Another Form of Relief

Here’s something shocking: Elliott Smith isn’t as depressing as you think he is. Sure, his songs frequently deal with addiction, abuse and heartbreak. Sure, his entire life and death has an air of tragedy about it all. Sure, some of the music is just downright miserable. Despite all this though, I still don’t find him half as depressing as the bulk of the current crop of Pitchfork or blog favourites. Some Song isn’t the most cheerful of songs. The themes above all seem to make it into it’s two minute length. The wordplay on offer makes it more than worthwhile though. The fact that this was actually a b-side gives a sense of just how damn talented this guy was.

So the heat is back with a vengeance, making sitting at my computer for prolonged periods rather unpleasant again. Which gives me an excellent excuse for the roughly fortnightly covers post!

MP3 Ben Folds Five – She Don’t Use Jelly (expired) (The Flaming Lips)
Ben Folds Five covering The Flaming Lips may seem like a pretty strange thing, but somehow Folds and his merry men got away with it. Taking a whimsical song and making it, well, whimsical with a piano, lets the song remain just as fun as it originally was, while also stamping it with the typical Folds kind of sound. The end result is such that you probably wouldn’t know it wasn’t one of Folds’ zanier songs if you had no clue about the original. I’m actually starting to think that Folds should release a covers album. Given how often he pops up in this feature, I’m guessing he’d have enough to fill one even without recording any new material.

MP3 Johnny Cash – Hurt (expired) (Nine Inch Nails)
Actually, speaking of strange choices for covers, on paper Johnny Cash covering Nine Inch Nails seems just about the craziest thing possible. So how on earth did he end up putting together an absolutely fantastic song that, dare I say, kicks the ass of the original. Cash’s version is just so full of emotion, so raw, that it’s just about perfect. Hell, I’m not even a Cash fan and this is just about one of my favourite songs. His voice, the subtle build of the guitar, it just doesn’t put a foot wrong from start to finish.

MP3 Elliott Smith – Thirteen (expired) (Big Star)
I just realised that this week’s edition is slightly morbid, featuring almost the very last songs of both Johnny Cash and Elliott Smith. Smith’s offering of the Big Star classic is a solid enough end to his career, even if it doesn’t come close to his best work. Taking a nostalgic song and running it through the Smith-o-matic leaves us with an incredibly mournful song, which is quite some feat given very little actually changes within the song itself. I often find that the critics of Smith pick on his voice as being the problem with his music, but anyone who can change the very nature of a song simply with their voice must be doing something right.

I’ve got some good stuff coming up over the next few days, including a bunch of new bands that are making some great music, and maybe a closer look at a couple of albums I’ve been sent lately. I’m still not sure whether to actually play around with actual album reviews, so we’ll just have to see what comes of it. Right now though, I’m going to go and melt or something. Fun!

When I wrote the first ‘Five for Friday’ post this time last week, I said I didn’t know whether or not it would be a recurring feature or not. Given how much I enjoyed it writing it though, getting to go into some detail about some of my favourite songs, I think it’s inevitable that it’s going to be, at least for a little while. As such, we now have part two in the series, where you get to read me rambling about some songs that I like, and as a reward, you get to listen to them. I think that’s how all this works anyway.

MP3 Semisonic – Closing Time (expired) (Feeling Strangely Fine, 1998)
It’s a shame that Semisonic will seemingly forever be lumbered with the “one hit wonder” tag as over the course of nearly a decade they put out several really great albums. They also hold a personal significance to me as they were the first real band I got seriously into after I purchased ‘Feeling Strangely Fine’ following some school exams when I was 16. Crazy times. Anyway, ‘Closing Time’ is probably their most definitive song, even if it isn’t their most complex. The words are pretty much self explanatory, putting across that feeling of being kicked out of a bar at the end of the night to a fantastic piece of guitar work. And the sadness from Dan Wilson’s voice when he points out that “every new beginning comes from some other beginning’s end” is just perfect.

