friday, nov. 4th
it’s the end of a very long, covid-y week full of chills, fevers, and the both hilarious and alarming beginning of the end for twitter as we know it.
anyway, social platforms and websites rise and fall. speaking of, i’m still getting reintroduced to tumblr and don’t really know what — if anything — i’ll do with it on the regular, but for now, i’m leaning toward the idea of using it as a music blog.
which brings us to this!
here’s a friday playlist of mostly new music. i’m going to try to stick with things that are available on bandcamp, whenever possible; if there’s something older, out of print, or worth sharing a video for, i’ll use youtube, but i’m going to stay away from the streaming services as much as i can.
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first up, this track from soft kill’s newest, ‘canary yellow’. from their social media, it sure looks like they’re on a long hiatus, if not done for good, and i can’t blame them. some of them have young kids now, and they’re stuck in that terrible spot where they’re doing great work, getting good shows, bringing big crowds, but not big *enough* to even break them even by the time they get home from a several week or multi-month tour. the state of the music business is, well, sort of like the state of everything else.
the whole record is excellent, and their best work, by a *lot*. they finally seem to have a handle on both what they’re doing and what they want to do, and i think they got both right here. i’m going to link two tracks, because they’re both superb.
first up, THE LINE. if you caught the 2017 return of twin peaks, you’ll be familiar with the chromatics, ruth radelet’s full-time gig. she takes over vox on this one, and it’s a lovely, melancholy, swaying kind of song.
next up, my favorite from the record, and, i think, the first single, CONGRATULATIONS TEXT. this, to me, feels like exactly what they’ve been trying to get right since the beginning, and this sound is like a sweet little paper boat set sail down the river. hopefully it turns up again sometime in 2024 or 2025, as they’ve suggested it might.
next up is from a debut that seems to be picking up a lot of steam — big joanie. far too much indie and indie punk has been too straight, too male, and too white for far too long, and it’s super dope to hear a band that is none of those.
this record’s out on kill rock stars in the US and (i think?) the UK, and while KRS can be really hit or miss, this one’s right on target. it’s a slow build, with electronic drums, really lovely harmonies, and a good danceable club groove. i somehow managed to get my vinyl of this record last week, and i’ve been listening to it on and off since then.
it’s funny — as a hopeless jawbreaker fanatic when i was a young man, i was, at first, a little unsure of what i thought of jets to brazil, because, at the time, they sounded like such a departure from jawbreaker. now, as an (ahem) older man, i can hear all the ways that jets to brazil were just really a natural evolution from where jawbreaker were by dear you, and this really comes through on ETC., the final jawbreaker odds and ends collection.
i did become a jets to brazil fan, and, in a pretty similar progression, as a young man, i thought PERFECTING LONELINESS was inferior to the band’s debut, ORANGE RHYMING DICTIONARY. i feel exactly the opposite about it, today; i rarely put ORD on the turntable anymore, but this record goes on at least once a month.
this particular song, CAT HEAVEN, used to sound so sappy and trite to me when i first heard it, but now, i think it’s the loveliest song on the record, and my second or third favorite. it’s a lovely ballad, and the final lines of the verse have, once or twice, brought me to tears with their sweetness and melancholy. it’s a real gem.
a true story about rainer maria is that a friend of mine played in a wild, screaming, anarchopunk hardcore band called brother inferior approximately 300,000 years ago, who once did a few tour dates (or maybe a whole tour?) with them. it’s weird to think how you used to be able to catch profane existence-ish hardcore bands right up next to saddle creek emo tearjerkers.
this record felt like it was meant to be their big break, coming in 2003, right around the time that saddle creek bands and rilo kiley were finally getting out of basements and bars and moving into small and medium theater shows. they never really went all that far, but i always thought this single was supurb; it’s urgent, exciting, and feels like the wheels are about to fall off all the way through. even towards the end, in the descending close, it sounds like it might come apart any second.
twitter is a weird place, but there is (or, at least was) a lot that was fun about it, and one of those things was discovering other musicians and what they do.
dan lehner’s a fantastic and versatile trombonist based out of new york, and while everything he’s done is great, this is really, really superb.
DEEP RED BELLS is, of course, a neko case joint from blacklisted, and used to be *very* well known and prevalent anywhere you might hear neko case being played (bars, coffee shops, the supermarket). i think it faded to the background a little once fox confessor brings the flood came out, because fox confessor is such a monster record that it blots out the entire sun, but DEEP RED BELLS is still worth remembering.
dan tells me that sami stevens, the vocalist for this lovely rendition, only had a sort period to prep for it, but you could have fooled me, everything’s in the right place here, including dan’s trombone.
RIP twitter, long live twitter, twitter will never die.
x will never, ever, not be one of my favorites. i do not care that exene is paranoid, i do not care that billy zoom is a right-wing libertarian, i don’t care, it doesn’t matter, shut up. x are an american institution and a permanent american punk rock and americana staple, and all of those idiosyncrasies — unpleasant though they often are — are part of that, too.
we’re hoping to catch them next month at revolution hall, e.g., the venue of choice for people old enough to prefer to sit at shows. of course, they’re much older than we are, and doing all the hard work, and i appreciate them for it every time.
under the big black sun always has and always will be my favorite, and REAL CHILD OF HELL is my favorite from my favorite. there’s a version of this on the excellent documentary “The Unheard Music” which is just john doe and exene working on it together that i wish a full recording existed of, but the full band version is legendary and lasting.
bridal veil are locals here in portland, and friendly acquaintances of ours that we’re working on putting some shows together with in 2023. they’re a really fun live act — which is not always a given with their particular brand of droning, driving shoegaze.
this EP reminds me of some of the best parts of 90s alternative radio shoegaze — enough hooks to keep you engaged, even if you’re not a huge shoegaze fan, lush orchestration, heavy low ends and lovely highs that cut through it. jordan at room 13 did a superb job mixing this exactly right, and if we weren’t already firmly in love with our own engineer and studio, we’d definitely be looking them up.
i don’t know much about this band, other than my partner — whose taste is infinitely, unquestionably better than mine is — telling me that i absolutely have to hear it, and she was absolutely right. nothing else on this record hits quite right like this one does, but this song is such an excellent, raucous good time.
it reminds me, more than anything else, of james at their best, and james at their best were very, very good.
and so we come to the end — tumblr has a ten song limit per post, which seems perfectly reasonable, because otherwise this post, already too long, would go on forever.
not all 00s nostalgia is good; like every decade, most of what was released in the 00s was trash, and that was especially true for a lot of synth.
but not ladytron.
ladytron were always effortlessly, unbelievably cool. the kind of cool you absolutely would not ever meet, at least in the united states. they’ve been consistent from the beginning, but nothing ever quite scratched the same itch for me that light & magic, from 2002, did. until… maybe now? twenty years later, CITY OF ANGELS, the first single from their upcoming record, time’s arrow, might hit the exact same sweet spot that their jet black, white belt, neon breakout record did. it’s sure an enticing thought, enough to get me to pre-order it.
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