Music Review: Smash Hits 2003 [Disc 1]

'Smash Hits 2003' is a misnomer.  This compilation is Smash Hits' Christmas 2002 album, a memento of that year, rather than songs that were going to be hits in 2003.  I suspect I probably got it as a Christmas present although I don't remember for certain.  I have a few of the Smash Hits albums from this era but this is the last one - I devoted myself to Now! in 2003-2004 before shifting entirely to rock music, going from a Smash Hits reader to a Kerrang! reader by Christmas '04.  That seems fair, given that I was 9 years old when this CD was released.  Disc 2 of the set is almost entirely made up of dance music, leaving disc 1, which I'm writing about today, to cover everything else that was popular in 2002.

1. Atomic Kitten - The Last Goodbye 🟡

Is this Strawberry Fields Forever?  No, it's Liverpool's other greatest band, Atomic Kitten.  After that brief misleading intro, we're into a standard Atomic Kitten pop ballad.  Atomic Kitten were never my favourite band but I do know pretty much all of their singles, including this one which I bought, but I didn't recognise it until the vocals came in.  It feels like a weird choice to open a pop compilation with a break-up song that wasn't a huge hit - having looked at the charts, it was probably chosen because it was a new song at the time, having just come out in December 2002.  The song is okay, I wouldn't say it my favourite of theirs but it's better than I remember. It's very soft and sort of mumsy, and it has that middle-eight-followed-by-key-change cliché that we're going to hear again on this disc.  I wouldn't buy this song if it came out now.

2. Blue - One Love 🟡

I recognised this song as being by Blue but I couldn't have identified it as One Love until the chorus.  I never really liked this group when I was younger - I understand they're going for that cool urban city vibe that US boybands do well but they sound more like a male Atomic Kitten.  This sounds very 2002, like it could have been cool but it's so over-produced that it sounds flat and dull.  The chorus lyric "One love for the mother's pride" always made me think of bread, rather than the streets or whatever they were going for.  I've never even had Mothers Pride bread, but I would rather have bread than Blue.

3. Liberty X - Holding On For You 🟡

Liberty X said "Hear'Say, but make it slutty".  Made up of the leftovers from the first pop music reality show I can remember, Popstars, they hit it big in 2002 with the sexy, black-leather-music-video song of the summer Just A Little, which I guess was on the Smash Hits Summer 2002 CD. This song is a bit of a downer though.  I do know it, but I don't think I cared for it.  Every song so far has felt like it's all sticking to one volume, one tempo, one set of harmonies... it's very safe.  All of the instruments on this sound programmed and synthetic.  I can remember all of the members of this band but I didn't think any of them were in the public eye so I did a bit of 'where are they now?' Googling.  Apparently a couple of them do Loose Women, and one of the men won a series of The Voice, but that's news to me. 

4. Darius - Colourblind 🟢

Like Liberty X, Darius came from pop reality TV.  He was considered a laughing-stock after doing a quirky Baby One More Time cover so I couldn't admit to liking this at the time but it is actually pretty good and somehow I know most of the words.  It's a little bit weak and Radio 2 but I understand that he needed to come back and be commercial to prove he could do it after the show.  Again it sounds dated, very 2002 - where did this music go?  Darius worked with other writers on this song but it feels like his, whereas Blue's song (which they also co-wrote) sounds much more bought in.  I was surprised to find that Colourblind was a number one hit but I enjoyed its brief resurgence last year when Radio 1 chose it as their 'Hottest Record In The World' for Comic Relief last year. 

5. Ronan Keating - I Love It When We Do 🟠

This is peak mum music (not my mum, but you know what I mean?).  I never liked this guy and I definitely don't like this song with its earworm chorus that still gets stuck in my head despite the fact I haven't heard it for many years.  Everything about this kind of music, and Ronan Keating, sounds like it was made to be in some British romcom of the era.  The verses are forgettable but the chorus, which goes "I love it when we do what we do cos we do what we do til it's done" is unfortunately memorable.  I hate that I'm going to have stupid lines like that and "I love it when we kiss and we hug and you're cuter than a bug in a rug" in my head again now.  I prayed for this to end.  

