Saturday 25 April 2015

World Party 'Is It Like Today?'

Chart Peak: 19
YouTube
Karl Wallinger formed Would Party back in 1985 - he is a multi-instrumentalist, former member of the Waterboys and a former music director of the Rocky Horror Show... 'Is It Like Today?' was released on 29th March 1993.
For a long time, I thought the only World Party song I knew was 'Put The Message In The Box', which I remembered hearing a lot on the radio. At the end of the century Robbie Williams of course had a big hit with his cover of 'She's The One' and I think it was around the time that I was able to connect my knowledge that World Party had their only Top 20 (or even Top 30) hit with a song called 'Is It Like Today?' to the song that I'd heard quite a few times without really noticing the title.
It's sort of tempting to dislike this song because it has a slightly self-important quality (it is, after all, written from the perspective of God) and has a slightly fussy pristine sound about it. And yet there's a wisdom that seems to make me like it almost despite myself, and despite my slight squeamishness about the lyric "Blood just looks the same when you open the vein" and the clumsy "he went to the the moon" line. And the melody is very good, in an obviously Beatlesque way;  the group's then-bassist David Catlin-Birch was also a member of long-running tribute The Bootleg Beatles, which probably explains his performance in the video. It doesn't explain why the video is for the slightly overlong album version instead of the single edit though.

Available on: Bang!

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