0.28.0 - I'll serve your ass like John McEnroe (Week 28 Wrapup)
This week: Songs to be annoyed at work to, new releases, a listening project grab bag, tangential discussion of tennis, and finally settling whether The Strokes are better than The Beach Boys.
I swear each of these posts is not going to be me making excuses for not listening to 30 albums a week, but if you've noticed a slow-down in my consumption rate for the past couple of weeks, that is both based on the shoulder injury I suffered being manly last week (mostly pain free now and seems to have fixed itself, thanks for asking), but also because we've just concluded two weeks of Wimbledon tennis coverage, an annual event which sees Catherine and I glued to our sofa for much of our free time during that fortnight because we love tennis and it only happens once per year. We've been playing Tennis together for probably nearly a decade now, somehow I have accidentally ended up on the Board of Directors for the tennis club we are members of*, and we play together in the Mixed Doubles league at our club where we are too good to be in Division 2, but not good enough to stay in the top Division. Anyway, it's very hard to both watch Tennis 4-5 hours per day and keep your music listening momentum up, but the tournament is now done and until we go on vacation in a month or so, I should have a clear run. I'm trying to hit album 700 around the beginning of August so that means I need to do 60 albums in the next 17 days, which is basically exactly the rate I have managed on average.
Outside of covering Nirvana and Oasis this week, here's everything else I listened to, divided into three handy, extremely loose themes.
That does not mean I don't find my weeks frustrating mainly because people rarely let me make all the decisions, and sometimes the decisions other people make are bad and I have to do a bunch of work to make that clear to them. This was last week, and so in the throes of one of those moments, I found myself listening to the music I listen to when I am frustrated.
I do sometimes wonder if at any point in Amy Winehouse's short, brilliant career anyone said to her "Amy, no-one is going to be into Soul revival music, you are never going to make it", or if the power of her performance was just so undeniable that people just got out of her way? I think about how RAYE exists as a modern incarnation of that phenomenon as well, but I'd grown up listening to Aretha Franklin and Gladys Knight and The Supremes and the idea that this kind of music could not just be in the charts, but topping the charts in the face of McFly and Girls Aloud and Razorlight; proof that brilliant, exceptional soul music will always find an audience, and how hard it is to be good enough to reach that standard. I like Back to Black more than Frank but both are excellent. The defiance in her voice in this album is what makes me reach for it when I am frustrated; there's a level of self-assured rejection of circumstances that I can only aspire to on my best days.
I'm a child of an MTV generation, and the video for Lullaby by The Cure had me fixated from the moment I saw it**. There were a thousand cultural influences which all coalesced around me to turn me into a teenage Goth, but this might have been the first crack in the dam. I remember asking for the album with the Spider song on (I was 13, what do you want from me?) for a birthday or Christmas present and never getting it, much to my disappointment. By the time I had arranged access to disposable income of my own*** and was no longer reliant on gifts to grow my music collection, Wish had just been released and Wild Mood Swings would be the first Cure CD I purchased; I think I was conscious of how much of a discography the band had when I got into listening to them, so eventually took the despicable shortcut of buying Standing On A Beach, Staring At The Sea, a Greatest Hits album to kind of try and devour their entire back catalogue in one bite.
YouTube's new Genre Assessment Captioning is a service no-one asked for
Depending on how cooperative my brain is feeling at any given moment, I can be a deeply negative person and extremely in my feelings and there's no-one like The Cure to give voice to the languid despair of modern life. Disintegration is my favourite Cure album now, which I think is a very basic opinion but there's not a song on there I don't love.
I've got a low tolerance for first wave Punk, and a low tolerance for the Sex Pistols in general, but there's no denying that Never Mind The Bollocks, Here's The Sex Pistols exists as the Yang to The Cure's Yin; all fire energy and unchecked emotion, directed squarely at anything remotely resembling the establishment. Let it be said that I think this is a good album and that I don't really enjoy it; but under the circumstances it seemed appropriate.
I was either going to end up writing 10,000 words about The Mars Volta, or skipping past them in a paragraph and I elected for the latter for the sake of my own sanity if nothing else. I like a lot of weird prog but I never really got into Rush, and so when every music critic I knew simultaneously declared Deloused at the Comatorium an Album Of Significance, I made a point of listening to it and coming away with a feeling of quiet bemusement. Prog is hard to get into blind on first listen and this version, following in the footsteps of a band I only knew by name, felt alien and incomprehensible. This week was probably the 5th or 6th time ever I've listened to it, and each time I feel like I'm a little closer to cracking the code, but I've still not fallen into its clutches. They say you have to try an acquired taste ten or eleven times for it to stick, so maybe in 20 years time it will be my new favourite album. In the meantime, I will say I would rather there be a thousand albums like this, doing something interesting and weird and trying to say something, than the latest radio friendly unit shifter.
