0.10.2 - OnetwothreeFOURfive, sixseveneightnineten, ELEVENTWELVE
Using these kind of thematic gimmicks to select albums to listen to has been strangely critical to making this whole project work for me. Generally, people like patterns and structure, and when faced with the boundless breadth and depth of All Music Ever Published, it would be easy to drown in the infinite choice available to you. So by making a choice to pick some kind of stupid thread to tie a bunch of albums together keeps me floating on the surface of the available options rather than being dragged beneath them. I once read author Steven R Donaldson say that creative endeavour flows easiest when you take two different ideas rattling around in your head and find a way to combine the two. I'm not sure this qualifies as 'creative endeavour' as much as it is 'low grade mental breakdown' but the principle applies here also.
It started with another online friend from my SomethingAwful Mafia days. Sana/Zephinoth was another regular in our IRC server, and like several others, we remained Twitter (and now Bluesky) mutuals. Back in the day when Twitter was a usable product and the world wasn't a terrifying corporate fascist hellscape, Sana posted asking for people to add to a Spotify playlist called The Count (which you can find here) with the idea being to find numerical song titles going up in sequence. As you should know by now, that's exactly the kind of stupid music gimmick I live for and over the course of a few days I wracked my brains for songs to fill the gaps (no google, that's cheating). I still have the playlist saved and enjoy the existence of it immensely (though I've never actually listened to it).
The second idea was asking myself at what point in this process I would end up listening to the Eve6 record. Another social media influenced thought process, back in the good days of twitter I was recommended the Eve6 twitter account to follow as Max Collins, the owner of the account and lead singer of the band, was genuinely fun and funny; he's humorously self-aware and laid back, but also genuinely enthusiastic about a genre of music (90s alternative rock) that has been perhaps unfairly disregarded. I was delighted to find that Max had moved his account to Bluesky (eve6.bsky.social) and I've enjoyed continuing to follow his exploits on there.
I'm sure you can see where this is going, mainly because you can see the album art above and can figure out what I ended up doing. Once I decided to do it, I started from six, figured out whether I could get back to one with band names (again, no googling, all from memory) which was pretty easy, then seeing how far forward from six I could get before I ran out of inspiration. I even have basically an entire alternate version* of this I could have done but settled on these bands in this order basically on a whim. Let's count together!
What made me, when I was thinking about One bands, select lightweight American pop-rock outfit One Republic to listen to instead of international British megapop band One Direction, who my niece loves and could have given me recommendations for? I can blame only my sickness-addled brain for surfacing Counting Stars into my head while digging in my memory banks. The only other One Republic song I knew was All The Right Moves, so I literally tossed a coin to decide whether to listen to Native or Waking Up, and the first one came out on top. My assumption was that those songs were both on the single album they released before disappearing, but it appears I'm not moving in the right circles as One Republic released their sixth studio album last year and it has a song on it which as of writing has nearly 2 billion streams. What, if you will pardon me, the fuck is wrong with people?
Counting Stars has nearly 3 billion streams, opens the album, and feels like the only song on here which matters - it's like it was released as a single with 18 B-sides. When you've got a hit, you've got a hit, but everything else on here was so intolerably empty it's hard to imagine forming an opinion about it. It's the music you put on when three generations of your family are all in the same minivan and you want something your 11 year old and your 86 year old nonna will both listen to and not find offensive. The whole experience was like audio anaesthetic, just making all the parts of me which feel anything about the music I am listening to gradually go numb. There's obviously a market for that, so I am pleased for them for getting paid, but it's not for me.
I listened to Tourist History immediately after listening to Native, and you know how all food tastes really great when you are hungry? I was familiar with Two Door Cinema Club but had never really delved into their stuff, not out of disinterest but just because time is finite; they felt a lot like a band working in the same kind of "interesting indie rock" space as bands like Bloc Party, and I liked and listened to Bloc Party a bunch so I guess I felt that need was already met.