MP3 The Elected – It Was Love (expired) (Sun, Sun, Sun, 2006)
I’m still not a big fan of ‘Sun, Sun, Sun’, but this song is just about my favourite of any song that The Elected have put out. If there’s one thing Blake Sennett can do well, it’s sounding melancholy while doing his best Elliott Smith impression. An entirely depressing story about two people who stay together because they know no better (“I just put up with you / Kid, I stayed because you wouldn’t leave”). I don’t know if it’s supposed to be positive or not when Blake describes this time as “It was love / Or at least the closest I got”, but it certainly doesn’t seem that way even if it’s supposed to be.

MP3 Elliott Smith – Happiness (expired) (Figure 8, 2000)
A nice segueway here from a man who sounds like Elliott Smith to Smith himself. I don’t really know what ‘Happiness’ is actually about, and it’s far too easy to shout “suicide” or “broken relationships” or whatever at it. I guess it doesn’t really matter given the song itself, and it’s certainly not hard to believe how real the emotion behind “all I want now is happiness for you and me” when Elliott is the one singing.

MP3 The Rakes – Retreat (expired) (Capture/Release, 2005)
It’s easy to proclaim that The Rakes sound like every other British band of the past couple of years, but out of the recent batch of “common people” bands, they are the one that I enjoy the most. A song about trying to strike that balance between not wasting your life but also keeping a social life, we never do really know whether the narrator decides to “retreat” or “go out for the fifth night in a row”. I’d hazard a guess that he’s heading down to the club just once more though. It’s a theme that The Rakes often return to, particularly in their awesome “Work, Work, Work (Pub, Club, Sleep)”.

MP3 Pavement – Rattled By The Rush (expired) (Wowee Zowee, 1995)
We’ll conclude with a Pavement classic today, from their often overlooked ‘Wowee Zowee’ album. If I’m honest, it was probably the last Pavement album that I learnt to enjoy, but upon doing so, I discover a whole bunch of gems, including this one. It’s probably the most accessible song on the album while still remaining as unique as most of their recordings. I’m not going to try and assign reason to it, although Malkmus has implied that it’s about marriage in interviews, which kind of fits, so I’m not going to argue with that. Thinking about it, I’m coming to the conclusion that it’s the fun of songs like this that I find lacking in Malkmus’ solo material and why it doesn’t end up doing very much for me. Kind of a random tangent I know, but it’s something to consider.

That’s all for tonight. On an entirely non-musical related note, if you get a chance to see Sarah Silverman’s Jesus Is Magic, make sure that you do. It’s just about the funniest, most offensive thing that I’ve seen in a very long time.

This post actually begun life as a conversation in the pub last saturday. And by a conversation, I mean something that lasted all of two lines. Here’s a recreation of that action packed drama:

Simon: I’d like to hear that Ben Folds tribute song to Elliott Smith.
Eddie: I have that. I’ll throw it up on the blog at some point.

Now this was said in something of a jokey way. Surely putting up songs for friends from conversations in a pub is hardly the most professional way to go about running an mp3 blog. The more I thought about it though, I came up with slightly less feeble ways to spin it into an entire post. What began as a single song I was going to throw up with some other stuff has turned into a small collection of Elliott Smith tribute songs. Now I’m not bothered about crappy covers of Smith songs, just the original songs that were inspired by him. Which makes him sound like a film soundtrack, but no matter. I don’t have many of these though, but we’ve got three. For what it’s worth, I was going to put up Weezer’s ‘The Other Way’ with this as it apparently relates to a point, but it seemed a tad inappropriate.

MP3 Ben Folds – Late (expired)
Well this is the song that started it all off. Apparently Folds knew Smith, and toured with him a few times. Which would have been one hell of a concert to see live, but I digress. Folds’ tribute to Smith is the kind of song that he can do best: the simple piano ballad that focuses primarily on the lyrics for impact. It’s an incredibly sad song (“No, no / Things were looking up for you / Least that’s what I heard / No, no / Someone came along and washed away your hard-earned / Piece of mind”), although I suppose that’s an inevitability given the subject matter. One of the few songs from ‘Songs From Silverman’ I really do like though.

