999,816: Catatonia — Road Rage

Since it was first coined in the late 1980's, the term "road rage" has (apparently) proved inspirational for countless musicians across a whole spectrum of genres, from bluegrass to hip-hop to ska; in fact, you could go to your favorite online listening site right now and load up a playlist of over forty different songs called "Road Rage", which I would aggressively recommend if you're in the mood to listen to a shitload of really bad techno.

Picking a "Road Rage" at random, you have a better than even chance of selecting an instrumental (you're in good shape if you land a bluegrass number). Of those "Road Rage"s with lyrics, about three quarters are metal songs—it's a good rule of thumb to flee any track that starts off with beeping car horns—and damn near all of them are about "gripping the wheel" and getting stuck at red lights and so forth. You'd think the lead singers of unheralded thrash bands would have lots of interesting experiences, but no, they are pretty much always getting trapped behind some bad driver on the freeway and thinking that anyone in the world gives a crap.

It's not much of a surprise that the most listenable "Road Rage" has, thank GOD, nothing to do with people in pickup trucks failing to yield. Welsh alt-rockers Catatonia scored a UK hit in '98 while attempting to re-purpose the term to mean, I guess, something like "the state of being irked by a dude", an idea which didn't really catch on despite a super-hooky chorus. Of course, Catatonia seemed to have a problem knowing what words meant; they initially thought the name of their band was another way to say "a pleasurable sleep", and in "Road Rage", singer Cerys Matthews throws around the term "space age" like a random vocal tic, so, food for thought.

Whatever Catatonia thought their song was about, they do a lot of good things with the music part of it. Upward key changes at the beginning of the second and third verses help show off Matthews' range. Her voice has an impish, Bjork-ish quality to it, slightly husky, alternately bold and quavering, and her native accent gives the 'r' in 'rage' a bit of a trill. The chorus—"It's all over the front page/You give me road rage"—is so catchy it's hard to care that it makes no damn sense. Anyway, how much Welsh do YOU know? That's what I thought.