Noughties By Nature #83: Helen Love - Debbie Loves Joey

Musically, this is exactly the same as Helen Love’s previous Radio Hits, Shifty Disco Girl, Does Your Heart Go Boom and the Peel favourite Girl About Town. And, like most other Helen Love songs, it mentions The Ramones, discos, beaches, and a story about a boy and girl in love.

But Debbie Loves Joey is a culmination of everything that is really quite good about Helen Love’s other songs, and cutting and pasting them all together creates an almighty pop explosion of bubblegum-punk-pop brilliance. It’s the eternal boy-meets-girl love song, but with wit and candour and a lived-in realism : "Special Vat in the Park"; "D’ya like the Sex Pistols, have you got a light?"

If this song hadn’t been a free download, and then released on an import 6-track EP, then it really would’ve actually charted. But after a long hiatus from the UK Music Scene, Helen Love came back with a bang, a much-needed breath of fresh Swansea Bay air.
Mark Price

[Spotify]
[YouTube]
[Album: It's My Club And I'll Play What I Want To]

Noughties By Nature #82: Johnny Flynn – The Wrote And The Writ

There’s an awful lot that’s been said about music and poetry, and their relation to each other. So many have said Bob Dylan’s more poet than singer, and even my mum says Eminem’s an ‘urban poet’, but the line seems so thin between the two it’s difficult to see which is which. Where does musical poetry end and pure music begin? I’d say the real distinction lies in how you think about a song after it’s finished – if you’re humming the tune, it’s music, if you’re ruminating on what’s been said to you, that’s true poetry.

In that regard, The Wrote And The Writ more than qualifies as poetry. An ambiguous tale about religion, priesthood and possibly love, it leaves you reeling at the sheer beauty of the words and what it could all mean. The rest of the band take a step back on this track, using just violin and muffled drums as background noise, whilst even Johnny’s strident dobro guitar takes on a more leisurely role, letting the words do their bit. That’s not to say the music isn’t important though, the sparse, slowly intertwining instruments carry Johnny’s deep velvety vocals along perfectly and, more importantly, beautifully.

That’s what this song is ultimately, truly beautiful. Every aspect cries out as if there’s some hidden message behind it that you’re not quite seeing, and that seems exactly the point. This seems the purest distillation, and most wonderful endorsement of musical poetry, and Johnny Flynn knows this - as the music winds down he lets his final line ring out, "Don’t say in a letter what you can’t in my ear".
Joe Skrebels

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[YouTube (live)]
[Album: A Larum]

Noughties By Nature #81: The Knife - We Share Our Mother's Health

Karin Dreijer Andersson could imbue a Morrison's shopping list with icy grandeur, which is a blessing given The Knife, for all their melodic brilliance, aren't really blessed in the “incisive lyrics” department. “Red wine and food for free- a possibility?” Seriously folks, my six year old cousin could do better than that. But if can bring yourself to ignore their woeful way with words, The Knife's gloriously atmospheric electro-pop will forcibly insert itself into your brain and refuse to leave. Imagine Daft Punk if their happy-clappy anime world was invaded by the Borg, and you've got the picture- whilst the bouncy percussion and crystalline synths inspires you to dance, the sinister main vocal and brooding sense of impending doom simultaneously inspires you to recoil with fear. I'd also strongly recommend checking out Ratatat's remix if you get the chance - more minimalist, just as sublime.
Adam Elmahdi

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[YouTube]
[Album: Silent Shout]

Noughties By Nature #80: Misty’s Big Adventure – Serious Thing

Misty’s Big Adventure were the decade’s great might-have-beens who never really seemed to fulfill their commercial potential (a thing I suspect they scoffed at the idea of just as much as they secretly dreamed about it). They may have done themselves no favours in this respect with their most well-known single Fashion Parade, which chose to quite hilariously mock the landfill indie scenesters who cluttered up the Top 10 in the middle of the decade. By continually yelling out about how odd, outsiderish and eccentric they were compared to their peers, they may have caused people to close their ears to how well they knew their way around a classic song as well.

Serious Thing is a prime example of this. Beginning as a gently strummed, mumbling little ballad about a relationship’s demise, it builds into a momentous, epic thing of wonder, filled to the brim with old-school easy listening harmonies, a wonderfully pounding instrumental break, and one of the most plain and simple but strangely effective lyrical phrases the band have ever produced: “Everyone says it’s a serious thing... and you’d be surprised at the pain it can bring”.

