I’m back from Resistanz Festival – the review for that will follow at some point in the next week – and we’re back to the regular /Tuesday Ten posts. Needless to say, this was written in advance last week, as I knew full well I wouldn’t have time over the weekend.

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This week is about getting things wrong. There’s a lot of apologies, acceptance of failure, but also accusations to others. Like “right”, which will follow next week, this subject turned out to be a tough one, something that is usually reflected in the smaller number of suggestions. Either way, thanks to everyone that offered suggestions. As always, all are considered!

A quick explanation for new readers (hi there!): my Tuesday Ten series has been running since March 2007, and each month features at least ten new songs you should hear – and in between those monthly posts, I feature songs on a variety of subjects, with some of the songs featured coming from suggestion threads on Facebook.

Feel free to get involved with these – the more the merrier, and the breadth of suggestions that I get continues to astound me. Otherwise, as usual, if you’ve got something you want me to hear, something I should be writing about, or even a gig I should be attending, e-mail me or drop me a line on Facebook (details below).

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/Apoptygma Berzerk
/Everything We Know Is Wrong
/Welcome to Earth

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We open this week with the intro track to Apoptygma Berzerk’s greatest album, and an album that in an alternative universe would have been a pop smash. It has everything – aliens, love, redemption, failure, monstrous pop hooks, swooning ballads, three or four tracks that remain club floor fillers to this day (twenty-five years on, I should add) what more could you need? The album opens, though, with a relatively short intro piece, that is ominous synths shrouding samples of people who believe in aliens coming to earth, telling us that we’re all wrong, and that the aliens have been coming all the long, closing with this:

“I think that’s going to be one of the most extraordinary and perhaps devastating discoveries in all of human history.
We will discover that practically everything we know is wrong, that actually reality is a lot more amazing than we thought…”

The main joy of this track, though, is what follows: and if an Apop live set opens with this, you know the mighty dancefloor smash-and-grab of Starsign is usually coming right up…

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/Prong
/Prove You Wrong
/Prove You Wrong

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The thundering, industrial-tinged groove metal of Prong is probably best remembered for the airtight, ferocious grooves of the 1994 album Cleansing, but that was already their fifth album. The predecessor was Prove You Wrong, that hadn’t quite got the production chops yet, but the seeds had definitely been sewn for what was to come: as the title track proved. Prong head honcho Tommy Victor’s aggressive delivery on every song suggests he’s spent his entire career trying to prove his doubters wrong, and this song is where he comes out and says it loud and clear. It’s a cracking song, too, the Fuzzbuster Mix version that became well-known on MTV giving it that bit more depth.

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/God Lives Underwater
/All Wrong
/Empty

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God Lives Underwater were an unusual band, mainly for the fact that they were an alt-rock band that made heavy use of electronics and programming (it would be a stretch to call them industrial rock, mind). From Your Mouth – with a heavily trip-hop leaning sound – was their “big hit”, but I remember them for the taut All Wrong. A song built around a looping, processed riff that then drops out for the pre-chorus, leaving just David Reilly’s voice. The song is Reilly reassessing his position in a relationship, realising, probably too late, that he had misjudged the whole situation but that he – and his temper – are very much part of the problem. And as a result, he admits he is wrong, and needs to get out.

David Reilly was just 34 when he died in 2005, cutting what had been an interesting career up to that point far too short.

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/The Bravery
/An Honest Mistake
/The Bravery

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The dark, post-punk edge to The Bravery’s sound was perhaps years ahead of it’s time – especially bearing in mind how popular that kind of sound has been in recent years. Their debut single, the surging An Honest Mistake, is a great example of this. The song is perhaps about a friendship rather than relationship – unusual in this week’s song suggestions, I can tell you – where the protagonist bemoans their habit of engaging their mouth before their brain and saying hurtful things. But in retrospect, it appears, they were likely right to call them out, but that doesn’t mean that they aren’t sad about ending the friendship by doing so…

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/Natalie Imbruglia
/Big Mistake
/Left of the Middle

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Natalie Imbruglia’s debut album is best-remembered for the monster, lovelorn hit (and cover) Torn (it sold over four million copies worldwide, and I’m sure the original band that recorded it, Ednaswap, did very well out of that), but just maybe, Big Mistake was the better song. It has a similar, electronic-meets-rock sound, but has rather more of a spikier edge and a bigger, louder chorus. Imbruglia plays the part of the wronged partner, sneering at a lover who has cheated and is trying to make up for what they did wrong, and leaving them begging to be taken back: the answer being a resounding no.

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/Built To Spill
/You Were Right
/Keep It Like A Secret

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Probably the best-known band from Boise, Idaho are alt-rock band Built to Spill, who’ve had a steady career over the past three decades or so, and unlike many of their peers never split up – the line-up just regularly rotated (Doug Marsch being the only constant member). Keep It Like A Secret is the album of theirs that I love more than any other – perhaps because it was my route into the band – and You Were Right is a song that carries the bitter edge of someone who had been told unhelpful things about their depression. It is, very deliberately, a song of clichés and platitudes, from ten other, better known songs, that tell him he’s wrong and that everything will be ok, even though he knows absolutely that it won’t be.

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/The Sisters of Mercy
/I Was Wrong
/Vision Thing

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More, it’s not hard to see why. It’s kinda like the comedown from the force of the rest of the album, then, and appears to be squarely about the collapse of a relationship. But the title is a deliberate misdirection. The protagonist was wrong, certainly, but only about their judgement, as they watch their partner go off and fuck someone else. There is absolutely no attempt at apologising for whatever they might have done on their side…

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/Bernard Cribbins
/The Hole In The Ground

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We now turn to something a little lighter, as I feature the second of the late Bernard Cribbin’s songs (Right Said Fred featured on /Tuesday Ten /507). The Hole In The Ground is something of comment on class war by way of a novelty pop hit, as the (working class) labourer is told by his betters (a Government official of some sort) that he’s digging the hole the wrong way, in the wrong place. Rather than listening to him – I’m sure said labourer had his instructions – the song ends with the official and his bowler hat in the now filled-in hole…

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/Frank Turner
/Redemption
/England Keep My Bones

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I keep coming back to England Keep My Bones – and while I featured English Curse and Glory Hallelujah in the past few weeks, it was six years and more since I did before them – and that’s because it’s an album that speaks to me about particular times and events in my life all too clearly. It’s an album about a young man trying to find their way in England, and looking back at what makes them English, but it’s also about confronting life’s mistakes and making amends for it, the latter being something of a theme in Turner’s lyrics over the years.

Redemption is one of the more difficult, darker songs on this album, as it confronts a “fight or flight” mentality that has clearly seen mistakes made that have rippled out and affected others (particularly ex-girlfriends, it seems), and the end of the song hints at botched attempts to make amends. Oh boy, I’ve been there, I’ve tried to make things right and likely made them even worse, on more than one occasion over the years. As Turner says in this song, though, “redemption is mine and mine alone“.

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/Ladytron
/The Last One Standing
/Witching Hour

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Finally this week, we have one more blast of icy air as spring leaves the winter in the rearview mirror. Ladytron were always masters of bitter, cold songs about relationships – in their world, the future is always as bleak as the past – and the deceptively gentle guitars and synths, and lovely harmonies, of The Last One Standing hide scorching truths. Driving and journey metaphors tell a tale of a relationship breakdown where communication is absent and two people are heading in very different directions, with the protagonist accused of wrong decisions and presumably being blamed entirely.

Of course, two parties in a dispute will always blame the other first, and never admit they are wrong until too late.