The Verve's Urban Hymns: A sort-of review

The seduction
A lucid dream. Not some drugged out room filled with negativity. A simple fix. Pop the pill, forget about the rest. Let Dr. Robert worry. Butterfly with tangerine wings, caught in the strobe lights, chrysalis confused. Chase it down. In your lucid dream.

The truth
“We are the rolling people. Don’t know why”

“Where all the veins meet...”

“I called the doctor so he could relieve my pain. He has a little pill for me, just a little luxury”

“Weeping willow, pills under my pillow”

“This is a fix. FUCK YOU. THIS IS A FIX. FUCK YOU. C’MON”

“Into the headlights. Another velvet morning for me”

“JUST LOST SOMEBODY IN THE BACK”

“Don’t you find that its lonely?”

The wisdom
Life is not simple. There are easy ways to arrive at this conclusion. The object of your affection could return the favour with a little less enthusiasm that you would have liked. Like that movie. You could hate your job. Like that song. You could make so many compromises that your every move is shadowed with self-doubt. Like that year.

There are other ways to reach this conclusion as well...

Knowing that someone you love is going to die, and that the drugs will not help this time.
Realising that its not possible to walk through life and avoid bumping into people.
Experiencing that feeling of release. Two guitars, bass, drums. Epiphany...and then poof. It’s gone. True pain captured, sold to a world starving for something real, only to find that they ate it, found it bitter, spit it out.

The pain
"Richard, towering over the rest of the bobbing crowd, looked around wildly. This was a signal for whoever of us weren’t wasted to go to him. Talk to him, reassure him he wasn’t through the looking glass, that there was no giant butterfly in the loo, no rabbit with a machine gun at the door. Today was bad though, he just sat down in the middle of the club floor. My feelings have been betrayed, he kept yelling out. I was born a little damaged, look what they made. Cold-blooded as it sounds, I knew that would end up in a song.

Later, that evening we took a ride home in Simon’s beat-up Chevy. Richard kept putting his head through the window and yelling at the passers-by. We had one serious scare. We stopped for cigarettes, and everyone except Rich left the car for a few minutes. When we got back, he was missing. A few minutes later, we heard a noise above our heads. It was him, sitting up on the roof, saying ‘Bow down’ again and again. We freaked, raced up, persuaded him to come down. He didn’t protest much, seemed more numb that anything else. Was jumping on his mind that day? I don’t think so. Suicide wasn’t his thing..."

The schism
The fact is that I don’t know shit about what I’m saying. I only know sound and the worlds inherent. But that’s not enough. I don’t know uppers. Downers. X. LSD. Coke. Shrooms. Hash. I know not of these worlds, and it informs the fact that I am attempting to write about them. But I still try. I need to hear some sounds that recognise the pain in me, even if I can’t relate to the pain in them.

But there will always be that gap, because I cannot put myself through any of it. There’s too much at stake. But if I were to feel tempted, the only reason I would not do it would be because I don’t have the guts. This will always trouble me.

I would recommend...

1. Days of Heaven

Terrence Malik's second feature. Thanks to Nestor Almendros' cinematography, perhaps the most visually ravishing colour film to emerge from Hollywood.

Watch out for: The distance shot of a train on a bridge, billowing black smoke sillhouetted against the blue sky

2. Happy Together

Does Wong Kar Wai conceive his movies as stories or as a series of interconnected images? This film will lead you no closer to the answer. Needless to say, it doesn't matter. Plus, props to him for making a movie about a gay couple without the word 'gay' being mentioned even once.

Watch out for: The music. A crazy mix of tangos, pop numbers and rock instrumentals

3. Entourage, Season 5

Anyone who follows this space knows how seriously I take my Entourage-watching. So hear this: Season 5 took the best programme on television and raised it to a whole new level of brilliance. The stakes are higher than ever before, and everyone raises their game. Also, I may not believe in God, but I sure as hell believe in Ari Gold.

Watch out for: Um...Episode 5 (the best stand-alone episode after Resurrection), Episode 7 for that scene at the airport, Episode 8 for its ending, Episode 12 for....

