Five songs that sound like they are from another planet
Some of the greatest songs ever conceived aren’t normally the ones that are the easiest to latch onto. Most people would be happy listening to a song for hours on end, trying to learn the chords or the structure inside and out, but sometimes the best songs in the world aren’t meant to be thought of in those terms. After all, musicians are in the business to make musical works of art, and people like Pink Floyd have made tunes that seem to be coming from another plane of existence.
Throughout rock history, there have been plenty of artists who fiddle around with what the studio can do, but when looking at the songs here, it’s hard to imagine that human hands even created them. This was the kind of music that no one had even considered before, and while it may have had its roots in rock and roll in many ways, there was a certain ex-factor no one could quite put their finger on, from the way that the instruments were played to the vocal performance that seemed to be come from the great beyond.
But the main caveat is that none of the songs here necessarily sound the same. These were meant to blow the doors out whenever they were turned on, and while some of them take a while to get going, they manage to take however long they want to to make the audience feel like they’re floating on air, either through some of the most insane recording techniques or the overall mood of the song.
Not all of them were socially accepted at the time, but once the song stopped, everyone could tell that something had changed within rock history. The air tasted different when you walked outside again, and now that there were no rules, it was up to the rest of the world to see where rock could go beyond what came out of the speaker.
Five songs that sound like they’re from another planet:
‘Stuck On You’ – Failure
Anyone who lived through the 1990s already went through their fair share of shakeups before the decade was even out. Grunge had turned everything on its head when Kurt Cobain showed up, and in its wake, everything from pop-punk to nu-metal to Britpop to whatever the hell Primus was managed to get regular time on the charts if it had the right idea. Failure certainly belonged in that company, but as soon as people heard those opening synthesiser patches of ‘Stuck On You’, it sounded like we had made first contact with musical beings from another galaxy.
There had been elements of shoegaze that had flirted with something more atmospheric in rock music, but listening to Ken Andrews sing this tune felt like someone delivering a song in slow motion half the time, complete with some of the strange chord changes ever heard in a mainstream song. Although Failure would break up for a few years following the release of this tune, it’s practically a blessing that Andrews stayed around to carve out a new career as an engineer and mixer on albums. Because outside of the trippy atmosphere, this feels like capturing the feeling of being under anaesthesia and slowly entering another world.
‘I Am The Walrus’ – The Beatles
Any Beatles fan knew that the band would be doing something a little bit abnormal once they made the studio their new home. They had spent the last few years making songs that didn’t always translate live, and while they tried their best, deciding not to test the boundaries of the live stage with ‘Tomorrow Never Knows’ was probably a smart choice. Most people knew to expect the unexpected, but ‘I Am the Walrus’ was the swan dive off the edge that the band never returned from.
After the acid-soaked experiment on Sgt Pepper, John Lennon turned in the kind of song ripped straight out of Alice in Wonderland. From the strange looping chord sequence to the nonsense lyrics, the song packs in some of the most obscure ideas anyone had ever thought of, whether that’s the looping chord sequence or having the radio randomly play Shakespeare midway through the song. Anyone would have been delirious after going through this song in one sitting, but listening through again, rarely has a song with this many weird quirks behind it had so much swagger to it as well.
‘Gold Dust Woman’ – Fleetwood Mac
Most people involved with Rumours would have gladly wanted to wipe their hands of the entire project once they were done. Fleetwood Mac were holding themselves together purely on the strength of the music half the time, and while it did make for some great singles, it wasn’t going to be easy to listen to a song like ‘Go Your Own Way’ if you were on the receiving end of the message. But whereas Stevie Nicks took the dignified approach when talking about her problems, ‘Gold Dust Woman’ felt like capturing a ghost on tape when she walked out onto the studio floor.
The tune is already one of the darkest on the record, but hearing her talk about the effects that the drugs were having on the band was like being in someone’s head as they go through their first high. Nicks was already harbouring a cold when working on the tune, but listening to her go for those final screams in the outro was when she truly went beyond the metrics of normal singing. This was the sound of Rhiannon’s voice being reborn before our very ears, and even if Nicks walked away as if nothing had happened, there was some spiritual entity at work on this tune.
‘Purple Haze’ – Jimi Hendrix
Everything about Jimi Hendrix didn’t seem like it came from this planet. There were pieces of his music steeped in everything from blues to rock and roll, but to watch him marry all of them together so seamlessly was like watching someone weave together the perfect musical work of art. But for all the beauty on display, Hendrix wasn’t one for subtlety when he blew out of the speakers with the first few notes of his debut single.
‘Purple Haze’ may become proverbial in the world of rock and roll guitar, but from the first tritone lick that kicks everything off, Hendrix was breaking down the door to people’s minds when he was playing. Outside of his fantastic lead playing and strange note choices during his solo, though, his voice was also half the reason why everything worked, sounding like some wise sage from long ago talking about the benefits of psychedelics. Hendrix had already talked about a girl who was putting a spell on him, but judging by what happened later, he took all of us through our fair share of trips.
‘Shine On You Crazy Diamond’ – Pink Floyd
It’s hard to gauge whether or not the members of Pink Floyd would take their inclusion here as a compliment or not. The whole point of their second iteration was to move outside the realm of space rock that they had been stuck in for years, but ‘Shine On You Crazy Diamond’ is a special exception. This was them paying tribute to their old days while also carving out a way for them to move forward, and in doing so, they made the kind of record that no other rock band could claim to touch.
The song was already meant as one big tribute to their former bandmate, Syd Barrett, but across both parts of this suite, the whole band sound like they are trying to communicate with him from the other side of consciousness. Everyone was already aware that they would never break through Barrett’s state of mind at the time, but considering the song was being completed when Barrett paid them a surprise visit, it didn’t seem like a coincidence. They had already made their peace with not being in a band with him anymore, but with those four magical guitar notes, they captured both the quirkiness of Barrett and the melancholy feeling of losing him in one go.
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