Saints, Scholars, Singers and Synths: An Alternative St. Patrick’s Day Soundtrack

Saint Patrick’s Day: is there any holiday with a more predictable musical accompaniment? One bar had to go so far as banning the singing of Danny Boy on March 17th, and anyone but a Red Sox fan gleefully contemplates the prospect of Japanese ritual suicide after hearing I’m Shipping Up To Boston more than twice. The sad fact is that for most Americans, Paddy’s Day consists of a heavy diet of Jameson, Flogging Molly, U2, and little other to do with as wonderful and diverse a nation as the Republic of Ireland.

Apart from politically correct rugby anthems, the IMF, Tallafornia and Jedward, nothing pisses off the Irish more than the drunken leprechaun stereotype associated with their country, and plastic paddy music usually goes hand-in-hand with such obnoxious assumptions. So this year, instead of blasting Sunday Bloody Sunday whilst downing jägerbombs, why not sample some of these lesser-known Irish acts?

Don’t Look Back In Anger: A Love Letter

I still remember the first time I’d ever listened to it. I was twelve years old, and earlier that afternoon I had been wandering around FYE, flipping through CD’s in the lamentably broadly categorized pop/rock section, when I’d come across that band from England I’d heard about. Before that moment, my musical tastes consisted of solidly established classics pillaged from my dad’s record collection: The Beatles, The ‘Stones, The Eagles, etc., and here were a band who not only looked like the Beatles, but apparently sounded like them as well. I spent what at the time seemed like an astronomical $15, and upon arriving home with my investment, played it in my bedroom on my beloved Sony boombox.

Hello. Roll With It. Wonderwall. Track after track, I slowly began to fall in love with the Mancunian vocals, heavy guitars, and dreamy psychedelic soundscapes that harkened back to the golden age of album-oriented rock. But it was the fourth song on the album that truly captured my imagination. The lyrics, bizarre and abstract, brought out an atavistic response in me that nearly brought me to tears- “Please don’t put your life in the hands of a rock and roll band, who’ll throw it all away.” The melody, sung in a major key, I found infectious. I had to listen to it again. And again. And again. I went downstairs tried to figure out it’s chords on my piano. I memorized the lyrics. I had a new favorite song.

English Premier League Teams and the Bands That Most Resemble Them – Part 1

You don’t have to probe very hard to find out that I’m passionate about music, but those of you reading this blog might not know that I’m also obsessed with Liverpool FC. My love for the club is intrinsically tied to my audiophile sensibilities, triggered after being mesmerized by the crowds on TV singing “You’ll Never Walk Alone” before a UEFA Champions League match in 2005.

I’d never seen anything like that in any American spectator sport, a stadium full of people singing a Rogers and Hammerstein show tune as if it were their national anthem, and then spending the entire 90 minutes adapting other songs into odes to their favorite players and club’s storied history. From that very match I backed the Reds as my preferred team to win the competition, following along as they defeated Juventus, Chelsea, and biting my nails as they overturned a 3-0 deficit at half time to win their fifth European Cup on penalties. I memorized the chants. I developed a seething hatred for Manchester United. I said a little prayer every April 15th in honor of the 96 fans who died at Hillsborough stadium in 1989. I watched every game from then on. I fell in love.

These days, I find myself getting up at the crack of dawn to watch some games, be it on my tiny laptop, in my living room, or in a bar. I’d sell my immortal soul to be able to see a game at Anfield, and mark my words, someday I will. But that didn’t have to be the case. To paraphrase David Mitchell, I, a man who lives over 4,000 miles away from the home ground of my chosen team can claim some deep attachment to some over-paid, hired hands from all four corners of the globe, who temporarily wear the same colored shirt that I am currently wearing, because from the moment they graced my television screen, I have desperately wanted to be one of those people in the stands, scarf in hand, shouting the lyrics to a song popularized by Gerry and the Pacemakers.

