Songs of the Week: Redux

Well, I’m gonna just cop out and do another “Songs of the Week” post this week because that’s really the only thing on my mind. So here we go:

Vampire Weekend – “Unbearably White”

Because of course the best song Vampire Weekend have released from Father of the Bride so far is called “Unbearably White”. That’s just the kind of band these guys are. 

In contrast with just about every other song they’ve released in this current album cycle, “Unbearably White” forgoes a lot of the sunnier, “indie”-adjacent pop characteristics for something much more sparsely arranged and moody. If anything, it reminds me more of the Vampire Weekend from 2013’s Modern Vampires of the City, which is always welcome. The arrangements on that album often went in strange new directions, sometimes mid-song, and there’s a bit of that going on here. The strings creep in rather unexpectedly on the chorus, and while in earlier songs they might have engaged in some baroque acrobatics thanks to the arrangements of former member Rostam Batmanglij, here they simmer just below the surface with a high tremolo, merely adding to the tension. There’s an eerie, almost breathy synth that appears throughout, which is easily another highlight. 

There’s just a lot of subtle, neat things going on here, and suddenly I’m a lot more excited for Father of the Bride.

Orange Juice – “Three Cheers for Our Side”

Sometimes you just love an album or song by a band a lot, and you listen to it a lot, yet for some reason you still don’t know anything about that band. Names of band members, where the band is from, nothing. You could easily look this information, but you don’t because you either appreciate the rare mystery in your media-consuming life, or are (far more likely) just too lazy to remedy the situation.

Alright, maybe that’s just me.

Anyways, that’s pretty much the extent of my relationship with Orange Juice’s You Can’t Hide Your Love Forever. My brother found out about it somehow, listened to it a lot, told me about it at some point, and then I listened to it at lot. Now I’m not arguing for consuming art entirely without context, because that’s hardly a responsible impulse in our current day and age, but sometimes something just hits all the right pleasure centres in your brain that you simply don’t think to ask any further questions. “Three Cheers for Our Side” is one of those songs for me. There isn’t a single thing about it that I don’t like. That guitar tone, the backup vocals, the jarring tempo changes, every single thing just works for me. It’s an incredibly well-executed piece of guitar pop, and I wouldn’t have it any other way.