Serious Thing ends as it begins, with a whimper rather than a bang, and feels like something The Magnetic Fields would have written if they were actually a quarter as good as some of you chaps seem to believe they are. There’s nothing half-arsed, lo-fi, cultish or indie about this noise – it’s big, bold and thoughtful, and deserved to be heard by many more people.
Dave Bryant

[Spotify]
[YouTube]
[Album: Funny Times]

Noughties By Nature #79: The Manhattan Love Suicides - Clusterfuck

The past decade has seen the music industry change beyond recognition. From Napster to Itunes - the means for people to get their ears on new music has altered immeasurably. And just as the method of consumption has been tilted on its head, so have the traditional methods for measuring a band's success. Chart positions? NME covers? They all seem terribly archaic notions and somewhat irrelevant in 2009. The advent of blogs, My Space and Spotify has meant you can take your musical pleasure instantly. This opening up of the music business to bands that are internet-savvy means a fair few can actually slip under the traditional radar. Which brings me to the band in question here. The Manhattan Love Suicides. A few articles on Pitchfork and Plan B magazine is not much return for one of the best bands of the past 10 years, is it?

The Manhattan Love Suicides. Go on say it out loud. As band names go it resonates. The band would have to be something special to match the name. And they were - first bursting into our world in late 2006, live they were a squall of feedback, attitude and defiance. In defiance of what? I'm not sure I ever fully worked that out. But their 20 minute sets still felt like a statement. Even if it was over 20 years since The Jesus and Mary Chain had first tried this nifty trick, there was still something powerful going on in giving an audience a brief teaser before pulling the plug and walking off stage in a maelstrom of guitar feedback.

In their three and half years together the band blasted through over 50 songs which is impressive a feat on it's own. It becomes even more so when you listen back to all 50 odd songs and find it's 99% killer and very little filler. For me they burnt no brighter than on their Clusterfuck EP. And it is the title song of that EP that I hold as my favourite tune of the past ten years. As a song it encapsulates everything I love about music - pop hooks and buzzsaw guitars. The Manhattan Love Suicides knew how to deliver a fuzzy adrenalin rush in 3 minutes and from the off this song is built around one of those irresistible pop hooks, you know, the kind that you are humming for days after hearing the song for the first time. Adding a wall of sound production to this pop song serves to intensify the rush of excitement as the song hurtles towards its destructive outcome. The guitars are delivered with barbed wire fuzz and the drums crash like the staccato of rapid machine gun fire - amidst the noise we have the ice cool vocals of Caroline McChrystal that somehow shimmer like a beacon of calm.

As the business side of making music lurches blindly towards its extinction, bands like The Manhattan Love Suicides might come and go and not prick public consciousness but for those that took the time to dig beneath the surface of pop culuture, it's these bands that we will remember the noughties for.
Trev McCabe

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[YouTube]
[Album: Burnt Out Landscapes]

Noughties By Nature #78: Patrick Wolf - The Libertine

Pretentions to militant outsiderdom were ten a penny in the past decade, but few walked the walk like Patrick Wolf. The Libertine takes the millenium's tendency towards no-more-heroes melodrama, fuses it with a sense of self-belief you could bend steel around, and forges an unstoppable flight of righteous prickly petulance. Bleak and Yeatsian in outlook and atmosphere, the song opens with delicately poised piano and slowly-unravelling strings that bow under the weight of a thumping backbeat. Its galloping rhythms swoop and loop through outcrops of dark electro, spurred on by lyrics that scatter at swordpoint a slew of romantic and chivalric tropes before Wolf, alone in "a drought of truth and invention", pulls us along through a full-throttle tilt at the darkness of a dried-up dystopia and over the edge into a better world.
Rhian Jones

[YouTube]
[Album: Wind In The Wires]

Noughties By Nature #77: Maps - You Don't Know Her Name

In this day and age of identikit asymmetrically-haircutted guitar bands who are barely distinguishable from each other (far more so than any X Factor contestant), it's not that easy to find yourself getting very excited about a genuinely 'new' artist. Which is why it's all the more exciting when a record by one such genuinely 'new' artist sneaks up and surprises you in the midst of washing-up-soundtracking Radcliffe & Maconie that you only really had on for This Just In anyway.

