It's Time to Tie Your Loose Ends Up (Tie 'Em Up!) -- More Errata!

As I start work on something far more informative and useful, some updates are happening around this blog. I've updated the sourcing for entries on the right side of the page through the most recent post prior to this one (this one will be added shortly!). I'll be updating the "CDs Visible in the Banner" over on the right as well, now that I have a more focused and higher resolution image in place--even if that means they may indeed be easier to read now anyway.

While I am doing this, this post also serves to advance my immediate cause of referencing Tommy Stinson's short-lived post-Replacements project, Bash & Pop, whose album (not first, not second--just album) I picked up yesterday as I thought, "Why do I know this name, 'Bash & Pop'?" and was luckily able to look them up quickly and then bump the heel of my palm against my forehead. I don't know them well enough yet to write much at all, though I was tempted to write a "Post 'Mats" article, as I have a fondness for (and a much greater familiarity with) the works of Paul Westerberg. But I'm going to keep myself restrained regarding my "immediate impressions" sensibilities for a non-exceptional instance.

What I will mention, however, is the next stack of items added to my queue at the moment, just as a starting off point for anyone who happens by and wants to give some, any, or all a thumbs up. As with the last time I did this, here's an image of those releases:

Agoraphobic Nosebleed/Converge - The Poached Diaries

Alien - The Pleasure of Leisure

Baroness - Yellow & Green

Bash & Pop - Friday Night Is Killing Me

Blindside - A Thought Crushed My Mind

Botch - An Anthology of Dead Ends

Boysetsfire - Live for Today

Bronski Beat - Truthdare or Doubledare

Burning Airlines - Identikit

Burning Airlines - Mission: Control

The Byrds - The Preflyte Session

Cabaret Voltaire - Mix Up

Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds - Tender Prey

Clinic - Walking With Thee

The Cult - Sonic Temple

An Emotional Fish - Junk Puppets

Brian Eno - Discreet Music

Bob Geldof - How to Compose Popular Songs That Will Sell Well

GoGoGo Airheart - GoGoGo Airheart

Harvey Milk - Special Wishes

Hot Cross - Cryonics

Jaguar Love - Jaguar Love EP

Jayhawks - Music from the North Country [Anthology]

Katatonia - The Great Cold Distance

Kno - Death Is Silent

Lit - Atomic

Mercury Rev - All Is Dream

Takako Minekawa - Roomic Cube

Mission of Burma - Unsound

Rabies Caste - Let the Soul Out and Cut the Vein

Radiohead - Amnesiac [Deluxe]

Radiohead - Kid A [Deluxe]

Radiohead - OK Computer [Deluxe]

Royal City - Little Heart's Ease

Ruhaeda - Ruhaeda

The Ruts - Something I Said - The Best of the Ruts

Slint - Spiderland

Smashing Pumpkins - Pisces Iscariot [Deluxe]

Chris Spedding - Enemy Within

Sunny Day Real Estate - Diary

Supersuckers - Devil's Food

Tangerine Dream - Green Desert

Television - Adventure

Tones on Tail - Everything!

Torcher - Your Word Against Fire

Tom Waits - Blood Money

X-Dream - Radio

 

Symphony of the Earth--One Fewer, and We Might Have the Question -- The Elephant Kashimashi

There are a dozen, or at least a half-dozen, ways to start writing about this. And it's really just two songs. Well. Two songs, two instrumental versions of those songs, and seven live recordings.

The opener that has always entertained me is that this band fell into my lap by chance. I was studying Japanese (which has turned out poorly) in college and was handed a random "Best Of" for Christmas about eight or nine years ago. It was a band no one, including me and the one who gave it to me, my father, had ever heard of in our area. No friends, searching for them online tended to turn up sites in Japanese, if anything. The cover wasn't an awful lot of help, and of course all notes were in Japanese. I was going out to visit friends, though, so I put it on in my car stereo as I drove out, having sampled it briefly at home. They were noisy, boisterous, and rougher than the sounds typically associated with Japanese music in the modern age, especially that theoretical entire genre of "j-pop," which tends to be bouncy and slick more than anything else.

Of course, that compilation started with an album track from 24 years ago, the rather noisy "Fighting Man," simply transliterated into katakana instead of actually translated. Of course, Japanese music of any popular variety is notorious in English-speaking countries for its broken-up nature and habit of using English awkwardly at best, and totally uncomfortably at worst, jammed into the middle of otherwise entirely Japanese lyrics, often seemingly for no good reason. While it does compose the chorus of that song, it makes no other appearances, beyond that refrain of "Baby, fightingu man!"

