0.23.0 - Refuse. Resist. (Weeks 22 and 23 wrapup)

This week: Songs and albums about games, the Queens of the Stone Age discography, and confusing the Spotify algorithm.

Well, I was all set to have a quiet weekend when things got thrown out of kilter when a friend's teenage daughter was hit by a car while crossing at a zebra crossing (thankfully she seems to be alright, despite being knocked into the air by the vehicle), which threw into disarray Catherine's plans, which we managed to stitch back together but she was then out all Saturday evening which I spent in turn watching coverage of the increasing tensions between the citizens of Los Angeles and the agents of the Federal Government sent to harass them, and spiralling out on my own, waiting for the escalation into full blown martial law.  Needless to say, the whole affair has left me feeling weirdly unsettled, with misfortunes both foreign and domestic on my mind.  It did make me think of Refuse/Resist by Sepultura who provided this week's article title though.

Because I missed last week's wrap up, we're going to go speed round through lots of these albums apart from where I have something significant to say to try and keep this article under 4 hours of writing time.  Lets' see how we get on, and we're starting with an album where I have something to talk about at least.

So this week, after embarking on a multi-year campaign to rerecord and rerelease all her albums which she did not own the commercial rights for, this week Taylor Swift purchased back the rights to her entire commercial catalogue from the previous holders, allowing her to fully own 100% of everything she has ever produced.  You may not care for her music, or her public persona, or the prevalence of her fans, but no matter how you feel about her as an artist (and it's established canon by now that I am one of those fans who annoy you, and I love her work) the fact that musicians are forced to enter into a devil's bargain with the music industry to give up rights to their own creative output is miserable;  her success and stubborn refusal to be made a victim of that system, at great cost to herself (cue in the infamous interview where Taylor says "People often greatly underestimate me on how much I'll inconvenience myself to prove a point if I think I'm right") by releasing versions of her albums owned entirely by her, which meant re-recording them track by track for years - and with the general support of her own fanbase who have refused to listen to the 'stolen' versions of her early albums and wait instead for the Taylor's Version to be released - finally devalued the value of her historic masters until she was in a position to negotiate for and purchase them for herself, at insane personal cost.  It's an incredible multi-year campaign to reclaim the music she made for herself.  The fact she had to be as successful, rich, stubborn, and bloody-minded as she was to make this happen is ludicrous, but that she was, and won in the face of so many opportunities to give up, is a triumph.

So I listened to Speak Now (Taylor's Version) as my monthly dose of Taylor for June (if she doesn't release a new album before December this year I am not going to have enough to get me through the year but I have hope), which has become my favourite of her early albums.  It exists just at the inflection point where she transitions from being a Nashville country singer and becomes a pop star.  There's still country twang sprinkled across this record, but as a seasoning spread across a series of songs which touch on pop-rock like Haunted and Better Than Revenge*, torch song ballads like Last Kiss and Enchanted, and country floor-stomping toe-tappers like Mean and Sparks Fly.  It also features Long Live, a song about the power of music and performance which makes me a little bit emotional every time I hear it.  It would be years before her rise to pop dominance would begin in earnest, but the first steps down the road started on this album.  

I mentioned briefly when I talked about ...Like Clockwork that I had spent the prior weekend at UK Games Expo.  I have a complex relationship with Expo, only because as someone who's not wild about large crowds and finds long periods of socialising draining, but also loves the community atmosphere you get at the show and the opportunity to disconnect from responsibility and just focus on the things I love about playing games with my friends, it can be a tough needle to thread.  

The first three albums above I selected for the drive down to the show because, well, they have the world 'Game' in their title and I'm extremely basic.  I knew Lene Marlin from her lone popular song (I don't like to use the term one-hit wonder because I think it's dismissive and very location-specific - I know for example she had several successful singles off this album outside of the UK) that I was aware of, Sitting Down Here, which if I type "...I'm sitting down here / but hey you can't see me..." might have popped the entire song into your head.  Playing My Game was fine and sounded a lot like the one song I knew, which isn't much of a surprise.  Desire are a Canadian band which make Italian Electro Pop, which I did not know was a specific genre but apparently it is.  Games People Play felt a lot like an album which should either be listened to very quietly as ambient background music (which was how I experienced it), or incredibly loud in a neon soaked basement filled with dancing bodies.  It was OK.  Finally we got to an album which I not only knew, but still own on CD, Gift of Game by Crazy Town, a band which felt like they existed to try and become the nu-metal version of the Red Hot Chilli Peppers and instead produced an album so specifically pinned to the year 2000 future time travellers use it like a beacon to orient themselves.  It feels like a generation of late Gen X and Millenials all know Butterfly which was an unlikely hit, but the entire album is just a hodge-podge of samples of what Crazy Town thought was cool at the time.  They broke up after their second album flopped badly, and sadly both DJ AM and lead singer Shifty Shellshock both passed away due to ongoing substance abuse issues in the last two years.  I know its a bummer, but I felt I had to mention it because it didn't seem fair to dunk on their musical output without acknowledging their personal circumstances.

