Urge Overkill via Pulp Fiction - "Girl, You'll Be a Woman Soon"

Release Dates: September 27, 1994

When Did I Download This? Just two nights ago, actually. Over Thanksgiving Weekend, between stuffing my face with stuffing and turkey and hanging with friends and family, I’ve been reading a series of excellent articles at the AV Club covering music from the 1990’s entitled Whatever Happened to Alternative Nation? So far it’s done a fantastic job of not only portraying rock’s grunge period and what it meant to us as teenagers growing up, but also how different alternative music was before the internet. Hyden says, “underground music was really underground; you had to venture out and look for it, and only after somebody let you in on the secret that it was actually there.” In a line he succinctly writes what I spent a lot of my time talking about in my Vampire Weekend and Violent Femmes posts. As a teenager, hours were devoted to scouring liner notes and indie magazines (sometimes unavailable in small town stores), talking to friends, catching small-time opening acts, and most importantly watching MTV. Another platform was movie soundtracks; The Crow, Juice, Reality Bites, Trainspotting, and one of the more classic R&B and rock inclined, Pulp Fiction, and they would all act as points to expand our musical boundaries.

Somehow in October of 1994, as a 14-year old kid, a couple of friends and I were able to sneak in to a theater to see the violent, profane, no-doubt-about-it ‘R’-rated Pulp Fiction. While I vaguely remember liking it, probably more for all the f-bombs being thrown around than grasping how great of a movie it truly was, it wouldn’t forever hold a place in my conscious until a friend bought the VHS sometime later. I remember him playing it incessantly, sometimes simply acting as background noise while we took turns playing guitar or Gameboy. I could tell he dug the music just as much as the movie, which, being as he was two years my senior and I looked up to him, made me really dig it as well. There was the surf tune from Dick Dale, Dusty Springfield’s “Son of a Preacher’s Man, and Al Green’s “Let’s Stay Together.” But my favorite was from the scene immediately following the twist contest. There’s something both sexy and hip about the moment when Mia Wallace (Uma Thurman) begins that old music reel, strums the opening chord to “Girl, You’ll Be a Woman Soon” on her air guitar, and breaks in to a frenzied dance when the song crescendos. Though it's very unhip when she ultimately overdoses on Vince’s (John Travolta) heroin.

Every time I came across Pulp Fiction on TV, or the film came up in discussion, I tried to remind myself I needed to grab the soundtrack. But I always forgot. In fact, I didn’t even know the song from my favorite scene is a cover of Neil Young performed by Urge Overkill up until this past Sunday, while I was reading the fourth entry of Whatever Happened to Alternative Nation? I like the limited amount of Neil Young’s discography I’ve collected, and I had heard of Urge Overkill, but I didn’t have wiki or youtube as an immediate reference point back then to look up where the song originated. I've never remembered to look at the back of a Pulp Fiction soundtrack in all those years since. Two nights ago, I went over to my computer, clicked the mouse button a few times, and “Girl, You’ll Be a Woman Soon” was loaded in to my music library. I’ve already played it a few times. It’s a good song, but after all these years I think I like it better in the context of an unknown classic from an unforgettable scene in that great 1994 film.

(Note: I know this should have preceded Ugly Casanova, but being as I just downloaded Urge Overkill two nights ago, that would've been impossible. I felt it wouldn’t hurt to go backwards (or forwards) one entry.)

Ugly Casanova - Sharpen Your Teeth

Release Dates: May 21, 2002

★★★★★ Tracks:

Barnacles

Things I Don’t Remember

It got old. Flipping through this particular girlfriend’s CD travel case and seeing page after page of Modest Mouse. Proper releases, EPs, mixes of best songs, bootlegs, she had it all. Just from simply knowing someone for so long so well, it was one of those insignificant obsessions that became very significant to me. I couldn’t get myself to like Isaac Brock’s strange lisp and even stranger blend of rock and folksy psychedelia, but more than anything, I didn’t like that she had found her new favorite band after she moved out west. Modest Mouse was directly associated with our drifting apart. However on her frequent return visits, she force fed my Plymouth Sundance those countless records. And the more I heard them the more I realized resisting was futile; Modest Mouse, with their eccentric music and powerful lyricism, was in fact much more entertaining than most the crap I was listening to at the time.

Shuffling through said girlfriend’s trapper keeper of music would net you the occasional alternative. Ugly Casanova is one that comes to mind, but being as this particular band was Isaac Brock’s side project, where he got to explore outside the boundaries of his primary group, I’m not sure it counts. Modest Mouse has always skirted the fine line between the elitist indie crowd and the self-loathing emo kids, but Sharpen Your Teeth tilts more towards the latter. Brock is rarely one to write an upbeat pop song you’d put on at a summer pool party, but the tracks contained within are incredibly mellow and often down right depressing. On “Hotcha Girls” he sings, “smells like autumn / smells like leaves / You don’t know that you’ll rust / And not belong so much / And then get left alone.” In “Parasites” Brock says in his usual deadpan voice, “the parasites are excited when you’re dead / Eyes bulging, entering your head / All your thoughts, they rot,” while victorious horns sound in the background.

But Brock has become one of my favorite lyricists, taking thoughts of self-reflection and greater universal questions and turning them in to clever pieces of wordplay. There are a few gems here, none of them any better than on the opening track, “Barnacles,” when he sings, “I don’t know me / And you don’t know you / So we fit so good together because I knew you like I knew myself / We clung on like barnacles on a boat / Even though the ship sinks you know you can’t let go.” Most everything here is backed by subtle acoustic guitars, occasional percussion, and some complimentary instruments; electric guitar, bass, and horns, which all lends itself to an isolated and contemplative batch of songs. There’s a lot to like here for die-hard fans, some of it acts as a bridge to the more mainstream sounds Modest Mouse would develop down the road. But it won’t convert any skeptics. Even for a modest fan like myself, Sharpen Your Teeth is a rare journey I take. It always brings me back to a universal personal experience all of us try to forget, or as Brock says, it “marks the path back to the point of departure.”