0.19.0 - I was Told When I Get Older, All My Fears Would Shrink (Week 19 Wrapup)
This week: Bon Iver, Paul McCartney, Death Cab, Ani DiFranco and a grab bag of other artists
So, I'm not sleeping again. Good for my productivity - if listening to albums at four in the morning and writing these works at 7am counts as productive - bad for my general focus and energy levels. In this case, it's not exclusively the general state of the world which is summoning me from my comfortable bed in the early hours, though that's definitely still a factor. In this case, I think either one or both of Catherine and I are fighting off some kind of low grade summer cold; nothing major, but it's making Catherine snore like a rusty chainsaw at the moment, and there's really no solving for it. So for the past few nights, I've been awakened by the miniature grinding wheel taking up residence next to me, which snaps me awake; and once I am awake, both my body and mind betray me. My ancient and infirm body tells me that since I am awake, I should probably go empty my bladder. In the course of making my way from bedroom to bathroom, my brain realises it is awake and deploys its legion of anxiety-laden flying monkeys to flutter around my cerebellum. I've tried heading back to bed, put on a podcast, try and get a couple of extra hours, but what I mainly get is complaints from Catherine about waking her up when I try and sneak back into the bedroom and how she'd like just one night of uninterrupted sleep. So tonight I decided to leave her there to her dreams and go sit in my office and catch up on some listening and watch the sun come up.
The fact my album counter is stopped on 499 is obviously also by design. The ability of the human brain to assign import and significance to arbitrary numbers in a sequence conflicts with my rationalist mindset - album 500 has no greater real prominence in a set of 1000 than album 227 - but I'm not immune to our species-wide malady for milestones, so I wanted to make sure I picked something appropriate for my half way point listening and not just barrel ahead with undirected listening.
On top of that, naturally when you are 480+ albums into an already mostly pointless project, its important to decide to slide in a sub-goal which you can't really talk about yet; sufficed to say I've had some extra inspiration for a direction to take my album consumption when I don't have a theme I am trying to hit, and consequently, I've managed to listen to a lot of seemingly disparate albums this week while cooking, driving to Manchester and back for an extended family (in laws) gathering, and waking up stupidly early. What this does present is an interesting challenge in how to group these albums together and talk about them, and I've done my best but it's early and I am already tired so if the links are tenuous, you will have to forgive me.
Moving straight from finishing the back end of the Metallica discography to listening to The Chicks and Wide Open Spaces was like a breath of fresh air which reminded me that music can be energetic and fun. I've mentioned before that I have a lot of time for The Chicks, both musically (I'm a sucker for tales of revenge, spurned women, and a slide guitar) and personally because of their principled stand on the Iraq War and willing to accept what it cost them in terms of negative publicity to stand firm for what they believed in. There's Your Trouble might be the most well known of their songs off this album, but I'm a fan of Let 'Er Rip where a bored and frustrated woman waits for her paramore to get up the courage to tell her he is breaking up with her.
A new thing that I learned this weekend is that there are people on Earth who don't like Kate Bush, something that I hadn't really considered before. I assumed the phrase "universally acclaimed" had been created specifically for her. But my sister-in-law finds Kate Bush's voice sets her teeth on edge, showing the infinite variety of ways in which people can be wrong. Listening to Hounds of Love is the third Kate Bush album I've covered so far this year and it the one I like the best, or certainly know the best. This was another family favourite, and I remember my Dad owning this on vinyl back in the day. It's fine if you don't like Kate Bush, but you should consider trying harder.
When I met Catherine, there was a lot of crossover in the Venn Diagram of our musical taste, but one of the joys of a new relationship is all the new music you can find yourself exposed to, and Ani DiFranco was someone I hadn't even heard of before I met Catherine. I heard Self Evident from So Much Shouting, So Much Laughter first, which she played to me from a mix CD from a friend of hers in Texas which is how she in turn came to it. Since that time, I've seen Ani DiFranco live twice, including once in a actual factual operating Church in Manchester which was quite a surreal gig both for us and for Ms DiFranco (considering all the ways in which her life/lifestyle/lyrics might be at odds with organised religion), but to this day I can't tell you which parts of her discography I've heard and which I have not. Evolve wasn't an album I was knew, but the familiar concoction of jazz instrumentation and poetic lyrics made me feel completely at home as we drove across the peak districts countryside roads in the sun.
