This week: Filter, Ben Folds, Self Esteem, First Aid Kit, me being bad at Excel
I'm not going to lie, it's been a slower week this week than normal. It's proving difficult to both listen to several albums per day while also watching as much snooker as possible during this slim two week window when that is permissible in our household. As such, outside of the nine albums I covered already this week, there's only a handful of other records I have found time to listen to, and I'm already in trouble with Catherine for abandoning her in front of the TV to write this blog post. Momentum is important and once I lose it, I find it very hard to pick it back up, so here we are.
While we are talking about things which have been causing me to struggle, I've started to get to situations where I do find myself with some time to listen to music, but don't have a snap choice lined up and end up scrolling around for inspiration. This is more of a me problem, because I have both my recommendations lists and "best albums" lists I can draw on, plus a bunch of artists with big discographies I want to embark on, but for those I want to do the whole thing inside of a week rather than scattergun across like a month of listening. The fact that I've set myself all these arbitrary rules might seem needlessly complicated and is just making this exercise harder for no reason, and that because it is. However, it's not going to make me change them.
Finally, lets address the slight issue with my dashboard, and specifically the "Projected Albums Completed" field. If you were to go back through the previous weeks wrapup posts, you would have seen those numbers going down and down gradually. in week 10 it was 1363; in week 13 it was 1203; in week 16 it was as low as 1037. So how now is it at 1445? Well, my well crafted projected metric which took the number of albums completed, divided them by the number of days passed since Jan 1 to return a fractional daily rate, and then multiply that number by the remaining number of days in the year worked perfectly; what it didn't do is then add in all the albums I had already listened to. When it hit just over 1000 last week, I suspected I had messed something up and checked my formula (it seemed outrageous that I was projected to just beat 1000 with 450+ albums under my belt by April) and found the error. So we are back in the realm of successful accurate projections, and thank goodness this isn't in any way my job and these calculations don't influence millions of pounds of company purchases every week.
With those uncomfortable truths behind us, lets talk about what else I listened to this week.
I've talked
previously about both Catherine's and my own enjoyment of Rotherham's Rebecca Lucy Taylor a.k.a. Self Esteem , so we have been in deep anticipation of her third album, singles and promotion for which started to pop up over the last few months. We've already secured tickets to her Sheffield Arena show (which promises to be a spectacle if her previous live performances are anything to go by), but outside of the anticipation, there's also been a degree of worry - I've not been wild about any of the single releases apart from
Focus Is Power, and as album releases go, this is a high degree of difficulty.
Compliments Please wasn't a huge commercial success, and as such there were no pressures or expectations placed on
Prioritise Pleasure when it released, either in terms of content or timing. When
Prioritise Pleasure became an unexpected but deserved commercial hit, Ms Taylor took the opportunity to parlay that success into opening other doors for her - appearances on TV, a show at the West End, and who could blame her - that's what I would do. But can you do all of those things, and also write another album to stand in comparison to your greatest success in 18 months?
The most basic human instinct is, when under pressure, just do what worked before, and hope it works again, and it feels a little like A Complicated Woman has some of that energy as well. It's not a bad album, and I've listened to it two and a half times already this week (in violation of my own decree to only listen to albums once this year), but the thing that made Prioritise Pleasure so impactful, and stand out so much, has some diminishing returns in A Complicated Women where some tracks feel like direct analogues to songs on the previous album. Maybe I will grow into it more, and seeing it live will no doubt give me a different perspective, but it's not the immediate blockbuster I hoped it might be.
I thought I would throw in a little mini-trilogy for a weird little band this week for a few reasons. One, I already wrote about
Short Bus back in 2017, so that saves a little effort; secondly, Filter are an interesting band to talk about just because it lets me say "Did you know that the T800 / Peacemaker's Dad / Doggett from the X-Files (delete based on which of those references you understand, if none of them insert 'the actor Robert Patrick in it's place, but know you are missing out on some formative pop culture) had a little brother who was also in Nine Inch Nails, and then left to start his own band?' because that is true. Richard Patrick is also the only member of Filter who's been in every iteration of the band (who, like Linkin Park, I assumed had broken up and disappeared in 2002 only for me to find out today they have a further four albums including one from 2023), which is very in keeping with his own experiences playing with Trent Reznor in NIN.
