"Walk Away Renee" - The Left Banke

This is one of my favorite pop songs of all time. It might seem a little too sentimental upon a first listen, and it is more than a little sappy for sure (check out those strings!), but that doesn’t mean that Steve Martin Caro’s vocal track isn’t one of the most gutting and disarmingly earnest performances ever pressed to vinyl. Michael Brown (keyboards) composed the music and basically masterminded the group through a tragically short career that only lasted four years, from 1965-69. In that period the group had just two major hits, including “Walk Away Renee,” which reached number five on the charts, and “Pretty Ballerina,” which is also a tremendous single that once again blended Brown’s dark melodic turns with the teenage mournfulness of Caro’s voice.

I visited Regent’s Park in west London today, and the lighting and weather being both extremely poetic, I naturally put this song on. Embarrassing, yeah? I know, but it’s really just a great song. The articulation and the circumstance of the first verse is one of the saddest things, I think, I’ve ever heard in my life.

And when I see the sign that points one way
The lot we used to pass by every day

Just walk away Renee
You won’t see me follow you back home
The empty sidewalks on my block are not the same
You’re not to blame

From deep inside the tears I’m forced to cry
From deep inside the pain I chose to hide

Just walk away Renee
You won’t see me follow you back home
Now as the rain beats down upon my weary eyes
For me it cries

Your name and mine inside a heart upon a wall
Still find a way to haunt me, though they’re so small

Just walk away Renee
You won’t see me follow you back home
The empty sidewalks on my block are not the same
You’re not to blame

Left Banke CDs are pretty much unavailable right now unless you have the bones for extortionately priced import copies (used, mind you) of compilations issued in the 80s and 90s. It’s really sad, but what can you do? People aren’t buying CDs, and lesser-known artists get shelved, never to be reissued. C’est la vie.

The Left Banke – “Walk Away Renee”

"When I Go Out" - British Sea Power

A b-side from the “Please Stand Up” single, this song is just another perfect lonesome sing-along from the chaps in BSP.

Submitted for your viewing pleasure:




When I go outside these days
Almost everything seems strange
And there are things I'd like to say

But they get swallowed on the way

The National Portrait Gallery

I spent the early part of the day slinking around the West End, making my way first to Charing Cross Road and Leicester Square, and then coming to the National Portrait Gallery. Proving that there must be a merciful soul sat somewhere in the bowels of London City Hall, the museums (or most of them, anyway) here are completely free. I had a look through the Victorian Era portraits, and found them to be pretty interesting. There was Thomas Carlyle, John Stuart Mill, and A.C. Swinburne, among others, but it was a portrait of Charles Dickens, painted when he had just finished the novel Nicholas Nickelby, which caught my attention the most. You can have a look for yourself…

Sensitive Euro Man

There is a fine song of the gentlemen of the now defunct popular group Pavement. “Sensitive Euro Man,” it begins, “we’re so envious of your etiquette demands.” Truer words have been seldom spoken, dear friends. Inside of every Bud-swillin’ American loudmouth is the heart of a Lager-swillin’ Chav, or a Cider-swillin’ football hooligan and vice versa and again vice versa.

London is a fine place, and the English a delightful people. Every day I walk through the charter’d streets near where the charter’d Thames does flow, “And mark in every face I meet, marks of weakness, marks of woe.”

The English rain has relented, touch wood (as they say here), and I hope to dive into Bleak House tomorrow. I’ve met some charming ladies here in this weird space station of a student residence building who’ve suggested that I might take in the lovely lush greens of St. James Park and/or Regent’s Park, so I will give it a try. A sporting gentleman always does, you know.

Some lines of T.S. Eliot:

The winter evening settles down
With smell of steaks in passageways.
Six o’clock.
The burnt-out ends of smoky days.
And now a gusty shower wraps
The grimy scraps
Of withered leaves about your feet
And newspapers from vacant lots;
The showers beat
On broken blinds and chimney-pots,
And at the corner of the street
A lonely cab-horse steams and stamps.
And then the lighting of the lamps.

From Preludes

He might’ve been a fascist though, so watch out…

Amazonian: Hey-o!

PAVEMENT: “Sensitive Euro Man”

Pavement in the Amazon: byawh!

St. Paul's Cathedral, Tower Bridge, Buckingham Palace

St. Paul's Cathedral

I went on a bus tour of London today and took some more photos. We passed by Tower Bridge again, so I got a couple of shots of it in the daylight, which was nice. St. Paul’s Cathedral was also a major highlight. Buckingham Palace is a bit of a bore. I saw a good poster outside a small war museum that read something like, “Better to be pot-luck today with Churchill, than humble-pie with Hitler tomorrow.” Both Churchill and Hitler were drawn as the respective food items.

