
Preamble: I recently had the audacity to take this grocery shopping with me on a Sunday when I had a bad headache. Not the smartest move. Whole excursion was doomed from the start. First the cart wouldn’t push properly. It seemed one of the wheels was bunk. Felt like I was pushing a mule upstairs. The cart didn’t even look right. I think someone had disfigured the basket, but I didn’t realise that until I started pushing it. I immediately thought to walk out and get a new one, but I had just bagged some mandarins and there were people all around me and I freaked out that the alarm would go off if I did, and then the strangest thing happened, I actually left my body for a moment and went past the checker with my bag of mandarins and I set the alarm off anyway. Shopping is just way too uncool for this curious and delightful headtrip of an album.
Shane
Track-by-track analysis
You Had To Be Drunk
David: This is ‘When the trees walk downhill’.2
Shane: Steely Dan’s Black Cow Pt II. I think this song was written about me. You know the things I do, what I subject myself to, the conditions I end up in, all for the sake of what? Sitting in a circle with some old guys. My second favourite song of the year behind that one by The Softboiled Eggies I told you about.
I Come From The Clouds
D: Described by Dave at the record launch as designating his origin in relation to rootsy blues musicians, the lyrics are too small for me to read from the insert, but I will say, this is very credible as a narrative.
S: Dave’s going for Elliot Gould in The Long Goodbye. I try to do this in the supermarket and look what happens.
Let’s Kill God Again
D: At the record launch an attendee turned to me and said ‘At first I thought this was “Howzat!” but now it sounds like “Golden Years FASHION!” however personally I would say to you, the music is an undeniable truth as is the sentiment, an atheism rallying cry.
S: Begging for a techno remix. It’s concerning that I picture Nick Giannopolis dancing to this, but then again he is the devil.
Junk Time
D: Hard to resist, it reminds me of a particular song on Clare Moore’s Liquor, but kind of stretchier.
S: Man those keyboards are creepy.
I Like To Be Haunted
D: I said to someone in the audience at the launch that this album was full of ‘I’ songs; ‘yes,’ they said, ‘Dave used to boast he never wrote a song with “I” in it but now he realises he’s going to die’; I assume and hope he meant die another day, not soon; in any case, the song itself is grand, though I think he really means he likes to haunt rather than to be haunted, or am I wrong.
S: I should really say something more than wow.
Only Passin’ Through
D: Works for me.
S: Unless this is about a ghost, thematically we’re in Paul Schrader and Bill Callahan country.
I’m In The Future Now
D: The second bona fide classic on an album of putative or arguable classics, this was described to me by an audience member at the launch as yacht music (I won’t steal your line any further than this Shane but feel free to elaborate).
S: Agreed, this is utterly Malibu Rum-a-go-go. How sweet is Stuart’s guitar break?
Bring Me My Liar
D: Great beginning if you’re listening to this on a shuffling ipod with Sven Liebaek’s Inner Space and Stereolab’s Sound Dust; somewhere in there it doesn’t quite hold but its innate potential gets it over the line.
S: Very Riders on the Storm, a deceptively easy song to karaoke, Jimbo’s song that is, I once tried and ended up writhing on the carpet berating the bar maid at a seaside family restaurant. Dave’s spiel about Douglas in bed with a young girl is unbelievable. “Who ya gonna believe, me or your eyes???”
I Was A Country Boy
D: Irrelevantly I recall the days of the Country Party when a politician from that party fumed in parliament ‘I am a country member!’ and some wag rejoindered ‘we remember’; however that has nothing to do with this fine memoir, a more truthin’ version of some of the things on Night of the Wolverine.
S: Dave blatantly sings this like a homosexual —intensifying the outcast message/punchline of the chorus (‘Boy was I country!’). I bought this CD on the strength of the masturbatory, Skunk Baxter guitar solo Stuart unleashed at the CD launch. Equally magnificent on CD and the sweetest breakdown by the Dave and Clare band that I know of.
I Needed Someone To Find Me
D: A not atypical DG rumination in form, though the suggestion of possibly fallibility is a mature progression; note that this track is not #11 as indicated by the sleeve, it’s #12.
S: I like how you mention things he says from the stage, not that you have mentioned it here or anything. You know if Robert Pollard can release a CD of his banter than Dave could release about twenty. That upcoming show with Henry Wagons should be a good one.
Punk Dies
D: Well, this should have been said 20 years ago, really, not now; I wonder where the Lurid Yellow Mist stand on Sid and/or Bill Posters.
S: My appreciation of this song is coloured somewhat by its similarity to a Wilco tune I don’t like very much. I expect to come around to it though.
Crime And Underwear
D: Some time ago I heard DG say from the stage (at the East, I believe) that he had distilled all social interest into these two elements; glorious tune, wry observational words about the human mass, a little bit in the vein of ‘Dandies are never unbuttoned’, you know.
S: A paean to sexual compensation and infertility. The man can no longer throw thunderbolts like he used to, so he compensates by indulging in crime and underwear, much like a man who relies on his back when his knees are troubling him.