Industrial metal, a kind of goth/sample/synth style which only really bears a passing resemblance to metal in either classic (Metallica) or Nu (Korn) flavours is a very acquired taste, but as someone who went through adolescence listening to Nine Inch Nails and The Cure and Sisters of Mercy and My Life With The Thrill Kill Cult (and basically all the soundtrack to
The Crow), this was an easy sell for me, aided by a ruthlessly effective lead single in
Hey Man, Nice Shot (which has an interesting inspiration which comes with a content warning for suicide if you decide to
read about it).
Title of Record would have the most unlikely of things, a crossover hit with
Take a Picture making significant chart progress around the world (a chill electro-ballad about how Patrick's lifelong and still ongoing battle with alcoholism led to him being arrested after getting blackout drunk on an aeroplane). It's an interesting and genuinely diverse sounding record; like Trent Reznor, Patrick went in a bunch of different directions musically without losing the core of their music, and if I was going to recommend an 'easy(er) listening Industrial album' to anyone, it might be that one.
With two albums I enjoyed under their belt, I also bought their third album which I neither enjoyed as much nor listened to as much as the other two as a result. Did I just have a short musical attention span back in the early 2000s? Were my expectations too high, did I just outright cut you off as a band if you produced something I thought was just OK? I think its more likely that, as the era of my great piracy began at that time, I just had a constant inflow of whatever the new hotness was at the time, and some bands just couldn't command my attention in the same way. As I said, I kind of assumed Filter had split up after this album, and by most respects I am correct, since the fourth album doesn't appear until eleven years after The Amalgamut and that is again a completely different lineup from the previous incarnations of the band with the exception of Richard Patrick.
As a final coda to this section, I did know that Filter were still something of a going concern because, in my anxiety fuelled news consumption during the first Trump presidency, Richard Patrick appeared in the news because a venue
cancelled his concert after he'd made several anti-trump posts on social media. Had he just chosen to vocally support the deranged orange fascist, he might have been in charge of the Department of Defence by now*.
Remember when I said at the start of this post that sometimes I am struggling to just pick an album to put on because I don't have a theme or a concept or an idea of what I want to say but I just need to listen to something? Please welcome First Aid Kit to the stage who are a band I gently enjoy, Catherine likes, and makes nice Sunday morning listening when it's 10am and you are tidying up your kitchen. Sometimes, it doesn't have to be more complicated than that. It's very pleasantly jangly and has a country twang to it that is pleasing, but I don't fall over myself to listen to First Aid Kit - they're (for me), music to have on in the background while you are concentrating on something else.
Here's a weird aside, but I would be remiss if I didn't mention it. Back in the late 1990s, when I was heavily into collectable card games, before the internet came to ruin everyone's fun, there was a print magazine called
Duellist (the entire run of which you can find
here on the Internet Archive the discovery of which nearly derailed my afternoon), and amongst the marketing bumf and 3000 word essays on the Magic:The Gathering rules interactions you weren't aware of, there was a 'letters from readers' section where readers had been encouraged to send in their own designs for Magic cards. Some 10 year old had written a card which just said "you win the game" when you cast it, and for some reason the name he gave this card was
The Lion's Roar. It was a dumb name for a badly designed magic card, and its not much of a better one for an album, sorry First Aid Kit. If anyone finds which issue of Duellist that appears in, let me know somehow - I checked issues 3-6 before I gave up due to time constraints.
Finally, I listened to Rockin' The Suburbs mainly because twice I have meant to listen to this album which my friend Andy H put in his recommendations list (but I would have got to it anyway, as I've mentioned before I like Ben Folds solo work) and have instead listened to Way To Normal and Songs For Silverman instead. This might not be the best of the Ben Folds albums (I like Songs for Silverman significantly more), this is almost certainly the best litmus test to see if you like his music - it's the Ben Folds blueprint from which all other albums exist as iterations on, and refinements of, the formula.
A short and sweet one this week - we have another week of Snooker and a three day weekend again next weekend, so I will try and slip some albums into the cracks in my free time if only to keep my momentum turning, but hopefully we will return to some iteration of a 25+ album week (I have it in my mind to do all of Metallica some time in May) once the action at the Crucible draws to a close on the 6th of May.
Toodles.
* I don't want to use my Cassandra-esque prognostication powers again after I killed the Pope last week, but I swear to god if Pete Hesgeth gets shuffled out of the administration, Kid Rock has to be out there waiting for a phone call.
