0.2.0 - We chilled on Sunday (Week One Wrapup)
I knew that by committing doing these weekly wrap ups each week that I was going to have to scoop up a bunch of albums in one big megapost in order to try and stick to the brief. I don't think I realised quite how many different records I was going to have to skim past with just a sentence or two - often critical darlings and personal favourites all getting the drive-by shooting treatment as they become just another statistic on the relentless journey to 1000, but here we are.
What I can do, before I dive into all the albums I listened to this week, is talk about about how I've ended up picking what I listened to. Originally, my thought process was pretty route one - there must be a thousand albums I've listened to that I can name off the top of my head, let's just start grabbing stuff out of my mental list of music and throw it scattershot across the week. Now, obviously, there are times when I've picked a particular artist to listen to and write about my feelings on like my post about the Kings of Leon this week which was called "Fantastic" by a professional writer, so is obviously worth your time.
This nearly made me cry in front of the people at Street Food Chef making my burrito, I hope you are pleased with yourself Rosenthal.
With that in mind, what I've ended up doing is employing a grab bag of different methods to decide what makes it to the playlist each day. In a lot of cases, I've picked a song, or an idea, or something that's just popped into my brain, and built a theme around it. Often, its based on just a single song I know somewhere in the deep catalogue of my mental song vault, but from that little seed, I'll go back and experience the whole album that song was originally published on. I've also - I was going to say 'cheated' here but I'm not sure anyone would accuse me of that - grabbed some lists of albums, not as prescriptive lists of stuff which needs to be ticked off in order to qualify as a proper music fan, but as a source of inspiration, or in case something has passed me by which I like the sound of. Specifically, I've been cribbing a bit from the Rolling Stone Top 500 albums of all time, which while slightly Amerocentric, has delivered a couple of interesting starting points for me.
What this has meant is that I've spent a lot of time this week with a mixture of familiar and new music, which has been a joyous experience. A large part of my drive to do that was based on falling into the pattern of playing the same comfortable, familiar albums again and again last year, and so far this project has delivered the opposite result, which has been wonderful.
OK, lets wrap up some albums I listened to before this post ends up at ten thousand words.
Sunday and Monday Listening
Dummy was a Catherine choice while we played board games together on Sunday night, after I did last week's wrap up. I love Portishead, and I'll almost certainly be doing a Portishead/Sneaker Pimps/Massive Attack Trip-Hop write up at some point in the future.
The New Classic, Britney Jean, Nine to Five and Odd Jobs, all felt thematically appropriate for my first day back at work, featuring Work, Work Bitch, and the famous title track respectively. Iggy Azalea (well, this album) is a guilty pleasure of mine - I love Work and Fancy and was extremely surprised after listening to those songs for 6+ months to discover she was a white Australian lady. She gets 'industry plant' accusations thrown at her a bunch and I see why, but I kinda like this whole album, sorry. I'll talk more about Britney at some other point, but I really enjoy Pop Britney and I'm less into Dance Britney. I only knew Work Bitch and was surprised how electro the whole thing is. I enjoy Britney as a person/phenomenon though, and this didn't offend me, it just didn't move me. Like, I suspect, a lot of people, I don't think I've ever listened to the Dolly Parton album all the way through - like ABBA I just knew the hits, and goddamn if I didn't really enjoy this. Her perspective-shifted version of House of the Rising Sun is clever and musically excellent, and the whole album was either mega-hits or incredibly well crafted deep album cuts. Dolly is a global treasure, by all accounts an incredible person and I was really pleased to have taken the time to listen to this all the way through.
Saint Cloud and I Know I'm Funny haha were after-work listening; I really liked Tigers Blood from last year, but had not listened to any the earlier Waxahatchee stuff, and both Saint Cloud and the Faye Webster album were both prompted by my initial scroll through the Rolling Stone Top 500. Saint Cloud delivered exactly what I expected (in a very good way) and has made it on to my "relisten" list for when I revisit some of these in the future, but the Faye Webster album, another entrant into the music-as-confessional-or-therapy genre really hooked me, to the point where I've spent the last week forcing myself to not listen to it again while I have so much road left to travel. I'll be back for you, Faye Webster, that's a guarantee.
Tuesday Listening
Now, this was somewhat calculated, as there's a list of albums I've already written about for the original incarnation of this blog, so you can find my thoughts on Fires, Prozaic, Daisies of the Galaxy, and We Are Your Friends at those links and I can recycle some of the writing I did back then.
Hunting High And Low was another Catherine choice for more board games, and prompts the question 'When is an album also a weird in-joke?'. If you're not familiar with this album (You will know Take On Me, everyone knows that), Catherine was a big fan of a-ha* as a young woman and infamously attempted to sing the title track from this album at a karaoke party held for our friend Rachel's birthday at least five years ago. Her performance, while stone cold sober, was impeded by her not having actually heard the song for over a decade, forgetting how it went, and quite how high Morton Harket gets on it, and as a result it produced a performance which reduced the entire room to tears of laughter as she gamely soldiered on to the end. Since that point, Hunting High And Low has appeared on every single shared playlist we've created as a group of friends to commemorate that great moment.
