0.3.0 - Everybody's working for the weekend (Week 2 Wrapup)
Another week down, and another seven days of running away from a series of bands I know I will enjoy because I worry that I will be burning listening to them for the rest of this year by throwing them away into the teeth of the early weeks of January. Instead, following the trend from last week, my album choices have been dictated by the strange connections my brain chooses to forge between musical artists, albums, and events in my life. So as well as listening to ten different albums covered in this weeks previous blog posts, here's everything else I listened to this week grouped into some semblance of structure.
Starting with a rare single album, I listened to this late last Sunday evening while having an existential crisis making katsu curry sauce. I'd got all flustered because a number of ingredients I was expecting to be there were not because they'd been used earlier that day unexpectedly by my partner, and the local grocery store 5 minutes walk away did not have suitable replacement. I panicked and used some very old spice mix I found in the back of our spice cupboard and the whole thing was a bit of a disaster. I put this on thinking it would settle me, having fond memories of calm and sedate moments listening to this album with an old housemate. I remembered half way through this, that those calm and sedate moments were more related to the mood altering substances ingested at the same time as this album, rather than because of it, and it didn't really do much for me apart from make me feel I had to see it through to the end, which did not help my mood.
The following morning, my partner said to me at breakfast "what was that album you were listening to in the kitchen last night, it was awful". While I obviously don't agree with that completely, Boards of Canada are a band that definitely require the correct headspace to appreciate, one I was not in at the time.
When I listened to the very first episode of TOGT11, I remember excellent and charismatic hosts Michael and Tyler talking about how In Rainbows was their first Radiohead album and immediately melting into bones like the nazis at the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark because the first Radiohead album I listened to was Pablo Honey, released fourteen years prior. After further listening, and convincing myself that Michael and Tyler weren't going to make me feel like a fossil (and are far closer in age to me than I thought initially), I've greatly enjoyed their near hundred episode run, and dear fictional readers, I think you would too.
Last year Matt in turn was invited to be on the show to discuss an album of his choice (Massive Attack's Blue Lines), which you can find here. "Great," I thought, preparing to offload a bunch of work to someone else, "I can just listen to a bunch of albums covered on TOGT11, link those episodes here, say they did a better job covering them than I could, and walk away clean." After finishing Blue Lines, I scrolled through the episode list for another album to listen to, and settled on their excellent discussion of The Avalanches Since I Left You, found here, and that's where things started to go off the rails.
(It remains only for me to say here that anything I could possible say about the two albums above is better covered by TGOT11, go listen to their stuff immediately, if not sooner).
You see, listening to Since I Left You, I was reminded of the time I saw The Avalanches live at the V2001 music festival, where they were playing in a small tent well off to the side of the main stages. I wanted to see them, so me and a friend stood in that tent and watched them perform excellently, and then when they finished, we checked the lineup for this small stage for the rest of the day.
God I love music festivals
Shortly due on that stage, in front of less than 2000 people, was Kylie Minogue, which is incredible to think about now; but back then, this was post "Teeny dance craze" Kylie, but pre "I Can't Get You Out Of My Head / Spinning Around" Kylie, which would come at the end of that year. This was "not quite sure where I fit in / hasn't had a hit in five years" Kylie, which is why she was in a tent with us instead on on the main stage where Muse were playing. But when you have a chance to see Kylie under those circumstances, you abandon your plans to see Muse and you stay in that tent and watch then-up-and-coming girl group Atomic Kitten do their set, (which I remember being fine in a way choreographed live singing and dancing to a backing track can be) then Kylie arrived with her dancers and blew the top off the tent with really an incredibly slick pop live performance covering every song of hers you could think of, and the crowd ate it up.
Having listened to The Avalanches now in 2025, I went back to try and find the specific period-appropriate albums from both the other artists in that tent that evening. Right Now is as entirely forgettable an experience as you would imagine it to be. Late 90s and early 2000's pop was empty, saccharine nonsense in the worst way; I listened to it less than 4 days ago (granted, I've listened to a lot of albums since) and I had to just bring the track list up on Spotify to remind me of anything at all that happened while I listened to it. Whole Again, (which if there is an Atomic Kitten hit, it's that one), is on there, but even that is a mid tempo balladic embarrassment - when I think of the quality of the pop music renaissance we are living in right now, it stands only as an illustrative signpost of how far we have come.
Record scratch - edit. So, in writing this, I've realised I listened to entirely the wrong Kylie album for the time I saw her live. It should have been Light Years from 2000; instead I listened to her self-titled album from 1994. I'm very mean to it below, but I wanted to be clear that her albums from not-the-early-90's are probably better. Sorry, Ms Minogue. I'll make it up to you somehow.
I was ready to be surprised by Kylie Minogue, the self titled album from the same time, and I wasn't at all - or rather, not in a good way. This album makes Right Now look like Fugazi; it's just recycled Casio keyboard beats and low tempo disco shuffle with Kylie singing about missing boys for an hour and seven minutes. My favourite thing about the album is there is a song on it called Where Is The Feeling? which is the first time I remember an album with a song title containing its own critical reviews on the track list.
From Kylie and Atomic Kitten, I started listening to other 2000's girl bands; Sugababes and Atomic Kitten exist in tandem in my mind as two groups whose Ship of Theseus lineups meant that the group persisted long after the founding members of each had moved on/been fired. Angels With Dirty Faces is the opposite end of the pop spectrum to Right Now; like Girls Aloud (see my article on them this week for more) their songwriters were the talented Xenomania, which means that it sounds way more like modern pop than it should, and Freak Like Me is a cracker which makes the best use of a Gary Numan sample that you will ever hear, and Round Round is another in the pantheon of great girl group songs.
