Word: chorused
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...songs on Pirate Prude, arranged into two groups of three (on the vinyl version, that means side one and side two): song one is a long, gradually building, apprehensive work; song two is short, light, vocal-oriented, and witty; song three is the emotional punchline, with a memorable chorus and a slow riff to match. The first song on side two, called "ooo," includes both the sounds of hesitant fingers on a guitar neck and a periodic irruption of jazzy trumpet-playing, as if to dramatize some kind of contest between cool, sleek exterior (trumpets) and internal fear or hesitancy...
...calls. "XXX" scarily suggests that maybe prostitution and normal romance aren't so far apart after all: "I feel like candy/I'll go out on the street and make some money/That was just a joke/About the money:/You're going to pay me with your life." That's the chorus: it comes around at least three times, and by the third time the "joke" has become a real threat. It's not a threat of literal violence at all, but the threat that the girl who is singing is already romantically enmeshed in a compromising situation with...
...deserves a medal) the clarity of every serious, fragile syllable. Helium can be oblique and witty, but here the directness is what shocks, from the boyfriend-girlfriend indictments of the verses ("He'll pay for anything, you're his money") to the anything, you're his money") to the chorus, which describes the self-image of just about everyone I know: "It's been a long time since you saw your body/ It looks like someone, yeah, it looks like somebody/ It's not beautiful, it's not ugly/ It's just your body and it looks like somebody else...
...that when he recorded this album he didn't have anything "poetic and beautiful to say, and I wasn't having girl-friend problems." He just didn't have the inspiration, I guess; the best moments are those that reveal a vague angst, best summed up in the melancholy chorus of "Range Life": "If I could settle down, then I would settle down." On paper it looks pretty straightforward, but in the song, with a changing melody over changing chords, it comes out as a tragic epiphany...
...while complimenting your intelligence in the process. Sometimes the slow triplets--TKP loved to play triples, for some reason--even conceal a useful, if cynical, epigram: "In all events considerations reach a point where resignation seems a way of getting everything you need..." introduces, mildly enough, a song whose chorus is a swell of despair. "I find/Words/Fail...