So you can imagine just how much this article appealed to my muso/footy fan tastes. In it, the author compares Manchester United to the Rolling Sones: brilliant, even legendary, “but just not ‘quite’ that band from Liverpool.” As the author, none other than actor and Reds fan Scot Williams, went on to compare the reigning champion’s obsession with overcoming the legacy of the team on the other end of the A580 to Mick Jagger, standing in his Upper East Side apartment, staring across Central Park at John Lennon’s building, the Dakota, the speculative gears in my head began to turn. If Liverpool, historically the most storied and successful club in English football, were the Beatles and Manchester United were the Stones, where would the other eighteen clubs that make up the English premier league fall?

Thursday Ten: Karaoke Classics That Won’t Annoy the Hell Out of Everyone Around You

When I was in high school I volunteered one weekend for a booth at my school’s annual “Harvest Festival”. I spent all day helping little kids throw rings onto impossibly large bottles and giving them little stuffed animals upon missing. It wasn’t exactly hard work, and it contributed towards my community service hours that my teachers all told me I needed to get into a decent college (they lied).

The only negative part of the experience was that the booth I worked in was placed right next to the “Karaoke Zone”, a television with a microphone and strange looking machine attached to it surrounded by folding chairs. For the next two days I was submitted to rendition after awful rendition of I Will Survive, Summer Lovin’, Bohemian Rhapsody, and Don’t Stop Believin’, with all mentions of sex and Beelzebub muted out, of course (it was a Christian school). On occasion the school’s chorus teacher would serenade us with the same Carol King song over and over again. By Sunday afternoon I was praying for a quick and painless death.

Since most of the kids taking the mic were middle-schoolers you’d probably think that adults are capable of making rational decisions when it comes to karaoke, but you’re wrong. Karaoke for adults, you see, is the domain of the drunk, a segment of society not particularly known for making well informed decisions. Don’t Stop Me Now, Wonderwall, and anything that’s ever been featured on one of the  Rock Band games has been beaten to death, dug up, resurrected and then beaten to death once more by intoxicated Americans at every Karaoke bar from here to the Philippines, and it’s not just Americans. I’ve done quite a bit of travelling in my lifetime, and I’ve seen way too many Australian backpackers singing Land Down Under, sunburnt English girls on holiday in Spain massacring the Amy Winehouse version of Valerie and, more recently, people of all nationalities cracking their voices at the chorus to Adele’s Rolling in the Deep.

When choosing a song for Karaoke, it’s important that you keep in mind just how much your vocal cords can handle, as well as try to build up a little bit of street cred. Everybody’s heard Sweet Home Alabama, Brown Eyed Girl, and Sweet Caroline. Try something new. Remember how we all fell in love with Zooey Deschanel’s rendition of Sugartown in 500 Days of Summer? It’s not a particularly hard song to perform, doesn’t have very confusing lyrics, and is relatively obscure yet well known enough so that people watching won’t be bored out of their skulls. This is what I look for in a good Karaoke song.

So with that in mind, here are ten songs that I always seek out, although I will admit to going along with the odd Devil Wen’t Down to Georgia after a few shots of Jameson, but who wouldn’t?

Arctic Monkeys, A to Z

Those of you who understand the significance of this blog’s name could probably guess that I’m a massive Arctic Monkeys fan. I was 16 and in high school when I first heard their music through my computer’s speakers, and from that moment onward I knew that they would be the defining band of my generation. Since then, their music has provided the soundtrack to my life; When driving I blast Flourescent Adolescent, when I’m at a bar I always select The View From the Afternoon on the jukebox,  when I’m heartbroken I strum the chords to The Only Ones Who Know on my crappy acoustic guitar. I’ve seen them perform several times, at one point driving half-way across the state that I live in to do so.

My world wouldn’t be the same if I’d never discovered their music, so here I’ve provided a brief guide to the Arctic Monkeys, an A to Z introduction to the four guys from Sheffield who changed my life.

Why I Hate To Love Billy Joel

As someone who heavily identifies himself by the quality of music that he listens to, I pride myself in the fact that, no matter how uncool I may be in almost every other aspect of my personality, when the topic of conversation turns to music, my taste is very, very cool. I’m not ashamed to hipsterize about how I loved Kings of Leon back in the Molly’s Chambers era, or how I regrettably passed on the opportunity in London one weekend to see a little folk band called Mumford & Sons perform in a pub. There is, however, one aspect of my musical taste that I do tend to hide from most music snobs: my love for the works of Billy Joel.