6. Busted - What I Go To School For 🟢

Yes! This is my shit!  I stanned Busted from the minute I first heard this song.  Without checking I can tell you it got to number 3 in September 2002.  It's really cheeky and is the poppiest possible iteration of pop punk.  It's light and accessible, but it's very much my first step on a path that I've travelled ever since.  I listened to this song on repeat at this time, on CD or cassingle in the car (sorry to my grandparents who had to put up with that) and I can still play the music video in my head, from 'Miss McKenzie' bending over in front of them at the start, them falling out of a tree while spying outside her house, right to them driving off with her at the end.  I've rated it fairly low on the basis of the song itself not really standing up to the test of time but for personal importance and nostalgia reasons it's really pivotal. 

7. Nickelback - How You Remind Me 🟢

I'd say this is another guilty pleasure like Darius, but this is from a time when it wasn't yet cool to hate Nickelback.  Or maybe it was in the grown-up music papers, but I wasn't reading those yet.  I liked this angsty rock song and again, I can picture the video with its green hue and Chad Kroeger fighting with his girlfriend.  I still know the words to this song and I will admit to liking it but I can't say I'm fond of their other work.  It's definitely more interesting than Blue and Ronan Keating - at least the song has some dynamics and the instruments sound real.

8. Oasis - Little By Little 🟡

This is an okay song sung by Noel Gallagher.  It's hard to say how aware I was of Oasis at this point.  I feel like I've always been vaguely aware of Blur v Oasis (which happened when I was 2) but I'm not sure I knew any of their songs aside from Stop Crying Your Heart Out which is on another of these Smash Hits CDs.  Little By Little is disappointing in comparison.  It's fine, but it's not as good as the last couple of songs, and not as good as Oasis had been previously.  It also has a really long outro which always loses points in my book.  

9. Appleton - Fantasy 🟡

Looking at this song title it means nothing to me - all I know is that the Appleton sisters were in All Saints and I'm sure Smash Hits suggested they'd started this duo to become 'rock chicks' - I knew one of them was going out with Liam Gallagher and Wikipedia says the other married Liam Howlett from The Prodigy.  That said, this sounds like Atomic Kitten again.  I forgot how the song went while I was listening to it and I can vaguely remember the chorus now but my brain is mashing it up with something else.  Why is everything in 2002 so slow?!

10. Britney Spears - I Love Rock'n'Roll 🟡

Britney is a year or so into coming out as a sexy singer rather than a teen idol at this point and she sounds good on this song.  She's no Joan Jett, but she's still cool.  However, I cannot stress enough how bad the backing track sounds.  If I remember rightly, this song appears in Britney's film Crossroads and she gets up and sings it at a karaoke night.  Karaoke night is exactly what it sounds like; it's really synthetic and horrible so it doesn't work without the context.  Classic song, great singer, but let down so badly by the execution.  No wonder it only got to 76 in the charts. 

11. Romeo ft Christina Milian - It's All Gravy 🟢

Romeo, the Stormzy of his time.  Even though I was starting to travel down the alternative route, I loved rap choruses so I liked this song.  I didn't understand what 'it's all gravy' meant at the time, but I'm sure Smash Hits printed articles to decode the language of Romeo and his fellow So Solid Crew members.  This is a nice collaboration - the two sound good together, it's very cosy - but it feels very short, like it could have done with another verse.  Christina Milian felt like a big name to have on a British rap song at that time given that she was an American singer who hosted a show on the Disney Channel, but her chart positions suggest she did better over here than she did in the US so maybe it made sense for her to appear after all.

12. Charli Baltimore ft. Ashanti, Ja Rule and Vita - Down 4 U 🟢

I loved Ashanti!  She sounds lush on this chorus.  I've never heard of Charli Baltimore or Vita outside of this song - both are female rappers and weirdly Charli raps the last verse and seems to appear on the track the least, so I'm not sure why she's given credit as the main player.  The Official Charts Company lists the track as an Irv Gotti Presents production rather than giving someone top billing, which makes more sense having heard it.  All of the ladies sound good but Ashanti is the star.  Ja Rule, on the other hand, sounds ridiculous.  He's got a low growling voice that bulldozes his way into this track.  He collaborated with Ashanti a lot but the combination here is like trying to pick up delicate porcelain with boxing gloves on.  