Fridays are new release day, and sometimes there's stuff I'm excited enough about to make time to listen to the day it drops. I turned the corner on Kesha a few years ago. I always enjoyed her music - Tik Tok is one of the great summer songs of all time - but only as a kind of singles artist; I knew she was out there putting albums out, but I had Tik Tok and Die Young on my megaplaylist of songs I can just shuffle when I am lacking inspiration, and that was all I needed. After the Dr Luke lawsuit, and I learned more about her as a person, I developed a lasting respect for her which soon translated to me listening to everything she has put out on her own. I listened to Eat The Acid a couple of years ago and enjoyed it, and so when her latest album .(...) (a footnote for which is here**** but I can't put asterisks after that album title without people becoming very confused) came out I made the time to consume it. Kesha isn't The Mars Volta and her songs are all some variation of Lets Party / I'm So Hot / I Can't Believe You are Hitting On Me / I Can't Believe You Fumbled Me I Am The Best but sometimes its important to establish a framework to build variations from. This album is that, but it's also the most Internet/Streaming Album I've seen - ALL CAPS SONG TITLES LIKE BILLIE EILISH, didn't bother to wait for a Deluxe version on streaming and just slapped 8 remixes on there which means that on this 20 track album, 20% of it is the song YIPPIE-KI-YAY in 5 marginally different flavours. I would have loved this is if it were 12 tracks long, but I lost interest a bit towards the back after I heard a remix of a previous remix of a song I'd already listened to. Sorry Kesha. BOY CRAZY is a great summer song though.
I've previously written of my love for Wet Leg so when the follow up to their self-titled album started bleeding tracks onto the internet I kept track of the singles releases in a way I haven't done for other bands. I listened to this three time this week, and it's already got several of the songs rattling around in my head, making me want to go back to it again. Its very much in line with the kind of modern indie ?girlpunk? (genres are stupid) the previous album was but I don't mind that at all. moisturiser might not surpass the success of their debut being plastered all over UK TV for what felt like a solid 10 months as every TV producer needing "something the kids are into" put Chaise Lounge or Wet Dream into their shows, but right now it feels like a solid continuation of their previous efforts.
I couldn't really parse my feelings on Sentimiento Muerto in the moment and I'm still struggling to talk about them coherently. My Spanish comprehension was somewhat up to the test of listening to their album to at least get the sense of what they were singing about, and I wasn't expecting a band with a sonic profile somewhere between Crowded House and Talking Heads to have anticapitalist and social lyrics closer in feelng (but not as much R rated language) to Rage Against The Machine or Fugazi. It's a puzzler; one thing is for sure, Sin Sombra No Hay Luz made me wish I spoke better Spanish.
I think I missed disappearing into an Emo band wormhole by only a couple of years. I think I had just reached the point where my post-adolescent music tastes had calcified enough, and I was a big enough snob, to not get drawn into the web of Dashboard Confessional and Sunny Day Real Estate and I say that fully knowing that I was so very close. I like Fall Out Boy and My Chemical Romance (well, some albums); at my weakest, I could have been the biggest Something Corporate fan. I listened to this late on Sunday night facing into another annoying week of work and transitioned quickly into paying attention to this album and my feelings on it, which were generally positive. It felt like it landed somewhere between classic "Emo" and a Ben Folds record and it left a good impression on me. I've said I don't have guilty pleasures in music because no-one should dictate to you what you like but yourself - this feels like it might be a genuine guilty pleasure because even I am slightly disappointed in myself how much I liked it. I'll come back to you, Leaving Through The Window, and let's see if I still feel the same way the next time we meet.
Ok, just one to go and I wanted to leave this one till last because I had a specific reason for including it. You might remember when I covered Pet Sounds that I had found a list of The Greatest Albums Of All Time by British music magazine New Musical Express (or NME for short) and they had put Pet Sounds at number 26 and This Is It by The Strokes at number 4; which coincidentally made me think I was having a stroke because surely I can't live in a world where someone thought This Is It was better than the album which has Sloop John B and God Only Knows on it. But I checked, and it's still there in print for anyone to see. Now, I get that there had been a trend away from bands with guitars and drums playing straight ahead blues rock prior to 2001; grunge and its various subdivision having dominated the electric-guitar driven musical landscape, but its not like The Strokes unearthed the Dead Sea Scrolls and ushered in a new era of musical enlightenment - they just went back to playing music in the style of Duane Eddy and Chuck Berry and late-stage Dylan and everyone declared them the saviours of our modern musical landscape.
I think this is a decent little album, though I'll admit to thinking a lot of The Strokes songs sound the same (I am sure many, many people think the same thing about Interpol songs though so I will accept that it's not a great piece of criticism). I think This Is It probably belongs on a list of the best albums of the 2000s; maybe the best albums of all time, somewhere safely in the triple-digit range. But number four? Ahead of Marvin Gaye, The Rolling Stones, Bowie, Public Enemy, Nirvana, The Beatles, and most gallingly one place ahead of The Velvet Underground from whom they almost certainly stole the majority of their sound? Outrageous.
Get back to number 230 where you belong, The Strokes.
*Another candidate for the most middle class sentence in this blog, add it to the scoreboard.
** Me and Tim Burton, apparently.
*** Fun story, for a long time my parents would make small regular payments into a bank account in my name; I did not have access to that account, but it was technically mine. When I learned of its existence, and took the time to memorise the account number and what identification I needed to access the account, I spent a series of Saturday's joyfully withdrawing my money from this account without my parents knowledge to buy music and RPG books. I was eventually busted when my parents instructed me to withdraw some money for our trip to Disneyland and sadly, the account did not then contain the money they expected it to. Words were exchanged.
**** OK, how do I feel about this album being called .(...) ? I don't hate it, it's different and memorable and its not self-titled and there's no title track. Normally I like titles which have parentheticals and punctuation but usually that's in combination with some number of words, rather than in the form of ASCII art. You'd never be able to ask for it in a record shop, you'd be forced to say "you know, the one with the lips and the three pink dots on the cover" and the fans would give it some pithy name like "The Lips Album", but since record shops don't exist any more and no-one has to say the title of the album out loud to another human being, I've decided I am fine with it.
