Every Great Song Ever

Bees Gees: “Odessa (City on the Black Sea)” (Odessa, 1969)

So long to Robin Gibb of the Bee Gees, who died Sunday in London after a long bout with cancer. With his passing, only one Gibb brother, Barry is still with us, and one of the most popular groups ever is gone forever. 

The Bee Gees were an unusually long-lived group, scoring #1 hits in the 60s, 70s and 80s, including an incredible run from 1975 to 1979 where they dominated the American and British charts like no group since the Beatles. The hits Robin and his brothers Barry and Maurice wrote in a weekend for the Saturday Night Fever soundtrack are burned into the popular consciousness, and yet I’ve never heard them and thought they sounded stale.

Understandably, this massively popular music is what’s best remembered today, but this band had a lot of hits before reinventing itself in a disco mold, and listening to the ten or so albums they released before their change in direction is rewarding, showing a band with incredible range and a sound that, in spite of all the change, was unmistakable because of the Gibb Brothers’ harmonies.

Robin was the one with the mid-range voice and heavy tremolo. He sang a lot of leads on the group’s albums, including a few of their big early singles such as “I Started a Joke” and “Massachusetts,” on which he shared the lead with Barry. In fact, it was a dispute over which song made the a-side of a single, one sung by Barry or one sung by Robin, that led Robin to quit the band for a year and embark on a short solo career. 

He sings lead on “Odessa (City by the Sea),” one of the group’s strangest, most psychedelic songs, from the 1969 double LP Odessa. They may have been a masterful pop group, but the Bee Gees also had their share of moments where they experimented and toyed with slightly more out-there ideas.

If they’d done nothing but Saturday Night Fever, their place would still be assured, but the group was so much more than that, and I hope that gets remembered as we think about Robin Gibb in the coming days.

Snowman: “Hyena” (Absence, 2011)

Oh, this band breaks my heart. Not their songs—those aren’t really designed for heartbreak—the band itself. Snowman broke up this year, after a mini-LP and three full-length albums, each of which was an improvement on the last. And the first one was great.

The band formed in Perth, Western Australia, in the mid-00s, which is way the hell across the continent from most of the other big cities in Australia, separated from everything else by hundreds of miles of desert. They kind of sounded like they came howling out of the bush, too, their sound a crazy mix of hard rock, surf, metal, soundtracks, tribal percussion, and, later, ambient music, synthpop, industrial music, and some sort of pagan ceremony.

They were a scorching live act, and I was lucky enough to see them three times in the space of a little more than a week back in 2007. They moved to Britain not long after that in order to seek wider exposure, but they never quite broke through (they did make Pitchfork’s honorable mentions in 2008). And then they broke up.

It wasn’t a big fight or anything. The rhythm section moved to Iceland and started a family, and this is a band that was definitely the sum of four people’s input. The unique thing they had going was gone the second they found themselves two members short. The remaining two members, Joe McKee and Andy Citawarman, are looking to new projects and may still work together, but Snowman is gone.

They gave us Absence posthumously, though, and it is a weird record. It sounds so hollow at the core—the band knew it was making its last record, and it’s as though that knowledge translated directly into the sound. The music is abstract but carries the menace of the unknown very strongly in its textures and rhythms.

“Hyena” is the epitome of this menace—all the teeth and muscle of its namesake creature with none of the fur and spots. About half of the song is nothing but repetition of the title. It’s blood-curdling with just that one word. It’s almost disarming when they remind you not to feed the hyena, which the point, because your guard is down when the music suddenly swells and snaps you in two.

So yeah, this band breaks my heart. I hate that there’ll never be another Snowman album. But such is life. I have the ones they made, and they’re among my favorites.

Snowman: “The Last Train Outta Town” (Snowman, 2006)

I considered saving this one for my year-end wrap-up, which I’ll be doing in December, but this song came up on the shuffle yesterday and I was too excited about it to wait.

Really, I could have chosen any number of Snowman songs, but this one’s on the brain, so I’ll roll with it. Snowman broke up earlier this year after three LPs and a mini-album. Their final album, Absence, is a lock for my 2011 top five and has been since it came out—“Last Train Out Of Town” hails from their debut, though, when they were a much different band, musically.

Snowman were a special band to me for more than their music. First, let me explain that I’m not a scene-y person. I think a lot of people have a perception that music critics are all constantly out at shows and pulling strings to go backstage and showing up at Brooklyn loft parties where there are artists to rub shoulders with. For some of my colleagues, this is a reality, but I’ve been a music critic in some capacity for eleven years now, and it never has been for me.

I’ve lived in Boston, the northern suburbs of Chicago, Fayetteville, Arkansas and now the Detroit area in that time, and I have only ever had contact with a few artists, and only ever gotten to know a tiny few in any kind of personal way. Snowman was one of them.

I actually met them in their homeland, Australia, at, well, an afterparty when I was on one of the only jet-set assignments I’ve ever had, covering the Laneway Festival in Melbourne and Sydney. I’d seen them perform earlier that day, and it was one of those rare, absolutely face-melting performances that sticks with you and overshadows everything else you’re seeing at the festival.

I found myself sitting next to them in a bar and started talking to them, and immediately it wasn’t like a journalist/artist conversation, but more of a people with mutual interests conversation. They had one album out at the time and were in the early planning stages of a move to London. The band formed in Perth, which is about the most edge-of-the-world city on earth, and they’d done all they could do without moving to somewhere bigger and more connected. Somewhere more proximal to the wider musical world.

I followed their music after that, even had the occasional friendly exchange. They made two more LPs and both were great—it was an odd sort of relief when the first one they released after I met them (The Horse, The Rat And The Swan) turned out to be one of the best I heard that year. That’s one of my favorite albums, period, these days.

The band’s move to England helped a bit, but it also ultimately ended the band. The rhythm section moved to Iceland to start a new life together. The band’s two guitarist/vocalists, Joe McKee and Andy Citawarman, have both moved on to other musical projects that I have little doubt will produce more excellent music. But Snowman definitely leaves a space no one else will be able to fill.

This song offers a small hint of the unique vision that made this band special—this is that vision in its embryonic form, when the elements that comprised it were still largely unmixed. You can hear the tribal music, surf guitars, hard rock, glam rock, industrial, avant garde and ambient tendencies of the band at the moment of collision, before they recombined them into a more seamless whole.

McKee (verses) and Citawarman (chorus) both sing here, and I love the tension between their differing approaches. McKee’s voice is portentous and kind of foreboding; Citawarman’s is much more exuberant, and he has a pretty freaky falsetto he can get to pretty much whenever he wants. The instrumental break with the sax and electric violin is awesome, too.

I’m going to miss this band a lot. They did their own thing from start to finish, and did it really well, making a couple of my favorite records in the process. I revisit them often.