4. Jenny/867-5309

Tommy Tutone recorded this in the '80s, its apparently a famous one-hit wonder. Its a good one-hit wonder too - solid, hooky, muscular. It sounds very Springsteen-derivative, but then it dawns on you that Sprinsteen's excellent 2007 single 'Radio Nowhere' sounds A LOT like this.

Watch out for: The dearth of singles like this on the radio today

Nada Nada: No need for words

Since this blog has anyways mutated into something of a forum for art-related shout-outs both cryptic and verbose, and because the last time I posted something on the brave new Indian rock scene it yielded a sum total of no feverish replies at all, I thought I’d repeating the whole soul-scarring exercise with a song which most of you in the know would already have heard, maybe because you’re a critic for Rolling Stone, maybe because you’re just up-to-date with these things or maybe because, like me, you listen to 95 FM in the morning and have heard Sarthak asking you to listen to this number with the speakers turned up LOUD. The song, released last year by Avial, a band brave enough to opt for singing its rock numbers in Malayali, is called Nada Nada, which roughly translates into 'keep on walking'. The music is churning rock, something akin to Ten-era Pearl Jam, without being anywhere near as memorable. The lyrics are earthy and effective (I googled them later - they sound like a Naxalite folk song), but would obviously be lost on a non-Malayali audience. It doesn't really matter though. On vocals, Anandraj Benjamin Paul starts out impassioned and rousing, and ends up wild and lacerating. His singing is powerful enough to be able to convey the feeling behind the words, thus rendering the actual words redundant. For those who think this is no big deal, I'd like to bet you'd be hard-pressed to compile a list of ten songs in a language you know nothing about but which still managed to grab you at a pure emotional level. And for narrow-minded Ghazal-reared couplet-obsessed protesters, a line from a Neville Cardus essay - “…but perhaps they were only dead anyway”

"I've spent every day since then chasing Amy..."

Try not to breathe

Try Not to Breathe (R.E.M)

I will try not to breathe
I can hold my head still with my hands at my knees
These eyes are the eyes of the old, shiver and fold

I will try not to breathe
This decision is mine. I have lived a full life
And these are the eyes that I want you to remember

I need something to fly over my grave again
I need something to breathe

I will try not to burden you
I can hold these inside, I will hold my breath
Until all these shivers subside,
Just look in my eyes
I will try not to worry you
I have seen things that you will never see
Leave it to memory me. I shudder to breathe

I want you to remember

I need something to fly

Over my grave again
I need something to breathe
Baby, don't shiver now
Why do you shiver now?

I will try not to worry you
I have seen things that you will never see
Leave it to memory me

Don't dare me to breathe

I want you to remember

Drake

The voice emanated from my stereo
It was a sleepy voice
Only the sleep eternal, not the daily one
A conversational voice, textured like a memory
It belonged to a man, but it could have been a woman
Come by my streetcar by the bay, the voice said
I would have done that, the request seemed so genuine
But I know he would not be there
If you would and you could, it said later
I could happily die after hearing that one line, and I would have if I had enough confidence in the afterlife
Or enough sorrow in my own life
Which he did
Sometimes it just happens that people like that
Can sing like this

9:13 AM (Crack of Light)

…through a crack of light I was unable to find my way, just one of the many quotable lines from a surprising proto-punk anthem called Seven and Seven Is by LA-based based hippie band Love , though the real kick is imparted by the driving force of the music which never lets up and finishes early, qualities which everyone but The Ramones abandoned in the ‘70s, which is interesting to me, but my imaginary corpus of readers is saying WHO CARES, to which I have to reply that heart of hearts, I do believe that somewhere out there are people who care - who find that their world makes the most sense when they are listening to music, for whom listening to records is not relaxing, but involving, driving, inspiring, who have the capacity to find success and failure, heartbreak and redemption in their music on a daily basis, who are like Rob Fleming in High Fidelity, and who, like him, suffer for it but never apologize for who they are - and that its just a question of finding them or letting them find me…