So the Games Expo weekend was generally successful, but the Saturday of every one of these shows over the years has been more and more crowded, so with the benefit of foreknowledge I took myself off the show floor to go and see several seminars and live recordings.  I went to see RPG and Games reviewer/influencer (God I have no idea what the right thing to call people is these days) Quintin Smith record his show an hour early specifically so I could sit in a quiet room where nobody was and listen to music and try and give myself some space.  I also met gaming academic Dr Emily Friedman who was lovely and polite, and chatted to me gamely after the show despite my awkwardness.  I always feel like I am imposing on people's time, as a random person in a crowd who happens to know who you are and what you do, so my brain is constantly at war with itself in my desire to talk to people I find interesting and not feel guilty about wasting their time.  In turn, I end up ejecting out of conversations in ways I then think was probably awkward or rude and then feel bad about it.  The mental landscape I work to navigate through sometimes presents unusual challenges, but at least I have this forum to express them out loud with you, the internet audience, as my unwitting therapist.  I will not be accepting invoices from any of you, don't even try.

So, while hiding in my anxiety bubble, both before and after the shows I saw on Saturday morning I listened to Peter Gabriel 3: Melt and Heart Shaped World by Chris Isaak primarily because they were two albums I knew off the top of my head had prominent songs with the word 'game' in the title (again, very basic).  Games Without Frontiers sits on Melt, and while I grew up listening to some Peter Gabriel, I really only know well the two albums my parents had (Car and So); I did buy Shaking The Tree: 16 Golden Greats (which was a Peter Gabriel Greatest Hits album) during my rampant CD buying phase,  so I know a lot of his songs outside of the context of the album they were released on.  Melt sounds a lot like a Peter Gabriel album from the 80's - inventive and weird and experimental which means it's not a great album to assess after just a single listen, but I enjoyed it both in terms of the music that was on it, and its overall contribution to my sense of calm as I sat quietly and just listened to music on my own.  Pretty much the same can be said for Heart Shaped World;  I know Wicked Game** and I think everyone knows it, it's one of those songs that is just inside the public consciousness, as well as being a song I enjoy playing on the drums with my friend Jenny who does a very nifty rendition of the guitar part.  The rest of the album follows the same kind of mellow blues rock which suits Chris Isaak's voice and was, like the Gabriel album, a very welcome oasis of calm.  

When you have listened to more than 500 albums in 5 months, swinging recklessly between genre, decade, and style, one interesting side is effect has been the way in which I have seemingly demolished the Spotify algorithm's ability to recommend music to me.  As a result, the morning before I set off for UK Games Expo, while I was putting my playlist together for the trip, I glanced at the 'albums recommended for today' ribbon and found that Spotify was recommending me The Divine Comedy, a 1994 album by actor Milla Jovovich, estwhile of The 5th Element and the Resident Evil series of movies.  Now, obviously, I wanted to reward this kind of renegade behaviour to see what else the algorithm might send my way in the future, and really, I had to know.

If you've ever wondered what Milla Jovovich's impression of Kate Bush is like, this album will answer that question for you in great detail.  It really feels like she was at a karaoke bar one night, blasted out The Man With The Child In His Eyes, and a record producer in the crowd thought "We could do something with this".  Again, let me stress this is not bad, and it's genuinely an interesting oddity, but it is fiendishly derivative of one of the most recognisable vocal and musical styles of  the 20th century, and that's a hard act to pull off.  

Also, if I can make a personal appeal;  I know Irish band The Divine Comedy are due to release a new album this year called Rainy Sunday Afternoon.  I have a lot of time for The Divine Comedy, and on my CD rack behind me is a copy of Regeneration signed by Neil Hannon.  While I am sure the wheels are already in motion, surely it's not too late to rename the new album Milla Jovovich just for the pleasing symmetry it would create.  If not for this album, please keep it in the hopper of suggestions for the next album title, gents.

I covered a lot of my general thoughts on Queens of the Stone Age when I reviewed ...Like Clockwork earlier this week, but it seemed like an appropriate time to go through the rest of their discography.  I have mixed feelings about these albums;  I think Songs For The Deaf and In Times New Roman... are the most consistently of a par with my beloved ...Like Clockwork;  Rated R has songs I like but also songs which don't work for me;  Lullabies to Paralyze is my least-played album, it just feels slightly empty trying to follow up the monstrous Songs For The Deaf and I'm sure there was a bunch of unhelpful pressure on it;  Era Vulgaris in turn felt like the "let's do something less commercial" reaction to Lullabies and is very jagged and discordant and less radio friendly, which is why I like it more, but it's very divisive.  I think Sick, Sick, Sick, I'm Designer and 3's & 7's in particular are the standouts but the whole album is gleefully strange, which might make you hate it.  Villains feels like the median point between the commercialism and experimentalism - a willingness to be largely a blues-rock band with interesting musical concepts scattered around the track list to make sure you are paying attention, which then in turns brings in a harder edge in places and a more introspective and personal one in others;  In Times New Roman... exists as a kind of perfect amalgamation of everything which has come before, more than the sum of its parts, not quite able to stand above the two career defining albums, but in conversation with them in a useful way.  