13. Ms Dynamite - Dy-Na-Mi-Tee 🟢

I liked this song at the time too, but it might have been for the novelty element of the chorus.  I feel like this UK garage/hip-hop scene was covered a lot in the music press, even the likes of Smash Hits, a lot when I was younger and it was very London-centric.  Especially coming from a part of the country which has very little racial diversity, the cultural and lyrical references in songs like this perplexed me - Ms Dynamite talks about lunch at grandma's having "macaroni, rice and peas, chicken and pineapple punch" and as a kid I could not wrap my head around a single meal combining rice and pasta.  Still, the song sounds good, even today.

14. Beverley Knight - Shoulda Woulda Coulda 🟠

I hated this Radio 2 soft RnB adult contemporary mum music in 2002, and I still hate it now.  I remember the chorus to this song, mostly because of the stupid title - it's Ronan Keating all over again.  Having songs like this on my pop CDs irritated me because you never saw Beverley Knight appearing in Smash Hits, so I didn't know who she was and yet she always got a place on Now compilations and the like.  It has another of those tacky key changes and overstays its welcome.

15. Beenie Man ft Janet - Feel It Boy 🟡

This song elicited no feelings in me, positive or negative.  I quite like Beenie Man's accent but the song just isn't catchy, despite it being a Neptunes production (it's got that distinctive drum pattern that screams Pharrell).  I'm not opposed to Feel It Boy, but it's boring.  Both of them did better - I love Dude by Beenie Man, and Janet Jackson doesn't get a chance to shine.  It's interesting that the song was put out as Janet Jackson ft Beenie Man and only scraped the top 100, then the week that they flipped the names it went top 10. 

16. Aaliyah - More Than A Woman 🔵

I didn't expect this song to be on here - what a pleasant surprise!  I vividly remember seeing the music video for this a lot and that it said RIP Aaliyah at the end.  At the time I hadn't been aware of any other music by her so it interested me that I was seeing a video by an apparently new singer who had already left us.  In fact, Aaliyah had been releasing music for a decade before her tragic death in a plane crash aged only 22.  Anyway, it's hard to explain what I love about this song but I think it's the hook - that riff, which is sampled from an Arabic piece, sounds incredible.  Of course, Aaliyah also puts in a great performance and it's devastating that she got to number one posthumously. 

17. Samantha Mumba - I'm Right Here 🟠

Looking at the title of this song doesn't spark a memory, and the song doesn't sound familiar listening to it either.  In fact, I'm writing this mere hours after listening and I don't remember it now.  I remember Samantha Mumba as being the black Billie Piper - they were both teen pop stars at around the same time.  The song is fine but again it's all very much on one level.  It's like she wants to be what Beyoncé would become in the coming years, but she's not quite there.  The song is about looking for a good man or something and there's a break where she says "Could he be over there? I think they've over here!" etc which is very cheesy.  We get a key change again and this one sounds the worst of all, it's like someone was taking a nap on the sound desk and accidentally knocked one of the sliders.  You know that sort of wobbly sound you get when your record is warped and it kind of speeds up a bit and goes off key?  It sounds like that.

18. Badly Drawn Boy - You Were Right 🟠

Again, I have zero recollection of this.  I know he won the Mercury Prize (a couple of years before this, it turns out) and it sounds like some post-Britpop music industry clutching at any man with a guitar and an English accent, trying to keep the spirit of 94 alive rather than accept that it's over.  This song is boring as fuck.  I paid attention to the verse where he was singing about Madonna - something about him having a dream she lived next door and fancied him but he turned her down - but ugh, it's so dull.  I'm offended that we were giving disc space to shit like this in 2002, there's no way I'd be seeing his video on Smash Hits TV anyway.

19. Supergrass - Grace 🟠
It starts off sounding like the intro to Go Your Own Way, then there's a guitar part that sounds like a police siren.  I've no memory of this song either.  It sounds like The Fratellis or one of those 'landfill indie' mid-00s festival bands.  It's definitely no Caught By The Fuzz, that's for sure.  Almost the entirety of the song is the same line repeated over and over; something about Grace doing it for the kids that I've forgotten by now.  None of the big Britpop bands were doing well in 2002; at least Elastica had the good sense to pack it in. 

20. Liam Lynch - United States Of Whatever 🔵

Finally, we're having fun again!  This is so fuzzy and homemade sounding, the bass is reverberating through my bedroom floor - it's the kind of excitement Supergrass debuted with.  I still know every word and every eyeroll in this little song.  I took it at face value at the time but now I wonder whether there's a wider context around it.  A bit of Googling says that Liam Lynch had a comedy sock puppet show on MTV in the late 90s but this song really does stand on its own.  Aged 9, this song with its headbanging and sarcasm was absolutely genius.  United States Of Whatever is short, a noisy punk rock outsider tacked on to the end of the CD, but for me, it's the highlight of the whole disc. Whatever.

