Red Mosquito

Gonna See My Friend vs. Parachutes vs Blood

Parachutes times 1,000. The last minute is sublime.

Higgs wrote:*yawn*

This is tough. It's defintiely not Blood, which is a really good song and tremendous performance, but half of Vs. I'm a bit tired of, and it's on that half.


I love both Gonna See My Friend (Breakerfall's flirt of a cousin) and Parachutes, but Parachutes is the better song. Nothing else like it in the catalog, and yeah, the ending is great.

Pretty weird trio here. No good way to reason my way through 'em, just picking my favorite, which is Parachutes.

Blood is great but I danced to Parachutes at my wedding

GSMF doesn't get enough love; when else is Matt having that much unadulterated fun with PJ?!

Parachutes is a lovely song but I think it loses some points for being an on-the-nose Beatles exercise.

Blood still slays me. Going with that but I could switch to GSMF if it's somehow close.

Parachutes made the top 16 in a loss against Go in 2015, and has a couple of top 32s under its belt in recent years.

The live version of Blood made the top 32 in 2019, but otherwise it hasn't really bothered the top tiers.

Gonna See My Friend made it to round 3 in 2015, before bowing out to Got Some.

Parachutes is lovely.

Parachutes is probably the song that suffers the most from Avocados production. On the album it sounds terrible and for that reason I'm voting for blood.

Parachutes all the way

JuanHamm wrote:Parachutes is probably the song that suffers the most from Avocados production. On the album it sounds terrible and for that reason I'm voting for blood.

Could be, but I might give that honor to Come Back. I agree it gives Parachutes a scratchiness that it doesn't need, but it's also such an unusual song that it can weather that choice better. You don't know what Parachutes SHOULD sound like, and I think we do for come back

Man, I love everything about "Parachutes" -- the chords, the melodic adventure it takes you on, etc. I love the way the whole thing hangs together in a way that is classically beautiful but also slightly askew and uneasy. I've never really heard the Beatles homage thing -- to me it always felt like a mid-period Elvis Costello song, though I am sure that is a far less likely influence -- but regardless, I can't deny that the end result is infinitely more compelling to me than either of the songs it's up against here, both of which feel like the kinds of songs the Pearl Jams of 1993 and 2009 could pull off in their sleep. There's a certain cathartic pleasure to both of them, for sure, but neither hits me in the unique place "Parachutes" does. An easy vote for me.

Parachutes with a relatively easy win here, although I'm a big fan of the malicious playing on the studio version of Blood. The band's songwriting was going to change in the next several years, but Blood showed they'd carved out this odd mix of punk, metal with funk flourishes that they could seemingly write pretty naturally and quickly.

But Parachutes is a beautiful song, with a great melody and some really powerful lyrical moments; I particularly love the 'war, break the sky and tell me what it's for' couplet, paired with one of my favorite small Mike additions to a song. It makes it worth him hanging back the whole song.