite its Spanish name (or perhaps to spite it), this song is from the perspective of an indigenous boy coming to terms with the rot of his heritage. Forced to bear a rattle snake bite as part of an initiation, poison courses through the new man’s veins concurrently with his discovery of the poison coursing through his culture. Crossing to the other side of San Jacinto mountain, he finds himself stumbling through “cut up land”—a white suburb—hearing assimilated terms from the cultures that once lived here. While he follows the dry river bed, he watches kids wearing water wings alongside “scouts and guides [making] pow-wow signs,” all while passing businesses like Geronimo’s Disco and Sitting Bull Steakhouse. It’s this sort of sobering commercialization of the sacred, of history, that make Gabriel’s declarations of “I hold the line” all the more heart-wrenchingly desperate—a dying man still determined to keep his people alive.
Of course, I wouldn’t be a cusp zoomer if I didn’t first investigate the accuracy of the culture presented in this song. I’m kidding, of course, but I do think it’s important to know who exactly this story portrays instead of settling for just a dollar general Native American™️ that could have come from anywhere. Though Gabriel’s powerful and potent empathy is always appreciated here on Max Todd Dot Com, it does seem like he has here amalgamated several traditions from tribes that, as far as I can tell, don’t currently live in San Jacinto. Currently, the actual San Jacinto nations belong to the sovereign Luiseño and Cahuilla tribes, neither of whom practice the traditions in these lyrics. From what little I know, the medicine men, sweat lodges, and bison reminisced on here sound Lakotan or Blackfeet to me, though that might be because those traditions are closer to my home in the central Rockies. This in mind, I’m left uncertain about the realism (or lack thereof) in this song—I’m obviously not indigenous, so who am I to say? Sure, a lack of nation specificity is often strange in my categorical brain, but this song definitely sheds light on a wider Native American sentiment to a primarily white audience well before colonialism became a hot-button topic in these circles. As always, though, Gabriel’s empathy is unmatched, and this isn’t even Peter Gabriel 4’s most soul-touching song (for that, I’d look to “Rhythm of the Heat” [Reviewed 08/26/2022], but after the numinous New Blood version, that’d hardly be a fair fight).
Pairs Well With: “Frosti” (Björk), “Synchronicity I” (The Police), “Peter Pan” (Arcade Fire)
TOXIC | Britney Spears And now, the moment you’ve all been waiting for… this one’s been a long time coming. For the past four years, it’s been a brutal, uphill battle against my every instinct, desperately gaslighting myself to return to the indie ivory tower. No more, my friends, no more, for at this year’s end, I have finally come to my senses and accepted that indeed, Britney Spears’s “Toxic” fucking slaps, and I will not apologize for it. I was only three during Toxic’s heyday, so you can’t blame me for being late to the party, but my resistance was still unjustified, stemming from some middle school elitism about being “different.” Obviously, that’s not something I can change, but that doesn’t mean I can’t admit when Britney knocks it out of the fucking park. It’s been a riveting journey, much of which was spent convincing myself I didn’t like “Toxic” itself, but instead just the sampled strings, because, you know, my street cred comes from the deep cuts. Even then, as a violinist, it was undeniable that this song’s violin sting is just fantastic, and I had to pin that admiration somewhere. You’ll never believe it, but things weren’t quite that sample (ha ha ho ho hee hee), because that sample was so cut-and-pasted that it barely resembled the original source, which I wrote off as “some Bollywood song.” Well, breaking fucking news, you manic pixie e-boy, “Tere Mere Beech Mein” is just as much of a banger, and I’m tired of pretending it’s not. So, if you’ll forgive me, a sidebar:
TERE MERE BEECH MEIN (DUET) | Laxmikant-Pyarelal & Anand Bakshi Itself taken from the 1981 classic Ek Duuje Ke Liye (oh, you haven’t seen it?), “Tere Mere Beech Mein” (but sometimes just spelled Men) was huge in a culture I never grew up with, and almost certainly stuck out to Indian Britney Spears listeners. A forbidden love story as old as time, Ek Duuje Ke Liye is a romantic tragedy about a pair of Hindi and Tamil lovers whose families are hellbent on tearing them apart. Legendary composer Laxmikant Pyarelal imbues this piece with so much intensity and gusto, repeating what would become the first half of “Toxic’s” sample in urgent bursts as Vasu jumps across rocks to reach his wind-buffeted lover, Sapna, for a forbidden encounter on the beach. Even without understanding Anand Bakshi’s lyrics, I’m still pretty swept away by certain parts of the song, even if it can be a little goofy. Maybe a lot goofy. The fucking laugh at 2:18? I’m sorry, man, it’s too funny. All this without the actual scene, too, which…
Okay, but I have to admit, there’s a solo at 2:23 on what sounds like a snake charmer’s been that sounds incredible just after this brief dialogue break (good save).
But I’ve been beating around the bush—let’s get back to “Toxic,” the song of the week, if I had to pick one. At that point in my Spearitual journey, I’d publicly come clean to liking the well-crafted violin sample (eye roll emoji, nerd emoji, clown emoji), yet I still hadn’t acknowledged how well it fits with every other element—the snappy guitar, the sparing but perfectly-balanced bass, and even lyrics like “devil’s cup.” I’m not usually a fan of Spears’s vocals or those of her contemporaries, but she herself sounds particularly violin-like in this piece, and I’d be lying if I said I didn’t love how low and growly she goes on “addicted to you.” And look, maybe that brief, vocoded bridge is still a little much for me, but I think it’s just camp enough that I’ll come around to it. In short: I’m addicted to “Toxic,” don’t you know that you’re “Toxic?” Wow. What a weight lifted from my shoulders—especially since, no spoilers, but a certain artistic hero of mine has coincidentally also given “Toxic” a new life… next year, though, next year. Maybe we’ll do Doja then, too.
Pairs Well With: “Tere Mere Beech Mein (Duet)” (Laxmikant-Pyarelal & Anand Bakshi), “Hella Good” (No Doubt) [Reviewed 11/18/2022], “The Reflex” (Duran Duran)
PLASTIC SURGERY | Inka Essenhigh I’ll never get over the Denver Art Museum’s Disruption exhibit, will I (DAM!)? So many good pieces, so little time. While I think this one is pretty self-explanatory (which, I think, is a huge virtue), it’s worth noting how cool some of these liposuction flesh lumps look—almost too obscure to be grotesque, much like the earliest of AI art. I wonder how one goes about creating figures so inscrutable that they seem randomized—or, even better, meaningful behind cartoon-gore absurdity? Or maybe I just really like this shade of yellow a lot. It’s flame yellowish-orange in Lego’s color palette, in case you were wondering. I know you were.