If you are reading this and you are one of my regular readers, it delights me to tell you that by the time you read this, the episode of This One Goes To 11 which Michael and Tyler very kindly invited me to appear on should be live on the internet. If you want to go and listen to me try and keep my instinct to talk relentlessly in check and let those guys get a word in edgeways, please go listen to or watch the episode (and all the others while you are there).
If you are here because you listened to the episode and decided to come read some of my writing then first of all, thank you. I don't get paid for this, there are no ads, and I don't really promote myself very well apart from to my very limited followers on BlueSky so I appreciate you taking the time. There's a lot of writing about a lot of albums on this blog, some more detailed and better than others if I am honest, so let me show you what I'm proudest of.
If you want to know why and what I am doing here, here's my launch post and mission statement. Last week I wrote about music podcasts and my relation to them, which you might be interested in. I wrote extensively about the album I covered on the show, so if you want a deeper dive into my feelings on Asleep In The Back, you can find it here. I've written about R.E.M, Radiohead, Taylor Swift, Tori Amos, cover albums, self-titled albums, and at one point I listened to 50 different cover versions of Sk8r Boi while writing about Avril Lavigne and Olivia Rodrigo. Hopefully, somewhere in my archive of posts is something you are interested in, and I've tried to remember to tag every artist in any post they appear in, so you can just search for a band and see what comes up I guess?
If you want to know where I am up to on my race to 1000 albums, I have have a spreadsheet you can visit online which shows you everything I've listened to so far and lists a bunch of fun stats about my music consumption this year which you can find here - Dashboard!.
Because the internet is how it is, I keep the comments on my blog disabled, but if you want to reach out to me, you can contact me on BlueSky where you can find me at @nottopgearrh.swifties.social or you can email recordreconstructor@gmail.com with feedback/suggestions and be amongst the first 5 people to ever use that email address in earnest.
As I am writing this, I have not yet heard the final version of the podcast episode so hopefully I acquit myself reasonably well. Because I believe that turnabout is fair play, I asked Michael and Tyler in turn to each recommend five albums for me to listen to as part of my journey to 1000, and they very generously and quickly provided me with a list each, so I thought this might be the ideal opportunity to cover their selections and let you (and them) know what I thought.
Michael's Picks
There are indie bands and there are
indie bands, if you know what I mean. Sometimes if you're plugged in to the music scene, or wander accidentally onto the pitchfork front page looking for agricultural equipment, you might see the same names appear over and over again. I remember putting off listening to
Spiderland by Slint just because it had become such a touchstone of indie music that I somehow felt cooler and more counterculture having not listened to it. This has been my experience also with Spoon, a band whose name kept appearing in my peripheral vision, another indie darling who you just
have to listen to. So, as a contrarian soul, I refused to, until Michael added them to my listening list.
I'm big enough to admit that sometimes I can be wrong or do things for stupid reasons, so I'll aways be grateful for Michael breaking my self-imposed Spoon blockade and in turn me realising that both Transference and Lucifer on the Sofa are the kind of albums I devour whole; Michael's recommendation came with a caveat that Spoon's output can be hit and miss and I've only listened to these two records, so it's possible I'm getting a better curated experience than others, and had I gone to them of my own accord, I might have felt differently.
Is the only difference between a Nine Inch Nails instrumental album like
Ghosts I-IV and a Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross movie soundtrack like
The Social Network OST the fact that one comes with a kind of prebuilt music video for the entire album? Its possible*, and I've
spoken effusively about my love of Nine Inch Nails and I can't reasonably find the line between the two. Every one of their OSTs is great, but I think
The Social Network might still be the best. Nothing about it feels secure, or safe, it's like an audio whirlpool of insecurity and arrogance and anger that couldn't be more perfect as an accompaniment to its source material, but works just as effectively on its own.
