The Let’s Get Lyrical campaign was born of a desire to combine Edinburgh’s status as an official City of Literature, with Glasgow’s as a City of Music.  There are events being held throughout February and it will come as no surprise to discover that they are a bit of a step up from the dreary indie pish I usually feature on these pages.

As you can imagine, there are an awful lot of scholarly things that can be written about this topic and, as you can probably also imagine, you aren’t going to read them here.  Nothing about all the value of oral traditions, the role of lyrics in folk music, or even the emotional impact of the details of the lyrics versus the more abstract emotions generated by the music – I have stuff to say about all of these things, but I am down visiting my folks in London at the moment, so settling in to write an essay would be considered somewhat uncouth, I suspect.

Instead, I have picked six fairly random songs by six of my favourite lyricists, and will write just a little bit about why they resonate with me so much.  I find it amazing how important I can find lyrics – to the extent that I would suggest that music can make you love a song, but only lyrics can make it a part of your soul – and yet there are vast swathes of my music collection where I am neither aware of, nor particularly interested in the lyrics.  A lot of the time they’re just plain indecipherable, and in the absence of liner notes in the digital age, tracking them down seems like an awful lot of work and I rarely do it; I doubt I am alone.

What it tends to take is a particular hook.  I hear a phrase which snags me, and then I am pulled in.  But for a lot of music I am happy enough for that not to happen, and just to enjoy the tunes.  When you really do connect with the lyrics, though, the impact of a song changes totally.

Eef Barzelay – The Ballad of Bitter Honey (Amazon)

Eef Barzelay, whether with Clem Snide or solo, has written some of the best, cleverest, wryest, most cutting lyrics I have ever heard.  This is the man responsible for the phrase ‘the root canal music of a prom night disaster’, but this song might just be his greatest.  Written from the point of view of a dancer whose ‘ass you saw bouncing next to Ludacris’ it manages to create the portrait of a sweet natured, shallow girl trying her very, very best to wring some sense of self-worth out of life, and failing.  Horribly.  It manages a particularly remarkable trick of being at once utterly excoriating in its description of the mores of the modern world, and yet tenderly sympathetic of the person who both embodies them and bears their burden.  So much sympathy and so much rage.  But that’s Eef Barzelay for you.

Eef Barzelay – The Ballad of Bitter Honey

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Barton Carroll – Shadowman (Amazon)

I don’t know how closely this song draws from real life, but this is a portrait of an over-shadowed, jealous and weak younger brother so well constructed and harrowing as to make me feel a little bit sick every time I hear it. As I have written many times before when describing this song, the absence of any shred of redemption is just plain merciless.  Very few people in pop music seem to have the sensitivity to construct such a believable relationship and such a real protagonist as this, and yet also the courage to eschew the mandatory happy ending.  It really is a brutally nasty, mean song.

Barton Carroll – Shadowman

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Songdog – Gene Autry’s Ghost (Amazon)

Songdog are a different kettle of fish.  Their lyrics are cryptic, clever and acerbic.  I remember listening to the start of this song, tum-te-tumming along, and suddenly doing a double-take.  ’What the fuck did they just say?’  I rewound the song and yes, they really did sing: “I’m nobody special, but I give pretty good head.” Songdog do this all the time.  They are dark, horribly (by which, of course, I mean awesomely) cynical and you always get the impression that you are a step or two behind what they are trying to tell you.  There’s such resignation to the music that this never seems pretentious or condescending however, just the work of a band who are woefully underappreciated and seem to have stopped expecting you to get it.

