This week: The Internet, Brandi Carlile, Tame Impala, Wilco, Fleetwood Max, Sarah McLachlan, Bruce Springsteen, Sneaker Pimps, INXS and Maroon 5
It's a three-day weekend here in the UK which means that Mondays are the new Sundays when it comes to posting weekly wrap ups. There are a lot of moving parts in play in the household this week - first, Catherine is away on a holiday with her mother on the Scottish island I want to move to one day, which is making me jealous, but has also offered me an unexpected Garbage Week Redux opportunity which, I'll admit, I have not taken any advantage of, mainly eating home cooked meals and staring at my computer trying to figure out how to bring in my Pearl Jam article for some kind of crash landing.
The other major concern has been my own impending trip away, this time to UK Games Expo, one of the largest Board Game conventions in Europe, at the Birmingham NEC starting on Thursday. My first UKGE was I think 2014, when I went for a Netrunner event and the show was 3 convention rooms in a hotel and a gazebo outside. Eleven years later, the event now takes up 3 convention halls and the entirety of the hotel ground floor for three and a half days. In 2014, 10,000 people attended the event; last year, 65,000 enthusiastic board game collectors descended on the show in force, breaking attendance records and with no sign of slowing down.
A relatively quiet part of the UKGE floor last year
With the exception of a slight blip for the global pandemic, I've been every year since that first trip in 2014, and each year we refine the experience a little. This year, my friends and I have a nice property secured near the venue, giving us the chance to experience the convention in all its glory, but when it all gets a bit too much or we just want to sit down and play games together only to find every flat surface is already occupied, we can retire to our home base for some peace and quiet away from the crowds. I'm very excited to get away again on Thursday, but this weekend trip probably means a slight disruption to blog posting while I recover from all the fun I've been having. I will see when I can get a wrapup post done next week, but probably no "main article" this week.
However, Catherine being away has afforded me a lot of time for music listening, so in addition to the twelve Pearl Jam albums I listened to in the last couple of weeks, I've been pacing around the house holding my bluetooth speaker like the worst customer on the bus (but its just me in here, so it's fine) cycling through albums as I get some jobs done prior to leaving for the convention. So, let's move through them at pace shall we?
This week I've been continuing to work on my Optional Mission Objective, working through a list of albums I am trying to have ticked off my listening list some time in August. I know that's very vague, but hopefully things will become clear as the year goes on and each of these albums being on that list is really the only unifying thread that ties them all together.
I was only vaguely aware of The Internet (the band, not the technological concept) before this week, but Ego Death jumped immediately into my list of gold starred albums to revisit, the kind of laid back hip-hop funk that I thought had fallen way out of favour still exists it seems, and I went from "oh, this has potential" to "damn this album is great" in the space of about 2 songs. Great late evening or chill Sunday morning music.
Brandi Carlile is another artist who I had heard one song by two or three years ago, thought to myself "I should check her album out" and then promptly forgot, so taking it off this list has been a helpful aide memoire. This was another instant hit, the kind of modern singer/songwriter country-tinged music that checks a lot of my boxes. It reminded me a little of Susanne Vega, a little of KT Tunstall and I enjoyed it so much I immediately recommended it to two different people I thought might also dig it. This one gets a strong recommendation from me also.
I knew Wilco mainly through Yankee Hotel Foxtrot which made it into my CD collection after a lot of serious music outlets proclaimed it An Important Album but it never really clicked for me, and that pattern continues with A Ghost Is Born. I know people who are ride-or-die Wilco fans and I suspect it's a musical acquired taste that I just haven't made the effort to acquire, but this left me cold. I mentioned also in my Pearl Jam album about bands putting self-indulgent commercially poisonous electronic meanderings on their albums and this album has a doozy, 15 minutes of relentless droning which made me think I was losing my mind. I don't know what bands are trying to prove when they do this, but I wish they would stop.
