Anything On Your Mind?
Let’s move on to 2013. First, a bit of business. If you want someone with actual taste, writing chops, knowledge, and everything else this blog lacks, Zachary Lipez just posted a retrospective of 2011-2015 that is, roughly, five zillion times better than my scribbling. It did, however, confirm that I really was mostly out of touch during these years. Anyway, being bad at this has never once deterred me, as the many hundreds of time wasters I’ve already posted proves. So onward to 2013!
2013 at least did not involve any new children arriving in my life, which would have been quite a surprise. I was pretty settled into a stable job at this point, and a nice bus commute plus the ability to listen to tunes reasonably often at said job left me more time to do some musical exploring. I was also starting to find some more blogs to help me find music. So I was still pretty clueless, but was starting to find my way out of it. Looking at the 2013 RateYourMusic list, I’ve got nine of those in my library, so a pretty big increase from the five of the year before. A sign of being in touch? My tastes becoming more basic? Random chance? Who can say?
What Are You Listening To, Josh?
A sampling of albums that I’m playing regularly, whether older ones or newer ones. Just the things that I think are worth highlighting, and maybe you’d enjoy.
Anyway, as with the last couple posts, we’re just going to pick three fun records from the year to highlight. I did sing (screech? howl?) the praises of Teethed Glory & Injury just the other day, so I won’t repeat anything about it. But that record does rule and otherwise would have been highlighted here.
Capnomancy, Diminished Men
Seattle homer alert! Diminished Men showed up in a bunch of year-end local roundups at the time, which is how I learned about this record. It was a bit of a pain in the ass to get a hold of, and I ended up buying it on wax and then realized I had no way of digitizing it, as it didn’t come with a download code (which was hit-or-miss at the time). I wrote the band asking if there was anything they could do for me, and they wrote back asking for my address. A few days later, a CD-R showed up in the mail with the WAV files. You can’t ask for more than that!
Anyway, the music strikes me as combining the most restless moments of Shadowy Men on a Shadowy Planet with the provocations of Nation of Ulysses. Mostly instrumental rock that is really trying to tell a story, like maybe a soundtrack to a movie you’re not allowed to see. It’s great stuff, and really rewards some repeat visits.
For anybody trying to track this down, the advent of Bandcamp means you don’t need to write the band and hope they help you out, you can just buy the digital files now. And while I was grabbing the link, I discovered they have a 2022 record I was unaware of. Nice! But also, cluelessness never really goes away entirely from this blog.
Niger, Mombu
This project is an Italian duo, with Luca T. Mai (Zu) on baritone sax and Antonio Zitarelli (Neo) on the drums. It’s primarily a record for baritone sax sickos, and nobody else. I remember putting it on during a gaming session and just baffling the other people there. It’s droning, repetitive, and basically all rhythm. But it scratches an itch I didn’t even realize I had until I heard it. I’m not even sure I should be including this record here, truthfully. But maybe someone out there is thinking “pounding rhythms on a baritone sax” and is getting fired up. If so, you’re welcome!
Fun fact: somehow, this was the first album I ever bought on Bandcamp. I haven’t got a clue how that happened.
The Chronicles of Marnia, Marnie Stern
Marnie Stern’s first three records were exercises in shredding, with her guitar pyrotechnics being matched by Zach Hill’s (Hella, Death Grips) fireworks on the drums. On this record, she’s still out there absolutely laying it down, but it’s a little less frantic in feeling. I don’t think that’s just the new drummer she’s working with, but the songs themselves seem a little more deliberate, with some more space in them that isn’t filled with a billion notes. It’s excellent stuff from an artist that I never really see people talk about very much, but who very much deserves attention.
Let’s Talk New Releases
Records come out every week, and there’s no way to stay on top of them. This isn’t a comprehensive look at everything, just a few things that have caught my ears out of recent releases. Any impressions here are very early!
This Is Jackie Mendez, Jackie Mendez
I know zip about this album, the background of the artist, or anything else. This came from me poking around in the “ska” and “rocksteady” tags on Bandcamp, as you do. Well, as I do. I have listened to this record twice, and I like it. Is it ska? Yes it is. So, you know, points for that. Unlike some other bands that enjoy using the tag for fun (do not look at this link, it’s incredibly stupid).
At any rate, spring is for ska and rocksteady, so I’ll probably keep spinning this for a little while.