You Don't Know Her Name has a solid grasp of what made indie great in the past - it has the moody and malevolent ambience of the sort of record that they stopped making in about 1993 (or, to be more accurate, that Ride, Catherine Wheel and My Bloody Valentine stopped making in about 1993), so much so that you can almost hear Mark Goodier jabbering an endearingly ill-fitting endorsement over the conclusion, and the wobbly intro is uncannily reminiscent of a shaky mispressed 7" bought in Woolworths' bargain bin the week it had fallen twenty places in the chart - but an equally solid grasp of what's relevant now; namely huge anthemic choruses and analogue synths repurposed to sound 'modern'. You get the best of both worlds with this song and it really ought to have followed Franz Ferdinand and Kaiser Chiefs into the charts and being slapped all over 'tonight... on BBC1!' rundowns.
TJ Worthington

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[YouTube]
[Album: We Can Create]

Noughties By Nature #76: Clock Opera - Once And For All

A greatest song of the decade that hasn’t even been released yet? Well, I’m a blogger, and that means constantly searching for the new and exciting, so as the decade closes the music I’m most interested in is not what has happened in the past, but what is going on now and in the future. John Peel once said that his desert island discs would be ten records he hadn’t heard yet, and this is an ideal I share. End of decade lists are fun (and this list sure is fun) but the future is more important. Who is to say that Once And For All by Clock Opera is not one of the greatest songs of the noughties? Just because it’s only on a new bands Myspace page with over 1000 listens doesn’t make it any the lesser as a piece of music.

To create Once And For All lead singer Guy Connelly chopped and sampled sounds then spliced them together again to create a life affirming brain invading pop symphony. It’s a song that combines electronic textures and harsh beauty in a magical way that led to our blog proclaiming “We love Clock Opera more than our own children.” It’s about as perfect as you can get in 2009. Decade closed. Over and out.
Robin Seamer

[YouTube]

Noughties By Nature #75: Adam Green - Jessica

Mainly because I’m a bitter and unlovable cynic, I’ve always found the phenomena of the ‘hate song’ much more interesting than the traditional love song. The more vitriolic spittle collected by the vocalist’s microphone during the recording session the better, if you ask me. When it comes to hate songs, they can be even more enjoyable when camouflaged by a veneer of jollity, and as such the true meaning often goes undetected for many listeners. Notable example: Twisting by They Might Be Giants, a song about a girl wishing her ex-boyfriend was dangling from a noose, subsequently used as the backing to a Pizza Hut campaign.

Ex-Moldy Peach Adam Green, in the standout track from 2003’s Friends Of Mine, takes things in a slightly different direction. Without paying attention to the lyrics, Jessica comes over as a meltingly heartfelt ode to singer, actress and MTV reality show star Jessica Simpson. Green croons like he has seldom crooned since, the gentle strum of his guitar mingles politely amongst his words as the strings begin to swell in the background, yet all this is at odds with the true meaning of the song. From the very first line (“Jessica Simpson, where has your love gone, it’s not in your music, no”), it’s quite clear that Green is sneering at the lack of artistry displayed by the target of his song.

As the song goes on, the mellifluous contempt continues, pointing out the subject’s “fraudulent smile” and pondering on how she’ll have little more to look forward to than waitressing jobs and a vain struggle against the ravages of time once her fifteen minutes of Viacom-sanctioned fame are up. Alongside all this, the backing strings glide around elegantly, and it’s kind of hard not to feel a little moved by the overall juxtaposition.

Adam Green has pointed out in interviews since the song became (fleetingly) popular that the target of the song is more the generic interchangeable US pop starlet circa the early noughties, and that Jessica Simpson was chosen as the specific subject simply because she was as good an example as any. Now, this doesn’t detract from the majesty of the song at all, but I can’t help but feel the whole thing would have an extra little dash of magic had it turned out it was all part of some calculated vengeance after Jessica Simpson had driven over Adam Green’s cat.

Yeah, as I’d said, I’m a bitter and unlovable cynic.
Mark Jones

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[YouTube]
[Album: Friends Of Mine]

Noughties By Nature #74: Aaliyah - More Than A Woman

Try and forget the fact that R Kelly produced 14 year-old Aaliyah’s debut album, the not-at-all controversially titled Age Ain’t Nothing But A Number, and may have had a relationship / dodgy marriage with her when she was 15. Try and respect the fact that she died tragically in an air-crash at the age of 22.