And finally, an oddity. Catherine had heard a radio programme about Emiliana Torrini and her album Miss Flower, which she had written after her friend discovered a series of letters written to her mother from suitors and admirers throughout her life, and Emiliana turned those letters and reflections into a kind of musical portrait of her friends mother's life (which in turn has also inspired a musical film project, which is where Catherine heard about it). The music is a kind of sparse electronica, and the vocals are dreamlike in some cases and incredibly present in others; the lyrics range from complex metaphor to literalistic readings from some of the letters in question, and the whole project is very interesting (if hard to dance to). I said to Catherine, who had put it on as we drove back, that it reminded me a lot of early Bjork albums in tone and consistency, and it wasn't until this morning when I was writing this that I found out that Elimiana Torrini (who I assumed was Italian or Spanish with a name like that) is also Icelandic so I guess that tracks. It's unusual and not immediately accessible, but I found myself paying attention to it quite keenly, so if you are looking for something that might challenge you with an interesting backstory to boot, give it a try.
it might be a while before I cycle back to listening to some more classical music, so it seemed like a good opportunity to tick Switched-On Bach off my list, another album that lived collecting dust in my Dad's vinyl collection when I was younger. At the time, I guess, the idea of electronically 'orchestrated' Bach, using the best modern musical techniques of the 1970's probably ruffled a lot of feathers and would have caused huge online discourse if we had social media back then. Now it feels almost quaint, just some straight-ahead, well performed renditions of classical pieces using synths instead of a full orchestra, but it's a very easy listen if you want the gentlest on-ramp possible into listening to classical music with a modern ear.
Sometimes I'm just in the mood for some good old fashioned modern indie rock, and this little fourtet of albums all crossed my path this week for one reason or another. Pinkerton is, of course, the last good Weezer album before Rivers & Co went off the deep end into an ironic/post ironic/sincere quantum realm from which they have never emerged. Like the blue self-titled album, Pinkerton is just a good solid rock album in which the lyrics point to Rivers Cuomo making some choices which might have got him cancelled in 2025; instead of controlling behaviour towards and white-knighting his fictional asian girlfriend on the Blue album, he switches things up on Pinkterton to singing about sexually pursuing a girl he knows to be gay. What a cool guy. The songs are generally pretty good though, even if this is where my patience with Weezer ends.
Until I listened to this album after it was covered by excellent music podcast This One Goes To 11, the only thing I had ever heard by Everclear (a band which did not, as far as I can tell, cross over from the US audiences to an international stage) was the song they contributed to the Baz Luhrmann's Romeo + Juliet soundtrack album (which, if I were allowing myself Various Artist albums as a cheat, I'd almost certainly cover because it's such a cultural artifact of specifically the year 1996). Having listened to So Much For The Afterglow, I can say that sonically it's very indicative of way Everclear music is, while lyrically and tonally being so far removed from each other that they might as well be in different galaxies. Local God sounds like a chill beach party guitar anthem and that's what I assumed Everclear were and why they'd never made it in the UK; So Much For The Afterglow applies the same rock guitar and drum tones to songs about poverty, child abandonment, and alcoholism, which was a hugh about-face in terms of what I was expecting. It seems terribly dismissive to say that lead singer Art Alexakis's musical therapy session about the struggles of his adolescence made great background music while I was cooking, but it really did.
When the long term relatiomship I was in collapsed into the series of events which would lead to me spending long periods of my life pretty depressed, part of the collateral damage from that nuclear fallout was that I stopped listening to The Foo Fighters. In Your Honour and Echos, Silence, Patience and Grace had formed a huge part of the musical background of that relationship, and the copies of those albums in the CD rack behind me were gifted to my by my then-partner; as a result, it was probably years before I even went back and listened to the albums of theirs that I owned, and even then I never strayed much past One by One. I was aware Dave Grohl and Co were out there making new music, and while he's sullied his reputation as the nicest man in Rock & Roll with his recent infidelity scandal, I've always been certain of his ability to write a powerfully energetic rock song. Until this week, I'd never listened to Wasting Light, existing as it does behind the 2007-2010 firebreak of my Foo Fighters listening; because Foo Fighters songs seem impossible to avoid, I'd heard These Days before, but nothing else, and it should come as no surprise that 2011 Foo Fighters can continue to produce simple, heartfelt, driving rock songs. Somehow, despite deaths and scandals and broken limbs and cancelled tours, Foo Fighters still feel like the central pillar holding guitar music together in the public consciousness.
