#95

#95. Violent Soho - Blanket (#53, 2016)

12th of 2016

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Sometimes they just call out to you. By all accounts, it's just another one, but there's that little edge that makes you not only lean into it, but start to wonder why everyone else wouldn't make the same conclusion. When the voting turned out for Violent Soho's "WACO" album, you have the two clear big hits and then everything else is just fighting for the best seat at the table. In that regard, "Blanket" is ahead of the pack, the highest entry for Violent Soho that isn't one of their show-stopping singles. Just a clear potency to it that was detected.

For me, it's just an economy thing. When you think about the song "Covered in Chrome" (#122), the first thing you'll probably think of is the song's chorus, where the word 'yeah' is uttered 15 times in a row. It's doing for the word 'yeah', what "Runaway" did for high E's. With thanks to some other contributions in the lyrics, the song gets up to using the word 'yeah', 50 times. This isn't entirely unprecedented I'll admit, I tried counting and found Usher & Lil Jon got up to at least 76 together (Ludacris did not provide any help). It's memorable though, I made a tweet a while back that said "Covered In Chrome" is just a guy at a computer pressing the 'yeah' button, which I assume would have done numbers if we lived in a just world.

With "Blanket" it gets a little more complicated. I really want to say that it surpasses "Covered In Chrome" on this metric but I don't know if I can verifiably say this to be the case. I'm running on my first instinct that the song's chorus is punctuated by triplets of 'yeah', but it's probably more of an 'ayyyeaheah' and I don't know how to count it. If we do go on my instinct and I'll bet I wasn't alone on this, you'll reach 60 times for this song, a count that certainly could've come to matching Usher if they didn't cut it out of most of the song's final chorus, just missing the forest for the trees here.

You can't have possibly expected the last Violent Soho entry to have gone any different, right? This song unlocks a primal urge to jump around and be stupid; the same way it compels me to start talking about the word 'yeah'. I suppose I can be fairer to the song on the whole, it really is a crisp production from the beginning, something that's only disrupted by the raucous chorus, which actually finds a way to out-do itself towards the very end. It's a very 'I'm out of breath' kind of song. It's good to have those every now and then.