Although the opening track on The Collected Fictions Mixtape is not a hip-hop song, it nonetheless takes numerous musical cues from the genre. The most obvious expression of this influence, aside from the vocalists each tackling a seperate verse, is in its use of sampling; amid the low-key soundscape of droning synths and rumbling bass echoing at the far reach of audibility, the first sound heard on the record is the voice of Morrissey. The choice was a direct result of Ulysses' time as producer on This Charming Sham, during which he developed a love for the music of the Smiths. "I just think they have the greatest lyrics," he enthuses, "And that's inarguable, isn't it? Their album, 'Strangways...', has the coolest opening line I've ever heard. I tried to come up with something better. I failed. So I stole it."

The sample, taken from the song A Rush and a Push and the Land is Ours, appears throughout fivehead: at the very beginning, and throughout the first verse, chopped up and sequenced in sync with the beat. Ulysses sings overtop, his voice muffled and filtered through auto-tune, cold and near indecipherable. The lyrics personify this sense of alienation, expressing a feeling of social anxiety while the backing instrumentals carry on in a robotic fashion. At the verse's end, the hook is sung again in its entirety, but this time by Nick Junk, his first appearance on album that will soon be dominated by his presence. At his arrival, the song shifts into something more euphoric. The guitars kick in, and the machinist instrumentation is replaced with genuine bass and drums. The melody remains the same, but the distorted riffing brings to mind anthemic 90s britpop, a vibe Junk sells with utmost conviction, his swaggering vocals celebrating antisocial tendecies, while Ulysses tended to wallow in them.

During the writing and recording of fivehead, Ulysses listened to recordings of popular rock tunes performed on the piano, noting how subtle differences in performance could dramatically altar what remained, essentially, the same basic song. "Music is so easily manipulated. It can be anything. I take the same chord structure and drag it from Kanye's 808s and Heartbreak to Oasis' Definitely Maybe, in the span of three minutes. An epic in miniature. It's a good opening track, because it shows that anything could happen on the EP. And it does..."

The song ends in mass sing-along: Ulysses and Junk sing in duet, their voices overdubbed and multitracked to the point of sounding like a choir. The final couplet repeats in joyous ad nauseum as the song fades into the next, the guitar gradually swelling in sound until it threatens to envelop itself and everything around it.

Lyrically, the song is an ode to the escapism inherent in music; blast your favorite tune, and your insecurities vanish in the rearview. "I'm rubbish at meeting people," says Junk, "Unless I'm onstage, screaming them down through a microphone. That's the best way of gettin' to know me. An' fivehead's about that. I think. It's hard to tell with Fuzzy, his lyrics are so fuckin' fruity."

Edited by user 24 May 2014 14:41:20(UTC)  | Reason: Not specified

The loudest track on the EP, 2012 is by no means the most rocking. A contemplative piece of shoegazing, it begins the emotional heart of the record: a trinity of songs removed, sonically and lyrically, from the anthemic tunes that bookend them. "It's the classic bait-and-switch," comments Ulysses, "You have to hit them with something catchy, then sneak in something a little more, uhm... melodramatic. And just when they're getting bored, dial it back up to 11."

The third song on The Collected Fictions Mixtape is essentially one long, heavily distorted guitar drone, burying Ulysses' solo vocal near the point of inaudibility. It is drum free, and the bass is mixed in to sound like an extension of the tremolo-tinged six-string, two instruments blended as one. Nick Junk's absence is appropriate, given the heavily autobiographical nature of the lyrics. Perhaps embarrassed how revealing they are, Ulysses masks his words through sheer volume of otherwise delicate instrumentation.

facehuggers and 2012 are, in almost every aspect, polar opposites; the former parodic, the latter tranquil, serious. Yet they share a similarity. "They're both about drugs," their writer admits, "But in an utterly non-rocknroller sort of way. One's a bit of a joke, and the other's about a feeling of... almost paralysis, really. Just being out of your mind, unable to move in any direction, while the world around you speeds by in a blur. In a sense, it's not even a drug song. I'm sure it's something quite a few can relate to. Or maybe not. Maybe I'm just crazy."