This Week: A bunch of bands from the mid 90s, my 400th album of the year, a real grab bag of other stuff.
It's been a hell of a week. I'm trying not to beat myself up too much about my pace appreciably dropping this week, primarily because my job has become a stress headache inducing nightmare which doesn't look like its going away any time for the next couple of weeks. and the last thing I want to do is put more pressure on myself to write here when I feel like my time is already massively constrained. I still enjoy it, as evidenced by the fact I wrote about Orla this week and I have a bunch of wrapup content to put up today to keep my hand in, but this week also saw the first 24 hour period where I didn't listen to a single album, this Saturday. I'm annoyed at myself because I did listen to like 95% of Something To Tell You by HAIM while Catherine and I were driving around doing errands all day before she went off on her Easter break and I just never finished it, so it doesn't officially count. I've put six albums under my belt today at least so I am trying to make up for some lost time.
If you've been following my thread on BlueSky of every album I've listened to, you'll have seen a BUNCH of Placebo albums on there which I've not documented yet. That was intended to be my other blog post this week, and rather than just dumping them all in the weekend wrapup, I've committed to doing the Placebo band wrapup properly this coming week if I can find some time, so currently my listening and writing are minorly out of synch. Nothing I can't catch up to though.
My listen rate has not been helped by a bunch of YouTube content coming out this week which was all multiple hours long but I wanted to spend the time watching. First, there was a new-ish SuperEyepatchWolf (A youtube essayist I enjoy for his eclectic selection of topics, his sense of humour and his very calming Irish brogue) video about the crazy world of Professional Wrestling which I deeply enjoyed. Also, if you've been keeping notes about these blogs (and why would you?) you might have seen a couple of references to tabletop RPG The Between which I played through with some wonderful folks last year. The GM for that campaign, Matt, has an excellent YouTube channel for his Solo RPG endeavours, and he has just premiered a non-solo project playing The Between in a game run by the creator of the whole thing, Jason Cordova. Matt does a great job on production, the cast does a great job getting deep into the game, and I've watched Jason run 2 different full campaigns of this on Youtube before, and I never fail to be impressed by how effortless he makes it look. Both strong recommendations.
In other news, this week marks something of an unofficial occasion in our little two-person household. As it is Easter school holidays starting as of last Friday, Catherine makes a point of finding somewhere to flee the country to as soon as the school she works at shuts its gates for two weeks. In this case, she has departed today for a week each staying with two different Spanish friends, one near Barcelona, and one in Palma, leaving me at home, working, and with a list of jobs which need doing before she gets back - in this case, a comprehensive, top down sort out of my home office room, several trips to the dump to throw a bunch of stuff away, take some board games to the charity shop, and erect some new storage furniture. However, this list of tasks does come with a subtle upside.
Catherine and I have been together for nearly 18 years now, and we have lived together for 16 and a half of those; Catherine is a very sensible woman and she likes to make sure I make sensible choices about things like "diet" and "exercise" and "not walking around the house in just my underwear at 2pm", things that not only were less of a concern when I lived alone, but that I actually enjoyed. So when Catherine leaves me for a protracted period in the house by myself, I can unleash my inner bachelor for a glorious week or two and make a series of bad decisions secure in the knowledge that no-one is there to tell me not to. However, when I dropped her off at the station this morning she made me promise that I would not go crazy and eat like a trash person while she was away, and I take my promises seriously*. So, for these two weeks, I may not be eating like I was 20 years old again, so instead I've decided to listen like I am.
Welcome to the holiday known only to me - Garbage Week**.
If I am honest, this is the only block of albums this week which has any kind of theme; everything else has been a bit of grab bag based on whenever I thought I had time to listen to something for 45 minutes or so between annoying meetings or when I needed to fully focus on some complex spreadsheet building. But finding a bunch of albums aimed directly at what I was listening to when I had adult finances but no responsibility was pretty easy, as conveniently there was a handy Spotify playlist I could use as reference material.
