Something For The Weekend: The Killers - All These Things That I've Done

Let's get this nice and clear. Brandon Flowers, if he lives to be 106, will not write a better song than this.

Actually, he's written one other song that runs it close - 'Why Do I Keep Counting?'.

You're probably snorting. Thinking, 'What about 'Somebody Told Me'? And 'Mr Brightside'?

What 'All These Things That I've Done' and 'Why Do I Keep Counting?' have in common is that they're both the sounds of an all-too-human self-doubter howling out for a sign, some kind of spiritual redemption. I mean, apart from the sex and love stuff, shouldn't all songs be about that? (Also see - Gnarls Barkley - Crazy).

What makes 'All These Things I've Done' so delicious is that Brandon Flowers is, apparently, a man who believes in God. I half-envy people who believe in God, because they have a nice, neat moral framework to define the edges - a clear line of defence against all the chaos.

Then again, it must be pretty frustrating when, with all your fleshy, needful human cravings, you can't help but spill over the boundaries.

So, the narrator of 'All These Things I've Done' is a man who considers himself 'good' admitting he's done 'bad' and vowing to change track - to use the experience of the bad to recalibrate the good.

Musically, it's a glorious great stomping juggernaut. A one-man march of defiance against his greatest failings. A gutsy proclamation of how it hasn't killed him so he's decided to make himself stronger.

But The Killers - bless 'em - are hardly the most charismatic band in the history of rock. Just look at them. They pull all the right moves but silly haircuts and ill-advised facial hair can't hide basic awkwardness. Still, as the mighty JG Ballard once wrote, "Be ordinary in your life, extraordinary in your art".

'All These Things I've Done' is the sound of an ordinary man (got soul, not a soldier) creating something very extraordinary indeed.

The Killers - All These Things That I've Done

LCD Soundsystem - All My Friends

"I wouldn't trade one stupid decision for another five years of life..."

Sorry to go all literary on your ass, but there's this poem, right... There's this poem by TS Eliot, called The Love Song Of J. Alfred Prufrock. And you should read it. Go on. It's here... Read it!

Good, eh? A withering, unflinching, lyrical evocation of the slow-motion panic of ageing. The queasy feeling that the best is done and the worst is yet to come. All gnawed up and toxic with time-terror.

By contrast, this is the best song ever about how looking back can be a big part of moving forward. About not being a Prufrock. About being thankful to have something to reflect on - not regret.

And, Jesus, one of the tracks of the year, too. The way it's so cheekily based around that circling, jittery, mantra-like loop of bittersweet bullishness which, in the last minute or so, comes crashing out into a euphoric, one-hit chorus of celebratory nostalgia ("If I could see all my friends tonight!")

I've just listened to it again and spent the 7-something minutes thinking, one by one, about all the people I've known who I liked or loved and, although I might never see or connect with most of them again, how they've all played some part into shaping who I am today.

Good therapy.

[MP3] LCD Soundsystem - All My Friends

Queens Of The Stone Age - Sick, Sick, Sick

A song about dirty, greasy, stabby, grabby, needy, greedy, whorish, moreish, shouting, pouting, slappy, happy, wrong, wrong, wrong, bad, bad, bad sex.

The best kind, then.

[MP3] Queens Of The Stone Age - Sick, Sick, Sick

Something For The Weekend: Furniture - Brilliant Mind

Furniture are yer classic '80s one-hit wonders - a ragtag of Londoners and Eastern-Europeans who, astonishingly, released four albums. But 'Brilliant Mind' is their sky-highlight. A precious, pristine, perfectly distilled four minutes of fame.

'Brilliant Mind' made the UK Top 20 in the days when the UK Top 20 really mattered, but it's surrounded by a wonderful swirl of obscurity. A pop hit not popular enough for anyone to actually remember.

It's a song so good it became the death of them; a black hole insatiably sucking back everything else the band put out to prove how they weren't just about one song.

But they were, and what a song: jaunty, off-kilter intro... chilly, pre-packaged drum-fills... standard-issue miserabilism... And then that thrilling, mid-point starburst of sax-propelled sorrow and self-pity.

In the second half of the '80s, easily digestable synth-pop was bedded in and the silly haircuts and costumes made it all the more non-threatening. But Furniture's story isn't kitsch or pastel-shaded; it's a tragedy. Shat on and shafted by record-company greed and incompetence, they were under-supported, had their album pulled and deleted, were dropped, cast out into a lengthy court-case... And when they re-emerged in 1989, the world had moved on and their moment had gone.

With hindsight, 'Brilliant Mind' is more than just a dark and doomy wallow; a lament to love and obsession gone awry. It's the signature song for the band's descent from Top Of The Pops to rock-bottom ("Everybody's yelling about you and yours and how I'd have the answer if I'd only open up and just let you in/They must be out of their brilliant minds...")