More photos on my Flickr page.



Tower Bridge by Day

Tower Bridge

I got into London this morning. Stood around red eyed and dog-tired for a while waiting for the shuttle bus. A lot of yawning and attempts at small talk with the other arrivals. When we finally got going we hit road work ten minutes into our journey, the blinding sun coming in through the big windows and I felt like an insect under a magnifying glass. Got situated in my room and hit the street. Hopelessly lost in a matter of minutes. I had a bacon bap (an enormous Kaiser roll with slabs of real greasy bacon) and a Ribena outside while I studied the map. I wanted to find a Lloyds bank and I knew it was to the northeast, so I thought I’d just head into the sun. Ended up going in the opposite direction for a while and took a bewildered detour through Russell Square and the University of London. They have these glossy blue plaques commemorating famous people who lived in the old buildings. I saw one for an old chancellor and a suffragette too. Hadn’t ever heard of them before. Eventually I made it to Liverpool Road in Bloomsbury and found what I needed. At night I took the northern line on the tube down to Tower Bridge and shot these photos. It’s been a long, long day, but I’m thrilled to have arrived and I’m determined to milk every free second sight-seeing. Got to start the job hunt soon…





Tower Bridge Wiki




"Closed-circuit cameras are operating for your protection"

People's Instinctive Travels

In a few days I'm shipping off to the UK for a semester of study abroad. I'm taking some English courses and hopefully working a bit part-time as well. For the duration of my stay, this blog, just like a Transformer, will become my online travel journal, including pictures and writings detailing the things I see and do. Okay, sweet, see you later.

In the G’rage (Part Duh)

When I first started getting into music, my friends and I had one of our first jam sessions in the sweltering heat of my parents’ garage. If I remember correctly, it started out with my mangling a rough rip off of Weezer’s 2001 hit “Hash Pipe,” while my friends Greg and Ben joined in with trashy drums and a screaming anti-lead guitar line. Ah, those were the days…

We’d later form a (slightly) more proficient ensemble in our last couple of years of high school, but in those formative years, the garage was our home. It was barren, metallic and almost entirely unsympathetic to any kind of creative work, but it was a place where we could lay into our instruments with an embarrassing level of earnestness and make a god-awful noise that was completely ours. Greg’s garage had hanging carpets rigged up to give the effect of a soundproofed studio, and deep inside this shag rug womb we would blast-off on double-tempo renditions of Nirvana, Green Day, and occasionally some classic rock like Zeppelin and the Eagles. I would hang an old karaoke mic from the ceiling and scream myself hoarse over songs like “In Bloom,” “Church on Sunday,” and “Rock ‘n’ Roll.” When we finally opened the big clanging door we were a reasonable high school band.

When I got a little older I started getting into the history of garage rock and started to re-listen to British Invasion bands like the Kinks, the Stones, the Beatles, the Zombies, and the Who. While these groups obviously exhibited a certain amount of polish and a knack for finely crafted melodies, it was the un-tutored, raw knuckleheaded-ness of stuff like “All Day and All of the Night” and “Get Off My Cloud” that really grabbed me by the guts as a teenager. Reading about garage rock more recently, I was reminded of a host of other groups I had heard on oldies radio as a kid that had championed that crude garage sound, such as The Troggs, ? and the Mysterians, the Kingsmen, and Steppenwolf. All of these groups had great pop hits that could be played with minimal technical ability and only required that the performer bring to the song a raucous enthusiasm and complete disregard for cool-handed composure. The kind of anti-elitist ethos that these brilliant songs represented really helped push me along to write my own tunes and start playing in front of people.

The Trashmen were a great garage rock group from days gone by. Here’s a very appropriate video for their hit “Surfin’ Bird.”

Last Flowers

Ed O'Brien - Guitar, Unicorn


Radiohead are in a tremendously enviable position right now. Since about 1995, they’ve been the most consistently impressive musical force to have braved the mainstream since probably The Beatles. While they may not have the ubiquitous cultural clout of the Fab Four, they are undoubtedly the most influential group of artists making music right now.

Think about it. Maybe they don’t sell like your Aguilera’s and J.Lo’s in their prime, maybe they do, I don’t really keep up on record sales. Still, the anticipation that surrounds a Radiohead release is incomparable in this day and age. From hardcore fans to musicians in pretty much every genre (see all the different tribute albums ranging from electronica to reggae to classical), from record company execs and concert promoters to the one guy in the next dorm room who knows how to play just the first half of “Creep” on his Yamaha guitar, people get super excited about a Radiohead release.