Wednesday Listening
I knew X specifically from this one song; I've always found punk difficult to relate to - its young and angry, and I'm only 20-40% of that statement at any one time, so the concept, the ethos, the identity I get; the music less so. However, female led Punk bands always got a bit more traction with me (Siouxsie and the Banshees and Toyah made a strong impression on younger me in a lot of ways), and so I was glad I'd listened to this whole album, even if I'm not likely to go back to it. I know Brothers In Arms front to back, and it's sad helplessness at the state of the world in 1985 felt depressingly resonant in our current age, even if the language in some of the songs is now very dated. The blues guitars here made me think of King of the Delta Blues Singers, and I contemplated Robert Johnson and his supposed deal wth the Devil as he played songs from 1937 which formed the foundation for most of the music I grew up listening to, and still do; that led me to There's A Riot Goin' On - Sly & The Family Stone started their career as a hopeful, fully integrated funk band, something very rare at the time; by 1971, racial tensions, band tensions, and political tensions turned that hope into the cynicsm and anger reflected in this record; Family Affair is a classic, but the whole album is a great piece of Soul, on the darker side of the emotional spectrum.
By this point I was fully in the doom-and-gloom of it all. Unbidden, the chorus from Everything Will Be Alright by The Killers appeared in my head, but at the time I couldn't remember where it came from, and just kept singing it under my breath to try and place it. I couldn't, I typed it into Spotify, and because I put "Everything is going to be alright" into the search, it missed the Killers track, but delivered me a later-period Weezer album I'd not listened to. I could write another 10,000 words about my complicated feelings about Weezer and their Ironic/Post Ironic/Sincere schtick since the Blue Album/Pinkerton days, but suffice to say this didn't convince me I was missing out - an album which seemed to be either earnestly or sarcastically or ironically complaining about how the band weren't successful and famous any more (but that was OK, but maybe it wasn't) just had me rolling my eyes all the way through it. This Is Why was a great palette cleanser - an album I knew I loved, which I've listened to several times since its lockdown-adjacent release, which makes me feel better about my occasional isolationist and anti-social tendencies. Finally, I listed to A Certain Trigger for much the same reasons; safety and comfort in the warm embrace of an album I know and love, even though Maximo Park never stuck with me past this one; I saw them live in Sheffield last year and they were very good, and I probably need to roll back through their back catalogue in earnest.
Friday/Weekend Listening
Friday brought with it the news of Sam Moore's passing, which led me to go back and listen to a trio of soul records that were constant visitors to my Dad's record player when I was growing up. It's honestly kind of sacrilegious for me to blow past three of the best and most influential albums of the 1970s, but there's nothing I can say about them which you can't find written better, more detailed, and more expansively elsewhere. I can only say, if you've not heard these albums and you care at all about the wider world of excellent music, these are titans; I don't like the term 'required listening', because no-one likes homework or being told they're not a fan of music for any reason, but Hold On, I'm Comin', The Dock Of The Bay, and What's Going On get my strongest possible recommendation.
Also the cover to Hold On, I'm Comin' is a photo collage of Sam & Dave riding a giant cartoon turtle, and I know you can all see that because the image is above this paragraph, but its possible you might have skimmed over this truly baffling choice and I thought it important to call it out. Safe travels, Sam Moore.
I did say in a previous post that I wasn't a snob and did think there was good videogame music, and this is certainly some of it, though this one was kind of a cheat as originated as a Catherine request; she loves Gustavo Santolalla's soundtrack to The Motorcycle Diaries, which did not appear to be available, and then I said "oh, he did the Last Of Us Soundtrack" and she told me to put it on. Like a lot of instrumental soundtracks (especially to video games), this is all about mood, so if you're looking for somber, haunting, introspective music with a slide guitar twang, this is that and in spades.
Finally, this morning I had You Don't Know Me by Ben Folds rattling around in my head. Can't tell you why, or what caused it, apart from maybe a residual holdover from seeing the Ben Folds shirt I bought when we saw him in concert last year, but the best way I know to purge stuck-in-head songs is to listen to them, so I did just that. Am I easier-going on the whimsy and winking irony from Ben Folds than I am with Rivers Cuomo and Weezer? Yes. Is that fair, or rational? Probably not, but I like way more late-period Ben Folds stuff that I've heard, so the tiebreaker goes to my subjective enjoyment of your work.
Last up, Chris Stapleton. I'll write about Country music at some point (almost certainly when I do some James Taylor), but modern Country has been a tough row to hoe for me until by chance I came across Chris Stapleton, long after the release of this album (a combination of hearing Tennessee Whiskey on a TV show I don't remember, his song with Taylor Swift, I Bet You Think About Me, and YouTube music commentator ToddInTheShadow's lists of best and worst songs of each year). I think if someone ever says to you, or if you yourself say, "I don't like Country music", this might be the modern album to change your mind.
All in all, that's 33 albums this week. Maybe next week will be slower?
*another all-lower-caps styling of a band, and its from the early 80's, AND it's just a phrase you might see in written language? Did copy editors and writers of the past hate this as much as I do? Please tell me.
