When It Comes to Making Dreams, It's All Mixed Up

Sometimes I don't know where to start. There are decades of music, and plenty of it I've never heard, and plenty of it you've never heard, dear readers. Do I come in an emphasize a long-time love of my own? Do I try to bring one out that I feel people will not know? Do I try to pull a band out from the sturdy position of independent fame and influence, showing it to people who never heard of it? Address resources for music? Point to only the things I'm looking at in the immediate?

Any of these is an intriguing idea, and, unfocused though it may leave me, I want to address all of them, and leave this a discussion of music from an unusual viewpoint--not restrict that viewpoint to only certain elements or factors of the entirety of music.

I'd like to write about a band I love dearly and have spent horrifying amounts of money on, to say nothing of what a few family members have spent on them as gifts, but to cover エレファントカシマシ¹ known in English by the half-translation, half-transliteration "The Elephant Kashimashi," but that's a massive undertaking. They released a new single in November (yes, they still do that in Japan!), and another is coming in April. The album they are likely to appear on has not been announced yet, though. This seems like a solid place to bring them up, but it's effectively guaranteed that I'd have to address something like the totality of that band--which has existed, unchanged, for the last 24 years, with an album release almost every single year in that time, to say nothing of non-album singles, non-album b-sides, and EPs like Dead or Alive (no relation to the British band, video game or movies). This isn't the time for that, as that will probably take a few entries, perhaps to discuss them by "era."

Similarly, while I've recently acquired the reissues of The Fall's Cerebral Caustic and Shift-Work, that's another band that would need a lot of time devoted to try to make an accessible discussion work. That's 29 studio albums, a number more lives ones, endless compilations, EPs, non-album singles and more music in general than one can shake a stick at, no matter how vigorously.

Oh Man, Wonder If He'll Ever Know...

I've been distracted, quite happily, by the release of Mass Effect 3 for the past few days, but this is a music blog, not a gaming blog, so let me set that all in order here. It only makes sense, in a way, considering I spent most of that release day not playing that game but dealing with music.

Early in the day, Facebook led me to local (primarily used) record (all vinyl!) store Hunky Dory (they also sell glass, if you're into that sort of thing), and the probable need to abandon my plan to make music stores in the area something like a weekly feature, as the experience was so very positive and so thoroughly reinforced my view of the store that pausing on arbitrary and non-established bases seemed wrong.

What happened was this:
Owner Michael Bell posted one of his regular "Album of the Day" posts to announce new arrivals, and Tuesday it was The Jesus and Mary Chain's Psychocandy. I'd just been asking Brian at CD Alley about the CD reissues of all their albums, so it seemed almost fated. I asked quickly through Facebook for a price, got one almost instantly and went out to pick it up. Indeed, Hunky Dory has been good to me in this respect before: I'd made no planned purchases before, but when I go out on a spree and collect something like the New Order reissues, I am often somewhat knowingly overwhelming myself. What album do I start with? How do I get a "feel" for a band when I'm plowing through multiple albums and various b-sides¹ and errata? For some, the best approach is to pick up a compilation, like a generic Greatest Hits (which occasionally is part or even mostly miss), or even a quality one, or maybe a strange obscure one.