Music / Song Review
You Need to Listen to This Song Right Now #53
Heavy Rotation — Isabella, James (All the Colours of You, 2021)
Heavy Rotation was a music industry term for songs that, one way or another, got incessant airplay. It referred to the large amount of rotations a particular record was given on turntables at radio stations. Since, until the 1980s, this was the only way to get new music into the ears and brains of listeners, heavy rotation meant increased sales — good for record companies and artists alike.
Today, some people still put records on at home and give them a spin. Most of us don’t. However, the term still applies, just in a different way. Streaming services like Spotify sell subscriptions to listeners and then pay artists based on listens. At least, that’s the way we think it works.
For me, heavy rotation means a song that is in my head for some reason. Maybe for a moment, maybe for a day, maybe for longer. It’s a song that I come back to from time to time and it still feels just as good. This series of articles is dedicated to these songs.
My aim is to highlight a particular song by a particular band or singer. It’s good to know a bit about the band, a bit about where the song fits into its history and where the song fits into what was happening in music at that time. Then there’s the song itself. Who’s playing on it, what are the lyrics getting at and why is it so good? How does it still occupy sonic space in our lives?
I’ll (try to) keep it short. It shouldn’t take you any longer to read this than the song itself. To that end, I put a Youtube clip of the original recording at the top of the article so you can listen as you read. Or not. And because a song is often much different live than in the recording studio, I stick a live clip on at the end.
What song is in your head right now? Here’s the one that won’t leave mine today:
#53 — Isabella, James (All the Colours of You, 2021)
In this series so far, I’ve tried not to write about the same band or artist twice. But it’s not easy for me since my selected go-to’s often go on the turntable at home. These people seem to have a way of getting into my ears, brain, and heart — and staying there forever.
James is such a band. This should be no surprise to me since they’ve been my favourite band since the early 1990s.
They were already ten years in when “Sit Down,” “Come Home,” and “Born of Frustration” came into my ears as the hopeful and intelligent antidote to the long-haired, plaid-shirted, and overly emotive in all its minor key earnestness, that was early 90s alternative music. “Laid,” the song most people will recognize, cemented their place in my CD library.
Big enough, but never the most popular band in their native England and relatively unheard of in North America, James is an amalgamation of 11 different musicians, three of whom have been with the band since its inception in 1982.
Jim Glennie has always played the bass and written the music, David Baynton-Power has always manned the drum kit, and Tim Booth has always been the talisman as the front man on stage and the vocal power in the recording studio. Despite a hiatus between 2001 and 2008, they have managed to put out 17 studio albums.
They were a big part of the Madchester Explosion of the early 90s, though never on the level of high expectations and dashed promises of the Stone Roses and certainly not of the later bombast and boorish laddishness of Oasis. It is thirty years now since that scene has come and gone, and they have survived.
And also flourished.
What is it about their music that does it for me? It’s not guitar-driven, though it is guitar-based. It’s not in your face, but it certainly gets in your heart. It’s not chords, it’s melodies. It examines, pulses, leads me to a place somewhere and lets me figure it out, gives me goosebumps, electrifies, soothes, lights me on fire, sends me through the ceiling, and soars. It is the sound of nostalgia at the same time as it is the sound of the future.
It’s a drug for me, this music. I get it, and it gets me. I wish for everyone to have music that does that for them. It does what I need it to do every time, without fail. Any album by them that I put on.
But lately, it’s Isabella on their latest album, “All the Colours of You.” A vibrating electronic theme sets the tone, and the high hat at 00:09 gets the beat underway. A friendly guitar at 00:14 and snare and bass at 00:27, with a repeating staccato single guitar chord until 00:40 when Tim’s low deadpan vocal comes in. He employs several voice characters, and this is one of them.
“Someday soon when I die / They’ll do an autopsy / And find your bullet inside / That way that you killed me that night / shot a hole in my heart/something inside me died.”
There are many ways that this could be taken, but I think it’s someone detailing their experience of falling for someone who loved their freedom a little more than they loved them. They didn’t mean to hurt anyone but took what they needed for their own purposes and left. Her name might have been Isabella, and the reference to “Two bodies on a bed jack knife / One’s a lover the other’s my wife” could refer to an open relationship and the danger of getting what you wish for.
It’s building, and by 1:20, you are just waiting for the chorus to rise out of this. A chiming guitar at 1:30 leads to the first part of it, and at 1:34, the recording values and smoothness of this lifting push the song forward. “Isabella / Loves the altitude / Freedom lover / shakes an earthquake of such magnitude.”
The high point comes at 1:48: “Every pleasure denied / Wakes the devil inside.” Knowing what you know about yourself, do you indulge your pleasures and let the devil out to do what he does? Or do you keep the lid tightly screwed on these things, even though that doesn’t make the devil disappear? What is the cost of twisting yourself into that pretzel? Or of untwisting it?
Melodies. Insistent. Pushing on. Background colour vocals. Chiming guitars. Freedom. Lovers. Karma. Freedom. Lovers. Lovers. And what will you do about it once the toothpaste is out of the tube?
Here they are at the top of their game, live at the 02 Academy in Oxford in 2021
You say you want more James? Here you go:
If you have made it this far, it will occur to you if this is #53 in this series, then there must be 52 previous ones. This is a correct assumption, and here I will link #52. At the bottom of it, you find a link to #51 and the bottom of that, you can — if you so choose — be taken to #50. This ingenious system that I thought up all by myself continues all the way to #1.
I really do hope that you like what you have just read. If you want unlimited access to thousands of writers, consider a subscription to Medium. It will set you back $5 a month and if you use the link below, then I get a slice of that. Every pleasure denied wakes the devil inside.
