Radiohead

Kid A
Parlophone, 2000

Not today but soon I will spend an entire month writing about love songs. It occurs to me this column is very often filled with stories about junkies and suicides and rock 'n' roll tragedies, none of which can be particularly pleasant to read about on a Monday morning. However right now I have just finished reading Chuck Klosterman's Killing Yourself To Live, so bear with me a little longer.

I enjoyed this book immensely. It's about Klosterman's road trip across the USA, visiting the sites of famous rock 'n' roll deaths (Elvis, Cobain, the Big Bopper, etc) for an article in Spin. Except it ends up having more to do with the women he thinks about on the road, and the evangelical Christian movies he watches in motel rooms while getting stoned. It also has many asides about the author's thoughts on various records.

Now chances are you're not a Radiohead obsessive (because you're reading this magazine and not snoring through Drum), so perhaps you haven't heard this theory yet: that Kid A matches up to the September 11 attacks like The Dark Side Of The Moon to The Wizard Of Oz. Klosterman reckons each track represents a period of that day, in sequence, with the tragedy occurring during 'The National Anthem' (relevant lyrics: "What's going on?") and the following song representing the immediate shock ("This isn't happening"), and so on.

This is fairly interesting, but it is Klosterman's argument and not mine. What it reminded me to do was say that the last track on Kid A, 'Motion Picture Soundtrack', is one of the saddest songs ever made. It is set to what sounds like a wind instrument electronically distorted and slowed down. "Red wine and sleeping pills/ Help me get back to your arms," are the first lines, and "I will see you in the next life" is the last.

You could take it to be a fictitious suicide note – Thom Yorke was suffering from depression and rebelling from the success of OK Computer when it was recorded – and I guess in the context of Klosterman's thoughts about celebrity and death, and how the two are entwined, that would make sense. But that doesn't do it justice. In fact, such a reading may miss the point altogether.

'Motion Picture Soundtrack' is one of the saddest songs I have ever heard, but it's not about death. As much as one can say it is about anything (Yorke told journalists he pulled the lyrics to Kid A from a hat), it is about mourning. The opening lines, "Red wine and sleeping pills/ Help me get back to your arms", are a profound expression of loss. And that is something that dead people do not feel. They don't feel a thing. Nor do they drink red wine.

Saturday Looks Good To Me

Every Night
Polyvinyl, 2004

My favourite tools in the trade of twee pop are whimsy and wordplay, and of course any such song worth its weight in second-hand cardigans would also have to be written by a well-off white kid who bruised liked a ripe pear. It has been a guilty pleasure of mine ever since falling in love with Belle & Sebastian, who inspired a revival of the genre in the late '90s with a series of records about love and books and minor dramas given motion-picture proportions with lush pop orchestra soundtracks to boot.

Another guilty pleasure, which seems to have become popular in indie music at around the same time and since, is self-referential lyrics (oh so po-mo, I know). Like wordplay it is the sort of thing that appeals to bookish types with fidgety minds who love nothing more than to get swept up in the analysis of everything and anything, as long as there is some minor detail to debate. And for such a person who also loves music, what could be more fascinating than a pop song that deconstructs itself as it spins?

And so we come to a track by Michigan indie band Saturday Looks Good To Me called 'When The Party Ends', from their third album Every Night, which combines all of the above to create four minutes of delightful nerdiness. It's written like a letter between young lovers who constantly miss the bus in the morning and feel misunderstood at night, with eloquent lines that keep becoming longer and more frantic as the tempo picks up and the sappy string instruments kick in.

About half-way through the song trips over its tongue for a second and then changes tack entirely, to become a diatribe on marketers who "know the demographic that we represent/ Because they heard all of our secrets through the heating vent" and, then, the songwriter himself. "So write another song about your discontent/ And wax nostalgic for a time less turbulent," he sings, like a jab in his own ribs, and then, my very favourite taunt: "And you can use your list of words that rhyme with opulent." It is a tiny, private protest, the musical equivalent of thumping your pillow and then feeling a bit silly at how ineffective it was.