Well Every Time I See You, I Wanna Thank You, More and More Each Time -- Reubens Accomplice and Long Waits

About five years ago, I stumbled onto a promotional CD at my former employer, the now defunct Borders. It had a peculiar kind of pastel cover art, with little description. I don't have the disc anymore, having passed it to someone else (with whom I've lost contact), but it was an album called Dog Problems, by a band called The Format. It rapidly disseminated itself with some effort from me, spreading "virally" even to people I don't (or at least didn't) know via those that I do and did. That band no longer exists, having broken up shortly after that very album, and reformed into the solo artist Sam Means and combining with members of Steel Train and Anathallo to form fun., who have achieved a pretty high level of success at this point.

However, I managed to catch The Format before they broke up, when they played a show at the local major independent venue, the Cat's Cradle. It was August 26th, 2007, and it was one of the larger lineups I've seen in my time. The Format was backed with Limbeck, Piebald, Reubens Accomplice and Steel Train. The overall highlight of the night was certainly all of the bands coming together to play Van Morrison's "Caravan" at the very end, but this was definitely a show that helped encourage my policy of checking into opening acts. There's a good chance I'll talk about Piebald another time (a very good one!) and Steel Train as well, but right now, there's a reason I'm talking about the band I'm here to write about.

Yesterday, I made the excited purchase of a number of items, from an album someone almost got me as a present ten years ago (but skipped on as it was apparently nowhere near gift quality in its used state), to two albums I've been searching for intently at every store I enter, to a well-regarded album that influenced a number of bands I like or love, to a difficult-to-find band of less known status--and even a few others. And yet, I came home and found a link in my e-mail, began my download, and those two albums I'd been searching for finished ripping to my computer and have remained untouched since. Indeed, the trays of my optical drives are sitting outside my desktop with the discs still in them.

That download was a link to the new Reubens Accomplice album.

I left that show five years ago with a rather large selection of merchandise:

All You Need Is Drums to Start a Dance Party, and You're Invited to Our Dance Party

There's something of a curse to trying to keep an open mind about music: the last post I made, over two weeks ago, hints at this.

Of course, that only addressed that particular time frame for purchasing music, not including the recent releases of a new Baroness record, a new Mission of Burma record, the hinted but otherwise unmentioned new Elephant Kashimashi record (albeit delayed--but, hey, I have to import the things!). I stumbled into the remaining FYE while out to see The Dark Knight Rises and found myself walking out with a number of severely discounted items that caught my eyes, either fulfilling curiosities existing or beginning new ones and being irresistible at the price of $1.50 for an expansion of experience, taste and ideas. These releases were, by and large, obscure in the near-extreme. One has befuddlingly misplaced cover art on Amazon and is out of print--actually, many of them are out of print--and another is easily found to be out of print (and semi-valuable!) by notice of the very artist behind it, with only a tiny bit of Googling. And, of course, they were on top of an existing backlog of material I've only skimmed, aurally speaking. I have made it a habit to listen to all "new" music I acquire, but that doesn't mean I am able to give it time to quite sink in.

There are a few ways this little problem makes itself most readily apparent, and is fed and pushed to move further into the abyss. Of course, wandering into a new place with hidden nooks and crannies (even those technically out in the open) of music does not ever help me, as I've noted above and previously. However, there are some other things that are problematic. A coworker recently asked for a recommendation starting from the song "Crystal" by New Order. Unfortunately, I've not gone past my initial experience of New Order, at least not much. I did pick up Substance 1987, the New Order companion release to the Joy Division compilation Substance (the "1987" was added to differentiate). A number of alternate cuts and edits are present on that release, some unavailable elsewhere. I still have not gotten the last of those reissues though, 1989's Technique, let alone the work New Order did after they left Factory Records. This gives me the impression that I've somehow failed to complete a branch of music knowledge, which drives me to go further on.

When Lightning Strikes and We Are Sleeping...

In case anyone is wondering where I might have been with my ramblings and random musical selections, you may note from the Last.FM widget over to the right that I have been happily continuing to listen to music, not including my vinyl and compact disc rotations (the latter being in-car listening). Mclusky's Mclusky Do Dallas, in all its vulgar glory, has occupied my turntable of late more than anything else in its white vinyl re-release form that appeared briefly in the collage of images that represented my collage of Record Store Day purchases this year. My car CD player has rotated endlessly, as it often does, based on where I am going, when and the whims of the moment.

