0.29/30.0 - It's a nice day for a white wedding (Weeks 29/30 Wrapup)
The more eagle eyed amongst you will have realised it is not a Sunday, I didn't do a wrap up post for last week or write anything this week and I am writing the wrap up for this week 3 days early. What can I say, its been a mess recently. It just so happens that this month we are going into a bunch of social events which leave me seeing my free time shrink down while at the same time I've been staving off spiralling anxiety issues, dealing with a short term feud with our next door neighbours about pigeons (which is too stupid to go into* but left me extremely tightly wound) and really I am just desperately in need of a holiday, so our trip to Australia in three weeks might be the only thing keeping me sane right now.
The real reason I didn't do a wrap up last week though was because I was sick; On Saturday our friends Anja and Eric got married after ten years together and they asked me to act as one of their ushers, which was a lovely thing to do for them. I did. however, shake hands with many people I'd not met before several of whom (Anja's German side of the family) had been through airports recently; we then followed that up with a mad dash across the Pennines to see Billie Eilish with the nieces which was exceptional,
Fortunately, I was able to justify it to myself in two ways - first, I was sick, what do you people want from me? Second, I knew also that I had a fully booked weekend upcoming also as Catherine and I are attending the Tramlines music festival in our home town of Sheffield from Friday through to Sunday, and I absolutely will not have any time to do any writing this weekend. As such, I figured I would just combine these two weeks together, run quickly through what I have been listening to, and then go watch some bands down at Hillsborough Park all weekend and then write next week about a topic I've been saving for just this occasion, the rich musical heritage of my adopted home town of Sheffield. I know I've said I don't plan these things in advance, but in the face of getting down to my last 300 albums, I have some high points I want to hit, and we have a big holiday coming up so I need to schedule my time effectively. Anyway, here's what I listened to for the last 9 days or so, outside of Billie Eilish.
You can tell I have been distracted for the past month or so because I somehow managed to not listen to a Taylor Swift album in the month of June. With the somewhat half-baked expectation that Taylor will release album number twelve this year so I can do one a month, I circled back to cover off both 1989 (Taylor's Version) and Lover this week. While it was a later album that made me a Swiftie (Evermore), and an earlier album (Red) which was the first time I made a point of listening to her music, 1989 I think is the inflection point from which she turned from a well known crossover country artist to a globally influential megastar, primarily on the back of the incident at the VMA's and her releasing Shake It Off which was everywhere. This album has so many hit singles on it you forget how all encompassing it was, but still the standout tracks for me are the album cuts - New Romantics and Out Of The Woods could easily have been smash hit singles numbers six and seven from this album but at that point you are just doing victory laps.
Lover is the album which kind of turned me off listening to her music initially for the stupidest of reasons - as someone from a certain generation, the word 'lover' makes my skin crawl a little - to quote my Podcast Anxiety Medication the McElroy's again, the only appropriate place for the word "Lover(s)" to appear is between the words "Meat" and "Pizza" on a menu. Even after the pandemic brought me back to listening to her music, I still avoided this album (and her self titled) because I had bad associations with it. It actually took me listening to the Era's Tour Playlist incessantly in advance of seeing her show last year for songs from this album to get their claws into me, and now it houses some of my favourites of hers - the three-song sequence of Paper Rings / Cornelia Street / Death By A Thousand Cuts is a standout. I can do without her jubilant celebration of the English in London Boy but they can't all be winners. Honestly, I think this is a very B+ Taylor album, but that still puts it head and shoulders above a lot of other things for me.
I can't remember what prompted this line of conversation, but I was talking to Catherine this week and she asked me if I was going to listen to some Shakira for the blog***. I like Shakira generally, I think she makes good pop music and gave a great Superbowl half time show performance, but I honestly don't think I've listened to an album of hers all the way through in anger in my life. Catherine told me to start with the Spanish-language ones from before she crossed over, and both Pies Descalzos and Donde Estan Los Ladrones sounded a lot like Shakira but singing exclusively in Spanish. It's interesting to me that the latin influence to her modern pop music was what made her stand out so much in a packed field of hot blonde pop singers is obviously not uniquely hers, it just wasn't prevalent in western english-speaking music outside of stuff like Gloria Estefan. Nothing noteworthly, nothing terrible, just a little cultural education.
Then I got sick and started feeling sorry for myself. Initially I thought I would again just make my life easier, and listen to three albums covered by This One Goes To 11 and then I could just throw up some links to their episodes on those albums and call it a day. I wasn't wild about LCD Soundsystem's Sounds of Silver but feeling miserable with a stinking cold isn't the ideal mindset to appreciate dancy electronica. Fables by David Ramirez was more my speed, but didn't make me excited just because this exercise has taught me that there are a lot of musicians making approximations of the same musical style in countless variations, and I just spent the time listening to it's softly spoken acoustic guitar treatment comparing it to Jose Gonzales and his version of the same thimg.
