Friday Night Jukebox, Vol. CDXXIV--Doves: Catch the Sun

 I've been wracking my brain this week trying to remember what introduced me to this week's tune.  At first, I thought it was via my TV while I was living in St. Louis on one of those music channels that come with a cable subscription...until I realized I'd left St. Louis by the time the single was released.  I also thought it might be through MTV--apparently the video isn't available anymore though it was supposed to have been really cool--but I have no recollection of said really cool video.  No matter--a good tune is a good tune whether you remember where you heard it first or not....

The Doves (comprised of Jimi Goodwin and twin brothers Jez and Andy Williams) met in high school at the age of fifteen, and a few years later started a dance band called Sub Sub.  They had a couple of hits on the U.K. Singles chart in the early nineties, but in 1996 their studio burned to the ground, and they decided to start anew as an alternative band named, surprisingly enough, Doves.  It would prove to be quite the shrewd move, as their first album would be nominated for the Mercury Prize, and they would go on to have two #1 albums and a #2 in their native U.K. between 1998-2010.  The Doves took a hiatus in 2010 and didn't reform until 2018.  They released another album in 2020 and it, too, hit the top of the U.K. Albums Chart.  For their career the band has released five studio albums and seventeen singles.  While they have been quite the phenomenon in their home country, they've never had an album reach higher than #83 here in the U.S.--still they've had a pretty good gig over the past thirty some odd years.

"Catch the Sun" was the second single released from their debut album Lost Souls.  The single reached #32 in the U.K., and the album hit #16 there as well.  Neither charted in the U.S.

Fun Fact:  The Doves worked as Badly Drawn Boy's backing band for his album The House of the Bewilderbeast shortly before releasing their first album.  Oddly enough, both albums were nominated for the Mercury Prize in 2000 and the Doves lost to...Badly Drawn Boy.

When I listen to "Catch the Sun" I hear a cacophony of sounds but despite its helter-skelter musicality, it works not in spite of but because of its simplicity--it's just guitar, bass, and drums but you'd swear there's an orchestra behind it.  The song--a carpe diem, of sorts--is infused with a measured exuberance both musically and vocally that takes it many steps beyond so many other songs that seek to inspire us in our daily toils.  Throw in a chorus that's so catchy it would make the Gods of Pop weep for its aural euphoria, and you have a brilliant piece of pop that makes for another righteous addition to the annals of Friday Night Jukebox.

Lyric Sheet:  "Catch the sun, before it's gone/Here it comes, up in smoke and gone...

Enjoy:

Republicans = Nazis

Peace,

emaycee

Friday Night Jukebox, Vol. CDXXII--Laura Marling: All My Rage

One of the gentle reminders I get on occasion when I write my weekly music post is just how many artists I literally know just one song that they have performed, and how there will never be world enough and time (thank you, Andrew Marvell) to listen to every artist and their catalog of music before my time on this world is over.  Such was the case with this week's artist and tune (once again, introduction courtesy of my darling daughter) --as much as I love folk music, I am certain that the songs and albums produced by this week's featured artist would become a litany of good music for me to listen to....

Laura Marling was born in 1990 in the U.K.--her mother was a music teacher and her father ran a recording studio, so she most assuredly had an early start on her career.  At the age of sixteen she graduated from secondary school and moved to London, moving in with her sisters.  She immediately began joining bands, and by the ripe old age of eighteen had released her first album...which promptly was nominated for a Mercury Prize (as were three of her later albums).  She won a Brit Award for Best Female Vocalist at the age of twenty-one, and in 2017 was nominated for a Grammy for best folk album.  Over the course of her fifteen year career Marling has released seven studio albums (six of which have hit the top ten in the U.K.), and two more albums as a member of the band LUMP.  Marling also made a brief foray into acting in 2015, co-starring in a short film called "Woman Driver."

Fun Fact:  As of 2020, Marling was enrolled in a master's program for psychoanalysis...all of which leads me to wonder just what the hell I did with almost sixty-four years of my life....

"All My Rage" was featured on Marling's 2011 album A Creature I Don't Know.  It was not released as a commercial single; the album reached #4 on the U.K. album chart, and #99 here in America.

I couldn't begin to tell you fuck-all what "All My Rage" is about, but I can tell you it sounds like a beautiful Irish folk ballad, the instrumentation is as gorgeous as it gets, and Marling sings like the Gods of Music blessed her vocal cords two times over.  Throw in the harmonies on the second visit to the chorus and Marling's cryptic lyrics and you have yourself a folk song as good as anything this side of American folk in the fifties and sixties.  And she was all of twenty-one when she wrote and recorded it--all of which tells me that music will always be in the very good hands of some talented musician somewhere.

Lyric Sheet:  "Cover me up I'm pale as night/With a mind so dark and skin so white/Is this the devil having fun?/I tip my cap to the raging sun..."

Enjoy:

Republicans = Nazis

Peace,

emaycee

Friday Night Jukebox, Vol. CXLIX: The Kaiser Chiefs: You Can Have It All

We're returning to the British Isles again this week (so many cool kids in England!) for a band that has had great commercial and critical success there and even less commercial success in the states than recent Friday Night Jukebox inductee Keane (or The Jam or The Waterboys....).

The Kaiser Chiefs originally formed in 2000 as Parva, bounced around with one LP for the next three years, and after being dumped by their record label, reinvented themselves as the Kaiser Chiefs and rose to meteoric success in their native U.K.  They've released six albums, two of which went to #1, two of which went to #2, and one each that went to #4, and #10 on the UK Albums chart.  Here in the states they've only managed to put two albums on the Billboard 200 (and both peaked at middling spots--#45 and #55).  They've won three Brit Awards, had an album nominated for the Mercury Prize (a sort of British Pulitzer for English and Irish LPs), a #1 single ("Ruby"), and have toured extensively since their major label debut in 2005.  All told they've sold over ten million albums and carved out quite a niche for themselves in their homeland.

Released in 2005 on their first album as the Kaiser Chiefs, Employment, "You Can Have It All" was actually the fifth single released from the album in the U.K., and was never released as a single here in the good old U.S.A. (and we're all the poorer for it).  The U.K. single was actually a special limited edition Christmas release and was limited to 2000 records--needless to say, if you ever come across this baby in some used record shop, buy it!  Some Brit kid will probably give you good money for it...

While some say the band is influenced by the punk movement of the late 70's and the new wave movement of the late 80's, I've always thought they would sound right at home with any number of bands that came out of the alternative scene of the early 90's (and many of which were influence by the same).  And "You Can Have It All" would have made more than one playlist on the numerous Alternative radio stations that grew out of that scene.  It's a slow paced song, relying heavily on the band's harmonies (compared to the Beach Boys, though I don't quite hear it) which are out of this world, telling the tale of a man who sees a woman on the bus and is letting her know that she can have it all (hence the title) and what she is going to miss should she leave the bus without him.  It's either love at first sight or he's a stalker, but what the hell, it's catchy as all hell either way.  The song concludes with the "you can have it all" chorus which I have been singing over and over for the last four days--it's ear candy that will add an extra bounce to your step and leave you feeling lighter than air...or not.

Rap Sheet:  "I'll tell you what it's going to be like/I saw you on the bus and that was that/There's more to this than passing by/There's more to this than meets the eye..."

Enjoy:

Fuck Donald Trump,
emaycee