Before regular service resumes next week with a closer from 2008, I wanted to talk briefly about some noteworthy 2022 closing tracks from some of the more talked about albums of the year.
We will start with one closer that I had already talked about in a full-length post back in April last year, Wet Leg’s ‘Too Late Now’, a reflection on sleepwalking into adulthood.
After the paywall, I will get down to it on Beyonce, Sea Power, Fontaines D.C., Kendrick Lamarr, The Smile, Ezra Collective, Dry Cleaning, Arctic Monkeys, Björk, Taylor Swift and Black Country, New Road.
Beyonce - ‘Summer Renaissance’.
Finishing what is likely to be the 2022 album top of the pile when lists are aggregated, Beyonce uses her closing track to celebrate the history of disco and house music through one of the godmothers of those genres and by comparing herself to several European luxury fashion lines by the very end. Beyonce’s Renaissance closer is her overt nod to Donna Summer in name, and by heavily sampling Summer and Giorgio Moroder’s 1977 envelope-pushing single ‘I Feel Love’. It isn’t the first time Beyonce has represented Summer in her work; 2003’s ‘Naughty Girl’ was an interpretation of ‘Love To Love You Baby’.
Black Country, New Road - ‘Basketball Shoes’.
The band’s second album, Ants From Up Here, climaxes with ‘Basketball Shoes’ a live favourite since debuting in 2019 and throughout the few shows that the band could play in the pandemic years of 2020 and 2021, a multi-layered closer subjected to some re-writes until it wasn’t obviously about Charli XCX. The studio version comes in at over 12 minutes and brings to close the concept of Concorde as the failing relationship detailed in the album and Isaac Wood’s time as the band’s lead singer. With the timing of his departure and the album’s release, this epic closer gives the impression of Wood signing his eulogy as his casket rolls out of sight.
Kendrick Lamar - ‘Mirror’.
Kendrick Lamar closes out his fifth album, Mr. Morale & The Big Steppers, with ‘Mirror’ a track on which he falls back on the familiar and well-trodden subject matter of the pressure of fame and fortune but mixes it with reflection on his newborn daughter and the therapy he references in the album’s opening track. There is certainly a school of thinking that the song is making a case for a prolonged exile by Lamar from the music business (“I chose me, I’m sorry”) and that holding up a mirror to himself and for his fans to do likewise is the conclusion of a narrative arc that has run through all five albums on Top Dawg Entertainment.
Björk - ‘Her Mother’s House’.
Ending her eleventh album, Björk’s daughter, Ísadóra Bjarkardóttir Barney, joins her mother on a lament to an empty nest. She told Uncut Magazine:
I’m trying to make fun of how clumsy and clingy you can be. When your kids are leaving, you gather up your courage to do a really graceful goodbye, and of course for five years you are still saying goodbye, and they are still coming back because you have to help them through things. So asking my daughter to this song with me was really trying to make fun of myself. Saying “I’m just doing my best, forgive me!” You’re trying not to be overprotective and then you find you’re underproductive in other areas. You can’t win!
In an interesting twist, the vinyl version lacks Ísadóra’s vocals and the clarinet, but both versions end with a nod back to ‘Undo’ from 2001’s Vespertine and can be regarded as highlights of her more recent catalogue.
Taylor Swift - ‘Mastermind’
Taylor Swift finishes at least one of the many versions of her Midnights album with ‘Mastermind’, an inversion of her 2019 song ‘Paper Rings’ in which she sang of the development of her relationship with Joe Alwyn as being accidental. Here, over a lazy electropop backing, she lays out the idea, with tongue firmly lodged in cheek, that it was all part of a grand Machiavellian plan, and she Littlefingered the whole romance by pulling the strings just so. This is then expanded to how she turned the adversity of her early teenage years into the domino reaction that brought the world Taylor Swift, the world's biggest pop star.
The Smile - ‘Skrting On The Surface’.