Before she died, she recorded the sexiest, most sensual, most sensuous song of the noughties: More Than A Woman. The melody is soft and curvy, the verse joins with the chorus which joins with the verse again. There’s this beautiful pause in the chorus, "More than a woman/More than a lover/[pause] More than another" which for some higher and heavenly reason is the most breathlessly anticipatory thing I have ever heard. The lyrics, especially for an R’n’B song, are beautifully poignant, honest and sweet, "We share pillows", "there’s no separating". This song makes me fuzzy inside. And sad. Beautifully sad.

According to Wikipedia, this was the first ever posthumous UK number 1 by a female artist. According to me, it’s the best UK number 1 by any artist.
Jamie Woods, Super Kawaii POP!

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[YouTube]
[Album: Aaliyah]

Noughties By Nature #73: Eastern Lane - Saffron

In late 2003/early 2004 the NME busied itself for several weeks discussing in great depth its own Brit Pack. A, rather large actually, collection of rock groups from disparate parts of the kingdom with seemingly no tangible link other than broad location. Of these bands, a few actually made it someplace. Kasabian, Keane and The Ordinary Boys have all gone on to achieve notoriety...

Eastern Lane were one Brit Pack band who it never really happened for. I think I remember their initial blurb said something about them sounding like The Strokes mixed with the Pixies. That sounded brill to me and I duly checked them out. It was a pretty alluring and as it turns out, pretty accurate description to a 16 year old with few reference points.

Eastern Lane played rock music that made it feel like you were standing and leaning forward as far as is possible without falling over, just. They were fronted by this unholy voice, screaming and screeching, soulfully swearing and bringing so much to these, at times, irreverent lyrics.

Why Saffron wasn't a bigger hit I'll never know. It was released on Rough Trade post Strokes/Libertines so surely they knew how and who to market it to. The fantastically catchy guitar intro is there. The singalong lyrical hook is there "it's over now before its even begun/my heart yearns". There's a guitar solo and he wooos over it. What were the kids thinking?

I lied earlier about the Pixies drawing me in to Eastern Lane, it was after I heard Eastern Lane, rereading the NME description that I checked out the Pixies and yeah, good decision.
Simon Lawson

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[YouTube]
[Album: The Article Cycle]

Noughties By Nature #72: The Moldy Peaches – Who’s Got The Crack?

In hindsight, it seems a little peculiar that a music press with its eyes and ears drawn to New York by The Strokes – an enticing sum of fairly conservative New Wave parts, let’s admit it – should lump them into a ‘scene’ with a scuzzily twee no-fi duo that looked like characters from a Jeffrey Lewis comic strip dressed for a street pantomime (and claimed to drink each other’s urine). But before Hollywood focussed on the band as the epitome of love-drunk cutesy indie-cred sometime after the event, Moldy Peaches were known just as well for their combination of brash punk chanting with well-aimed playground obscenity (I doubt Ellen Page and Michael Cera would seem as doe-eyed and charismatic if they ended Juno screaming Downloading Porn With Davo). They reached their filthy, forthright best with Who’s Got The Crack, a sing-along that sounds like it was recorded in an alleyway let alone a bedroom, swaying as it does from syrupy nursery-rhyme (“I am a goat, in a moat, with a boat”) to a riotous terrace-worthy chorus. The climax, where the group seem to shed their last inhibition and augment to a whirlwind of ruffled harmonies before collapsing entirely, demonstrates ably their enduring appeal; like potty-mouthed alchemists they seemed to create something bracing without even trying. Considering their stage show is said to have regularly seen most of the audience onstage with them, the effect of this song alone could have been not only joyous but also devastating. If anti-folk continues to endure then this forever be its Cumberland Gap.
Thomas Blatchford

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[YouTube (live)]
[Album: The Moldy Peaches]

Noughties By Nature #71: Battles - Atlas

If you check the internet, there's lots of interesting information to be found about this band. Who they are, how they do what they do, what they're all about. Beyond a certain level of polite interest, I don't really care about that stuff. It's not what makes this such an astonishing musical thing, and it might just spoil things. Loads of people make loops and layer them up. Loads of people play live drums alongside these loops, and then jam along. Plenty of bands channel the spirit of the Dr Who theme: Why, Muse were doing it only a month or so ago. And there is clearly no chance that we're ever going to run out of seven-minute long faux-instrumentals with an art-rock bent, not while there's a world-wide-web.