I wonder if Michael selected Grace and Elephant with a devilish deliberate agenda in mind; Are there two albums in the whole pantheon of music more poisonously polluted by a single track who's overexposure threatens to invalidate the entire fabric of the album around it? This might be a uniquely British perspective, perhaps. Maybe the trend to fit any 7 syllable phrase into the Seven Nation Army riff and chant it at any possible gathering of the kind of people who enjoy chanting things at people (primarily football matches) is safely confined to the borders of our deeply troubled nation. Seven Nation Army was a great song, simplistic but brilliant for it, with an infectious hook which loses a lot of its majesty when you've heard it used to chant "Mans-field Town are all wank-ers" for the 800th time. And if the laddish masses have co-opted the White Stripes, then no lesser force than every television executive and advertising director have rendered Jeff Buckley's Hallelujah into nothing more than a warning klaxon that the TV show or advert really wants you to feel wistful and sad right now. Once more, its brilliance is its fatal flaw; too powerful, too profound to be allowed to be overused with such little care, but the damage is done now, and while it's undoubtedly the definitive version of an exceptional song**, I don't need to hear it again.
It saddens me somewhat because before both of these albums were ruined by overexposure (see my
article on
August and Everything After for another album dragged down by the weight of its most popular song), I'd count both of them amongst my favourites. Michael said in his note to me that he was shocked I hadn't listened to
Grace before, and honestly, it was particularly the
Hallelijah factor which had kept it off my running order until now. It's hugely frustrating because going back to both
Grace and
Elephant I was reminded both of how much I liked them, and how many better songs there are on each album than their poster child.
Last Goodbye and
Lilac Wine are my favourite tracks from Jeff Buckley's opus, and
Girl, You Have No Faith In Medicine and
There's No Home For You Here, even
Hardest Button To Button are more indicative, more representative and authentic to the rest of the White Stripes output than
Seven Nation Army ever was. So I look past (listen past?) my annoyance and frustration with the songs which propelled their albums into ubiquity and try to remember them how they once were.
Micheal's note about his picks included a touching story of remembering the significance of being given Grace by someone he knew only fleetingly and lost touch with, but the album recalls that person and their time together whenever he hears it. If the streaming service musical goliath has cost us so many things that were once great and powerful about music in the name of cheap and easy accessibility, that might be the greatest loss. Like Michael, I have so many albums indelibly linked in my mind to the people who shared them with me; a throwaway Spotify link cast into a Whatsapp message can never hold that same weight, and that makes all of us a little less connected instead of more.
Tyler's Picks
I'll be honest, I thought Tyler had recommended me Projector by Geese one day and then about an hour later the band announced they had broke up, but that was instead a different modern super-indie darling band called Goose, so you can see how I would be confused. I listened to the Cameron Winter solo album back in January and it really didn't land for me***, but I found Projector much more accessible and easier to find the immediate appeal, while still having enough sonic weirdness to keep you on your toes. It made me ask myself if I should go back and give Heavy Metal another try to see if maybe it was just the January blues holding me back. It sounds like it emerged from a time warp from Alternate Reality New York where The Strokes and Interpol never existed, and Geese discovered angular guitars, syncopated drum rhythms and idiosyncratic vocals all on their own. That's a compliment, in case that's not clear.
The true joy of asking for recommendations**** from people with expansive music taste is sometimes, out of left field, you end up listening to an ambient electronic album from 1971 at 4am on a Tuesday. For a bunch of reasons I've been working through one of my on-again, off-again cycles of insomnia recently, and so I found myself in my messy home office looking out at the darkened suburban streets with my headphones on, immersed in the experimental soundscape of A Rainbow In Curved Air by Terry Riley and letting it become what I focused on rather than work stress, or geopolitical anxiety, or how much my back hurt because I somehow got older and this is just what happens apparently. Whether it was the time, the exhaustion, the stillness of the suburban night I couldn't tell you, but I found this a deeply emotionally resonant experience. I'm slightly worried that if I go back to it outside of those specific circumstances the illusion might fade, but I enjoyed listening to it on an almost profound level.