Like much of Radiohead’s post In Rainbows output, this is a song that Johnny Greenwood and Thom Yorke have long had around to kick the tyres and hone into shape. Debuting at an Atoms For Peace show in 2009 and a phrase that had been attached to Radiohead’s online presence since OK Computer. The song had gone through several tonal shifts before this version, in which Tom Skinner’s light yet funky drum work elevates the mood above some prior arrangements. At the same time, still, a ballad lamenting the human condition, shards of sunlight break through.
Ezra Collective - ‘Love in Outer Space’.
Speaking of Radiohead, I get a flashback to 2016’s ‘Glass Eyes’ from A Moon Shaped Pool when the intro to this starts up, which is not something I pick up when I hear the Sun Ra original. This version is all piano lines tumbling into each other and cooed vocals. Femi Koleoso of the band told Apple Music that the Ezra Collective had been playing an instrumental version of the song for years in a live setting but that bringing in Nao to add the vocals would be the perfect way for the album’s journey to finish and to open out for listeners to go on and have more adventures.
Sea Power - ‘We Only Want To Make You Happy’.
The band formerly known as British Sea Power are a favourite in Run Out Grooves towers, with various items of merch from beer to tea mugs dotted around different dwellings over the past twenty years. This album, their seventh studio effort, isn’t shy about giving fans what the band have always done well, and epic finales have been a staple since 2003. So, it is no surprise they have delivered another ending that plays to the maxim of go out as you mean to go on, even if the name change has meant the album serves as a partial Batman Begins reboot of what the band are about. Windswept, wailing guitars are never off the menu, but the orchestration sees them parking their ships on Sigur Ros’s tundra.
Fontaines D.C. - ‘Nabokov’.
Previously the Lolita author’s references in pop music are restricted to Sting shoehorning in a rhyme with cough in The Police’s ‘Don’t Stand So Close To Me’. Here, the Irish post-punk band are trying to portray the sense of the author’s work in a Rolling Stone track-by-track breakdown in support of the album;
I think the lyrics are about almost like a perverse take on … it’s compromise in a relationship sort of rendered as civility. It’s an exaggeration of a compromise that’s necessary to a functioning relationship, to the point where it sounds pathetic. I just wanted to kind of put myself in that position, in that song, to express how it feels to no longer have absolute independence and autonomy over your life, when you decide that you are in love and you want to share your life with someone. There’s lines like, “I will be your dog in the corner, and I would light your cigarette.” It’s just this subservience that I wanted to use to express the element of compromise that’s necessary.
As Sea Power did on their album closer, the song sounds like it was either recorded in a hurricane or a faithful attempt to recreate the sound and squalor of one on record.
Arctic Monkeys - ‘Perfect Sense’.
Alex Turner told Radio X that this was one of his favourite songs on The Car, short, sweet, and recorded with minimal fuss. It carries itself like it was soundtracking a climatic, probably triumphant scene of a film with our protagonist wrapping up the action in a suitable fashion. There is an opening reference to Richard of York, the English king who spent most of the 20th century with a car park built on top of him. The song brings to mind some of the work that The Divine Comedy, Tindersticks or John Grant have produced over the last few decades.
Dry Cleaning - ‘Icebergs’.
Finally, I wanted to give mention to the final track on Dry Cleaning’s Stumpwork which drummer Nick Buxton has said of;
I think this is quite a bleak moment for us. Definitely the most icy-sounding track on the album. It feels like a really good end to the record to suddenly have this explosion of brass come in, and then it just peters out very slowly. I like that the album ends on quite an icy tone, even though that doesn’t necessarily represent us in how we feel about things. It’s a slightly more poignant ending rather than a nice, lovely outro.
For anyone familiar with Dry Cleaning’s output classifying one of their songs as being especially icy feels like trying to crown only one Beach Boys song with the highest surfing vibe.
I hope those who have supported the newsletter by paid subscription have enjoyed this brief look at some 2022 closing tracks. If this is something that subscribers enjoy, there is scope in the diary to look at more 2022 closers in this fashion and to look at 2023 songs each quarter. Let me know in the comments!
Some real 'common ground' favourites here, but, while I've always prided myself on not being 'resistant to change', I'm still finding it really hard to genuinely like anything on 'The Car'!