Some local friends of ours – who work at a local zoological park – also do wildlife education and outreach work as TOP Conservation, including monthly talks in Hythe at a bar we really like. Last month the talk was about insects, and a fascinating talk it was too.

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/amodelofcontrol.com now has a Patreon page, at this stage purely as a potential way of helping to cover the running costs of the site. There is absolutely no compulsion to do so: if you feel you can chuck a small amount to the site each month, that would be appreciated.

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Needless to say, this got me thinking about songs that feature insects, and asking as usual for suggestions got me a lot of songs, some of which mention insects more generally, and good number more were mentioning specific insects. Most of the songs this week, as a result, cover a number of the latter. Insects – more specifically fruitflies – were my wife’s subject of study for her masters and PhD, so I’ve learned a lot about insects over the years from her: even so, I’ve still likely got some details in the rest of this post wrong. If so, I’m sorry!

Anyway, I’ll buzz off now* and leave you with the songs.

(*I was going to try and avoid puns, but I couldn’t resist)

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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/Pitchshifter
/(We’re Behaving Like) Insects
/Infotainment?

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With the exception of the evergreen Virus, material earlier than www.pitchshifter.com has been conspicuous by its absence on most PSI tours over the past twenty years or so, with JS Clayden long on record as not being a particular fan of that earlier material, and certainly the band they became was very, very different to those early years! That said, Infotainment? is an important stepping stone: it is where the considerable influence of drum’n’bass became prominent in their sound, and would shape their best known songs. (We’re Behaving Like) Insects chops up breakbeats to create a staccato, complex rhythm that is accompanied by huge slabs of guitars and JS Clayden’s barked vocals. Here, he’s railing against conformity and bland uniformity by comparing humans in the mid-90s to insect colonies that must stick to their defined roles to succeed: but the sting is that those that really succeed are those that cause immense damage to others.

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/Mastodon
/March of the Fire Ants
/Remission

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The mighty Mastodon – probably one of the biggest post-Millenial metal bands around these days – are now relative veterans, having first broken through with their debut album Remission back in 2002, and their mix of stoner metal, tech metal and proggy textures made them stand out immediately. Their early albums were all (loosely, in some cases!) based around one of the four elements, and Remission was the fire album. March of the Fire Ants has a stately, monstrous power – just check the riff that heralds it – and seems to have little to do with the titular insect in the lyrics.

There are a lot of different Fire Ant, but most of them are red, aggressive and have a nasty bite and painful, venomous sting – the name comes from the feeling to humans that a sting feels like being burned. There are worse – as TV naturalist Steve Backshall found out – like the Bullet Ant, the world’s largest ant and one with a sting that apparently feels like being shot.

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/Yeah Yeah Yeahs
/Mosquito
/Mosquito

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There are an awful lot of mosquitoes – around 3,600 species of them – and these small insects that are characterised, among other things, by having specialised, long piercing-sucking mouthparts. They mostly are for obtaining nectar from flowers, but a number also suck blood from much larger animals (including humans). That latter part is a real problem as a number of species of mosquito are vectors for a number of diseases such as Malaria, Yellow Fever and Dengue Fever, that cause hundreds of thousands of deaths per year in the developing world where treatments are not available.

We live on the North-Eastern corner of the Romney Marsh in the far south-east of Kent (and England), and for centuries the area was plagued by mosquitoes that carried what we now know was malaria. The insects are still common in the area, but thankfully Malaria is no longer an issue around here.

This YYY song is far from their best – Mosquito comes from an album that felt like the band’s heart wasn’t really in it, and it wasn’t especially a surprise when the band took a hiatus after it, but this song does actually reference the titular insect…

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/Add N to (X)
/King Wasp
/On the Wires of Our Nerves

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Trying to identify what is a wasp appears to get complicated. Basically, they are part of the Apocrita suborder alongside Bees and Ants, and wasps are generally the ones that sting their prey. This makes them formidable predators, and solitary wasps – of which there are many – are mostly known to be parasitoidal, in that they lay their eggs on or in other insects, and eventually kill them. They also vary enormously in size, from the Asian Giant Hornet (up to five centimetres long), to the smallest known insects that are barely 0.1mm long.

Not exactly popular with most humans – they can become something of a nuisance in the summer, particularly when outdoors – there aren’t that many songs to reference them either, so here is analogue electronics fetishists Add N to (X) with their bluesy, Moog-and-robot lament.

