Red Mosquito

stip wrote:the opening lyric is great

yeah that's good too

it's like a bad sandwich with amazing bread

Love both of these tracks but its going to You Are. I feel that Rival needs Dave A to kick it and make it bounce a tad more. You Are plays to Matt's strengths of a mechanical beat. Very close though.

Tough one!

bodysnatcher wrote:

EJ wrote:You Are is kinda terrible. It would've been more interesting as an instrumental.

yeah, lyrics kinda kill this one for me.
althought the "i am the shoreline but you're the sea" line is pretty solid

See, I've always had a problem with the opener on Rival. "All my rivals will see what I have in store" is darkly menacing, and it's a great promise of an opener, but all of the ominous simplicity and unstated threat that makes it good is thrown out the window by tacking the lamest follow-up possible onto it. "My gun." My god.

I realize there had to be something in there to finish off the melody and eventually rhyme with sun, but christ that's a fucking stupid way to do it. It's like an Austin Powers joke or something. "You will never expect the horror and ferocity that is coming to you, Austin Powers! You can NEVER IMAGINE THE actually here it is it's a gun."

Also, "How will the man who made chemicals difficult shed blood" should get replaced. It reads like it's supposed to be a "how will this authority figure, who helped source my anger with that authority, respond to the ultimate loss of control," but it's hammy and it doesn't really get to the crux of it. After all the great abstraction and metaphoric detail of the first verse, tacking something this trite on there ("How will the man who made math hard for me react when I shoot him") feels way too distant from the honest insight and almost fantasy-like eagerness that makes the song powerful.

the my gun follow up is weak. I don't mind the how will the man who made chemicals difficult lyric though.


This is, I believe, the only set of stone lyrics I like

stip wrote:the my gun follow up is weak. I don't mind the how will the man who made chemicals difficult lyric though.

There's a quality to the more event-specific lyrics that just smacks of "middle aged guy trying to understand and interpret adolescent angst." Especially with it taking the first-person perspective of the shooters, the way it does.

Honestly, I always thought it would have been better as just sort of a "bluster" song. Keep most of the lyrics, replace the ones that allude to a specific event, and it's fine. As it is, the main/opening riff has too much drunk playfulness and the bridge is too much of a surreal (but still upbeat) carnival effect to capture the shiver that the lyrics hope to acquire. Compare this to Jeremy, where the lyrics were fantastical but almost snapshot-like, and where all the danger and neglect built up to a real musical feeling of loss of control.

The carnival thing could have worked, the very graphic threat thing could have worked, but together they just feel oddly ambivalent.

Musically, the whole song seems to want to incorporate a sense of play...like the singer is meant to be dramatizing something serious, but the music is winking at you the whole time. Even the band seems to pick up on this, tossing a strangely carefree yelp onto the end of one of the verses. So, yeah, having a bunch of over-the-top drunkenly swaying intimidation lines ("I've been harboring fleets in this reservoir / Red sun!") would have been great. Specifically talking about school shootings is...well, it's kind of weird. Especially when you sound more and more like you don't "get" the emotional core of the event, the more you try to be specific about what happened.

It's kind of unsettling, too, and not in the way you might hope. It's unsettling in much the same way as when your grandfather suddenly makes a loud racist joke at a Mexican restaurant, and the waiter is right behind him.

Ditch like 3 lines in the whole song, replace them with abstract warnings like the ones that appear elsewhere, and for the love of god play up the carnival shit.

The playfulness of the music coupled with the lyrical content is the main thing that makes the song work, IMO.

digster wrote:The playfulness of the music coupled with the lyrical content is the main thing that makes the song work, IMO.

Yeah, I thought that was the point. They work perfectly together. It's happy insane carnival clown psycho killer music!

Yeah.

McParadigm wrote:Specifically talking about school shootings is...well, it's kind of weird. Especially when you sound more and more like you don't "get" the emotional core of the event, the more you try to be specific about what happened.

While Rival is an excellent song, I don't feel like it captures anything about the event whatsoever. Especially from a band who felt bold enough to have the subtitle "Growing Up Gay in Littleton" on the lyric sheet. It actually took me a while to get really into the song for that very reason.

I agree. There is something ominous about the song, but it would never tie it into a particular event

I don't think it's specifically tied to Columbine, at least strictly speaking in regards to the words on a page, but it seems specific enough to know it takes place before a young person is about to commit some horrible act. It's pretty hard for songs to invoke fear (as opposed to joy, melancholy, hatred), but I feel unsettled when listening to this in a way that few other PJ songs make me feel.

http://www.mtv.com/news/articles/143305 ... song.jhtml

Stone Gossard wrote:[There was] just kind of a melody that went through my head and right after Columbine happened. It kind of maybe took on a little of that, where I put myself in the mindset or tried to think about what those guys may have been thinking the night before.

Back in my younger days when I was still in my "why doesn't Pearl Jam rock anymore?" phase, I had high hopes for Rival. I thought it would be something like Blood or ANimal, and when I heard the growling dog at the beginning, I was excited. Then this awkward music started playing and Ed came in with his weird sounding voice. "damn, another weird, stupid one" I thought. Oh the ignorance of youth! It would be some time before I came around to it, and now its my favorite Binaural song.

Yeah, I was stupid too when Binaural came out.