What makes Atlas so different that it is FUN. Everything about it is fun. I'm amazed it hasn't been used to soundtrack a cartoon. Bits of it sound like Pink Elephants On Parade, and believe you me, praise doesn't come much higher than that. It's got that brilliant eerie lurch to it, a kind of drunken half-articulated leg-scrape of a gait that'll drag you out of your seat and run skeleton fingers up and down your ribs to get you to dance.

And the melody! That ridiculous spiralling munchkin parade! Slightly eerie, yes, but only in the way that truly brilliant children's films are often eerie, the way that Heath Robinson drawings are sometimes a bit eerie. Y'know...FUN-eerie.

The band's album featured a mirrorbox full of instruments, left hanging in blackspace. The implication being that the music is generated by some kind of mechanical possession, that sprites and gremlins are generating magic from inside the machines, while the band sleep. All they have to do is turn up, tune up, and rock out.

And that's why I'd rather not know more. The prosaic truth - talented musicians come up with catchy tune - lets the song down, and that would never do.
Fraser McAlpine

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[YouTube]
[Album: Mirrored]

Noughties By Nature #70: Darren Hayman – Something I Could Never Be

Hefner’s masterpiece is We Love The City, dealt with elsewhere in this series, but after the band split and the under-rated French album was released, Hayman found himself embroiled in legal action with his former record label and unable to release more songs. This meant that songs were stockpiled and when the first solo record Table For One came out there wasn’t room for this little gem, which had to wait a couple of more years for the Dessert menu release before it saw the light of day.

Seemingly more personal than Darren’s other solo songs that tend to be 3rd person storytelling nowadays, Something That I Could Never Be is an insistent song that careers along at a fair lick as the words and thoughts tumble out and may well be about insecurity “I wanted to be something i was scared to be” or just a nostalgic look back into the past "There was a pub down the road, i drank their in my teens.... now the pubs at MacciDs". But is probably about neither.

What it has is a great chorus and some great chiming guitar parts and a sudden finish like so many great songs.
Matt Gaynor

[Spotify]
[Album: Table For One - The Dessert Menu]

Get well soon, Darren!

Noughties By Nature #69: David Cronenberg’s Wife – Runaway Pram

David Cronenberg’s Wife sneaked into the music scene at the tail end of the decade like naughty gatecrashers at a posh student party, urinating in the punchbowl and gobbing in the communal bowl of cold rice, then trying to engage the self-consciously fashionable boys and girls at the soiree with their observations on paedophilia, perverse morgue workers and abusive relationships. In a decade which saw a lot of cute, prissy and inoffensive kids with guitars say close to bugger-all about anything, they reintroduced startling lyrical dexterity, and disturbing themes which sat just on the right side of gothic melodrama.

It’s somewhat strange, then, that their best single also happens to be the one which was the most lyrically basic, consisting of scattergun observations, nonsense phrases and the demanding repetition of the title for the chorus. Whether the idea of a runaway pram was a reference to the pram in the film Battleship Pontemkin, or some metaphor for life itself, or even a description of a clapped-out old Citreon 2CV is anyone’s guess. Nonetheless, Runaway Pram worked like a charm, also opening the fantastic Bluebeard’s Rooms album like a statement of intent. Twanging guitars clash with Clinic-esque screeching keyboards, siren effects, and Mancunian vocals sung through gritted teeth to make this seem like the opening theme to a crazed B-movie project. The song splurges up like a volcanic geyser, peaks and then splutters out at the end with a cheeky, solitary guitar twang – a final, threatening little afterthought.

DCW may have spent the last couple of years largely being ignored by the mainstream media, and in many respects seem too contrary and eccentric to ever truly cross over – but next decade may see one of two things; either a surprise hit, or a surprise splash story about their “sick” lyrical content in one of the tabloids. Place your bets now.
Dave Bryant
[Spotify]
[YouTube]
[Album: Bluebeard’s Rooms]

Noughties By Nature #68: The Wave Pictures - Now You Are Pregnant

This is one of those songs. It just grabs you at first listen and then throttles you into submission, until you find yourself stuck with it on repeat whilst you lie on the bed for a whole weekend, surrounded by t-shirts and posters from their gigs.