La Montmatre, or Monty's as it was more colloquially known, was a terrible bar near the
badly built church in the centre of the small town I lived in from my early teens until my mid thirties. On a Tuesday evening (the day of the week that most screams 'party' if you ask me) , in the basement below the main bar, the ragged handful of counterculture youth the town could support gathered together for Drop Out, the weekly alternative and metal night. It was truly an awful place; a tiny dancefloor with a pole (not a stripper pole but like a structural support beam) right through the middle of it, a bar where questions like "are you old enough to be drinking in here?" were never asked, and in return we paid 50p or £1 for the worst barrel dregs and beer that wouldn't sell to anyone else. There were next to no chairs, just a few small booths, so you'd spend most of the night sat on the sticky maroon carpet or perched on a step somewhere; the toilet facilities were just a couple of urinals and a single cubicle for guys, and not much for the ladies since the queue to use the women's facilities was the most consistent thing week to week about the venue. Terrible decisions were made in that basement by a number of people, but for years, I would be in there from 10pm (it was more expensive if you paid the cover after 10pm) to 2am, listening to the music that defined that time period for me.
It doesn't exist any more obviously, three decades have erased everything except the physical shell of the building (now a different kind of terrible bar) and the memories we made in there. Fortunately, with the advent of streaming services, D and I have spent some time painstakingly recreating the songs which formed the core playlist of the Drop Out experience, and its from this list that I am pulling my inspiration for the albums I listened to today. And of course, after all that setup, the first album I listened to isn't on the list***.
Tragic Kingdom came to mind because last night, as we were winding down for the evening before bed, I was flicking through TV channels and came across a BBC show where they showed performances on UK TV of songs which went on to be bigger hits for someone else. I love a stupid music listicle in TV form, it's true brain-off comfort TV for me, but Catherine is less of a fan, so it was just playing in the background really. When Talk Talk appeared on there singing the original version of It's My Life, I said out loud "Tragic Kingdom, how have I not listened to that yet"****
In terms of presence, presentation, and landing at the exactly correct moment, Gwen Stefani might be the easiest rock star slam dunk in history, a fact that no doubt***** continues to be galling to her brother Eric, who only let his little sister sing in the band as a backing singer before lineup changes moved her into the lead. I've never been a big Ska person - I think Madness and the Ska Craze of the 1980's in the UK burned a lot of us out - but the really heavy ska influence is kept to the album deep cuts, and the singes (Spiderwebs, Don't Speak, Just A Girl) are straight up rock anthems at this point. I like No Doubt as a greatest hits band, and I had a lot of time for Gwen Stefani (but if I am honest, I'm vaguely aware of her presence in US reality TV and her country music pivot with her husband Blake Shelton but have deliberately not engaged with it), but Tragic Kingdom was never one of my favourites in the 90s, and not much has changed thirty years later.
OK, let's talk about Whale, and We Care. It seems absurd in hindsight that I owned a copy of this album, one of only two albums released by a Swedish alt rock band with very little in the way of promotion or radio play. There's some fortunate timing at play I suspect - Bjork had released Debut to critical acclaim a year or so beforehand, and several record labels probably had A&R guys out there in the world searching for the 'next Bjork'. However it ended up in the Drop Out DJ's record box, one thing was for certain - when Hobo Humpin' Slowbo Babe came on, the dancefloor filled instantly. It's exceptionally quirky, but kicks ass, and sounds like nothing else. It's the most one-hit of one-hit wonders you can imagine, but because I never bought singles, only albums, and I wanted to own this song, I ended up with a copy of this album. Until today, I probably hadn't thought about it in 15 years, but goddamn if I didn't instantly know every one of the tracks on there, and this whole record has the tonal consistency of an orchestra falling off a cliff. That's Where It's At is a hip-hop influenced party anthem; I'll Do Ya is a pop song in which lead singer Cia Berg gleefully describes her favourite sex acts (this song is one I had significant thoughts about as a young man); Happy In You is a major key breakup song,while I'm Cold is a haunting pop song told from the perspective of a traffic accident victim dying at the side of the road. It's completely unhinged and should not work and I love it for all those reasons. This album isn't high art, except in the way that all art is interpretation so it might be, but damn if this isn't the one from this week I'd suggest you all listen to, just for the sheer audacity of it.
