Beware! Beware! – Disco
People from the high life don’t write great novels, songs or paint wonderful paintings. Why would they put themselves to the grind of creating them? They must already have enough things to entertain them, including anecdotes from other famous people.
In fact, you can pinpoint the moment that your favourite rock stars lost their magic as the time that they earned success. That probably meant being invited to parties. That probably meant speaking to influential people. It must’ve meant dancing. People who dance, have rich friends, and party are all right. They just don’t write good music.
Beware! Beware!’s music sounds like the contraband tape made of a folk supergroup rehearsing underneath a convenience store. It’s all fuzzy, but you can definitely get a whiff of the magic. You can also detect some frustration. “Disco” is a good, highly melodic jingle-jangle sound squashed by an evil distortion evil. It sounds great, and, of course, ironically, this would never be played inside of a disco, but perhaps in a rehearsal room underneath it.
Dan Krochmal – Nobody
Humour. It’s something that, like food, not everybody gets. See, that was a famous and dark quip. You felt guilty. But it forced you to smile. You might, depending on your beliefs, be going to hell. But wasn’t it worth it?
The fact is that most people do not possess humour or charisma. It’s also true that this does not stop the ones less blessed with these gifts from wasting your time on their knock-knock jokes and tall tales about swampland.
But if you are among the lucky recipients of those two marvellous qualities, you may be able to just smile it off. Sure, let it annoy you. Fine, it can eat at your heart a little bit. But boring, egotistical people are hilarious in their way and especially in the manner in which they never get what they really want or need.
Dan Krochmal is a gifted songwriter and talented would-be comedian. “Nobody” is a song about feeling terrible about yourself and making it a mission to bring others down to your basement level. Who doesn’t know swamp creatures like those?
But the song is also a nice, clever mix. This isn’t exactly a pop song. And you couldn’t quite see it as a rock tune. The truth is that it exists somewhere in the middle, and the balancing act would make a lot of people feel dizzy.
