This song is pretty old, so old it’s sprouting gray hairs and hipsters are raiding its closet for stuff to wear to class.
I really like this song. It has a sort of melancholy sound, sad and wistful. To me, I take it as a song about a breakup, one where a friendship and deep dependence upon each other has ended. One partner, the singer, wants to forget completely. “It would be much better If I knew / nothing about you.” He (the dominant voice is male) wants to move on, and his method of doing so is to scrub his mind and his life.
The thoughts of the relationship — “the windows that we watched from” — “take him away” to a time when they were together. There are traces of her, “scents,” ghosts that haunt and reappear, triggered.
Despite an intimate relationship, the girl “acts like you don’t know me,” and thus “tempts my anxious mind” to say something, to engage and break his insistence to move on.
The song ends with a repetitive chant, “I’ll go, I’ll go, I’ll go, I.” It reminds me of the end of “Breezeblocks.” This might go back to the breakup, when she left. It might be a threat from her. It might also be a threat from the narrator, to move far away to escape more the lingerings.
It’s just a great song. I found it last year, and even then it was old. But it’s still a goody.
Ever since Mark Ronson found a way to make himself the primary artist in “Uptown Funk” despite featured artist Bruno Mars singing the entire song, there has been an increasingly pervasive sound that has permeated popular modern music. Listeners sometimes refer to these songs as “funky” with both positive and negative connotations. While The Weeknd is often criticized for using his somewhat odd, high-pitched voice to sing a slightly different combination of words usually revolving around pussy, money, and drug use (original material, I know), he successfully captured this groove that artists have been experimenting with. The simple bass rhythm drives this head-bobbing tune while simultaneously contrasting the instrument’s low notes with the higher register of his voice.
And speaking of “Uptown Funk,” both songs have eerily captured Michael Jackson’s catchy pop cadence in several moments. Even some of the gasp-like noises and “ooohs” can be heard complimenting the main lyrics to the song.
Meanwhile, the lyrics of the song still ring true to The Weeknd’s “style” (if you want to call it that), which basically means that while the sound is fresh and groovy, it still seems like a version of his individual work, in part because he’s still doing his I’m-really-fucking-high-right-now-and-the-surplus-of-money-and-female-attention-is-awesome thing. Whether you’re a fan of his or not, if played loudly and with sufficient subwoofer support, I would challenge even the whitest of white people not to move to the admittedly repetitive but all around groovy vibe. Enjoy.
Once the tectonic plates of cultural sensibilities conclude crashing against one another, we’re left with settled dust and a changed landscape. Boomers still reference the Summer of Love with the faint glimmer of a twinkle in their eyes that only those remembering their first crush can summon. It was a period of time that saw dramatic and significant change, both culturally and politically.
Music works much the same way. Right after Mumford & Sons’ “Babel” came out in the second half of 2012, listeners were drowned with a biblical flood of clap stomp, hey-hoing by the likes of The Lumineers, Passenger and Phillip Phillips, whose Top 40 success marked the end of Mumford-styled music being cool, because plugging insurance companies isn’t what indie folk is about. It’s the banjos, man. The banjos. To put this in very depressing perspective: Steven Tyler – yes, that Steven Tyler – just released his own country/folk album.
In the last 5-7 years, music has seen a multitude of indie-pop, electronic-indie bands, thanks especially to widespread use of and access to the internet and streaming services, which made it easier than ever for bands to be heard. Aside from the tedious roulette of genre combinations these bands generate, where it’s perfectly acceptable to refer to one as new wave folk-indie pop, the fact remains that the sound has peaked.
Walk the Moon’s “Shut Up and Dance” has appeared on every Top 40 and alternative station in KC for the last couple of months. Which is great, because I think those guys are a fun band and am really happy that indie-pop (or whatever the hell you want to call it) has found its way to Rick Dees’ eardrums. A band with a similar sound won’t eclipse the success they’ve had, seeing as how “Shut Up and Dance” peaked at 4 on the US Billboard Top 100 .