It's all simple enough - just guitar and that wonderful, angelic voice. A very tender song about unrequited love, shoe shops, and Johnny Cash not quite being as important as Elvis. It's wonderful. And there's very little more to say than that.
Oliver Billenness

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[YouTube (live)]

Noughties By Nature #67: Jarvis Cocker - (Cunts Are Still) Running The World

Everyone's favourite malcontent, ahead of the game as ever, chose 2006 to anticipate the cultural turn towards weary recognition of a present as fucked-up and fatalistic as the past. The all-conquering valedictory vitriol that fuelled Common People and Cocaine Socialism is still here, controlled but uncompromised. This single could have been a slurred score for the powerless and broken, bitterly swilling the dregs of

proletarian consciousness around in a can of White Lightning at a dilapidated bus shelter. Instead, its scalpel-sharp sociological skewering is enunciated with a dignified detachment. The verses roll by with reined-in rage, stately and sardonic, queuing up for a chorus that weighs in with a queasy, unsteady stomp whose ragged vocals let the blanched despair show through.
Rhian Jones

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[YouTube]
[Album: Jarvis]

Noughties By Nature #66: XX Teens - How To Reduce The Chances Of Being A Terror Victim

You'd have thought - given that much of the decade has been spent waging a global war on terror - that there'd have been more of a song and dance made about it. Or at least a few more songs. If this had been the 1980s, by now every medium-sized urban centre in America would boast a shouty punk act called Raised To Orange and Billy Bragg would have knocked out a couple of b-sides rhyming "little bottles through the x-ray" with "wars far away". Perhaps a phoney war excites less interest.

In this gap strode XX Teens (a cruel irony that, having changed their name to avoid upsetting Xerox, they're now lumbered with sounding like the S Club Juniors to The XX). They managed to sum up pretty much the tenor of the last ten years amongst those for whom the fear of something dreadful, and possibly foreign, lurked around every corner. The lyric is a direct lift from a 2003 Fox News webpage advising how you can best avoid becoming part of a front-page mosaic of out-of-focus photos of the dead - and, yes, it is a genuine Fox feature.

Ripped from the headlines, and declaimed over a military-light-industrial beat, Fox's panicky over-compensation guide turns, surprisingly, into an classic of that much-loved genre, the list song. The absurdity of this fit of the vapours crumbles in a mix of the bleeding obvious ("when in a foreign country, don't advertise that you're American by speaking loudly, holding up maps, exchanging currency at airports, showing American flags, etc…"), the contradictory (American flags make you a target, but staying at overseas branches of American chains will protect you) and the downright nuts ("Do not live or work in a highly urban area that most likely would be a terrorist's target, such as New York City, Washington, D.C., or San Francisco" sounds impossibly fine until you discover you're living next door to the Unabomber.) It's angry and sarcastic without the need for any editorialising - sometimes, simply reflecting back is all that's needed. You could almost imagine Richard Stilgoe having done the same thing with, say, Gas Board regulations back in the Nationwide era - perhaps his eyebrow more artfully arched, and with a piano instead of a thumping beat. And reducing the War On Terror to the scale of a petty bureaucracy with a death wish is exactly the sort of downsizing we needed. This is what the background noise of the decade sounded like.
Simon HB

[Spotify]
[YouTube]

Noughties By Nature #65: You Slut! - Mybloodyjesusexploreronfire

You Slut! have been on the wane lately while their members focus on their other (more successful) projects, but this track alone has made them the envy of every instrumental band the world over. Mybloodyjesusexplorer... builds from picked guitars through riffs and angular chord sequences that constantly catch you by surprise - but there is a moment of absolute perfection towards the end of this song that immediately renders whats gone before utterly redundant. This will raise the hairs on the backs of even the most soulless of necks. It's almost impossible to explain why it works so well. This, right here, is perfection.
John Helps, Maybeshewill

[Spotify]
[YouTube]
[Album: Critical Meat]

Noughties By Nature #64: Girls Aloud - Biology

It's fitting that the best pure pop single of the decade came slap bang in the centre - the noughties had been around long enough for its music to get a general idea of it was about, but just ready to start getting restless. We already knew that Girls Aloud (and, of course, their writing/production gurus Xenomania) were capable of instant classics, but Biology was the first of their songs to start trying to push envelopes as well as all the right buttons - a three-piece suite taking in fifties riffs, sixties strut, seventies swagger and pretty much every manufactured pop trope since the eighties. Sure, the lyrics are borderline unintelligible and downright odd ("You fall on your knees and the geek at your feet says you're neat and the beat gets closer"), but once the celestial synths show up in the proper chorus - this being a Girls Aloud song, everything sounds like a chorus - and the irresistible "way that we walk/talk" hook rears its catchy head, you're too busy dancing to notice, let alone care.