99.9% by KAYTRANDA might have been the thing that started the healing process. I knew of this album from the podcast I'd discovered it from, but like many of the albums from that show, the value was in the guest and hosts interpretation and passion for it, rather than the music itself. The music itself in this case was a collection of cool, soul-infused hip hop from Montreal that made me stop what I was doing and go "Damn" on more than one occassion. Its been a while since an album got the gold star, I'll-be-back-for-you-in-2026 treatment in my album listening spreadsheet, but this one made the cut. An incredibly strong recommendations.
So even though I didn't save myself two paragraphs and wrote about those albums anyway, I'd still recommend you listen to the This One Goes To 11 episodes on The Sound Of Silver, Fables, and 99.9% at the links, where smarter people than me explain why those albums are actually perfect albums.
I was still sick. My brain, obviously addled from mainlining Sudefed and Ibuprofen, told me I should listen to some albums about being sick. I cued up four albums, listened to them all, then basically immediately realised I had listened to The Sickness by Disturbed and Era Vulgaris by Queens of the Stone Age already this year. It was bound to happen eventually, and I am amazed it took until album 650 for me to screw up and listen to an album twice, but it did totally mess up my thread of every album I had listened to on BlueSky to the point where I had to issue a correction.
As a result, only two of the four albums I listened to from that block counted - first was Flyleaf's self-titled album which I only know because I'm So Sick was used as one of the less-mainstream band tracks in the original Rock Band game. Having only heard the one song, I was unprepared for the Christian Rock Switcheroo I was about to experience as once again an early 2000's rock band turn out to be secretly full of love for Jesus. Does my natural suspicion of organised religion and people who make it the central feature of their existence make this music any better or worse? Impossible to say because of the whole "perception is how we filter reality" thing we human have going on, but the further we got into the album, the more I was like "Wait, this is getting way full of Christian symbolism for my tastes". I'm So Sick remains a great rock song though.
It's weird listening to Mudhoney so recently after I did my Nirvana discography run through a couple of weeks ago. I'm pretty vocal on my feeling that "Grunge" doesn't really have a coherent sound as a musical genre - Pearl Jam, Soundgarden, Alice In Chains, Nirvana, Stone Temple Pilots, these bands all take their musical inspirations from pretty distant branches of the guitar based musical tree. But you listen to Superfuzz Bigmuff**** and you hear the prototype, not yet out of playtesting, alpha 0.01 release of the sound which would make Nirvana the voice of a generation. Because I was young and all about what was happening to me right then and there I guess I never made the effort to trace back the historical lineage of the grunge acts I listened to as a teen; though Touch Me I'm Sick got enough play at the alternative nights in our nightclubbing years to have lodged into my brain as a song with 'Sick' in the title. If this album didn't have such a stupid name I'm be more inclined to be kinder to it, but as a historical document, the place a the seeds of a musical revolution were planted, it's an interesting big of musical archaeology even thought it's significantly overshadowed by what followed it.
Then, finally, the news of Ozzy Osbourne's passing meant I had to listen to something of his. If you grew up listening to Iron Maiden and Metallica, you had a minor, an undercurrent of understanding of who Black Sabbath were and what they meant to what would be called 'Heavy Metal' fifty years ago, and now would barely raise an eyebrow from your most conservative grandparent of choice. By all accounts Ozzy was a good guy, giving generously of his time and money to charitable causes, having come from humble beginnings himself. While I am sure lots of people would point to The Blizzard of Ozz as the classic Ozzy album to listen to, I have a different touchstone.
At this link, you can watch someone accomplish what I never could.
Bark At The Moon, the album, is a great classic rock album. It sounds like the platonic ideal of what 80's heavy metal sounds like; its full of face melting guitar solos and Ozzy screaming like a madman. It's deeply, incredibly fun, and while Crazy Train gets all the mainstream appreciation, if you wanted to go a little off the beaten path, wind down the car windows, put Bark At The Moon on loud, and see where the road takes you.
That's it, everything I listened to. It's past four on Friday now and we need to go to the festival to see Pulp this evening, so I am just going to click 'Publish' on this without proofreading it; if it seems more full of errors than my usual posts, I will come back and tidy it up this weekend, but the sun is up, the weekend is here, and it's time to fit in as much live music as I can.
Back next week for some pro-Sheffield propaganda.
* I like birds, we've had a bird feeder in our garden for years, one of the neighbours put industrial bird repellent spikes on the top of our fence without permission because they were shitting on her side of the fence. The issue has been resolved at just a complete lack of trust or respect between our household and theirs. Like I said, stupid.
** After multiple visits to the Co-op live this year I'm coming around to it as a venue but the access in and out is still the worst I've seen in a live venue; as a result, a key element of any show there is how are you going to get in and out of the venue and back home without sitting in bumper to bumper stationary traffic for two hours. As we had the nieces along this time, I was not placed in charge of the pickup/dropoff plans and as a result, well, we say in bumper to bumper stationary traffic for about an hour.
*** I've remembered now, I was playing 'Hips Don't Lie' on my drums because its good practice for both triplet feel latin rhythms and it has some complicated crossover sticking on the snare that is good practice.
**** I cannot roll my eyes hard enough at this album title. Honestly.