As a palette cleanser following Native though it was like sweet clear water; I bopped along with great delight to it and while it didn't light a fire under me to go back and explore their back catalogue with urgency, there's definitely more of a chance that I revisit this album now the seal has been broken.
First, let me say that it wasn't until I was putting this together that the concept doing a The Doors / Two Door Cinema Club / Three Doors Down triple bill occurred to me, so file that under lost opportunities and let's move on.
I've been losing my mind this morning because I am almost certain that I first heard Kryptonite as part of a video game soundtrack; maybe a Burnout game, or one of the many EA Sports or Tony Hawk franchises which had eclectic alt-rock jukebox soundtracks. However, either I am wrong or that information is impossible to find now all our search engines are useless, because I can't find any evidence of it appearing anywhere apart from on Rock Band and Rocksmith games, and I'm equally certain I bought this song on Rock Band because I already knew it. Regardless, Kryptonite is a great song with a really fun drum breakdown and like Counting Stars, opens The Better Life with everyone's most common reason to listen to it. I always wonder about the logic of putting the lead single first on an album; back in the day before playlists, I'd happily sit through five or six songs I didn't know before I hit Black Hole Sun at track 7, or Jeremy at track 6. It gave those other songs a chance to seep into my psyche that radio/tv/music video play had afforded the lead single, and it became part of why I would love albums as a whole, rather than as a collection of songs.
Regardless, if you think you know what 3 Doors Down sound like because you have heard Kryptonite, you are mostly correct; they are the template for what I think of when I think of when I think of College Rock (I use that term advisedly, its not really a concept here in the UK but from context I think it's correct); they play music that feels like it should be played in a crowded dive bar. It's a kind of high tempo energy that makes you feel slightly drunk and unhinged in the consumption of it - this isn't a record of peaks and valleys, this is a fright train of forward momentum; all gas, no breaks.
Look, I didn't intend for this also to be a collection of albums made famous by one song, but 4 Non Blondes have one album, it's this one, and this album has What's Up? on it (at track 3, at least), and I had certainly never sought out the full album it came from despite how universal the song was. Whatever I was expecting the rest of the album to be, I would have been wrong; I was expecting something more Sheryl Crow, more Sarah McLachlan than what was delivered, which is an album which veers all over from honky tonk blues, through kinda-proto-funk-rock, to folk protest songs, and yes, a little bit of Sheryl Crow in there. You might generously call it eclectic in it's style, and every song is delivered with gusto, but it feels like its fighting against itself to find a real sound and identity. That Linda Perry would go on to write some of the great hit songs of all time for other people should be no surprise, but the ability to write in so many genres might be what made Bigger, Better, Faster, More! a puzzling experience for me.
I've written about Ben Folds before both in a couple of recent posts, and the self titled Ben Folds 5 debut back in the original incarnation of this blog; so for fear of repeating myself, I'll just say that I very carefully picked this album to give myself a chance to talk more about BF5 when I do Whatever and Ever Amen and Unauthorised Biography... at some time in the future (also I learned there's a Ben Folds 5 album from the early 2010s I didn't know existed?). I still enjoy and applaud the concept of musicians, in a guitar driven world, making a rock band where the guitars are replaced by a piano, and this album is a pretty strong statement of intent; I think both the subsequent albums from the debut are better, but there's a lot to like here if you prefer to trade production and craft for raw guts and emotion.
Is there any way to go into an album clean and give it an unbiased first listen when your whole frame of reference for the band is the song for which they are most well known? Like with 3 Doors Down, I was expecting the Eve 6 self titled album to be a lot of songs which sounded a lot like Inside Out in various variations and incarnations; the more I went through (and circled back through) this album, the more Inside Out felt like the outlier. Was it so successful because it exists as the perfect alchemical mix, the ideal ratio of x% Green Day Pop Punk, y% Eel's-esque heartfelt emo, z% Post-grunge rock to produce an uncontrollable reaction which propels it far beyond your control?