To think that this was the sound of the overground at the start of the twenty-first century. It's almost worth forgiving Simon Cowell for.

Almost.
Alex Wisgard

[Spotify]
[YouTube]
[Album: Chemistry]

Noughties By Nature #63: Primal Scream - Accelerator

Even Primal Scream's better albums follow certain worrying protocols. The most dubious of all is the Trad Rock Track: that throwaway, three-chord-boogie which appears on every release, and that has been responsible for some of the band's most facile moments.

The exception to this rule was inevitably on 2000's XTRMNTR, an album of such abrasive, corrosive, industrial brilliance that even a song which relied on the most generic of rock templates was warped into one light-speed, future-shock slab: Accelerator.

Accelerator begins at a hundred miles an hour and keeps rushing faster and faster until the band itself can't keep up with the relentless pace. Even then, Bobby Gillespie, lost in the white-noise blizzard, urges them on: “Into the future! Into the future! C'mon! C'mon! Hit the accelerator!” before the song folds, tears and collapses into a warm splat of guitar noise as the band drop into a black hole of their own furious manufacture.

Inexorably forward-facing, and almost too brutally momentous for its own good, Accelerator is built for speed, not comfort, power, not precision; the triumph of gut feeling over sense. The only thought that went into the mix was to decide just how many faders to push up to the very top.

Accelerator was the last release from the dying Creation records - a final wry and defiantly rock 'n' roll gesture from Alan McGee. The song that gave us the thrilling future, the discarded past and tinnitus.
Joe Sparrow

[Spotify]
[YouTube]
[Album: XTRMNTR]

Noughties By Nature #62: Sunset Rubdown - The Mending Of The Gown

It's sometimes difficult to reconcile a man and the music he makes. Spencer Krug, for instance, resembles a chubby choir boy, the type of unassuming guy you wouldn't give a second glance in the street. His songs on the other hand sound like the ranting of a bonafide maniac. OK, perhaps he's a little more restrained than his erstwhile bandmate Carey 'Frog Eyes' Mercer, but they channel the same frenzied quasi-mystical vein with brilliantly baffling results. The muted, fuggy mix attempts to restrain Krug's vicious keyboard hammering and the kaleidoscopic swirling guitars but to little avail - a critic once described Sunset Rubdown as “sounding someone vomiting Crayola over a microphone” and although I suspect that comment was made with derisive intent, there's a certain truth in it. Vocally, Krug resembles a mad preacher in full flow - not the grizzled, fire-and-brimstone Nick Cave type, but a youthful zealot yelping from the pulpit with passionate, almost sinister fervour, and whilst one could argue for days over quite what he's on about, there's no denying it sounds the part. Personally, I'm sure there's some rhyme to the reason, but even if you do consider his lyrics a random assemblage of words masquerading as something deeper, there's no denying that at the very least they're damn fun to sing along too - “Or any other random spirit lover- busted; I have lusted after yooooooooou...the way bloodsuckers do...the way bloodsuckers do...the way bloodsuckers do!”
Adam Elmahdi

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[Album: Random Spirit Lover]

Noughties By Nature #61: Felix Da Housecat – Silver Screen Shower Scene

Electroclash may leave the decade as a bit of a joke – heck, it hardly left 2003 unblemished – but from behind the posing emerged (sorry) a slew of implausibly great pop records. Fischerspooner were the peacocks that (at least in their own heads) ruled the roost, to the extent that the movement is now virtually synonymous with Emerge, but Adult’s Hand To Phone, Miss Kittin & The Hacker’s Frank Sinatra, Toktok vs. Soffy O’s Missy Queen’s Gonna Die and Vitalic’s La Rock 01 all buzzed with vivacity behind their vacant expressions. Master of them all though, mixing jet-setting super-slick glamour with seedy, gritty electronics, was Felix Stallings Jnr, also known (ridiculously) as Felix Da Housecat. And Silver Screen Shower Scene again featured the omnipresent Miss Kittin, rattling off a preoccupied commentary that gave the impression of the glitzy, debauched surroundings (“Sweet seduction in the magazine / Endless pleasure in the limousine / In the back shakes a tambourine / Nicotine from the silver screen”). Meanwhile throbbing bass drones and a sound not unlike the shower itself being ripped rhythmically to pieces make the whole sordid affair irresistible.
Thomas Blatchford