Bad Dream Songs, Cemento
First of all, I don’t think I’ve shouted out Iron Lung Records (here in Seattle!) before, but they’re one of the essential underground labels going right now. You can look through their stuff on their page or just go ahead and use the “greatest label of all time” tag. Expect lots of metal, lots of hardcore, lots of uncompromising stuff. But it’s not just exclusively abrasive things like that, as Cemento shows. This is pretty pure post-punk, in the original goth-y sense of things. Everything is awash in reverb. This would have absolutely crushed it if it had been out while I was in college.
Cleveland, Onlooker
The bio for this record says Onlooker combines the sounds of Wire, Thee Oh Sees, METZ, and Hot Snakes. And, geez, I’m not really going to do a lot better than that description. For the record, I think the Hot Snakes side of things is probably the most dominant of those strains, although that might be due to the barking vocals. But if you’re a fan of certain kinds of post-hardcore, this album is going to make you really happy. It works for me!
Five Random Songs
Yes, it’s the “classic” five random songs format. It’s been told before on this blog many times, but basically, on an old forum, people would post the last five songs their shuffle pulled up. I liked it, so I made it into a blog. And now, here we are.
“Anthems For a Seventeen Year Old Girl”, Broken Social Scene
I feel like most of the bands described as “collectives” come from Canada. Broken Social Scene is one of those, with a whole bunch of people doing a whole bunch of stuff. I feel like I don’t really remember anything about this band, so I decided to go back and review what I said about this band before. I discovered:
- I made the same comment as above, only using “ensemble” instead of “collective”.
- I mentioned I don’t really remember that much about the band, a couple times.
- I re-discovered the same song in three of the four previous postings.
- I misspelled the album name the only time I mentioned it. (I have gone back and fixed this.)
Honestly, just an incredibly bad performance all around. There’s a certain aspect to this blog where it seems like it’s been dropped on its head that is inescapable. I like to think of it as being kind of like chatting with me about music. But when I go back and look at previous entries, it really drives home how ramshackle this entire affair is. Sorry! Why does anybody read this? Don’t tell me!
“Last Call”, Kanye West
Note: I’m going with how he was credited on this record.
Anyway, this wrapped up The College Dropout, it’s 12 minutes long, and honestly, just go ahead and skip ahead. The presence of this kind of thing is proof that I really am not putting my thumb on the scale in the random songs section.
“Midnight Cowboy”, The Bar-Kays
Oh yeah, that’s the stuff. This is a cover of the theme song to the Academy Award-winning movie (only X-rated movie to ever win!), and you can’t really complain about something like this showing up in the playlist. As always, the Bar-Kays are pure sunshine.
“Nail in the Wall”, Vertigo
Largely (completely?) forgotten now, Vertigo put out three albums of heavy psych-rock in the early 90s for Amphetamine Reptile Records before packing it in. Even at the time, they maybe didn’t quite fit in with the zeitgeist, if you can describe underground rock fans as being a zeitgeist. For the noise-rock sickos that followed AmRep closely, they weren’t really loud enough to satisfy. For the indie rock folks, they were in a lot of ways too conventional. So they never really seemed to get much attention, even among people that were really diving deep. I played them pretty often in my show, and I think I was the only one. Truthfully, they did have a natural constituency if they could have found it, which is people who were really into Mudhoney, as there’s some alignment around the guitar tone and approach. But, alas, they were not from Seattle or on Sub Pop, so that was also a miss.
For whatever it’s worth, I think the middle record (Ventriloquist) is the best of the trio, followed by this album (Nail Hole). I always liked them, and I think they’re a good example of how AmRep was actually always a little broader than the popular conception of the label, which kind of starts with being “the label that spawned Helmet” and sometimes doesn’t extend a whole lot further than that.
“Particle Man”, They Might Be Giants
There are a few songs for TMBG that have followed them for decades. “Istanbul (Not Constantinople)” being the most obvious one, but “Birdhouse In Your Soul” and “Particle Man” are also in that category. I guess it’s just Flood that follows them. Anyway, these are tunes helped make the band, but it seems like being asked to play them over and over again has left them seeking variety. Live, they usually turn “Istanbul” into a drawn-out experimental thing, all stretched anticipation and deferred climax. “Particle Man” also goes through a lot of variation. Shuffle pulled up a version from Dial-a-Song which was fun, but I couldn’t find that exact one on YouTube, so instead here’s a live version from KEXP.