Silversun Pickups Play “Lazy Eye”

Listen to this track by four-piece Los Angeles-based indie-rock purveyors Silversun Pickups. It’s “Lazy Eye” a well-known cut from their 2006 debut record Carnavas. It served as lead single to that release, appearing in February of the following year and being a feature on their late-night TV appearances on Letterman, Leno, and a phalanx of other shows of the period. The song’s video was a stand-out, set at an all-ages music venue, and fraught with tension between youthful patrons. The song even appeared as a playable tune for the Guitar Hero and Rock Band video games, and therefore etching itself even deeper into the cultural consciousness of the mid-to-late 2000s.

“Lazy Eye” rides on a Smashing Pumpkins meets Neu! style motorik beat, locked in with earnest focus. Singer, guitarist, and co-writer Brian Aubert’s voice spans the spectrum of low-key contemplation to an angry roar, all of that wrapped in a restrained and ambient soundscape of guitars, bass, drums, and whisps of electronic effects that drift in and out, showing that the palette of guitar-based indie-rock was just as diverse and expansive as any genre.

The groove is mesmeric with the words adding value for the way they sound as much as they are a means to convey the story. And what a powerful story it is. Its exceptionally compelling opening statement really hits the ground running on that score: I’ve been waiting for this moment all my life. But it’s not quite right. That set of lines contains whole worlds of emotional geography. And what about the titular Lazy Eye, anyway? Is it meant to be literal, or does it imply something that’s more symbolic? Interestingly, the answer is a resounding yes on both fronts.

First, the lazy eye was real. Aubert had one as a kid; a bad time to have anything about you that other kids can point out and label you with. It’s not the physical nature of the thing that’s the focus. It’s about how you feel when you’re stuck with it, and how you then perceive the effect it has on other people.

In turn, it’s about how the lowest common denominator responds to that thing that makes us an object of their curiosity or revulsion. This is one of those things that lives in the province of uncomfortable self-consciousness that we all experience, especially when we’re young. For Aubert at one point, it was a lazy eye. But it could have been anything and can be for anyone.
Brian Aubert and Nikki Monninger of Silversun Pickups | October 2013 (image: Nan Palmero).
In this, “Lazy Eye” joins a tradition of pop songs that is all about what it feels like to be young and in a world where one feels everything very keenly. Being young often involves struggles which are imbued with life and death urgency experienced from the inside out. It means big overwhelming feelings that bear down on the way that we think about ourselves and our place in the world. It connects with how we believe other people may or may not think of us and with many blurry lines in between. Big Star’s “Thirteen” and even The Beach Boys’ “Wouldn’t it be Nice” hover around these same themes.

“Lazy Eye” keenly locks into this mindset: to suddenly, and for the first time in our lives, come to an awareness that we are presenting ourselves to others whether we wish to do that or not. This is one of those things we do not miss as we get older, even if we may miss so many other things about being young; to experience big emotions that include feeling exposed to the world and finding that we don’t have the capacity to really understand where those feelings come from, what they mean, or what to do with them.

Further to that, the song also touches on another malady profoundly felt by the young and in some ways can stick with us beyond our youth, too; everyone has it all figured out but me.

“Everyone’s so intimately rearranged
Everyone’s so focused clearly with such shine
Everyone’s so intimately prearranged
Everyone’s so focused clearly with such shine …
That’s why I said I relate
I said we really
Need to fight to relate.”

~ “Lazy Eye” by Silversun Pickups

In a state of mind like that, the common advice to just be yourself, kid seems hollow and distant. It’s a chasm apart from where we find ourselves while young and unused to managing or even recognizing the difference between our true selves and the costumes we feel we have to wear to fit in, to fight to relate.

“Lazy Eye” captures so much of the feeling of youthful uncertainty, with the narrator imbuing the moment he’s waited for all his life with the importance of scaling Everest. Really, it seems like the scene he’s experiencing is really about finally getting to talk to that person he likes while feeling like he’s messing it all up; I like this person so much and everything I’m saying to them right now sounds so stupid. Perhaps it’s the song’s video that conveys that scenario more overtly than any hard-coded lines in the song itself. But otherwise, what is more indicative and uncomfortably relatable to how it feels to be young and unsure of oneself than that?

Besides the groove, which is undeniable on a musical level, this lyrical distillation of youthful awkwardness and earnestness hits dead center. It’s well-observed. But it’s also full of empathy, too. Most of us felt some form of it when we were young, and more of us feel it when we’re older to a greater degree than we’d perhaps like to admit.

When we cast our minds back to the heady days of youth, we either edit it out or inwardly (sometimes outwardly!) cringe when we recall some of the things we’ve said, thought, or did. But awkwardness and clumsiness in social situations is just as much a part of the human experience as anything. In many ways, it’s a vital part of our apprenticeships as well-adjusted people, even if it never entirely goes away.

Silversun Pickups are an active band today. You can learn more about their output and their recent movements at silversunpickups.com.

For more on this tune, here’s a video about its background from the band themselves.

Enjoy!

