The 333 Best Pop Songs of the 2000s: #145

#145: "Bullets" (2007) - Tunng

From Sheffield to Robert Smith's pad at Crawley and now, we'll travel south into London's West End, into the bohemian rhapsody found in the basement of a Soho apartment, where we find Mike Lindsay modeling his electronics and keyboards and samples and found sounds around singer Sam Genders's folksy meanderings. The result of this combination is something to akin to mid-period Pink Floyd...had Floyd guitarist David Gilmour strummed an acoustic for his entire career, and before Floyd singer and songwriter Roger Waters's bombast surplanted all of his wit.

Instead of musical bombast, Lindsay turns Genders's cryptic, Orwellian lyrics into a bouncy, haunting, Weillian jaunt during the verses and the choruses. That stark contrast provide the song with an eeriely disquieting mood, one that's set by the strange singing--tribal chant? backmasking? both?--at the beginning (and is reprised near the end). Lindsay's production work here is splendid and inventive and ceaseless, as he drops disparate samples in pocket after pocket, resembling the work of DJ Shadow and the Dust Brothers (and, before them, the electronic/loop work of Terry Riley). His production work doesn't end with the samples, either, as several different atypical percussion instruments are used--some repeatedly, some in just one spot. It's a record constructed to be heard with the headphones, and it demands multiple plays just to be able to decipher all the different sounds, not to even mention what originated all those sounds. The effect is Brechtian (as is the communal sense of the group, as several of Tunng's members were recruited because neither Lindsay nor Genders were comfortable with performing on stage without some accompaniment).

What's also difficult to decipher are the lyrics. Genders's story here stems from an amalgam of symbolist and stream-of-consciousness writing, a mixture of Eliot and Woolf; the meaning is never clear, but the lyrics do have meaning--they're not just nonsense verse. Though the lyrics often use the pronouns "I," "your," "we," "us," and "our," the pervading sense is of a horror universal, of an overall sense of enforced malaise upon society, of a stripping of will and memory, of apathy abounded, of where not only do we not remember what we did--we don't remember why--and we don't care. Tunng use avant-garde pop to give us images of a world in the aftermath of the politics that Johnny Rotten railed against, and they find that Rotten was right, that we're all pretty vacant.

This avant-garde pop Tunng uses--it's very Beatlesesque. It's not derivative of the Beatles, though, at least not in the way most Beatles-influenced bands are deriviative of the Beatles. Lindsay and Genders don't mine the Liverpudlians' pop structures nor vocal harmonies; what they take is Lennon & McCartney's avant-garde expermentalism, the least copied/influenced aspect of the Beatles, the one most in need of further development. Lindsay and Genders do just that: they take the Beatles' (and Terry Riley's and DJ Shadow's) sonic experiments, adapt them into the twenty-first century by using DJ montage (instead of, say, scratch n' sniff) style mixed with the '70s singer-songwriter variety of storytelling, Brechtian/Wellian collage, and fester--at least in this song--black humor and satire of an Orwellian bent to give us something to ponder upon and nod to while the world spins madly on.