Ask any familiar listener, casual or diehard, to sing the song’s infamous single-line chorus and invariably you’ll hear back: “Send it up on fire / Death before dawn.” This sinister lyric holds for the track, ostensibly about a submissive wife figure detailing to an oppressive male subject her daily domestic routine in which she “cleans the house…., put[s] all [his] books in an order” and “makes up a colorful border”. The lyric is fitting, the assumed revenge she takes warranted. Phair is comparing herself to a canary (a bird known, apart from its more charming attributes, for its extreme nervousness and restlessness when caged and handled for too long), her accomplishments are tantamount to learning her name and “jump[ing] when [he] circle[s] the cherry”. The imagery is simple, even bordering a touch on clichéd ‘90s-grrl-angst, but Phair sells it with her flat, whispery vocal delivery against the chilly, sparse instrumentation that approaches near crescendo but reliably cops out each time like a weak tide approaching the shore.

Klinger: In the past, we’ve spent a good amount of time talking about the double album, and we’ve broken them down into two basic categories: the Grand Artistic Statement and the Pile. Your Grand Artistic Statements showcase an artist who is trying to create a larger narrative (Tommy) or immerse the listener in an overall mood (Exile on Main St.). The Pile records are the work of artists who just have songs coming out of their ears and cannot possibly edit them down to one cohesive statement, so they unload them all at once and leave us to sort it out. Maybe we should have come up with a less dismissive-sounding name for them, because they include such masterworks as Sign o’ the Times and the “White Album”.

Elton John’s Goodbye Yellow Brick Road is a good example of a Grand Artistic Statement, in the sense that it is a two-record meditation on the nature of rock stardom. All throughout the album, we hear Elton and lyricist Bernie Taupin both revel in and recoil from all that stardom has had to offer them thus far. It’s interesting to note, though, that this album was recorded in the most Pile-like conditions imaginable. According to the involved parties, the musicians were gathered in their mansion/studio and lyrics would get penned in the morning, a tune would be added in the afternoon and the track would be laid down in short order. It was an assembly line that led to one of the biggest blockbusters of the 1970s, and it marks the point where Elton John, the rootsy, slightly nebbishy balladeer, became ELTON JOHN, flamboyant, glammish, still slightly nebbishy rock star.

On Vampire Weekend’s first two LPs, lead singer and lyricist Ezra Koenig name-dropped Lil’ Jon, Peter Gabriel, and Jackson Crowder (identity not important) more times than he did God. In fact, Koenig’s lone reference to the divine was merely colloquial in nature: On “I Stand Corrected”, he sings, “Lord knows I haven’t tried”. That hardly counts. Though memorable, Koenig’s lyrical concerns back then didn’t register as all that weighty or ruminative. They instead had the mark of privileged, idle-time eccentricity, e.g. punctuation distinctions, sartorial refinement, and milky Spanish beverages. What came to the fore through such imagery, especially on the band’s eponymous debut, was a vivid sense of place. Fleshed-out themes weren’t a priority.

On this count, Vampire Weekend’s newly released third record—far and away its best—is a much different and more interesting animal. Though Koenig hasn’t jettisoned his colorful and digressive wordplay, Modern Vampires of the City comes through as a very theme-driven collection of songs. Both the sunny Ivy League provincialism of the band’s debut and the confident post-undergraduate worldliness of Contra are in the rear-view. In their place: aging, death, and the Man Upstairs, the last of these perhaps most overtly. Modern Vampires of the City is indeed a deeply God-haunted work, with song titles that include “Unbelievers”, “Everlasting Arms”, “Worship You”, and “Ya Hey” (think “Yahweh”). Now Koenig doesn’t give any indication he himself is a believer (more often just the opposite), but there is a recurring sense of engagement with God throughout the album, a sense of wrestling with the implications and impossibilities of faith. By accident or, more likely, by design, this builds and builds until Koenig puts everything on the table and addresses God directly.

In late April 2013, I sat in the Sonoran Desert, listening, for the first time in years, to Alice in Chains’ “Nutshell”. The occasion for this event was a cousin’s First Holy Communion. Her family lives just outside of Phoenix, Arizona, and though their neighborhood is willfully suburban—massive sports complexes don’t naturally exist in the desert—the Sonoran’s vast, charred landscape is never entirely masked by strip mall sprawl. Indeed, from the relative comfort of my cousin’s back patio, it seemed that any of the hundreds of miles that stretch outward from there to the Pescott National Forest (and well beyond) could have served as the setting for the cover photo of Alice in Chains’ Dirt.

On that late April evening, I found myself listening to AIC for the most banal of reasons: my uncle had set his satellite radio to the Lithium channel. As a teenager, I was a fan of Alice in Chains, perhaps more so than of any of the other grunge bands of the early-1990s. To date, I have probably heard “Nutshell” hundreds of times. Still, on that oppressively hot night, I found the song more moving than I ever had in the past. There was something eerily appropriate about Layne Staley, a victim of a fatal drug addiction, crooning, “I’d feel better dead” on the eve of a sacramental celebration. Catholicism, if nothing else, promises the ecstasy of an afterlife, a life that begins when the eternal soul is resurrected from the imperfect, ever-decaying body. In a way, Staley’s sentiment is entirely Catholic, which is a thought that I honest-to-God never imagined I’d think.

The two couldn’t sound more dissimilar—in fact, nothing else on Guyville sounds even remotely like “Joe”—and yet when their sequencing is taken into account (not unlike my previous meditation on “Help Me Mary” and “Glory”) alongside their shrewd parallels and contrasts, it further spotlights how it is the accumulation of Guyville’s subtleties that ultimately round it up to in-your-face heights. Not the deadpan assertion that Phair “want[s] to fuck you til your dick is blue” (but we’ll get to that eventually, never fear).

“Soap Star Joe” begins like a bedtime story, Phair, in the same husky, mock-macho affect employed on “6’1””, telling us of a “hero in a long line of heroes, looking for something attractive to save”. The verses are punctuated with various “they say” disclaimers, which either warn us that the yarn she’s spinning is hyperbolic and untrue, born of judgment and hearsay, or in fact so typical and true that she’s boasting her expert ability to paint this portrait with her eyes closed. “Joe” wears tight blue jeans and too much aftershave, has thinning hair, apparently waves his dick around like he was “sprung from the skull of Athena” then “rode in on the back of a pickup…and won’t leave town til you remember his name”. Phair’s vocal performance on “Joe” betrays an ambivalence that suggests she’s either singing about no one in Guyville, or just about everyone in town.