I was so convinced I'd already covered Cool It Down by Yeah Yeah Yeahs I ended up scrolling all the way back through my ongoing Bluesky thread to make sure I hadn't just somehow missed noting it down. But no, I've made it halfway without listening to an album I probably listened to fifty+ times during the later parts of the COVID lockdown. Like I guess many many people, I first got exposed to Fever To Tell and Yeah Yeah Yeah's in general (I have to keep stopping myself from putting The Yeah Yeah Yeahs because that's not their name but it should be if only for the sake of my sanity) via the medium of Maps being part of the original Rock Band videogame track listing. That song, and Date With The Night which was also on there, would be staples of our Rock Band playing sessions, and as a result would drive me to get the album, and then listen repeatedly to it. In truly unhinged fashion, I've got many hours listening to 2003's Fever to Tell, even more listening to 2022's Cool It Down, and somehow I have totally skipped the three albums released in that nineteen year span. Karen O. is still incredibly infectiously angry and dreamy in equal measure and Fever To Tell is a modern classic.
What links Death Cab for Cutie and Bon Iver? Both of these are bands that I came to, way too late, and only because of links to other bands I was listening to. For Death Cab, as I said in my first proper post for 2025, I avoided them for a long time because I thought based on the name they were some kind of surf metal band (who knows where I got that idea from), and it wasn't until I dug deeper into The Postal Service that I went back and started listening to their albums. Even in that case, Codes & Keys never made it past a perfunctory listen to say I'd experienced it though - Transatlanticism and Narrow Stairs were far more my speed and got the majority of my listening time. The more I interrogate my listening habits, the more I realise I hit a certain checkbox point with bands where, quite arbitrarily, I decide I have got everything I am going to get out of a bands work and just let them ride off into the sunset, often to my own detriment as I miss out of music I would definitely have enjoyed. The appeal of new experiences is too great for me to stay in any one place for too long it seems. If Codes & Keys had come before Narrow Stairs, I might be talking about that album (which I love) in these terms, but I will say Codes & Keys doesn't have I Will Possess Your Heart on it which could well have been the tiebreaker.
When Bon Iver blew up, I wasn't unaware of the fact, but for reasons which can only be put down to contrariness and a stubborn refusal to admit other people can be right, I just didn't engage with For Emma, Forever Ago when it was getting 8.1 scores from Pitchfork and named Album of the Year by Rough Trade and Observer Music Monthly. Then, when the Pandemic hit and I disappeared into a Taylor Swift shaped rabbit hole from which I have never emerged, Bon Iver's presence on the Evermore album (the album which made me a Swiftie and which might still be my favourite of her discography) led me to reconsider my stance that this album couldn't be all that great and go back and listen to it. It's fine, good even, an excellent example of an acoustic male singer/songwriter excelling in the form, but its still not as exciting to me as it was for those people back in 2007 - maybe because my love for Sufjan Stevens and Badly Drawn Boy and going back to James Taylor, I felt this to be just another very well crafted album in a genre already populated by giants. A decade later, A Crow Looked at Me by Mount Eerie would come out as the next truly groundbreaking album in this genre, but again, if you had no background in this kind of music, I can see how this album could easily be someone's favourite of all time. For the record, his tracks with Taylor are amongst some of my favourites in all of her work, so hopefully that makes up for me not liking this album as much as everyone else does.
I love The Beatles. I like Wings, and Band On The Run is an all time great. I've never listened to this before this morning, but it was on a list I am trying to work my way through and if I am honest, it did not endear itself to me. Paul's slightly kooky, cartoonish side, with funny voices and characters and narratives, worked in the context of the Beatles because he was a writer with many editors; his instincts could be pared back and made to work inside the framework of whatever musical goal they were trying to accomplish. Without an editor at all, that's how you get an album like Ram. It's incredibly creative, and I have no doubt that McCartney is a musical genius, but there are so many ideas on here I couldn't help but feel like stuff like Uncle Albert / Admiral Halsey and Monkberry Moon Delight got pitched as Beatles album tracks and were swiftly rebuffed for being too hokey. I'm all for people experimenting, putting their stuff out there and seeing if it finds an audience, and I know for sure Ram has a lot of fans, but I am not one of them. Sorry Paul, lets see if I can find a way to make it up to you.
And there we are, week 19 in the books. Next week, I have to pick something to listen to for Album 500 as the halfway point, and I have a list of nine other albums I need to finish for an article before the weekend, so hopefully deadlines will motivate me to actually get some more writing done. As always, if you want to correspond with me I've set up the recordreconstructor@gmail.com inbox which is currently a pristine white wasteland which is quite pleasing, or most of the people reading this can just send me a Whatsapp message.
Peace.