I know 'Alternative Rock' is a big tent, but this album seems to drape itself across all of it - funk rock, pop punk, college rock, proto-emo; somewhere in this eleven track album is a specific style of alternative rock that might suit you. Personally, on one and a half listens, I'm quite partial to Showerhead because it has a great snare/hihat opening groove and if you listen to it side by side with Eel's Flyswatter there's a certain tonal similarity I find interesting.
I've spoken before about my enjoyment of Zero 7 and When It Falls remains exactly what I want out of a Zero 7 record; a kind of zen chill, a meditative calm which occasionally veers into the sinister just to keep you on your toes. It's hard to find meaningful stuff to write about them when their entire output exists to me as a kind of state of being. When I say I wouldn't be able to distinguish between this album and Simple Things I do not mean that in a negative way - were I to put on a Zero 7 record where they had decided to add in electric guitars and crank up the tempo, I'd consider that an extreme personal outrage. If music exists to mirror our various states of emotional existence back to ourselves, this band is a moment of peace and contentment, a quiet Sunday brunch with no plans, a state free of concern or anxiety. It's a valuable service, an emotional state I don't reach as often as I would like, and I will defend it with my very being.
Have I lost my mind, or are there somehow no prominent bands with an eight in their name? I rattled my brain for two days trying to come up with anything, but I couldn't and so, for my own peace of mind, I put 'eight' and '8' into Spotify and filtered by artist to make sure I wasn't missing anything obvious. 808 State were the only act in both sets I remotely recognised, and I rejected them specifically because they don't have an 8 in their name, they have an 808, so they will be due for a paragraph-long drive-by review from me in 2066 or thereabouts.
Why eight? Is it cursed? Obviously there are some bands with Eight in the name, I can see that from my search, but none of them have made it big enough to cross my path, and I cast a pretty wide net musically speaking. So, in the interest of calming my OCD if nothing else, if you are about to be a very successful musical act and you are looking for a name, please consider adding an 8 in there somewhere, it will make me much happier.
I have tickets to see Nine Inch Nails in June so you can be sure I'll be doing a full back catalogue runthrough of their stuff in advance of that show; if I could have thought of a different Nine band I would have chosen to listen to them instead. Fortunately, I had a big commute to do and a 100 minute double album was exactly what I needed to fill the time anyway. Remember how I said the music Zero 7 plays represents a mental and emotional state I rarely find myself in? Well, The Fragile exists as the flip side to that coin; sombre, spare instrumental tracks and howling frustration about the the state of all things - this is the mental soundscape I recognise all too well. It's hard to find a way to cleanly recommend NIN music to people despite how much I love pretty much everything Trent Reznor does. There's no conversational line which starts with "Hey, have you ever wondered what a depressive self-destructive mindset sounds like converted to music? It's going to sound impenetrable for the first four or five times through this nearly two hour experience, but once you've cracked it, it will just continually leave you tense and unsettled each time you listen to it." It's wonderful stuff, and the electronic/instrumental tracks on here have a direct lineage to Trent's Ghosts I-IV, V, VI albums and his work on modern soundtracks like the much lauded Challengers OST from last year.
Do you think George R. R. Martin is a big fan of 10cc? The first time I read the very first Game Of Thrones book back in 1996 (yes, it's nearly the 30th anniversary of the first books publication, I am sure The Winds Of Winter is coming any day now though) and saw Jaime Lannister say "The things I do for love" in a pivotal early scene, the song immediately popped into my head. Same when I saw the first episode of the TV show years later, and while it's not forced, it does feel, I dunno, intentional.
Going into listening to Deceptive Bends I knew three things about 10cc. They did the song I think about from Game of Thrones, they named themselves the average volume of male ejaculate, and they were responsible for the song that as a child I knew as 'the cricket song' but is actually called Dreadlock Holiday and feels like it might be on the wrong side of being culturally insensitive in this day and age. What I was not expecting, though the name should have given me a clue, is that 10cc are a band who seem exclusively to sing about drugs, doing drugs, having sex, having sex while doing drugs, and making juvenile jokes. I thought they were a serious band! I thought everything that was produced by English guitar bands from the 1970s had to be some kind of well thought out prog rock odyssey, not a collection of Beavis and Butthead references set to music.
