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

"Helpless" - Neil Young

Over the last year, it seems like every time I come back home on my breaks from school this wave of nostalgia overtakes me. It's not really something I ever expected to happen, considering I so desperately wanted to escape the south when I was living here full time. I suppose the fact that I'll be graduating college at the end of the New Year has something to do with this. Pretty soon I'm going to have to make some big decisions about what I want to do with myself or whatever, and I really just don't want to. So as a consequence of that I guess I'm feeling a little wistful for more carefree times or something.

"Helpless" is a really simple Neil Young song that you might call the centerpiece of Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young's 1970 album Deja Vu. If you ask me, most of the material that resulted from the collaboration between these former members of the Buffalo Springfield, The Byrds, and The Hollies, is mostly bland, uninspired stuff, but the group did have its moments. "Helpless" is one of them. Notable among its surrounding tracks for it's sheer sparseness, it very much resembles a Neil Young solo cut. The song itself is overtly nostalgic, and in the wrong hands it might be just that, but Young's earnest delivery lends the song an overwhelming sense of loneliness and yearning that transports it to a much higher plain.

Anyway, I’ve been thinking about this song a lot lately. As I said before, it’s ludicrously simple, with basically one verse repeated twice with some slight variations now and then. It’s also basically just one set of three or four chords all the way through. The lyrics have got this real wounded tone, and are childlike in their attention to detail.

Blue blue windows behind the stars
Yellow moon on the rise
Big birds flying across the skies
Throwing shadows on our eyes
Leave us helpless, helpless, helpless.

“Helpless”– Neil Young, Live at Massey Hall 1971

Buy it here: Amazon

Neil Young Bio: All Music

The Coolest Stuff I Came Across in 2007 (Off the Top of my Head)

The Orlando Magic – They are awesome now. I don’t care if they’re only third in the Eastern Conference: Howard, Turkoglu, and Keyon are gonna take it to tha Heece (as Prasad would say). If nothing else they’re going to go to town on the Knicks on Wednesday, and I’ll be in attendance to witness it first hand.

The New England Patriots – I really want the Celtics to crash and burn, but the Patriots are just really great. I kind of latched onto the whole New England sports bandwagon at the end of the Summer, since my two roommates are from Mass. and have been hardcore fans of the Sox and Pats since before it was cool. I’d love to see a perfect season in my lifetime, and you can’t hate them too much, since they still kind of have something to prove, having lost the Superbowl last year. Highlights of the season included a fantastic dropped lateral that miraculously resulted in a deep pass from T-Brad. In addition, Junior Seau is the perfect name for a linebacker.

In Rainbows by Radiohead – ‘Nuff said.

Norwegian Wood by Haruki Murakami – This is an old book, but I just read it a couple of months back. It’s basically just a really heartfelt adolescent coming-of-age story for introspective, slightly bitter college students like me. It’s a little romantic, sure, but everyone’s gotta feel sometime. If you’re interested, check the archives for my original review.

Live at Massey Hall 1971 by Neil Young – The second installment in the Neil Young Archives series, it’s an official bootleg that documents probably the most inspired phase of Neil Young’s artistic career. Sure, On the Beach, didn’t come around ‘til 1973 or ‘74, but in ’71 Neil Young’s entire body was twitchin’ with what Crazy Horse producer David Briggs would call “the Spook.” If you ever get a chance to listen to this, or better yet, pick it up for yourself, check out “Don’t Let It Bring You Down,” “Love in Mind,” “On the Way Home,” and “Ohio.”

Rap – It’s actually pretty cool, if you look in the right places.

The Office (US) – I was a fan of the UK version, but over the last year and a bit (season three) I really got into the US version. Seasons two and three are basically perfect and ought to be watched on DVD with all the deleted scenes. Season four not so much. Dwangela? Jam? I liked it better when the tension was there, to be honest, and it’s probably for the best that the writer’s strike has probably ended the show for good.

I’m sure there were more cool things, but I want to maybe eat some cookies now.

A merry Christmas to all…I insist.

In the G'rage... (Part One of ?)

Yesterday I finished up a semester interning at a lit agency, and as a going-away present I was allowed to take a couple of promo copies of books they have in stock from publishers. One of those books is Rolling Stone’s now out-of-print Alt-Rock-A-Rama. So far, I’ve only read through a few of the pieces compiled in the book, but I was inspired by one of the features, “The Original Punks: The Greatest Garage Recordings of the Twentieth Century,” by Robot A. Hull (no joke, guy goes by Robot), to do a post on a great garage-rock group of whose history and musical output I know almost nothing. They’re called The Loved Ones, and they’re from Melbourne, Australia.

I got the following track, “Surprise, Surprise,” from a blog post over on Aquarium Drunkard, a cool blog based in LA, that was part of a series on rare garage rock from the 1960s. Dig the metalic fuzz of the song’s opening—it’s a bit like the Rolling Stones’ early singles, but it doesn’t have any of the big corporate rock connotations they’ve gained by being stars for almost half a century. The Loved Ones aren’t nearly as obscure as some of the stuff Robot Hull talks about in his piece, such as The Memphis Goons (who sound pretty awesome, considering they referred to themselves as “Xavier Tarpit, Jackass Thompson and Vanilla Frog”), The Godz, or the Shaggs, but their material also isn’t as widely known as their more successful contemporaries such as ? and the Mysterians (“96 Tears”), The Kingsmen (“Louie, Louie”), or the Troggs (“Wild Thing”).

For these reasons, I thought I’d post “Surprise, Surprise” for your listening enjoyment. It’s got elements of the Kingsmen, the Beatles’ early releases, and the Stones for sure, but ultimately it’s just a damn good nugget of garage rock greatness. It might not be as perfect as the Trashmen’s cacophonous “Surfin’ Bird,” (“B-b-b-bird bird bird, bird’s the word") but it’ll be stuck in your head for at least the rest of the day.

“Surprise, Surprise” – The Loved Ones

Check ‘em out on Amazon.