And, excuse the clever-cleverness, but have a back-to-back listen to Furniture and this National track. Those Tindersticks/Nick Cave comparisons seem a bit off now, eh?

[MP3] Furniture - Brilliant Mind
[MP3] The National - Daughters Of The Soho Riots

Editors - Smokers Outside The Hospital Doors

I'm not going to play the 'Who's best - Editors or Interpol?' game, because it's stupid and makes people say things like, 'Editors are the poor man's Interpol' when, of course, they're the poor man's Bunnymen and anyway, Interpol are the poor man's, middle-class, more-exotic-because-they're-American Joy Division and...

Fuck it. Go on, then...

I've spend a week with the first two Interpol albums on repeat and I can confidently say that they're the most overrated band in the world right now. Y'know, I think they're really, really good, but Christ, the way people go all dizzy-eyed and devotional at their very mention...

Editors go for clarity. They have a keener ear for melody, while Interpol can be a bit meandering and murky (see 'The Heinrich Maneuver', a single that sounds like a throwaway album track). And although Interpol have some towering tunes (NYC, Untitled, Slow Hands...) they haven't quite mastered the art of telling a story, of crafting an album as a progression, a journey.

Editors first album definitely did that, and judging by this swelling, panoramic bewilderedbeast, their second is going to be another grand symphony of melancholy ("I can't shake this feeling I've got/My dirty hands, have I been in the wars?/The saddest thing I've ever seen/Is smokers outside the hospital doors...").

[MP3] Editors - Smokers Outside The Hospital Doors
[MP3] Interpol - The Heinrich Maneuver

Get Cape. Wear Cape. Fly - Standing In The Way Of Control

Take that, Mark Cunting Ronson.

[MP3] Get Cape. Wear Cape. Fly - Standing In The Way Of Control

The Field - A Paw In My Face

There's that knee-jerky thing about electronic music being all maths and no soul. Measured and modulated and programmed but not organic enough to glimpse the humanity of its creator.

Yeah. That's true for bad electronic music. But this is very, very, very good electronic music and there's more soul and life here than in a thousand over-crooned, wobbly sensitive-male singer-songwriter extended Americanised vowels or Liam Gallagher sneers or Maria Carey-style yodel-warbles.

They call it 'microhouse'. They would. Probably because there's a heavy four-to-the-floor thing going on - but only as a solid foundation for the faraway, sexy, liquid, dream-soaked layers and textures to glide and swirl over.

They know nothing. This isn't House. It's early, Derrick May-style Techno with sunlight washing out the neon. All the flab stripped away, dark, visionary, electronic (practically machine-fetishising) but simultaneously evoking urban claustrophobia and the wide open space of hope and yearning.

It's that relentless, mantra-like, racing-heart pulse. Music for staring out of train windows to.

And Swedish, naturally.

[MP3] The Field - A Paw In My Face

Something For The Weekend: Super Furry Animals - Presidential Suite

This is a song about the Clinton-Lewinsky thing and so it's crammed with sly political jabs and clever, cutesy wordplay ("Another Cuban cigar crisis...") but it's also quite shiveringly beautiful and one of the most out-and-out romantic things I've ever heard.

Musically, it meanders around a sweet, lilting trumpet before lifting off into that gorgeous, swooning, swimming-in-chocolate-milk chorus.

I like things that shouldn't work in theory but somehow mesh in reality. Beauty blossoming out of defying logic. It's the way singer Gruff Rhys mutes his usual (wonderful) snarling Welshness into something soft and swelling. "When we met", he croons. "There were fireworks in the sky/Sparkling like dragonflies/Spelling 'All bad folk must die!'" Equally silly and poetic.

I also like to think it's more generally inspired by some kind of illicit passion - something fleeting and forbidden. I love the idea that the heat of a stolen moment could be so impenetrably shielded; bullet-proofed from the leaden mundanity of prying eyes ("We belong in the Presidential Suite/Armed guards in the street...")

[MP3] Super Furry Animals - Presidential Suite

Simian Mobile Disco - It's The Beat

James Ford and James Shaw have gone from using vacuum cleaners for percussion (on previous incarnation Simian's 'Chemistry Is What We Are' album) to being the lean, clean remix machines (best is their wholesale slash-up of The Klaxons' 'Magick').

This is off of their forthcoming, wonderfully titled debut album 'Attack, Decay, Sustain, Release', features Ninja from The Go! Team on vocals, a shameless nick of Technotronic's 'Pump Up The Jam' riff and - my favourite - an audacious, breath-holding breakdown of three-second silence.

It'll soon be as inescapable as last year's Justice twist on 'We Are Your Friends'. Lots of luck with the being a "freak on the dancefloor" thing, though. Unless you're well and truly twisted out of your tits on something glitchy and metabolically shambolic.

[MP3] Simian Mobile Disco - It's The Beat