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/Spahn Ranch
/Locusts
/The Coiled One

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A rare excuse to feature electro-industrial band Spahn Ranch, whose unusual sound (unafraid to bring in house music, jazz, and torch songs, among other influences) meant they were perhaps more of a niche band than they deserved to be. The sparkling remaster of 1995 album The Coiled One recently has rekindled interest at last, and the album opens with the grinding, driving force of Locusts.

Locusts are a form of grasshopper that under certain conditions (after a drought and when a rapid growth of crops follows) swarm in their billions, stripping entire fields of crops bare in minutes. They are best-known as Desert Locusts in sub-Saharan Africa, but also are found elsewhere (which is something I didn’t know before writing this…

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/st. vincent
/Flea
/All Born Screaming

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One of the highlights of the excellent recent st. vincent album was Flea, a song that got under my skin quickly. A song of obsession and perhaps coercive control, it tells of someone obsessed and lavishing their lover/victim with things and platitudes as a way of keeping them forever. Needless to say, it’s a particularly sinister song, but also packs a mighty punch thanks to the tumbling, powerful chorus.

Fleas are tiny parasites that live outside their hosts, live on their blood and can be difficult to rid from the host – as dog and cat owners will well know. They are also notable for being able to jump up to fifty times their own body length – the equivalent of a human being able to jump 80 or 90 metres!

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/Crazy Town
/Butterfly
/The Gift of Game

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There were a lot of suggestions for songs involving butterflies, many of which I’ve used long since – such as the seething industrial funk of Butterfly Wings by Machines of Loving Grace – so my wife suggested that I should include this Nu-Metal also-ran. Led by two vocalists – rappers Epic and Shifty Shellshock – they were something of a one-hit wonder, thanks to the immense success of Butterfly and everything else being basically forgotten.

The song is one of those that relies on the work of others – sampling Pretty Little Ditty by Red Hot Chili Peppers to create the distinctive core of the song, and is most notable for the lush, colourful video that features pretty women turning into butterflies…

Butterflies are winged insects that often have striking colouration and use mimicry and camouflage to avoid predators, and this summer at least in our local area we’ve seen more than we have in some years. One particular butterfly – the Comma – decided to lay eggs on my Hops last year, and if they do so again this summer, we’ll be moving the caterpillars to local nettlebeds that they also prefer.

Shifty Shellshock (Seth Brookes Binzer) died of an accidental drug overdose last year.

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/The Magnetic Fields
/100,000 Fireflies
/Distant Plastic Trees

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I must say The Magnetic Fields have never been a band that I knew much about, or ever dug into like friends have. But I must thank for them for suggesting this beautiful, desperate song that as NPR note, is a song of absolutely devastating loneliness. Sung by Susan Anway, who died four years ago of complications related to Parkinson’s disease, is the frail voice at the heart of this song, and the titular insects come in when she captures enough of them to light her room and help stave off the loneliness.

Fireflies are a type of beetle that have evolved the ability to create and emit light by bioluminescence, captivating humans for centuries and creating extraordinary spectacles at night

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/The Human League
/Being Boiled
/Travelogue

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The Human League’s origins are entwined with a number of the other notable Sheffield bands that emerged in the 1970s. Martyn Ware and Ian Craig Marsh were originally in The Future with Adi Newton, who left to form his own group Clock DVA. That brought in Phil Oakey as the replacement vocalist (his first job being to write the lyrics for Being Boiled, the first single by The Human League), and a few years later, Ware and Marsh left to form Heaven 17, with Oakey and Adrian Wright then taking the group in a hugely successful pop direction.

It’s fair to say that Being Boiled is light years removed from the likes of Don’t You Want Me. Instead of sleek pop hooks, ominous synths create a proto-industrial atmosphere only made weirder by Oakey’s lyrics referencing the practice of sericulture, the cultivation of silkworms to produce silk, which has resulted in domestic silkmoths being unable to survive in the wild.

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/Wire
/I Am The Fly
/Chairs Missing

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A song that Elastica, er, borrowed for Line Up (much as they took the guitar riff from Three Girl Rhumba and created the entire hook for Connection) actually deserves better than to be remembered as a source of inspiration. This taut, terse track sees Colin Newman imagining himself as a fly getting through the air-pellet gap in the screen to be an absolute pain in the arse to a human, reminding that said fly can apparently spread more disease and be a whole lot more irritating than a flea…

Wire were a band for many years that were uninterested in looking backward, instead jettisoning old songs and playing the new – or radically rearranged – instead. In their current era as elder statesmen of post-punk, they’ve remastered and re-released old material, and even played some of it live again…

As for flies? Over 150,000 species of specialised insects that have two sets of wings, but one is used to fly, the other to control flight to incredible effect…