‘I Give You Two Seconds To Entertain Me’ – Northern Portrait
From the Napoleon Sweetheart EP (Matinee)
There were some fine releases on the Matinee label this year, but far and away my favourite was this slice of soaring guitar driven Pop by Denmark’s Northern Portrait. Think the sound of Gene, Bradford, The Railway Children, Faith Brothers and, yes, The Smiths at their giddiest peak (or some other more contemporary group if you’re a younger person than I). Like ‘The Good Old Days’ this was one of the songs guaranteed this year to have me leaping like a loon; my heart carousing and crashing with heady abandon.
My only reservation would be that lyrically it leaves me wanting much more; it feels too typically like a hipster early twenty something earnestly decrying what he sees as the commercial corruption of an object of desire. I can imagine that, if I were a woman, I’d be really rather offended by some of the lines, and the inference that one cannot be both physically desirable and ‘true and genuine’ at the same time. And what’s ‘genuine’ anyway? As for the idea of ‘selling out’… oh, don’t get me started…
But maybe I’m being picky. Maybe if I was a young thing I wouldn’t care. Maybe people don’t really care about words anyway (I remember Malcolm Eden saying that a lot of McCarthy fans didn’t care for the words, for example, which shocked me to the core at the time).
As a sonic pleasure, it’s a treasure. Maybe that’s all that matters.
This track is really one of the very best of the year. I got a sense of James and Bradford (underrated?) from them as well, but Railway Children sum them up quite well, even if they were just good enough at the time. I can understand what he means lyrically however; where people sell their soul to their own beauty while never cultivating the beauty within. You'll have to admit, some so-called beautiful people are shallow in this way and have very little else to give of themselves but their skin.
I say this of course while looking in the mirror.
Posted by: Lincoln | December 18, 2008 at 04:26
Yes, but it's a somewhat easy target isn't it? And songs always seem to make that point using women as the subject/object. And what about all the beautiful people whose beauty is also more than skin deep? Don't they get fed up being stereotyped in that way? 'You're pretty, therefore you must be shallow and stupid'? I just kind of figure i've heard enough of that kind of thing, that's all :) It's still an awesome sound though!
Posted by: alistair | December 18, 2008 at 07:10
But McCarthy lyrics were really good! (Weren't they?) (<-Seasonal pantomime chorus: "Oh-yes-they-were...")
Posted by: "Zein Kuruch Dur Fich..." (<- Hey look... "Fich" looks a lot like "Fitch". Oh-no-it-doesn't...) | December 18, 2008 at 19:00
Exactly! And yet, apparently, there were many fans who just heard the jangling guitars and didn’t care about the lyrics. Which seemed bizarre to me (still does), but then, lots of things do :) (oh yes they do...)
Posted by: alistair | December 18, 2008 at 19:17
But McCarthy's *jangling guitars* were really good! ("Oh-yes-they-were...")
They played at the Lemon Grove in Exeter when Banking, Violence and... came out. It was really good, but a bit disappointing that hardly anyone showed up. ("Oh-no-they-didn't...")
Posted by: "Dein Furuch Zur Kich..." | December 18, 2008 at 19:33
Hello, I wrote the song, and I can tell you that the lyrics in the 'though she's got a million...'-part aren't about women as such, but about a particularly appalling one I once had the misfortune of meeting. And she isn't the only very bland person I had in mind whilst writing it; there were several male people there as well. By the way thanks for a good web page. Merry Christmas to all.
Posted by: stefan | December 19, 2008 at 13:09
thanks for that Stefan, glad to have your comments. I can understand that you were writing about one particular woman. i'm sure we've probably all come across people like that of both genders. my point remains though that there seem to be more instances of songs saying those kinds of things about women as there are about men, and so a gender stereoype is more pronounced as a result. But then, it's very difficult to write with one specific person in one's mind and then for that NOT to become interpreted as a kind of 'global' statement when the art form becomes mass produced and replicated. That's the nature of mass media, after all.
Posted by: alistair | December 20, 2008 at 19:35