Song of the Week: Penny Sweets

I'm so happy I could cry. I was secretly hoping you would pick Penny Sweets this week, and here you are making all my dreams come true! I actually had every intention of using this one as the first Song of the Week before we started voting for them, but I changed my mind at the eleventh hour and went with Prawn Soup instead. It really doesn't make much of a difference either way, there's no wrong answer in the Skinner Brother's catalog, but I have still been pining over this missed opportunity ever since.

So what's so special about Penny Sweets, you ask? (Because we both know you didn't click on that video. You owe me a cupcake if I’m right about that...) To state the obvious, it's just so damned good! It's effortlessly enjoyable, and sometimes you just need a little break from... all this *gestures vaguely*

Did the bassline blow my head off as promised? Not yet, but there is still hope. The bassline does give it a little sparkle of chaotic energy though, and the lyrics are playfully antagonistic from beginning to end. Think about it this way—if you take the music away from this song and just quote any part of the lyrics to a random guy in a bar, he's probably going to hit you.

That's the metric I use for determining how cool a song is, by the way. If it wouldn't get you knocked tf out over a basket of mozzarella sticks, is it even worth remembering? In the immortal words of the Devil's Rejects, “The next words out of your mouth better be some brilliant Mark Twain shit, because it's definitely getting chiseled on your tombstone!”

Sick to the bone but I'm bastard clever

Close enough. Penny Sweets is sharp, catchy, and it's laced with devastating wit. To put it plainly, this song is what happens when you give the little devil on your shoulder a microphone and a couple of shots of tequila. It is one of the many vibrant, genre-blending gems from the Soul Boy IV album, and if you've already had the pleasure of listening to that you'll know that Penny Sweets is nestled in among some lyrical titans. Basically, it had to be tough to survive in that pond.

One of the strangest compliments I could probably give this track is that when I'm driving with the radio up, the bass vibrates my driver-side door in such a way that all the early-onset arthritis in my knee disappears like a cockroach when the light comes on.

That may sound strange to you youngins, but for those of us who have joints that predict the weather better than the 6 O'clock news, this is a miracle of modern science. Big Pharma doesn’t want to know about Penny Sweets! (At least that’s what they keep telling me in their emails).

And not to toot my own horn here, but you guys should be proud of me— I only had to Google one thing in this song without having to use my Brit to Yank translator (Jackie) to make sure I wasn't about to say anything profoundly stupid. Admittedly, I had no idea what an Ericsson 4 was because I wasn't born in the 1800s. I assumed it was a reference to the brick of a phone you can see Zac carrying throughout the video, but I wanted to be sure before mentioning it.

Did you know the Ericsson 4 was also a Volvo Open 70 racing yacht that, according to Wikipedia, broke the world record for the greatest distance travelled in 24 hours on a monohull yacht? That's right, you read it here first: even Google has no idea what an Ericsson 4 is, so now I don't feel so bad.

Seriously though, if that phone from the video fell off a building it would create an extinction-level event that only the phone itself would survive. That's probably what killed the dinosaurs, come to think of it. The phone would be left beeping in the bottom of a massive crater for centuries to come, playing happy birthday to itself like the Mars Curiosity rover until the battery finally died.

Gigantic phones and monohull yachts aside, if you're subscribed to the Skinner Brother's Patreon channel, you'll see multiple behind the scenes videos where Zac has described his songwriting style as melody first, not lyrics. In my completely unsubstantiated opinion, artists tend to fit into one of those two categories (lyrics first vs melody first), and when they're really good at one of them the other tends to suffer unless they have help. Kind of like how the rest of us are usually either really good at English or math, but not both.

What's curious about this is that despite the melody being the primary focus, the lyrics are always stellar as well, and Penny Sweets is no exception to that. I honestly cannot think of a single other band with so many quotable songs. In fact, I am hard pressed to think of a single song from the Skinner Brother’s back catalog that doesn't have at least one line that would make an excellent tattoo, or perhaps some kind of deranged motivational poster.

...And that's enough of that. Here's the lyrics to Penny Sweets if you'd like- I'm reasonably confident about them this time since I pulled them directly from the music video.

Onward to greatness, my friends.

☘️🖤

I blow ya head off with the bassline
Come through with the 4-5
Penny Sweets when I'm broke like
I live my movie every Friday night
Catch the wave then I feel right
Cuz I can sleep when I'm dead like
Them fucking goons got no appetite
I tell Alexa change the beat right

Sick to the bone, but I'm bastard clever
Texting my phone from a different Bella
I'm up London city at the break of dawn
Pocket of green and an Eriksson 4

Take me back to something
All my love no bluffing
You don't know about nothing
So why'd you talk so much then?

Heard it through the grape vine
I thought nothing
Jackson Alley road cats keep the beats bussin'
Every prick in the place thinks he's on somethin'
I thought they made music, I guess it didn't cut it

Sick to the bone, but I'm bastard clever
Texting my phone from a different Bella
I'm up London city at the break of dawn
Pocket of green and an Eriksson 4

Take me back to something
All my love no bluffing
You don't know about nothing
So why'd you talk so much then?