You would think there might be a point at which I don't fall in love with a soulful, poetic and heartbreaking/broken female singer songwriter not named Lana Del Ray (and you can read about my feelings on her
here), but today is not that day.
Shelter by Alice Phoebe Lou exists somewhere between the Honorary Boygenius Member list and Mitski but she does it well and with enough of her own style to feel like she is her own woman, rather than a poor copy of something someone else did. My next plan is to play it in the car while Catherine and I are driving somewhere, as I did with Allison Russell and Faye Webster and Laura Marling, and see if she enjoys it as much as I did.
I like Bad Bunny. I have a lot of time for him even if Catherine can't play any of his songs in her Spanish classes because they are too rude for the teenagers who's mind's she is meant to be shaping. I listened to Un Verano Sin Ti a couple of years ago when it was suddenly everywhere and it wasn't hard to get why, but I'd satisfied my musical curiosity, and Reggeaton wasn't something I was likely to find an appropriate circumstance to listen to. I'm quite comfortably middle aged now, the parties I go to involve less grinding and much more "sitting on a nice sofa with a glass of red wine". I came to DeBÍ TiRAR MáS FOToS primarily concerned about how annoying it would be to type correctly because of the random capitalisation and Spanish accents I needed to get right*****. I don't know how much more I can say about Bad Bunny and this album because I find it difficult to pick out individual tracks and I have only my very basic Spanish to lean on lyrically - but I can say with certainty I had a good time and came away from it in a better mood than when I pressed play on the first track, which I guess is one of the desired outcomes.
Punk has historically been a genre I've struggled to embrace. I think it's primarily because the emotional catharsis punk songs generally offer I find instead in Metal, or Rap, and the necessity of the form to feel relatively simplistic musically, being more about energy than technique, generally means it falls into a kind of mental no-mans-land in my musical tastes. I can appreciate it intellectually, but if someone asked me to name my favourite Punk album I would tell them its London Calling by The Clash, and I'd hope very hard they wouldn't ask me to name my second favourite punk album. As such, Chicago punk band Meat Wave and their album The Incessant were starting off at a disadvantage, and they wandered directly into the grey area in my psyche labelled "Oh, I get what this is, I can appreciate what they are going for, musically its very sound, how many tracks of this are there left?". I've a strong suspicion that seeing them perform live might completely flip my opinion, but for the time being it was something I was glad to listen to, and glad when I stopped listening to it.
That's it, that's all the albums and now I need some kind of pithy outro which I'm universally forever stuck for inspiration. Someday I'll try not to write some kind of weird summary and just stop when I have run out of stuff to say, but that won't be today. I want to thank Michael and Tyler again for having me on the show and giving me interesting music to listen to. I hope you'll stick around, and I hope you'll go listen to more of their stuff.
Next time I might end up writing about Limp Bizkit. You're going to want to come back for that at least, right?
* Where that leaves the Tron Ares OST, which is billed as a Nine Inch Nails album and not a Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross album, I can't pretend to explain.
** Sorry, Alexandra Burke fans. Also, while making sure I got the spelling of her name right I found an article online called "Ranking the top 50 covers of Leonard Cohen's Hallelujah which I felt just reinforced my point all the more.
*** One of the real challenges of trying to listen to 1000 albums in a year is knowing you won't have the time to devote to sitting with an album for three, four, eight, twenty listens before it starts to make sense. Enough people love the Cameron Winter album that I am pretty sure it's a me problem.
**** Truly one of the best outcomes from doing this has been asking for recommendations from people, telling them nothing is off limits, and then actually listening to those albums (that's the part most people fail at) and telling people how you felt about them without judgement. It has exposed me to so much stuff, and helped me feel better and more connected to people across the vast collection of interesting people I've somehow met. I'd strongly recommend it.
**** My suspicions were confirmed as I spent 3 minutes typing 17 characters and had to check it against the title on Spotify three times before I was convinced I'd not screwed it up.