Died Pretty

Next To Nothing
Citadel, 1985

It'd be easy to spin this record at 33rpm without realising it was a 45, and that's exactly what I did the first time I played it – the undulating carnival keyboard of 'Ambergris' oozing out of the speakers like treacle instead of, had it been at the right speed, something closer to honey warmed up and turned liquid. It wasn't until the chorus kicked in that I realised the mistake. I just assumed Died Pretty had taken too many downers like every other underground band in the late eighties.

When you play it properly, 'Ambergris' and its pairing on Side A 'Plaining Days' are less miserable than simply well-paced. Both are driven by a keyboard that rises up and down like the tide over a gently-thumping bass heartbeat. When something happens, some small change in the wind sets a song into action, it swells up without any warning. You barely even notice until all of a sudden Ron Peno's singing from the top of the thrashing whitecap, his voice broadcast like a siren.

By the time you do notice it, the song is ready to fall again – receding back into the steady up and down of its rhythm. It's that organic feeling, those seamless shifts in motion, that I like most about the first side. On the other you get a hint of where Died Pretty would end up. 'Desperate Hours' is much more mechanical, an enormous rock track with hoarse vocals, abrupt stops and starts and a clanging guitar that eventually explodes in noise. It's paired with 'Final Twist', which begins with a keyboard but turns into another boisterous rock song.

It's not only the aural spectacle of 'Desperate Hours' that hints at the power of Died Pretty's later work. Both of the tracks on Side B sound like they belong in the world from the cover of Doughboy Hollow, the album that Died Pretty would become renown known for six years later – a rusted-out old car and a steel wind vane fallen in a paddock, with a mass of black clouds bearing down on them from behind. But for me that album is too blokey. Too rustic and too deliberately crafted. My favourite Died Pretty songs are on the first side of their first record – 'Ambergris' and 'Plaining Days', which flow like the water in the sea behind the storm.

Ed Kuepper

Electrical Storm
Hot, 1985

When the bricks and concrete heat up in the inner west the streets get tinted orange and the rooftops cascading down from Annandale burn like the columns of an electric heater. There is no respite on this side of Sydney – no canopies of leaves forming an arch over the streets, no refreshing wind blowing up from the water. Just exhaust fumes and radiating sidewalks. Eventually dusk brings a cool change and there's a moment half-way to night which is the most beautiful hour anywhere in the city. That's the time when you should play Electrical Storm.

Laughing Clowns, the arty post-punk group formed by Jeffrey Wegener and Ed Kuepper after he left The Saints, were a Sydney band. It's hard to imagine their dark blend of jazz and punk existing outside of the Sydney avant-garde scene that fostered the likes of Tactics and Voigt/465 around the start of the 1980s. But after that band broke up, Kuepper returned to his roots for musical inspiration. His first solo album was called Electrical Storm, in dedication to the wild displays of nature during the Brisbane summer.

The stories told both by key tracks are set at night, but they sound as if it's noon on a scorching day. The opening song 'Car Headlights' is dominated by a flickering acoustic guitar that conjures up more electricity than if it had been plugged in – the type of spark that carries in the air before a violent change in the weather – and lyrics about cars heading down a street surrounded by bush. The feeling it evokes is reprised for the title track, which is about being paralysed by heat in the middle of the night.

A few years ago in an issue of literary journal Meanjin – based in Melbourne but named after the Aboriginal word for the area that Brisbane is built on – writer Ross Gibson explored the ideas behind 'Electrical Storm' in an essay called 'Subtropical Rock'. Like Iggy Pop, who had made The Stooges unique by turning the sounds of his own "motorised landscape" into pop music, Kuepper took the electricity in the Brisbane air, the sputtering of refrigerating units and the relentless heat and somehow turned it into a song. "In three minutes or so, the song encapsulated what goes on in your own spirit and in the air when a Queensland storm finally breaks," he wrote. Perfect summer listening.