MP3 Rilo Kiley – Ripchord (expired)
MP3 Rilo Kiley – It Just Is (expired)
I could have put up nearly all of Rilo Kiley’s 2004 album ‘More Adventurous’, as there’s a ton of Smith related content on there. Jenny Lewis and Blake Sennett were obviously huge fans of Smith (Sennett so much he seems to model himself on him musically), and that’s reflected in a lot of the album, but particularly these two songs. ‘Ripchord’ is just Blake and an acoustic guitar, which fits the song perfectly. I’ll be perfectly honest that I didn’t even realise it was about Smith at first, but it seems so obvious now. The second verse is sung directly to Smith (“I don’t know if you meant it / But you did yourself in / And I was even having a good day / When I found out we’d lost you”) and ends up being incredibly powerful. ‘It Just Is’ is the song that closes the album, moving from the loss of Smith the artist (“He wasn’t our son / He belonged to everyone”), moving through to the broader acceptance of death itself. It’s a powerful and fitting eulogy.

And just to bulk this out a little more, it only seems fair to include a little Smith while I’m at it..

MP3 Elliott Smith – A Fond Farewell (expired)

There are a bunch of other tribute songs to Smith according to a list on his Wikipedia entry, but these were the only ones that I already had. Or rather, the other ones listed were by bands that don’t really appeal to me all that much. There’s also a ton more Elliott Smith related content over at Sweet Adeline, his official website. You know, just for those of you who have been living under a rock these past few years and aren’t actually aware of him.

There is just about one thing that I find more interesting than music in this world: politics. Now I realise a ton of you have just written me off as being entire insane, but I can live with that. Nor do I particularly hide my politics, being a card carrying (literally) liberal of the (hopefully) non-loony variety. As such, it seemed fitting that the first mix I’d put together on here would be a combining of my politics into what I usually do here.

So in celebration of another glorious raping of our civil liberties that the public don’t give a shit about, Another Form of Relief is proud to present The World Is A Mess, But Our Hair Is Perfect. This is an updated edition of a mix I originally made last year, and seems depressingly more relevant than that. I know there’s a certain irony in most of the songs being by American bands about American issues, but god knows British bands aren’t getting political which would make this thing pretty damn short.

Note: This will only be available for a limited amount of time, so if you want any part of it, get it now, as I’ll be taking it down within a week of this post.

MP3 01 – The Robot Ate Me – The Genocide Ball (expired)
MP3 02 – Koufax – Why Bother At All (expired)
MP3 03 – Actionslacks – This Damn Nation (expired)
MP3 04 – The Rakes – Terror! (acoustic) (expired)
MP3 05 – Ted Leo & The Pharmacists – Counting Down The Hours (expired)
MP3 06 – The Decemberists – Sixteen Military Wives (expired)
MP3 07 – Ben Folds – All You Can Eat (expired)
MP3 08 – The Wading Girl – Amber Waves (expired)
MP3 09 – Stars – Celebration Guns (expired)
MP3 10 – Elliott Smith – A Distorted Reality Is Now A Necessity To Be Free (expired)
MP3 11 – Ben Kweller – Jerry Falwell Destroyed The Earth (expired)
MP3 12 – Desaparecidos – Greater Omaha (expired)
MP3 13 – And You Will Know Us By The Trail Of Dead – Worlds Apart (expired)
MP3 Bonus – The Rakes – The World Was A Mess, But His Hair Was Perfect (expired)

The additional Rakes song doesn’t really fit the rest of the theme, but the title fits perfect and it’s a rather good song, so I thought I’d throw it in there. There’s an 18 minute version of it with a massively extended pub conversation, but that seemed a tad overbearing so I kept it to the shorter version.

I’m not sure how well it flows together, but I tried to assemble it the best I could so it had some sense of cohesion to it at all. I know it can be a little preachy at times, and this may grate for some people, but I like my music to actually have a message, and everything here certainly has one.

I’m going to try and put up some kind of new mixtape every fortnight, but seeing as I’m exceedingly lazy it’ll probably end up being every couple of months instead. Still, enjoy. Normal service will resume sometime tomorrow.

And until then, Good Weather For Air Strikes have a complete Belle & Sebastian concert up in awesome quality that is certainly worth your time.