I love a music video. There was an artistic peak where the idea of a television channel devoted to non-stop broadcast of a variety of music, and each song being accompanied by some form of visual medium which enhanced or amplified the qualities of the song was a viable business model. If you ask me, we should have stayed there and the future is a mistake we will never recover from, but I don't get to make those kinds of decisions, apparently. Regardless, I owned and listened to Ill Communication because the video for Sabotage was the perfect visual accompaniment for a song that went pretty hard; the idea of creating a series of title credits for a 70's cop show that never exists with the song as a theme song works impossibly well. It's like Garth Merenghi's Darkplace met Hill Street Blues but fifteen years ahead of its time. I'm amazed the nostalgia machine hasn't somehow dredged up the Sabotage video and commissioned a 24 episode season based on it. Conveniently, Ill Communication is a great album. It launched me into my love of all things Hip-Hop, features Sure Shot which was another Drop Out dancefloor anthem. I'll probably do Hello Nasty later this week so I'll talk more about The Beasties and seeing them live then.
I would watch this show. It would be deeply problematic.
I never got into the Manic Street Preachers. They were a band that had critical acclaim and deep lore and well loved albums before I even knew they existed. I heard the tales of the disappearance of Richey Edwards, their guitarist, after the fact; I felt I was catching up on a TV show that had already been running for three seasons. I'm sure that in Chesterfield, someone, somewhere was listening to and extoling the virtues of The Manics and their early albums, but it was never in my earshot. I remember seeing them on UK Friday Night counterculture variety show
TFI Friday (it was a TV show before it was a bad chain restaurant, US readers), where it was a big deal as it was their first time playing live as a three piece. In truth, the success of
Everything Must Go might have come from a slight morbid curiosity of how this band were going to continue, but it's a great rock record filled with powerful songwriting.
A Design For Life has killer drums which are very fun to play (I speak from personal experience) but a presciently evergreen message (along with
If You Tolerate This Your Children Will Be Next which feels like a prophecy in song form).
In what might be a shocking revelation to everyone reading this, I think it's possible that during the whole Britpop explosion of the mid 90's, those bands fronted by women somehow never quite got the coverage, the mainstream success of their Y chromosome-having contemporaries. I remember both Sleeper and Belly fondly, and I've covered Elastica before, and watch this space for me listening to Republica's self-titled debut late this week, and all of them deserved to more than "oh, and here are the ladies doing this Britpop thing as well, let's all give them a round of applause". The It Girl is a great companion album to Elastica, both incisive observation of lived experience for young women in the mid nineties, a kind of exasperated disbelief at how stacked against them system and attitudes continued to be; Star isn't Britpop at all, as Tanya Donnelly's other other band (post Throwing Muses, pre The Breeders) had some chart success around the same time and I guess people just lumped everything together in their minds. Belly were always really my sisters' band, and my only personal relation to them, apart from hearing this album a bunch around the house, was that I believe they were the first live band my sister every saw, with me chaperoning her to the gig at the age of 15 in Sheffield, with me as a worldly 19 year old. I remember them being very good. I also want to just shout out the designer for the banner art for Belly's Spotify page...
Every day, I inch a little closer.
Goddamn I have written a lot for 6 albums and it's nearly midnight now and I have work tomorrow so its time to speedround the rest of these albums; sorry, many albums that I dearly love.
I listened to these two as part of my trip to see Orla Gartland as a pair of other bands I have also seen live at the Albert Hall in Manchester where they put on excellent performances. In good new for me, I have already written about
Eye to the Telescope already; I listened to The Breeders a) because of the
video for
Cannonball which was everywhere, b) because my friend Hado was way into the Pixies and so we all kind of were, and when Kim Deal moved to her own band, I bought the album.
Last Splash is one of my favourite 90's albums, it's incredibly influential in what I love about music, I feel bad for glossing over it.