A part of the philosophy that drives me to do this every week is the idea that all music is valuable, every band is somebodies favourite, and you shouldn't gatekeep or alienate people from the big tent of Music Enthusiasts just because the music they are enthusiastic about is by Maroon 5. I get why they, like Nickelback, exist as a kind of overexposed, commercially produced punching back for the Serious Muso crowd, but they're a band that have a slick commercial polish and an album full of well constructed pop songs that are easy to sing along to. I'm never going to own a copy of Songs About Jane, but I can't in good faith get all uppity about it's existence. I'll say this as well, Maroon 5 songs are great Karaoke picks - Moves Like Jagger is a fun little duet, and Harder To Breathe is very high energy. Don't try for She Will Be Loved though, you can't get that high even if you think you can.
The cover art of Tame Impala's The Slow Rush made me immediately think of Dark Souls 2, and the area where there's a quicksand pit and some ziplines over it and a bunch of basilisks. Not relevant, but I thought I would share. Another band I've been aware of, but never sought out until this week, this was another gold star record. I would say I really need to get better at the thing where I know that a band is popular then I actually listen to them and try and figure out why, but I guess this year that is exactly what I am doing. Next year, lets hope it sticks. This album is great as a kind of comedown album, it feels like the ideal time to appreciate it is lying across your sofa with the curtains drawn and your eyes closed.
With INXS, we were out of the new discovery process and very much into the "revisiting a classic" phase instead. I know a lot of INXS songs, testament to their popularity and their level of exposure. I remember my Dad being very annoyed at INXS for recycling guitar riffs in their songs and I kind of see his point, but the drive of Need You Tonight and Suicide Blonde are undeniable. Kick's non-single tracks kind of passed me by, in a way where I'd definitely know it was INXS if I heard them but without the instant hook of the popular singles, but it didn't light a fire under me to explore the rest of their discography.
As I've alluded to in my previous articles, I was very much a guy who liked the Lillith Fair bands of the early 90s, so I own and have enjoyed Fumbling Towards Ecstacy many times*. I like nearly all of this album, just great big earnest emotional tracks skirting the line between country and 'soft rock' (whatever that is), but it's an album which commits the cardinal sin of publishing a cover in its track listing. The rule I stick to is if you put a cover on your album, it has to be both different AND better to avoid my judgemental gaze, and if you are going to cover Joni Mitchell, and the title track off her iconic album at that, you are never going to meet those lofty goals. Another album which is vastly improved by you stopping it playing just before the last track.
This week seemed like a good time to listen to some Bruce Springsteen, for
some reason. I'm not going to tell you anything you don't already know about one of the best albums every made, apart from to say if you've not heard
Born To Run I'd implore you to take the time, but I can tell you that this was another firm favourite in our household growing up. The Boss, along with The Zombies and The Beatles and Roberta Flack, were my mother's favourite bands to listen to, and we'd often have this album blaring through the house from my dad's oversized speakers in our dining room, or rattling the windows of our car on family trips. Since I was very young, I've always sang along with albums - I think that's the natural state of being for everyone but I've been informed that is not correct - and so my parents enjoyed recounting to anyone who would listen the story of me singing along to
10th Avenue Freezeout where I thought the song was about someone called Ted W Freezow, and refused to sing it any other way or accept that I was wrong.
And if you think I wasn't qualified to talk about Born To Run in depth, my god, is there any aspect of the story of Rumours that has not been covered somewhere? If, somehow, you're not aware of the story of Fleetwood Mac's seminal album just type "the story of Fleetwood Mac Rumours" into Youtube and watch your computer melt down. When you have recovered, watch one of the 5,000 videos it has recommended to you, it's quite something. The Chain has to be up there on the list of the best songs of all time, you all know that. I listened to this album, it was inevitable, what else is there to say?
Last week I talked about Chvrches and how if I'd known they were carrying on the legacy of a 1990s band I loved, I would have got to them sooner. This is that album,
Becoming X by the Sneaker Pimps. If I were invited on a music podcast to talk about obscure albums everyone should listen to, this might be my outsider pick, a record which has disappeared into the mists of time but I think is tragically underappreciated. So much so, I wrote about it comprehensively in 2017, so if you want to know more about how I feel about this album, go read
this!
And with that, we are wrapped for another week. As I said, probably no article this week until I get back from UK Games Expo where I will force my housemates to pick albums for me to listen to as we play games. Till next time!
*Feel free to make up you own dirty joke or comment here, I am not doing it for you.