Songdog – Gene Autry’s Ghost

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Billy Bragg – The Saturday Boy (Amazon)

I must be one of thousands of young men who heard this song and thought ‘Fucking hell, that was me!  I am the Saturday Boy!’ Billy Bragg does this all the time, particularly in his early work, and this is far from alone in its ability to absolutely and utterly nail what it feels like to be male and lacking in both sexual confidence and skills.  Almost every man I know has in his past a girl on whom they had the most unspeakable crush and who, for all she may have enjoyed our company as much as the attention, had about as much intention of going out with us as she did of flying to the moon.  The closing line sums it up so well: “While she was giving herself for free/ At a party to which I was never invited”.  People think of Bragg as a bit of a caricature of himself these days, but that’s massively unfair.  Political songs aside, his love songs show a writer more gifted than anyone I know at taking all sorts of complex emotions, and entanglements and distilling them into a single line, full of warmth, a bit of humour and, most of all, the knowledge that he absolutely, undoubtedly Got It.

Billy Bragg – The Saturday Boy

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The Mountain Goats – Dance Music (Amazon)

I am not a particularly committed fan of Darnielle’s wider canon, but The Sunset Tree is a stone cold classic.  There are a lot of tender, heartwarming  and heartbreaking moments on the record, but one of those stop-dead-in-your-tracks moments occurs early in this short, perfect song.  Coming from a stable family background as I do, I would never be so stupid as to suggest that I can really grasp the kind of domestic horror described here: “I’m in the living room watching the Watergate hearings/ while my step father yells at my mother./ launches a glass across the room, straight at her head/ and I dash upstairs to take cover./ lean in close to my little record player on the floor./ so this is what the volume knob’s for.” It is short, direct, unflinching and does what all great writing should: finds not just details, but the one crucial detail.  I remember that one short verse bringing me so much clarity: the violence, the fear, the intense relationship with music.  I am sure I still don’t entirely grasp what this kind of life is really like, but this song has done more for my understanding than any advertising campaign or newspaper article I have ever come across.

The Mountain Goats – Dance Music

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Tom Waits – Fish and Bird (Amazon)

In this particular case, it is not so much just about the lyrics themselves, as the personal context.  I bought Alice just as Mrs. Toad and I were getting together and listened to it constantly.  She lived in Edinburgh, I in London, and we went back and forth every couple of weeks – it was a rather improbable romance in many ways, but a complete whirlwind nevertheless.  It was pretty obvious to both of us, I think, that this was something special, but as the months wore on it slowly became clearer and clearer that resolving our geographical problem was going to be a very, very significant challenge.  Mrs. Toad was a touch more spooked by this than I was and the relationship suddenly became very, very shaky indeed – you know when you can hear the tension in someone’s voice and you know that something is up, even if you can’t dig the details out of them. Anyway, after Christmas of the first year of our relationship she decided she couldn’t face it and packed it all in, putting an end to over a month of looming unease which had taken the shine off eight months of thrilled, giddy romance.  Fortunately for me (and her I suppose) she saw the error of her ways two or three months later and came crawling (hey, this is my story, so that’s how I’m telling it okay – so what if it wasn’t exactly crawling per se, but I digress…) back.  However, in those months before she saw sense I was trying to come to terms with the fact that it seemed I had lost the girl I was absolutely certain I wanted to spend the rest of my life with.  And I drank gin and listened to this song.  A lot.

Tom Waits – Fish and Bird

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The Go! Team have never rocked my world, particularly, but they rarely make music I fail to enjoy.  Their boisterous, brassy TV theme pop tunes have a kind of carefree verve to them that simply bypasses my No Fun in Pop snob filter, irrespective of the fact that I don’t really engage with their albums in a particularly in-depth way.

When they start rapping, I must confess, I do start to clench up just a little bit, but that is just a style of vocal delivery which I have never liked and there is not much which can be done about it.

Otherwise, the chimes, the seventies dance party vocals, the stylish, but not too serious aspect to the music just gives this album a good vibe.  There are tunes like Apollo Throwdown which could be from any Go! Team album, ones like the opener T.O.R.N.A.D.O., which has a much harsher edge to it than I am used to from them, and then some glistening shimmer pop, reminiscent of Saint Etienne.  This variety, as much as the brevity of the songs themselves (thirteen in forty minutes), keeps the album fresh, even though this doesn’t particularly sound like a band ruthlessly challenging itself at every opportunity.