All Saints I listened to because I had just seen Melanie Blatt on Taskmaster a few weeks ago; no other reason. I have a real soft spot for All Saints, both the band and the record (but at some point soon I am going to talk about my feelings on people releasing self-titled records); obviously it features the sacrilegious cover version of Under The Bridge which mars it for life, but I love Never Ever and I Know Where Its At and even some of the album deep cuts (I have an inexplicable fondness for Beg off this album as well) are worth your time. Also, long before L'il Kim, Maya, P!nk, & Christina got their hands on it, the All Saints version of Lady Marmalade sits proudly at the end of the track list and...well, it's not as good, obviously. You can't expect them to stand a chance against perfection.
And that led me on to Girls Aloud, who I listened to five albums from and wrote specifically about this week like a madman.
One of these things is not like the other.
On Wednesday, I broke a wisdom tooth eating a particularly chewy sourdough pizza crust, and like most idiots, chose to ignore it and hope it went away. Life showed me the error of my ways and kept me awake all night in moderate agony while I phoned up our amazing Health Service for some emergency dental care, something I mostly hate at the best of times. This required music that would a) keep me awake while I waited for a phone call and tried to put in a days work on 1 hours sleep, b) would get me psyched up to have someone drill a hole into my gums.
House of Pain (Fine Malt Lyrics) might have been a bit on the nose but it was the best I could think of at 2am. Never has someone found more ways to say "I'm Irish / I like to drink and smoke weed / I like to fight / House of Pain is my crew" than Everlast has, and this album should just be Jump Around repeated over and over, instead of the staggering 19 different-but-basically-identical tracks housed upon it.
Vulgar Display Of Power is one of the best high energy metal albums of all time. Phil Anselmo might be a nazi sympathiser, but I didn't know that in 1992 and this album destroys. If you've not heard Walk, next time you need to feel empowered and angry at something, make that your soundtrack.
Eternal Blue is from the Pandemic Listening era, but it's a really great metal album. I have a huge soft spot for melodic female vocals over crunchy guitar and drums, and Spiritbox deliver a plethora of variations of that formula here. If you've looked for a metal album to see if you vibe with it, this might be a good starter; not too much challenging shouting/screaming here if you like to concentrate on lyrics.
Leviathan is a metal concept album about Moby Dick, and I had talked to Matt about Moby Dick a couple of weeks ago, so it came back to mind as a result. Mastodon do incredible crunch in their metal, but with variation and complexity that you can start to appreciate on repeated listens; they're also the kind of band that writes concept albums about Moby Dick; that is, my kind of band. I've seen them twice, once in a support role (they were awful, but the sound mix was very bad for them I think), and once at Corporation in Sheffield and they were excellent and extremely metal.
City of Evil, and Avenged Sevenfold in general, aren't quite my usual taste when it comes to metal, but in my mind they're indelibly linked to Mastodon by the track list to Rock Band 3, where The Beast And The Harlot from this album and Colony of Birchmen by Mastodon feature together. A7X are a modern(ish) Iron Maiden, and someone should fill those shoes, and as musicians they are very talented. Kept me awake and bobbing along right up to dental surgery, I will give it that.
Razorlight are not metal. I listened to this the day after my surgery, because I had Los Angeles Waltz stuck in my head since I had used it for the title of the Kings of Leon article last week, and I needed something to listen to while I walked to the pharmacy and back for antiobiotics and painkillers It was fine. Los Angeles Waltz is maybe the only good song on there though.
Nearly done, I promise
Home stretch now people.
Foo Fighters I listened to because I had at that point become very alive to the self-titled-ness of my listening this week. It's very depressing when people can process their grief over the suicide of their friend by writing and recording every instrument on an album which launches a band and you back into rock megastardom. This is a proof-of-concept for what a modern rock band should sound like, but recorded thirty (oh god let that not be true) years ago.
Insider came from a period in my life between the idea of people making mix tapes and CDs for people, and streaming services; in that interstitial period, what happened was that other music nerds I knew would send DVD-Rs or thumb drives filled with .mp3 versions of, like, 80 different albums. I'd come away from visiting people and they would go "you like some of the music I like, here's 3.5GB of mixed music from my hard drive, have fun". Amongst one of those mp3 dumps was this album, from a kind of melodic hard rock/alternative band from New Zealand I think? Anyway, O Fortuna is the kind of song I want playing as I engage in some kind of Gotterdammerung style galactic conflict, because who doesn't want to sing 'Puny Human / You are no match for me' and mean it. The rest of the album is pretty good too, its a real sleeper hit in my collection by a band I know next to nothing about.
And talking of music you want playing as you enter into a confrontation, I've always wanted Power Struggle off One Minute Science to be the music playing as I came to the wrestling ring. I think my opportunity for that has passed (Ric Flair is 75 and still gets played down to the right though...) but like Amplifier, I heard Power Struggle in some mp3 collection and then torrented and listened to the whole album. It's generally decent alternative rock, but its hard to point out anything else notable about it.
Port of Morrow is a lovely album I mainly know from trying to learn Like A Fool on guitar for a couple of years on and off. I picked that because I wanted something pleasant and unobtrusive to listen to while I played board games with Catherine, and this delivered.
And finally, talking of unobtrusive, Simple Things (and the entire Zero 7 back catalogue) is extremely nice, chilled music for a Sunday morning pancake breakfast, which is what happened. Notably an early appearance by Sia here, where she's been quietly operating in the wings of popular music for two decades before breaking out into a star on her own.
Two weeks down.