This is why, to me at least, they’re as good as the Beatles. Okay, this isn’t the Sixties. Rock ‘n’ Roll is dead, and all the rest. Multimedia reigns supreme and music just doesn’t seem to mean as much to people as it once did. Regardless of all that, any time a band is able to write the kind of songs that can inspire a enormous, not to mention completely rabid, fan base (many people I know, myself included, didn’t bat an eye at the $85 price tag for the disc box), sell loads and loads of records, have the press frothing at their collective mouth, AND create a common ground over which people can communicate about music in spite of often times drastically clashing tastes, you know there’s something really special going on. So, while Radiohead lunch boxes and collectible figurines don’t exist yet, the five lads from Oxford really are a massive band on par with the greats of rock history.

All the same, this position of prominence comes with a huge deal of pressure to perform. After all, the most important band in the world ought to consistently release incredible music, right?

It’s true that the band has set an incredibly high standard for itself, and as a result of this there’s bound to be some disappointment when they don’t meet it. This is especially true today in the age of message boards, file sharing programs, and blogs. Such channels have allowed fans of the band to listen to a lot of the band’s material in its earliest incarnations. Much of the band’s seventh album, In Rainbows, was debuted to audiences in the US and Europe a year before it was released last October, and one song, the angelic “Nude” (formerly called “Big Ideas”) was a song the band first debuted while touring behind their 1997 masterpiece OK Computer.

The concept of bands “road testing” new material is obviously not a new thing, but ever since the Internet popped up, people have had unprecedented access to bootlegs and other scraps of previously unavailable material (manifest in the form of website art and webcasts in Radiohead’s case), which can, in some cases, make them become very attached to original live performances and their arrangements, as opposed to the final versions recorded on official releases.

Having listened to “Disc 2” of Radiohead’s In Rainbows several times now, I think that it’s safe to assume that the band has intended it as a kind of companion EP in the vein of some past releases like the Airbag/How Am I Driving?, I Might Be Wrong, and Com Lag EPs. It’s my belief that “Radiohead Nation,” if you will, was dying for a double album, something in the ilk of The White Album, maybe. With In Rainbows Disc 2, we didn’t really get it. In other words, there’s a reason the double vinyl included in the disc box only bears the ten cuts from the version of the album that became available for download on the band’s website a couple of months ago (it’s no longer available, but latecomers have only to wait ‘til the record “drops” via TBD records New Year’s Day).

So basically, what we’ve got with In Rainbows Disc 2 are a few incredibly awesome B-Sides (“Down is the New Up,” “Bangers & Mash,” “Four Minute Warning”) and a few just plain great ones. Is that such a bad thing? I don’t think so.

Anyway, after all that, I’d like to share an early version of one of my favorite tracks from Disc 2, “Last Flowers Til The Hospital,” a plaintive ballad whose lyrics echo the techno-paranoia of the OK Computer era (“Appliances have gone berserk”). As you might have inferred, I find no fault with the access the Internet grants fans to get a glimpse of their favorite artists’ more obscure moments. Certainly albums should be bought and copyrights must be observed, but I believe the bootleg as it exists in the music world ought to belong to the fans. After all, a rare live recording hardly ever falls into the hands of anyone but the most devoted follower, one who undoubtedly owns every commercially available release anyway. For fans, bootlegs grant candid insight into the creative workings of the groups that influence their lives profoundly, and this, I think, is a pretty wonderful thing.

“Last Flowers (Til Hospital)” – Thom Yorke solo, 2005

Happy New Year!

Another New Year's Day and I find myself sitting around my family's Florida home with a few new ventures on the brain. Resolutions? Don't get stuck in any boring dead-end nowhere situations. Also, record some new material and read a good amount of non-classic literature. What about you?

Here's a track by Feist, taken from the unreleased "Red Demos" recorded before her breakthrough LP Let It Die. It's called "Intuition," and it's a dark, sultry little number that, like the other tracks on the bootleg, far surpasses the (mostly) standard female singer-songwriter fare found on Let It Die and (to a lesser extent) most of what I've heard from The Reminder. The songs from the demos feel a bit less pre-meditated and much more loose, and it's a pretty refreshing way to hear everyone's favorite French Canadian indiepop media darling, especially after all those iPod Shuffle commercials.





One, two, three, four:

"Intuition" - Feist