“Don’t get me wrong, you weren’t the first girl that I ever kissed with tongues (How many tongues has he got? Are they forked?)_ / But you were the best, you let me touch yer chest, ‘cuz I saved yer twos on me last cigarette.”_
Little Man Tate's Jon Windle must have had Jarvis in mind when scribbling the lyrics for this shoulder-shrugging ditty. But where Jarv induces a shiver of delight in conjuring lines about ‘the first girl at school to get breasts’ with a flourish of his spindly writing hand, Windle’s rewrite merely elicits a shudder: why not buy her 20 L&B and she’ll be eating out of your arsehole before supper time?
Musically this is a slight but surprisingly pleasant affair, Maz Marriott doing his best Johnny Marr impersonation via sighing guitar phrases which carry on in a familiar, ‘Heaven Knows I’m Miserable Now’ kinda way. But really, those lyrics are hard to forgive – rather than survey the post-post-industrial wasteland (sorry Sheffield!) which spawned them with disdain, or even sharply-observed fondness, Little Man Tate are content to simply wallow in it with the unmerited complacency of a stoner who’s just completed the latest Final Fantasy game and lost all his friends in the process.
That, and it’s starting to sound downright creepy hearing all these twentysomethings wanking on about the good old halcyon days of yore: this isn’t fucking Logan’s Run, you know. Get. Overrrrrrr. It.
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5Alex Denney's Score