0.25.0 - Our common goal was waiting for the world to end (Week 25 Wrapup)

 

This Week: New HAIM album; songs for drinking, geopolitical disasters

This is a day late but I had a pretty busy weekend;  we were entertaining my mother-in-law from Friday afternoon to Monday morning, had the social event of the summer in the Locksley Beer Festival on Saturday, and then a day watching tennis at the Nottingham Open Final yesterday, leaving me little time to write my blog.  It's also been incredibly hot all weekend and it's caused me to sleep very badly, in addition to generally sleeping badly because my global terrible news quota has meant my worry bucket is very full.  I've become concerned that I am somehow speaking terrible, anxiety-inducing apocalyptic events into existence through this blog like some internet-enabled Death Note notebook, so I'd just like to say that I think this week, hugely positive things will happen in global geopolitics, capitalist systems will be exposed and everyone will get a free week off.  At this point, that had to be worth a try.

So, apart from 15 different Tori Amos albums, what did I listen to this week?

Both a diptych of albums I listened to this week, and a stylish jpeg to give your boss when you hand in your notice.  

I was going to start this paragraph by saying that I liked HAIM before it was cool, buy honestly I don't know how cool or not it is to like HAIM.  Their profile is certainly higher now than it was before they appeared on a song with Taylor Swift, and my Swifties social media presence seems to indicate that a lot of people have jumped on board with their new album, I quit (which was released last Friday) because of their association with Taylor, but I have no sense of their popularity outside of the self-selecting bubble you enter when you become a fan of something.  Anyway, I was always going to listen to this album this week when my fancy signed vinyl appeared (a slightly extravagant precondition of getting a presale code for the HAIM gig we will be attending later this year), and since I had already listened to Days Are Gone and Women In Music, Part III this year, I decided to put a bow on it and listen to Something To Tell You as well just to have all the discography in the bag.

Something To Tell You feels like a classic difficult second album.  It's not a bad album, or even a mediocre one because I'd listen to HAIM's least accomplished music over a lot of bands best, but it doesn't have as much to say as Women In Music nor the immediate punch of catchy, intelligent debut songs that Days Are Gone has.  I'd still put several songs on this album (Want You Back, Found It In Silence, Right Now, and the title track) into a theoretical best of HAIM playlist, but for me it's a good album overshadowed by the releases either side of it being great.

I quit I'm still forming an opinion on;  it can take a few cycles through for some of the tracks to start to get their hooks into me and my main listen through this album was while listening to my mother in law talk about how much she likes detective series set in countryside locations so it didn't really have an opportunity to put its best foot forward.  I might give myself an opportunity to enjoy it again in a setting where I can pay more attention to it this week.  

Since we were going out drinking on Saturday afternoon in the nice summer weather, I decided to listen to some albums which feature songs about drinking.  Now I could have gone all route one and just listened to Chumbawumba but I low key hate that song not for the song itself, but for the thuggish lad culture that kind of adopted it, I presume to the great chagrin of the left-wing anarcho-punks who penned it.  Anyway, instead of that, I picked three slightly less ubiquitous drinking songs and listened to the albums they are on.

Going into this week, the things I could tell you about Bran Van 3000 were:-

1. They sang the successful summer song "Drinking in LA"

2. End of list

Drinking in LA is such a great tune though - a weird narrative, chill vibe, interesting samples - and I remember it being all over the radio whenever in the mid 90's it came out, and it just kind of stuck with me since then.  It's also another great karaoke song for a group as long as at least one person knows the verse.  I assumed it was on an album, and Glee is its home, the debut album for Bran Van 3000, who I did not know they were Canadian, nor that they kind of formed by accident and ended up producing four albums since the release of this one.  If this blog had a global audience I would assume angry Canadians were taking great offense at my dismissal of their contribution to global musical canon, but I kind of enjoyed this whole album if I am honest.  It reminded me a lot of The Avalanche's Since I Left You (though its possible the correct reading is Since I Left You sounds like Glee).  They do indulge in the cardinal sin of having a cover version as a main track on their album but their version of Cum On Feel The Noize sounds so spectacularly different from the original that it gets a pass.  If you've an interest in interesting sample-driven electronica hip hop which doesn't take itself too seriously, maybe try this album on for size.

I think Jimmy Buffett has a reputation for being the kind of music Gen X dads listen to as the soundtrack to their midlife crisis, but the jokes on you because we skipped having kids, my midlife crisis has lasted years and has a very eclectic soundtrack, and I've got a soft spot for some gentle country guitar and some tongue-in-cheek appreciation for the simpler things in life.  The only thing which is going to challenge you about A White Sport Coat and A Pink Crustacean is the title, but not everything has to be a gourmet meal;  some times you just want a bowl of max & cheese.  Oh, for completeness, I could again have gone and listened to Margaritaville but I thought it was too obvious, so I picked this album for its far more on the nose song, Why Don't We Get Drunk?

I don't know what happened to take bands who's entire thing was building sick guitar hooks over and over again and just going "A huh huh huh huh huh" over the top of them out of musical circulation, but it's possible I guess that everyone just kind of got together, agreed that ZZ Top had done it as well as anyone was ever going to, and raised its jersey into the rafters to retire the form forever.  As a young man of a certain age with a father who was a pretty slick guitarist, I had a small but well curated selection of blues guitar bands in amongst the Nirvanas and Pearl Jams and Soundgardens I was listening to, and my copy of Eliminator was well-worn.  I never sought out other albums by these bands; to this moment I couldn't tell you if there are more than album by Boston or The Allman Brothers Band - I assume there are, but the ones my Dad gave me were the only ones I ever listened to.  It wasn't until much later in life that I heard La Grange off Tres Hombres, and made confident by my love of Eliminator, bought that too.  