Now, you may be one of the millions of people who aren’t ashamed to be a fan of the sixth best-selling American recording artist of all time. You might be one of those people who sing along whenever Piano Man comes on the jukebox at your local bar. You might not be ashamed to blast The Downeaster Alexa on your car stereo with the windows down. You might be from Long Island. You might be thinking “Hey, I love Billy Joel. He’s not uncool.” Unfortunately, I feel duty-bound to inform you that, if the world were to rank every band and solo artist on a Top Gear-style cool wall, Jeremy Clarkson would have no choice but to place Billy Joel in the Seriously Uncool section, right next to Three Dog Night.

A Beginner’s Guide to The Stone Roses

This morning I awoke to news so wonderful that I spent the better part of my day dancing around my house to I Am The Resurrection for hours on end.

The Stone Roses, the band responsible for what is arguably one of the greatest British albums ever recorded, the band responsible for what is definitely one of the greatest debut albums ever released, the band responsible for inspiring Noel Gallagher to pick up a guitar, the band who seamlessly blended guitar-centric indie with drumloop-centric dance, the band whose anthemic tunes defined a generation caught between the rave music of the 1980’s and the Britpop of the 1990’s, the band who almost singlehandedly take credit for inspiring the Britpop movement, are reuniting. This seems like a good topic to start this blog with.

I’m an American. I shouldn’t know anything about the characters on Coronation Street, the events leading up to the Peterloo massacre, the ownership of Man. City, the distance between Salford and Bury, the meanings of the words “scran”, “gaff” or “the dibble” or anything else having to do with a provincial, post-industrial city with a population of half a million in the north of England. But partly because of the music made by Ian Brown, John Squire, “Mani” Mounfield and “Reni” Wren, a little bit of me regards Manchester as the center of the universe, and for a few years in the late 80’s and early 90’s, during the waning days of Margaret Thatcher’s political reign of terror, it was.

Coinciding with the widespread recreational use of ecstasy, night clubs like the Haçienda became meccas for members of the newly burgeoning rave scene culminating in 1988 and 1989, two years ensconced in the memories of those who were there as “The Second Summer of Love“. Re-dubbed  “Madchester”, Manchester transformed from a declining industrial town built around the cotton trade into one of the cultural capitals of Europe. Mancunian bands like The Happy Mondays, New Order, Inspiral Carpets and 808 State found widespread commercial and critical success in these years, and brought so much music industry attention to the sounds emanating from the city that for a while it seemed like anyone with jangly guitars and funky drums could reach the top of the charts. Few of these bands can claim they would have done it without the initial success of The Stone Roses’ debut album.

But still, despite the huge sway their legacy holds over the British media, most Americans have never heard of them. The group cancelled their 1990 tour of the United States, proclaiming in a press statement that “America doesn’t deserve us yet“. The American press weren’t so kind to them either, in particular Robert Christgau of the Village Voice, who asked “What do they do that the Byrds or Buffalo Springfield didn’t do better in 1967?” This cross-the-pond skepticism ensured that few would be exposed to the band outside of late-night MTV.

So, in honor of this legendary Lancastrian ensemble and in an attempt to expose at least one person to one of the most criminally ignored yet highly praised bands of all time, here are nine essential tracks spanning the Stone Roses’ career. You can watch the YouTube videos below or listen to the playlist on Spotify, but I recommend buying or downloading their original, eponymous debut if you like what you hear.

Please Allow Me To Introduce Myself

. . . I’m a man of wealth and taste. Well, I’m a man of taste at least. My name is Mario and I’m a 23 year old Journalism school graduate from Miami with a not-so-healthy obsession over indie music and almost anything British. This is going to be a rather brief introduction as I’d prefer to just dive right in and start my pontificating over the minutiae of my favorite music, so if you’re at all interested in the ramblings of a real-life Rob Fleming, and if the cliché in this introduction’s title didn’t make you want to vomit, then give this blog a read.