Overall, not a great showing for this album, with half a dozen good songs and a couple of great ones.  Lets hope disc 2 is better, when I get to it!

Music Review: I like it when you sleep, for you are so beautiful yet so unaware of it - The 1975

 This week I'm reviewing one of my favourite albums of modern times, if not of all time, by my favourite modern band.  I've been listening to I like it when you sleep, for you are so beautiful yet so unaware of it by The 1975 on vinyl from their Grammy-winning box set, for maximum pretentiousness, although I picked up one of the last copies of it when they reduced them to £19.75 on their online store. 

1. The 1975 💚

I like it when you sleep... is The 1975's second album, released in 2016, and it opens with a call back to their debut with a new version of the first album's opening track.  It's a bigger version with a choir backing Matty Healy and it sets the scene for what's to come, even if the lyrics are just an artsy description of oral sex.  It's not really a 'song' so much as in intro piece which is why it doesn't rate more highly.

2. Love Me 💜

The intro to this song is like being punched in the face by someone with a handful of glitter.  It's The 1975 at their most glamorous and it's inextricably linked to the neon pink lighting that accompanies this song in their live show and the bright sparkly rockstar excess of its music video.  My intro to The 1975 is kind of complicated as I can pinpoint three or four different moments where I fell in love with the idea of them before actually committing to a relationship with the band, and the release of Love Me when I was new to Spotify and still paying attention to their New Music playlist is one of those moments.  The music is so rich with little guitar parts and synth moments, and it references both modern and classic pop culture - it sounds like Fame-era Bowie, INXS and all of the most exciting androgynous, leather trouser wearing glam rock of the past few decades.  That's balanced with lyrics that drop the Kardashians, internet culture and newfound celebrity in the 21st century.  It's sleazy but not in the usual misogynistic way - it manages to be sarcastic and ironic but also somehow serious.  I love hearing it live and I love hearing it at the start of this album.  The perfect statement of intent for a collection of songs which combines retro sounds with modern day ironic commentary.

3. UGH! 🎀

This song is 3 minutes of perfection and definitely one of my top 5 favourite songs by The 1975.  I've lived with this album for almost 5 years now and there are a lot of songs on here that I would have given a higher rating if I hadn't played it to death, but UGH! is one of those songs that I never tire of hearing.  It's funky like a Prince song and infinitely catchy with its fast paced lyrics about drug addiction and narcissism (there's a lot of drug addiction and narcissism coming up).  It's devastating that it's no longer in their live set. 

4. A Change Of Heart 💙

The first ballad on the album.  The lyric sheet for this song is thick with references to the classics, the current and even The 1975's back catalogue.  It's this cleverness that puts some people off but I love it.  Matty 'quotes On The Road' while also shrugging off his relationship as being mostly an interest in his girlfriend's breasts.  He complains about Instagram ("your eyes were full of regret, and then you took a picture of your salad and put it on the internet") and then quotes his first album ("I never found love in the city", "this is how it starts").  It's got self-deprecation ("you look shit and you smell a bit") and Britishisms ("you were fit but you're losing it"). Where you expect a big 80s chorus, you get a weird bendy synth part which I adore.  One criticism I have for A Change Of Heart is that it's all on one level - it sticks to the same languid pace throughout and kind of plods along, which works for the song (it's like dragging out the end of a relationship you're trying to cut off) but sometimes I'm not in the mood for it.  It's the first outing for what I call 'soft Matty' where he croons in a more fragile voice to the one he used when telling people to love him a couple of songs ago.  A Change Of Heart is a very sweet and very realistic break-up song. 

5. She's American 🟦

This opens with a great 80s-sounding riff and I love the guitar sound on this song.  There's more drug references in here - so far that's one in every song but he does ease off a bit later.  It's hard to say whether this song has pro- or anti-America stance with its references to guns and the attitude of the American girl he's seeing.  The exploration of America is new for this album but is carried on through I Like America and America Likes Me on the next album.  Despite this change in perspective from the small local world of the first album to the international life of this song, we're reminded that Matty is an uncomfortable English outsider in his new environment with phrases like "proper weird" and some eye-rolling on the 'we're so intelligent' in the chorus. 