Beer Drinkers & Hell Raisers is the song that came to mind for the exercise, and is such a good song not only has it been snatched and covered by several other bands, Motorhead used it as the title of one of their compilation albums which feels both like a hat tip and a weird insult to steal another bands song title for your own greatest hits collection.  Sometimes the best way to get a real good bagel, or bao, or korean fried chicken, is to go to a small kitchen where that is all they make and the menu has at max 4 items on it.  This is the ZZ Top philosophy.  They make one kind of meal, but if you are looking for the kind of music you want playing as you drive your 1960's muscle car through a dusty desert at twilight, ZZ Top are who you should call.

Remember when I said in last weeks blog that it was the point at which things started getting scary, news-wise?  Well, seven days later we are well past 'started' as we head towards a rerun of "lets start a unilateral war on a Middle Eastern nation" from everyone's favourite White House resident.  As a result, I listened to a bunch of albums that for some reason stick in my mind as someone who saw their father go off to war in the early 1990's, watched with mounting horror the second Middle Eastern intervention in the 2000s and now wonders what the consequences will be this third go around.

Consolidated are another band I heard through my friend Hado, who's sister was our pathway into the music of Tori Amos.  I never asked Hado where he first found Consolidated, a left wing hip-hop/industrial collective whose albums exclusively addressed social issues and their positions on them, who's concerts involved passing microphones into the audience and doing Q&A's on their beliefs, and fused rap, guitars, and samples long before Nu Metal arrived and ruined it for everyone.  Play More Music is the blueprint of a Consolidated album for me - full of samples, soundbytes of concert footage crowd questions, and songs about gun control, propaganda, safe sex, LGBTQIA rights and drug legalisation...and the Iraq war.  It's incredibly heavy handed and on the nose, but I'm starting to come round to the idea that some things need to be said clearly, with volume, and on repeat to get peoples attention, and this album certainly got mine.  I wish I could go back to 1992 and tell those people in Consolidated that the things they talked about had changed, that the problems had been addressed, but they seem like nice people and I don't want to lie to them.

Another band I liked before they were popular, the DJ at our local rock nightclub loved to play Sugar and Spiders from their self-titled debut, so long before Chop Suey became a meme I'd been listening to System of a Down for three years.  As musicians acutely aware of the consequences of war and genocide, being all of Armenian descent, SOAD don't care about being subtle or clever in their messaging.  "Why don't presidents fight the war, why do they always send the poor?" isn't complex thought, but the aggression of the music isn't the formless, undirected violence people who fear their kids listening to metal will experience - it's a crowbar trying to find purchase in the fractures of the teenage psyche and lever open enough room for them to feed in the idea that state-sponsored violence is bad as vociferously as they possibly can.  Mesmerize, much like the other System albums goes at absolutely a thousand miles an hour before pausing only briefly then shooting off in a different direction.  B.Y.O.B. as an anti-war anthem is deranged in all the best ways, and is worth listening just to that if you're not sure a full 40 minutes of Armenian Protest Metal is what you are looking for.

I'm going to do all of TOOL and A Perfect Circle at some point as their own thing, so I'll save the Maynard James Keenan conversation for a later date;  but I listened to Eat The Elephant a lot when it came out in 2018 as it felt like it enunciated a lot of what I was feeling about the first Trump administration, something that I would ironically cheerily go back to now.  "Signal the final curtain call in all its atomic pageantry" indeed.

I deliberately sought out a grounding in rap some time in the late 90s.  My parents had vocal opinions about the validity of rap as a musical style, which always struck me as odd as a lot of the soul and blues and funk that I knew growing up had come from them.  I wasn't trying to be contrary or rebellious in exploring rap music (people who know me and my therapist will know that seeking acceptance/approval from my parents was far more my jam and would be a source of endless failure for me in that regard), but even then in my early 20's I'd formed the core of my nascent belief that if music was popular, had an audience, that there must be something to it.  I mean, I'm not going to lie and say that my love of The Beastie Boys and DJ Format and Ugly Duckling and Eminem didn't help ease me into the rap world with some cultural water wings to prevent me from drowning, but by the early 2000s had a firm appreciation for the classics.  Outside of one Rap album which is now forever dead to me but I would once have called the greatest rap album ever made, Outkast might be the rap artists I most consistently enjoy.  On a given day you can ask me to pick between Stankonia, ALTiens and Aquemini and I might give you a different answer depending on my mood, but but pure hit rate, lyrical flair and confidence this album has is undeniable.  

Ironically, B.O.B. (Bombs Over Baghdad) was adopted by the US military as their unofficial war anthem for the Iraq invasion, more evidence that a) 90% of people only listen to the chorus and just make up what they think the song is about at like the most surface level reading you can imagine and b) you can never make anything cool or good or popular enough that it can't be ruined by someone.  

So there you go, we survived another week, and assuming I manage to get some sleep now this heatwave has backed off and as my internal insomnia clock trends towards 'crash' once more, I have another whole week of music to face into including deciding what my 600th album is going to be.  In the meantime, enjoy all the free cake and ice cream being delivered to you by accident, and your secret crush texting you that they have deep feelings for you.

Only good things this week.  Deal?