(Anyone who can find us a proper, non-remixed, non-interjected with other sounds stream, let us know)

Noughties By Nature #60: The Avalanches - Frontier Psychiatrist

Cut-and-paste is a dubious technique, missing more often than it hits, but when it works it’s wondrous. The Avalanches’ debut album provided a seemingly-effortless masterclass in superior sampling, with ‘Frontier Psychiatrist’ as a deservedly acclaimed star turn. The dustbin of vinyl and B-movie history gets comprehensively upended in search of quality cast-offs, before these scraps are stitched together into a kaleidoscopic collage underlined with an imperious blast of brass that carries all before it like the flags of a conquering army.
Rhian Jones

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[Album: Since I Left You]

Noughties By Nature #59: Super Furry Animals - Slow Life

This is not the only album closing, techno/rock epic of Super Furry Animals’ career. Come to think of it, it’s very much an older, subtler version of The Man Don’t Give A Fuck in tone. It’s the one that integrates the two to most astounding effect, though, and makes the most cutting use of very few words indeed.

It takes intriguing new turns at every stage, throwing everything from swishy strings to harmonica to thunking beats into the mix without ever jarring. In particular its eerie, cut up opening, fragments of sound echoing around, before melding into a selection of Cian Ciaran’s finest bleeps and back again, builds up momentum and anticipation so well that not only do SFA still use it to come on stage to, The Flaming Lips have done too.

With all that in the music the words don’t need to do much to set the scene, and there’s a numbing list of dominance ("Move you/Buy and sell you/ Terrorise you...") that briefly interjects before everything unites behind the immense, taunting, one line chorus. At first I thought it was "[it] rocks, our slow life", a continued satirical display of complacence which would fit with the distant massed "I simply need my slow life!" In fact it’s actually "rocks are slow life", a stern and taunting warning that vengeance will eventually come from the very Earth itself. There aren’t many bands that could pull that off.
Iain Forrester

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[Album: Phantom Power]

Noughties By Nature #58: Why? - Gemini (Birthday Song)

"I want a verb and you give me a noun". Now, Shakespeare's sort of touched on this linguistic imagery. In fact, I could probably name many more poets that have used a similar tactic in their own work (that's if I knew a lot more about poetry). But I don't expect your average modern day poet, not even the most rebellious of sorts, could anticipate themselves writing this next line: "What do you dream up, when I tongue you down?". Vulgar but beautiful, let's not forget that Yoni Wolf can be quite the poet himself.

And yet Gemini (Birthday Song) shouldn't just be famed for its words on sex (the joys of it and the frustrations of the lack of it, in this song's case). This is the most grabbing song on Elephant Eyelash, a truly eye-gouging attention seeker of a song. With its settled, streamlined guitar chords and yes, that slightly clichéd use of metaphors, you'd be forgiven for thinking this is a bog-standard love song. But Wolf's voice is unique and as mentioned, so are some of the lyrics and no matter how hard the band tries, it's unlikely they'll ever muster up the life-affirming atmosphere - growing and growing throughout - that does this wonderful song so much justice.
Jamie Milton

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[Album: Elephant Eyelash]

Noughties By Nature #57: Spiller feat. Sophie Ellis-Bextor - Groovejet (If This Ain't Love)

1999 wasn't the best year for Sophie Ellis-Bextor. Her band Theaudience had split, there was little chance of a solo career and she was reduced to modelling as a devil (albeit a sexy devil) in adverts for gaming websites. I don't think she expected the end of the nineties to turn out like this.

So it was a surprise that she was involved in the first real chart battle of the noughties. On one side was Victoria Beckham releasing her first solo single 'Out Of Your Mind' (well, solo if you ignore Dane Bowers & True Steppers); on the other was Sophie and DJ Spiller with Groovejet (If This Ain't Love). The tabloids loved it, it was considered to be a 'personal battle' to see who was the Real Posh.

Of course the winner was Sophie with the laid back tunes of Groovejet perfectly matching her languid vocals. The question "If this ain't love, why does it feel so good?" never being answered in the song, other than through the way Sophie asks it. It's always the catchy songs that manage to get lines through under the radar and a song that promoted sex purely for enjoyment rather than love certainly did that.

For once, the indie kids beat the pop brats - although the victory was slightly dampened by the pop direction that Sophie took after this single. But if she didn't do that we would never have had the punchline "Murder on Zidane's floor", and what would the noughties have been without that?
Ben Hall

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