I wasn't shocked or offended by it, because obviously it's from fifty years ago and the standards for what people can say on a record to shock you have shifted somewhat, but it still made me feel uncomfortable, but more in an elderly relative oversharing about their healthy and active sex life kind of way.
I thought about stopping at ten; If I missed out the missing eight, I could put together one of my beloved 3x3 album art grids and be done and out of here by now. But, honestly, I really wanted an excuse to listen to Finger Eleven because I love Paralyzer. I don't want to sound like I am repeating myself here, but once more we face an album with a single standout song, positioned first on the tracklist; from Eve6 to Three Doors Down to Finger Eleven, the lineage continues. Is this the devils bargain? Robert Johnson met him at the crossroads, but more recently, do you put a number in your band name, get a single song launched into the lower earth atmosphere of popularity, and hope to hang on to the rocketship long enough to make a career, or at least have some good stories to tell?
I came across Paralyzer on a shuffle mix on Spotify way back when. I went through a phase of using their "your daily mix 1-5" to see what the algorithm thought I liked that week, and while it was a combination of stuff it knew I had played and seemingly random other artists, sometimes you would find a diamond in there. I was extremely hopeful that the rest of their output would be this kind of interesting Rock/Disco hybrid with the kind of well observed lyrics I had expected from Franz Ferdinand or Pulp; I quickly discovered that was not the case; Paralyzer exists as an exception on Them Vs. You Vs. Me and while I don't want to paint Finger Eleven with shame with unfair comparisons, if the rest of the album is not in the Nickelback/Creed ballpark, it's certainly outside in the parking lot, trying not to get noticed.
Finger Eleven, you made one of my favourite songs, so please don't be offended if that remains the only song of yours I really enjoy for the foreseeable future.
Look, if I became a multimillionaire superstar musician, you can be certain I would have every one of my friends come be in a band with me and get to put out an album if they wanted to, because why not? Eminem had a crew before he broke big, and so when The Slim Shady LP made him a star, he got his crew into the studio and made a record with them, and it's exactly what I would do as well.
Look, I am sure some of you must be thinking "oh, there's no way he didn't google for this one, there's no chance this mid 40's Brit who is the dictionary definition of white and nerdy knew the Eminem side project off the top of his head". I'm sorry, but it's worse than that.
Yup, I own this album, the special edition no less (I don't know what makes it special). Remember what I said about 10cc and it being a bunch of sex and drug references and Beavis and Butthead jokes and how standards have changed? Well, that was what we industry call foreshadowing because oh god this is that but so much worse. It's not unlistenable, and the rest of D12 outside of Eminem get their spotlights and hold their own, but it's just seventy five goddamn minutes of dick and fart jokes and talking about how much sex and drugs they all do. Why did I like this? I think about going through all the Kendrick albums a couple of months ago and it's just so far removed from what modern rap (that I enjoy) exists as.
It was 25 years ago, so maybe I need to give myself a break for being a 20 year old shithead, and them a break for being the same, but damn if this didn't make me feel icky the whole time I was listening to it. If you want to take anything of interest from this record, Girls, the final track of the album is a fun diss track from Em to Fred Durst and House of Pain, and if you like rap beefs and diss tracks, it's an interesting curio.
Here's a fun coda to sign this extra long blog with; Devil's Night was my 334th individual studio album listened to since the first of January, marking exactly one third of the way through my journey to 1000. Will I get bored before my handful of readers do? It's a contest of wills, but for now, I'll once more beg forgiveness from Brian David Gilbert as I use his image to congratulate myself.
*One Direction, 2 Unlimited, The Three Degrees, The Four Tops, Five, Electric Six, Sevendust, then I ran out.
