Revisit of the Week: Guillemots - Trains to Brazil CDS (2006)
I am very privileged to have grown up in Finland and I wouldn't change it for the world, but one thing I "regret" about not being born in the UK is that I would have loved to have been here as a young music nerds as all the incredible artists I was falling in love with were releasing singles. I've made it very clear in all my posts here and elsewhere that CD singles are one of my favourite formats, and the 90s and 2000s were a true golden period for them, each bite-sized selection of songs opening another potential treasure chest of b-sides for obsessed fans to fall in love with. In Finland, CD singles were obviously a thing but to a much more limited degree and usually you could only find ones for the internationally big artists. What I have instead been doing in my adult age is trace my steps back and scour through Discogs and eBay (and brick and mortar stores where appropriate) to collect everything I missed. Quite often I'm already familiar with the b-sides courtesy of ye olde P2P network slouthing back in the day, but those mp3s have often been removed from their original context. So rather than skip a CD single that might appear as I randomly choose these revisits, I'll embrace that opportunity instead to go back to them and pretend I'm a teenager who's just brought it home fresh and spends the next days, weeks, months listening to these b-sides in this order - like I did with the handful of singles I did buy new.
This issue of "Trains to Brazil" we're talking about today is a re-issue. The song was originally released as a single back when Guillemots were still on the indie label Fantastic Plastic; when the band signed up with Polydor and included the track on their debut album Through the Windowpane (2006), "Trains to Brazil" was subsequently released as the album's third single and brought back on the shelves with a new set of b-sides. "Trains to Brazil" itself is one of Guillemots' finest moments and arguably their signature song, though using that term is a little loose in definition given it wasn't exactly a hit nor did the Guillemots really ever gain a following enough to have something like a legit signature song. But it is the song that most people who never jumped on the bandwagon seem to remember from them, and fondly so. When I first heard it I thought it was a life-affirmingly positive song of defiance against the odds, thanks to its cheery disposition - written after the 2005 London bombings, it's an ode to celebrate life even if there are forces in the world out to try to bring you down. That's what it sounds like but in reality it's a bitter song born out of grief and caught straight in the anger stage. "Those of you who moan your lives through one day to the next / Well, let them take you next / Can't you live and be thankful you're here?", frontman Fyfe Dangerfield spits out in borderline contempt of anyone who dares to complain about small inconveniences when real people's lives were snuffed out way too early for no good reason. It's a sad song still in mourning, but coloured with a vivid palette of summery melodies and verdant arrangements. That juxtaposition is powerful, and makes it such a memorable song.
The b-sides for the CD singles of the Through the Windowpane era had a bit of a format going on (until the fourth and final single "Annie Let's Not Wait" which did things a little differently). For each the CD singles the A-side would be followed by two songs: the first one would be a slow, piano-driven and typically quite sparse ballad (often labelled as a 'demo' to begin with and featuring only Dangerfield), while the second one would be more experimental and weird courtesy of all the different band members' influences colliding into one track. This is exactly what we have here. "White Rag (Demo)" sounds like Dangerfield riffing on a gentle piano melody while inspired by the sheet of laundry hanging in the backyard he's seeing through the window, expanding that into a metaphorical musing as the piano keys gently plink underneath him. It's intimate, contemplative and beautiful - a simple song but one with a strong gripping power courtesy of Dangerfield's charisma and emotive voice, which resonantly fills the airspace in the room. This is followed by "Blue Eyes", a nearly-seven minute experimental piece that spends its extended runtime wallowing on top of dramatically deep tom fills, lingering and slithering guitar lines and desert-dry atmospheric textures. It's somewhere between a soundtrack piece and an arthouse jam, and I've always been a little distant about it but let me tell you what - last weekend I was listening to this and just lying on my floor (as I sometimes do) and I was getting a bit lost in the sound, positively. What took me away from it were the vocals, lead by the band's guitarist Magrao - his very theatrical, guttural reading is maybe a notch too much in the surrealism scale for me and distracts from the atmosphere the music weaves.
Together these three songs form a very eclectic 15-minute journey that doesn't really make sense together objectively speaking... but that's part of the charm of CD singles. Taking disparate bonus tracks sourced from all kinds of directions and creating a brand new space with them, forming a small bubble universe that builds a new context with what has been given. A little treasure chest where not everything is real gold, but it's still exciting to crack it open. Had I bought this in 'real time' chances are I'd have formed wholly different responses and reactions than I am now, being familiar with these songs for several years as random mp3s (and mostly ignoring "Blue Eyes" in my old DIY Guillemots b-side compilations where I just wanted all the "normal" stuff) and still learning to appreciate them in the context they originally came in. But gosh, I love that learning process. CD singles are great.
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