6. If I Believe You 🕌

Side B of the record and The 1975 are taking us to church.  The organ intro collapses into a more expected synth part but this song is very black-influenced with a gospel choir enlisted to help Matty ask what it would be like to believe in a god.  We get soft Matty again here but this time it's not a break-up that's making him fragile.  The moment where he says he 'had a revelation' (brought on by drugs rather than religious enlightenment) works great in a live setting when he throws his arms up like a televangelist and the switch between long and short notes in the chorus is very effective too.  There's a break for a horn solo which, combined with the waltz beat, is a different sound for the band but it works - this is the first really boundary-pushing experiment in genre of the album but it won't be the last.  The outro may be a little too long but I'll allow it.

7. Please Be Naked 🚙

This instrumental track opens with the sound of traffic and builds up only to fade back out for the piano to take centre stage.  It's very soothing and pretty and, like the last track, an unexpected piece of music.  The bass drum comes in with a boom that reminds me of the train at the end of Kate Bush's Cloudbusting and there's some nice glockenspiel/music box that comes in nearer the end which is gorgeous.  This song is the start of the 'random background twinkling' that they use a lot now in their music, especially in the more ambient/instrumental stuff but it's restrained here and sounds like part of the song rather than the band recording in a room where an orchestra is tuning up.  I saw the band perform this with a symphony orchestra which was the ideal treatment of it, as it was too chill for a normal concert.  The close-down of the song by dropping back to just piano carefully drops you back out of the dream and into the album. 

8. Lostmyhead 💙

We've had gospel and ambient, now it's shoegazing time!  The 1975 are so many different bands on this side of vinyl, never mind across their album or back catalogue.  Lostmyhead is mostly instrumental with just a couple of lines lifted from an earlier song, Facedown, as if providing us with a sequel.  I love the distorted strummed chords which lay a foundation for the soaring strings and guitar parts that sit on top.  It's reflective and warm and when the guitar solo cuts through the noise it's like the sun bursting through the clouds.  It's a revelatory experience seeing this song live with George pounding the drumkit and Matty up on a podium sawing at his guitar which is slung so low it's covering his knees.  At the end everything fades back into the distorted noise and sounds like pulling the plug on a storm and listening to the muddy water disappearing down the drain.

9. The Ballad Of Me And My Brain 🧠

We open with a sampled choir sound that is so weird and discordant, then a bass synth sound that feels like a vibration coming through the floor rather than a sound.  This is another of my all-time favourite songs.  The delivery is urgent as Matty frantically searches for his missing brain, and in the panic he still manages to be very British ("it's likely in a Sainsburys"), millennial ("Oops I Did It Again started playing") and self-deprecating ("would you sign an autograph for my daughter Laura? Cos she adores you... I think you're shit").  The 1975 performed this the first time I saw them and it was one of my favourite moments of the set - the lights covered the stage like a purple curtain that slowly opened out into the crowd and revealed Matty thrashing about and yelling the lyrics like it was a panic attack.  This song is another perfect few minutes.  

10. Somebody Else 🔵

Soft sad break-up Matty returns; before the brink-of-tears vocals even start you can tell we're in for heartbreak by those 90s ballad piano chords.  This song became the mainstream favourite from the album for some reason and maybe that's why I haven't rated it higher.  It has all the hallmarks of classic 1975 - there's a synth riff, there's lyrics putting himself down and referencing modernity, and it's set to a pounding dance beat.  A Change Of Heart is him leaving her; Somebody Else is him begging her not to leave him.  He knows it's over, still he clings.  I don't love the vocal effect on the 'get someone you love? Get someone you need?" bit but there always seems to be one on every album so I can live with it.  The 'fuck that get money' response to that line has never fitted the song for me, but I guess it's a comment on choosing career over relationships -  tied to the first verse line "I took all my things that make sounds, the rest I can do without".  It's a devastating break-up song about jealousy and desperation and loss. 