A lot of people complain about there being too much music out there, from the perspective of not getting to hear all of it.  I find the issue to be slightly different: there’s so much music out there that you need never stray away from things you already know you like.  That’s why things like the radio are important, because it is a medium more likely than any other I can think of to play you songs outside of your comfort zone.

The Go! Team are a band who I would probably never listen to of my own volition, but who I always enjoy when someone else puts them on the stereo, and this push and pull at the fringes of our music taste is something we are all in danger of surrendering in the current, highly specific channels of media consumption.

The Go! Team – Apollo Throwdown

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The Go! Team – Yosemite Theme

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Website | More mp3s | Buy from Amazon

I have been listening to this EP (or mini-album, whatever you choose to call a six song, half hour long record) for a long time now, and I still feel like I am not all that ready to write anything you could meaningfully call a review.

This kind of music (and this specific band) appear to be wildly popular with a particular part of the Edinburgh musical public who tired of acoustic guitars faster than I was ever likely to, but I myself am still only starting to get used to it now.

I’ve always been slow to absorb sounds which are particularly different to what I have listened to before, and now that I am no longer a youngster I no longer have an annoying flatmate to open my ears to new things despite my naysaying, so this kind of stuff was always going to take a little while to sink in.

‘This kind of stuff?’, you ask.  Well, I mean stuff which uses sporadic bursts of frenzied excitement to punctuate mysterious, atmospheric songs, and where the combination of awkward, abrasive electronics and raging guitars help the music reach intermittent highs of combative intensity.  Where the songs are driven forward by a drummer who sounds like Vampire Weekend might if they took a slightly lower, more dangerous class of drug than the lovely high society ones they might do at the moment. And where the vocals are used more as another instrument, adding layers of atmosphere to the songs, rather than particularly being used to deliver lyrics.

This is a lot gentler than the likes of Eels on Heels, who I wrote about last week, and actually there is a lot less use of electronics here than I find myself assuming – it’s more percussive, choral guitar music actually.  Instead of finding it more accessible when it gets close to guitar pop, it’s actually the moments where this record veers the closest to normal pop music that I like it the least, funnily enough.

Ringerz is a bit too close to things I feel I’ve heard a few too many times before, and Horses and Dogs is just plain crap.  Having said that, I am still really enjoying the EP as a whole, and the rest of this record, whilst it is awkward and not always all that yielding, contains some really inspired moments which it is taking me a lot longer than it should to actually get my head around.

Islet – Powys

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Website| More mp3s | Buy from Shape Records

This is something I think has real promise, without necessarily saying that I personally think it is quite there yet.

North American War are working with Glasgow’s excellent Winning Sperm Party, and have released this EP as a free download, as WSP release all their things.

Me & My G.I. Joes is all drifting atmospherics and atonal guitars, seemingly inspired by a lot of US indie music from the nineties, broken up from time to time with bursts of spasmodic, frantic drumming and disorientated fuzz.  There’s a disinterest to the vocals and, to a degree, to the playing as well, which gives the impression of a band kind of making it up as they go along.  I assume this is not the case, but it does come across that way in a sense.

When I say that I think this is not quite there, I am being quite specific, for a change.  Whilst I enjoy the first couple of tracks, there is a slight thinness to them, and when the much beefier Jelly Witch comes in I find myself slightly wishing there was just a bit more depth and power to the production all round.  Get this kind of music vibrating the base of your spine, and I think you’d have something on your hands which could really blow people’s tits off, but one or two of the tracks don’t quite have the visceral impact that I reckon they could do with.

It meanders really nicely, and the bursts of noise make it a bit like watching someone stagger towards you on the way home at night – you’re never quite sure if they’re a jolly drunk or an aggressive one, and something in their gait makes you change your mind every minute or so.

I do get the impression this stuff could be ear-punishingly awesome live, however, and don’t let my quibbles detract from the fact that I really am enjoying this EP.

North American War – Jelly Witch

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MySpace | Download for free from Winning Sperm Party