#2000sMusic #IndieBands #IndieRock #SilversunPickups #songsAboutChildhood

The Delete Bin

2015-10-21 17:00:00

Neu! Play “Hallogallo”

Listen to this track by Dusseldorf duo and krautrock architects with an ironic consumerist moniker, Neu! It’s “Hallogallo” the lead track off of their eponymous 1972 debut record.

The band was made up of guitarist Michael Rother, and drummer/multi-instrumentalist Klaus Dinger. Both were involved in early iterations of fellow innovators Kraftwerk, and deal in many of the same musical approaches to a generous use of space and economic instrumentation. Speaking of space, this tune in particular seems to evoke a vast aural landscape of motorways and fast car travel. A sense of childlike wonder is contrasted to the idea of a dehumanized world of metal and glass that is an important undercurrent and vital tension in the music.

The incredible thing about this song in general is that this tension is evoked by the sparsest means, most notably a simple and unrelenting drum beat that is so undeniable it even has it’s own name: motorik.

The motorik beat is characterized by it’s straightness, so much like the image of a sleek automobile streaking down a motorway that it evokes that image even without any lyrical cues. Dinger plays the beat with so few interruptions on the part of the music happening around it that it seems almost machine-like, not played by a person. It is in fact accentuated by the impressionistic wash of sound created behind it, with backlooped electronics and guitar pedal effects that play in and out of the movement of the piece. Those supporting elements never try to take the wheel. That beat is right up front doing all of the driving, riding layers of musical tension as it carries us along with it.

I think what makes it such an effective piece of music is that dynamic which seems to suggest a narrative without lyrics. This really feels like we’re taking a fast car trip somewhere. Where is this journey taking us? Where will we end up by the end? To me, that plays into some pretty common themes that their former colleagues in Kraftwerk explored about the future, and about what role technology would play in it for good or ill. That was a rising concern by the early 1970s, what with space programs and early computer interface technology quickly on the rise and in the papers.

Yet here with Neu!, there really isn’t any sort of sense of dread to be found in this song. To me, this piece of music shimmers with optimism. Maybe that’s because the term “Hallogallo” isn’t strictly about machinery or the fate of civilization on the surface. It’s about connection, and celebration, literally being a portmanteau that mixes the German “hello”, with a slang term for what would loosely translate as “wild party”. This song seems to suggest that as we hurtle into the future, at least we still have our rock ‘n’ roll to keep us grounded.

Plagued by only regional success and record company indifference, Neu! Would be a concern until 1975, with a hiatus period lasting until the mid-1980s before breaking up soon after. Their influence on many bands is significant, most notably Stereolab who work within a similar musical space that deals in constancy and tension, plus other bands and artists like David Bowie, Brian Eno, Porcupine Tree (who actually covered this song), Death in Vegas, OMD, Ciccone Youth, Broadcast, and many, many others.

Klaus Dinger passed away in 2008.

You can find out more about Neu! by exploring this site.

Enjoy!

#70sMusic #DroneRock #EarlyElectronicMusic #Kraftwerk #Krautrock #motorik #Neu_

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Today #Bandcamp Friday supports #LA fire recovery

90 song 'today only' compilation:
goodmusiccomp.bandcamp.com/alb…

Featuring tracks by: #PerfumeGenius
#KFlay
#REM
#FayeWebster
#Dawes
#DeathCabforCutie #PostalService
#MacDeMarco
#NekoCase
#TVOnTheRadio
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#ToroyMoi
#TenaciousD
#ModestMouse
#LittleDragon
#LALOM
#MJLenderman
#CourtneyBarnett
#RealEstate
#MyMorningJacket
#HurrayForTheRiffRaff
#JasonIsbellandThe400Unit
#SoccerMommy
#AnimalCollective
#ColdWarKids
#RickyMontgomery
#Lucius
#TheMidnight
#SpiritualCramp
#KingGizzardAndTheLizardWizard
#MadiDiaz
#Interpol
#MilitarieGun
#ChelseaWolfe
#iRo
#DirtyProjectorsAndStargaze
#PUP
#Porches
#AnnieDiRusso
#HippoCampus
#NewPornographers
#TySegall
#NealFrancis
#MikiRatsula
#Dr.Dog
#TheDip
#LocalNatives
#TundeAdebimpe
#Gustaf
#WaterFromYourEyes
#Mudhoney
#Centro
#SilversunPickups
#RYX
#ManchesterOrchestra
#PoolKids
#FIDLAR
#TheArmed
#HEALTH
#Momma
#SYML
#MiyaFolick
#JoshRitter
#TheHeavyHeavy
#Pachyman
#NickThune
#SoulAsylum
#HotlineTNT
#BEL
#Sycco
#TheHoldSteady
#cumgirl8
#RichyMitchAndTheCoalMiners
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#brotherkenzie
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#FlockofDimes
#Friko
#GeorgeAlice
#ThisIsLorelei
#ShannonLay
#Eggy
#AlyciaLang
#JamesHenryJr
#WatkinsFamilyHour

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