11. Loving Someone 🟣

I'm going to start with my complaint about this song, which isn't so much about the song but more about its afterlife.  There is one line in here that alludes to sexuality ("it's better if we make them want the opposite sex") but somehow after putting the album out the band decided to make it a gay anthem with a rainbow flag lighting scheme and 7" sleeve.  They claim it was the fans who adopted it as such, but I don't remember that being particularly widespread at the time.  It's actually a great song that's full of information about the political climate of 2015-16 (pre-Brexit and pre-Trump) - there's lyrics about immigration ("if it was safer on the ground they wouldn't be on a boat") and a reference to the Greek economy which make it feel like a draft version of Love It If We Made It, the political song on the next album that won a lot of Song Of The Year accolades.  It's full of smart language and references - Matty could talk about chavs but instead he goes for "disenfranchised young criminal minds in the car park besides where your nan resides".  He also drops a too-clever line about Guy Debord's Society Of The Spectacle which is a lot for a band who were until this point regarded as a slightly-more-edgy One Direction.  

12. I Like It When You Sleep, For You Are So Beautiful Yet So Unaware Of It 💚
This is The 1975 being allowed to make a proper piece of ambient music for the first time but not the last.  A song like this, which is a 2-part mostly-instrumental work, was a surprise when the album came out.  It's very different to the big pop hits on the album but somehow it still fits, maybe because there's so much experimentation going on here.  The switch from the more relaxed first half of the song to the beat dropping is a great moment on the album, same with the moment when the vocal samples come in.  I love the way it builds up but haven't quite worked out the perfect setting for the song - the first half is a nice relaxing piece for winding down and then the second part is exciting and is likely inspired by the late-night garage dance music you'd hear on the radio in the 2000s when driving in the city.  It ends kind of how it started with a sort of bleepy, almost ringtone sounding, synthesised piano sound, leaving the way it came in to make way for another big pop song.

13. The Sound 🔂

A proper pop song except you don't usually hear lines like "sycophantic, prophetic, Socratic junkie wannabe... simple Epicurean philosophy" in pop songs.  It sounds like it should be on Radio 1 but in a good way and it makes sense as the encore closing song that it has been since it was released.  It fits in well with 2016's pop music which had bands like Years & Years reaching for a 90s post-acid house sound.  Like Love Me, it's great to dance to and features a real guitar solo, but it doesn't stand up quite as well to the over-exposure it's had over the years as a live set mainstay and radio favourite.

14. This Must Be My Dream 🌃

This is the most underrated song on the album - aside from the last 2 songs which I'll come to in a moment, this is the only one I haven't seen the band play live.  It's dripping in 80s musical references - there's a sax solo! - and lyrics which you could apply to that era as well as our current decade ("I personify the adolescent on a phone").  It's another song about choosing your rock'n'roll career over your relationship and sounds like the fight that precedes the bargaining phase of the split chronicled in Somebody Else.  Can anybody else visualise it appearing in the jukebox musical based on The 1975 that I hope someday gets written?

15. Paris 💜

This song has a real 'sad ending' vibe to it, like a wave goodbye to the album.  There's more drugs references in abundance here as the lyrics paint a picture of a messy relationship that was doomed from the start, a sort of drugged up shopping list of neuroses and quotations.  Paris was one of my favourite songs but I've gotten a bit fed up of it in the live set, however hearing it today reminded me of why I love it - it's faster on record than I remember it being live.  We get soft Matty again but this time it doesn't feel like he's giving us self-hatred, instead he's laying out his case and allowing us to feel sorry for him whether he's aware of his hopeless situation or not.  

16. Nana 🟩

The last two songs on the album stand in stark contrast to what's come before.  This song is very simple - we get acoustic guitar and lyrics telling a story with straightforward rhymes, bereft of the usual clever references and purple prose.  It's just Matty in a one-sided conversation with his departed nana - "I don't like it now you're dead".  His voice breaks while singing the final line, "I think you can tell, I haven't been doing too well" which breaks my heart and sums up not only his grief, but the album as a whole.  With that one line he tears down the ironic, self-deprecating, constantly-referential façade and has another revelation, this time not brought on by drugs or religion, just truth.

17. She Lays Down 🟩

Much like Nana, this is straightforward in its delivery, but She Lays Down is even more stripped back and minimal.  It sounds like just Matty, in a room by himself, playing his guitar and singing and just recorded like that.  It's even more personal and sad - if you thought a song about the death of Matty's grandmother was heart-wrenching, here's one about his mother's post-natal depression.   These two personal, raw songs make for a strange ending after the hour of 80s synth and ironic brightness of the rest of the album, and to be honest I sometimes leave this side off the turntable if I'm playing the album just because they're such a comedown.