Finally, these five albums have been strewn about the last 10 days or so as part of my ongoing secret listening side goal;  each of them I've been aware of in one way or another - I listened to Robyn's Body Talk after Dancing On My Own blew up and much like this time, enjoyed it in a kind of electro-disco way.  I mean this in the best way when I say it reminds me a lot of the better Eurovision records that I reviewed a few weeks ago.  I don't have much to add to the discourse on David Byrne and Talking Heads apart from to say this album is a classic, Talking Heads are musical pioneers and I love them.  I feel bad dumping More Songs About Buildings And Food at the end of a catch up article but I don't have much to say other than I love it, Talking Heads are exactly the kind of weird I find fascinating and obviously I am not the only one.

I came late to the Lizzo party.  One of the things that's apparent when you decide to listen to 1000 albums in a year is you realise what a quantity of new music there is out there being released every single month, and Jesus Christ, I'm nearly 50, I only have so much time.  I'd heard the name, and read very positive reviews of her music, but never encountered in the wild, and never made the time to seek it out.  That was, until video game company Harmonix released their now defunct, extremely excellent DJ/mixing game Fuser which I loved, and featured Good As Hell as part of the list of songs which could be used in the mixes in the game.

In case you've never seen Fuser in action, I jumped in and messed around for 4 minutes and recorded it here for your viewing pleasure

I ended up putting Good As Hell into stuff I was messing around with all the time because it was just great, and as soon as I had exposure to one song that I liked, I had to go seek out more, so I ended up going through a phase of listening to Cuz I Love You once a day, and then Special when that came out at the back end of the Pandemic.  So, here is my apology and great appreciation for the work Lizzo does - I'm sure she's was doing fine without me as a fan, but I am glad I got there in the end.  

Third Eye Blind are another band I know for only one song, Semi-Charmed Life, which I own on some kind of alternative rock mix CD somewhere in the depths of my collection;  I never knew anyone who was an avowed Third Eye Blind fan despite growing up at the time they were popular and being a fan of the general genre of music they produced.  My friend Paul tells me he listened to this album a lot with his brother back in the day which makes me think this is a US/UK crossover issue like Everclear (Paul, along with my friend Keane, are my barometers for US cultural influences I seems to be missing).  Regardless, Third Eye Blind (self-titled is cowardice) didn't leave much of a mark on me, but probably because I've been exposed to so much alternative rock in my life you really have to have something unique going on to break through my alt-rock calluses and get my attention.  

Finally, Sleater-Kinney are a band I respect and understand their musical contribution while never quite getting along with their music.  For a long time they've been appearing on lists of important musical artists and I have tried, but Riot Grrl was a genre which just never clicked for me - I have similar feelings about Bikini Kill and The Go-Gos - while understanding where it sits in the great buffet of musical choices available to us, so when I listened to The Woods I was expecting not to get along with it, and I was mostly correct.  Quite by accident, we saw them live last year at a festival along with Yo La Tengo, The Decemberists and Death Cab for Cutie/The Postal Service and as with most live performances, enjoyed it far more than I did on record.  I wonder if it's just a lack of exposure that's holding me back from appreciating it?  My more honest guess is it's probably not really intended for me, and I think that's great.  Music for everyone might be the same as music for no-one, and I would rather people play to their audience, as the most authentic versions of themselves, than take away what makes them want to make music in the first place in some bid to appeal to 3% more people in the world. 

So there we go, back on the horse and eighteen more albums in the books.  A couple of big live shows coming up for me in the next three weeks so I'll be doing a couple of back to back full discographies in the next couple of weeks as gig homework.  Should be interesting.  

Stay safe out there.

* Better Than Revenge causes weird conversations, because the Taylor's Version specifically changes one lyric from the original - the original song has a lyric which is some pretty obvious slut-shaming ("She's better known for the things that she does on the mattress, whoa-oh") which Taylor changed in the Taylor's Version because she wasn't comfortable with it any more.  Regardless, lots of swifties have a weirdly specific love of that lyric and are elated to have it 'back' now that Taylor owns her masters and they can listen to the non-Taylors Version guilt free.  My opinion is, if she changed that one lyric out of all the five albums she faithfully recreated, maybe she genuinely wishes it wasn't on there are everyone should respect that.  That's just me though.

** I first heard Wicked Game from this scene in my favourite David Lynch film, Wild At Heart, which I saw on Channel 4 back in the day.  I ended up finding the soundtrack in an HMV one day and loved the song and that soundtrack a bunch.  I think everyone else knows it from the music video with the supermodel on the beach though.