But this is it. This is where popular alternative music shifts. If you still don’t believe me, look at Passion Pit, who just a few years ago were one of the hottest bands around. Now, their latest release, “Kindred,” has received medium to medium reviews but doesn’t have a single that’s broken into the top 25 spot for any of the Billboard rock lists. Now they’re the 29-year-olds that still hang out at college bars. We get it, you still like to drink like it’s 2007. Nobody thinks you’re cool anymore.
Sundara Karma’s “Flame” is the result of those plates shifting. When I first heard the singer, I assumed that it was another song in the same vein as all the other indie pop bands out there. The voice is certainly similar enough. But it’s clear that this is very much a rock song, and Sundara Karma is very much a rock band.
I originally toyed with writing about another of Sundara Karma’s songs, “The Night,” a few months ago. It’s on my Absolute Best of 2015 Spotify list and never gets old. Same with “Flame.” Each listen rewards you with something new, whether it’s the jangly guitar or the peculiar way the singer pronounces words.
“Flame” is one of those songs that sticks with me. There’s not one thing that I can really identify that makes it so appealing other than that it never gets old. It’s always good to have songs like that in your library. And if Sundara Karma’s sound really does mark a renaissance alternative music, then I’m excited to see how the music landscape changes.
There’s a certain satisfying nostalgia to being a hopeless romantic. Some songs and movies bring that nostalgia to the center of your attention, propped up just enough to be slumped over in sadness. It’s not that you miss being sad, or feeling lonely, but you recognize that those feelings used to exist in your psyche and there’s nothing wrong with that. It’s comforting, actually, remembering that you used to feel a certain way. Strange enough, “40oz. on Repeat” hit me in this exact way.
I’d like to think that if I were 10 years younger, this song would be my anthem. I always saw myself as the “good guy,” the Jim Halpert of my life (then again, who didn’t? Does anyone really see themselves as Dwight or, God forbid, Toby?) who just couldn’t quite get the girl that envisioned himself with.
The opening lines of “40oz. on Repeat” aren’t cryptic whatsoever. They play like the inner monologue of a jilted Casanova, pissed at himself for his romantic ineptitude, at his failure to even take a chance at texting a girl. He later goes on to say, “I don’t care at all, I’ll drink some alcohol, it’ll make me who I really want to be.” He then says that he always drinks too much because nobody understands him.
FIDLAR has been on my radar for a while now. The video for their song “Cocaine” features a pissed off Nick Offerman going on a urine-soaked rampage. What’s not to love about that? They have a harder-than-usual sound for the surf-skate punk rock music that I’ve been into lately and “40oz. on Repeat” is no different.
Except it kind of is. It’s more reminiscent of their 2013 single “Awkward,” which feels like a spiritual predecessor to “40oz.” with its woe-is-me message. It’s authentic, though. FIDLAR expresses those kinds of feelings with angst and snarl, not butt-rock crooning a la Hinder or mellow moodiness found in early Death Cab for Cutie.
You can’t really anticipate finding a song that strikes you in such a way. Lyrics drum up memories the same way that a smell reminds you of the awful lunch your daycare used to serve. But the problem was that I had no reason to relate to those emotions anymore.
When you spend your formative years developing an inner monologue that insists you’re sitting, waiting, wishing for that special person, and you finally find them, these songs should mean nothing to you. Instead, they remind you that there was a time before your current happiness. A time filled with complex and gut wrenching emotions that kept you up at night, cursing yourself or a spin in Fortuna’s Wheel, wondering why me? Why?
And those songs meant something then. More than they do now. They told you that you weren’t alone, no matter how selfish you acted or idealistically you thought. Someone else knew what it was like to feel that way. But now, what you’ve got is a song that captures a glimpse of those memories, if only for 4 minutes, reminding you that what you went through will always remain.
Daily Phat Jam 