While we are glossing over albums I love, Midnights (3am Edition) was my 400th album of the year, and the calendar ticking over to a new month gave me permission for another Taylor album. This one is special for me because I because radicalised as a Swiftie during the Pandemic, but I was listening to albums that had been out for months at the time; this was my first opportunity to experience the excitement of a new record as a fan. The ability for music to generate communal experiences is the best - I'm not sure anyone knew what to make of this album when it came out, but it's firmly found its place high amongst the most beloved of her canon. I love Vigilante Shit.
The fact that at 16 years old in her bedroom, Lorde could write, arrange and produce an incredibly evocative portrait of young urban life with some of the most outrageously catchy synthwave pop songs of all time is unfair. I like
Pure Heroine more than
Melodrama (Catherine does not share my opinion) but its very close.
Glory and Gore is the deep cut I like, but this album feels like it somehow has all the hits on it. We listened to this driving back from Orla Gartland, primarily because there's no internet signal as you drive over the low mountains between Manchester and Sheffield, so my Spotify could only play whatever was saved locally to my phone, and Catherine picked this. I listened to
Animals because I woke up incredibly early on Monday because of work stress and thought about doing a time/clock theme for the week before it became apparent that my theme for the week was going to be 'trying to think of reasons not to quit my job on the spot'. I feel bad about listening to early Ke$ha albums because of the whole
Dr Luke connection, but I wanted to listen to
Tik Tok (still a party pop classic) and she has a new, independent album coming out soon so I will make it up to her by listening to that as well.
Talking of bands covering other people's songs, and incredibly one-hit wonders, I listened to The Futureheads self-titled debut; not since Alien Ant Farm covered Smooth Criminal have a band been so trapped by the success of a cover version undermining all their own songs. I like their Hounds of Love cover to be fair, but its a total gimmick, and the rest of the album fell pretty flat for me; like a less interesting, less energetic Maximo Park.
Sometimes you have to just lean into the bit when it presents itself, so when I got to record number 404, I just typed "Error" into Spotify and picked the band with the closest name. I don't know anything about Errors, but I can tell you that It's Not Something but It Is Like Whatever ended up being a collection of interesting electro-ambient music that was pretty good to do work to. The single lower case word in the intercapped title makes me crazy though (I don't think its represented in the album cover art either, a large part of me feels like whoever typed the title into the Spotify db just missed the shift key and no-one cared enough to change it).
Last, but not least, Electric Callboy. A colleague at work who knows I have wide musical taste and like metal recommended them to me and told me just to listen to them without reading anything. They are amazing. If you think kind of high energy 90's eurobeat swirled together with the bassiest growling metal, that is
TEKKNO and the entire Electric Callboy schtick. It's not winky or tongue in cheek; it's a fusion that only works because the energy carries seamlessly between the dance and metal parts of the song that it seems impossible that no-one has done this before. They are unbelievable fun; please go watch their latest
music video for just a taste of what makes them so special.
And I'm done, proofreading and link adding notwithstanding. Thank you for bearing with me while things have been crazy, but I'll keep sticking with it as long as someone out there is reading it.
Have a good week.
*While my instinct is always to subsist on a combination of Indian, Chinese and Pizza Delivery, I can't kid myself, I am nearly 50 and all it does is make me nauseous and bloated and kind of depressed. I mean, I predict that would happen, I have no way of knowing for certain because I've never done that recently, obviously.
**Not the band, more the lifestyle. A week of living like a trash person.
***I've reached out to the committee which validates this list for clarification; Tragic Kingdom came out in '95 along with a lot of stuff which is on the list, it seems insane to me that Just A Girl wouldn't have been played along with all this other stuff.
**** Of course, 'It's My Life' isn't on Tragic Kingdom so this whole process was a complete sham, but this is how it happened.
*****Do you see what I did there?******
******Jesus there is an unnecessary amount of footnotes on this article, but I like them and no-one uses them any more. Lets be honest, no-one puts long form text on the internet and expects people to read it any more, so I guess I'm special in several ways.