What has interrupted my posting, however, was a recent influx and an attempt to catch up a backlog of complicated reissues.

To put this in a kind of perspective, here is an image of the purchases I've made in the last week, which is not totally out of character and should clarify any concerns about what on earth keeps me from focusing on a single release or artist to discuss them:

You can click to enlarge that sucker, and in the process see the sheer volume of stuff I just inundated myself with. For those who cannot make things out, here's a brief rundown:

With Fear I Kiss the Burning Darkness -- Firey Songs (with Tongue in Cheek)

I was at work yesterday and someone noted that the song they were listening to--to be quite honest, I can't recall--was appropriate for our discussion relating to work-things being burnt down (which will have to go without explanation, except to say that this was not a plan any of us had in mind, so the secrecy is to protect the sanctity of the workplace, not its employees plan to end it), and so ensued a discussion of songs with the word "burn" in them, as I groped blindly through my memory for songs after suggesting Nine Inch Nails' "Burn," I found myself pretty lost. I noted that it was hard to think of songs with "burn" in the title without my digital music collection (more specifically: the program I use to deal with it). The use of google was immediately noted, but of course the song is ridiculous common and parsing for multiple conjugations of the verb is not easy. We started assembling an increasingly ridiculous set of songs collectively, eventually dabbling into early rock like Jerry Lee Lewis' "Great Balls of Fire" and Elvis Presley's "Burning Love" (written by Otis Blackwell and Dennis Linde respectively, to get credit where due!), after exhausting our memory of other titles.

The words "Fire" eventually got added, which only made the list that much more ridiculous. However, my original goal was to try to incorporate other songs that were referring to the word in its destructive sense (if you didn't click the link, the NIN song gains its title from the refrain of "I'm going to burn this whole world down!" with intense emphases I can't replicate visually without looking ridiculous and thus failing to actually convey it).

I could continue that idea here and do it the justice I intended, or just play with the whole idea and go with songs I think are really good that use the word in their titles. How's that?

She Walks in So Many Ways -- What Else Hides Here?

While I can have a packrat attitude in general, it is often supplemented by a tendency toward organization, even if the rules for this organization are known only to me. As such, I've quietly added a small handful of "resource" pages to this blog for various purposes, such as identifying the places from which I derive my entry titles, which are generally from the artist I'm discussing when I am discussing a single artist, but are sometimes lyrics that come into my head as thematically relevant to the issue or work at hand. I separate them out by month of web-publication for an entry to keep them somewhat easier to digest, though I plan to archive them by year when it gets to that point, in order to keep the volume of links reasonable. So far, this means I've written these basic charts for March, April, May, and June.

I also feed my excessive attention to detail with a selection of the resources I regularly consult for my personal usage in carefully sculpting the flow of my digital music collection. These can be absolutely mind-boggling for people, as they are so utterly devoted to the minutiae of music release that one wonders what on earth possesses people to do it. I've learned to only appreciate this, as so long as someone is always going further than I am, they will include the information I want, and I can just marvel in abject, slack-jawed wonder at who would take the time to scan or photograph a thousand 7"s just for the purposes of simple variations in the printing of 45" record labels. Indeed, though, I was just spending time cataloguing the bonus tracks on my nearly-complete collection of the Byrds' '60s albums, and am currently listening to chronologically arranged tracks included on the original and reissue of Blue Öyster Cult's Tyranny and Mutation.

For the purposes of clarifying my extremely subpar photography skills, I've also compiled a list of the CDs that appear from my own personal collection in the banner that heads the blog. It's subject to change over time as my collection expands, and sometimes unusually shaped or sized releases are pushed out of place to my "Box Sets" shelf. Which I wish I didn't need to separate, but making room for boxes that can hold full-sized 12" LPs is not very spatially efficient.

You can also find a few less focused links, like my last.fm profile page where you can see what artists I've been listening to most on my computer (naturally, vinyl and in-car CD listening is not tracked), as well as what tracks I've last listened to as of the time you visit. The movie reviews I wrote for a few years are also available over on the right, and a link to a gallery of my more unusual vinyl records, and the Facebook page for this blog, which I politely request you "Like" if you get the chance and use the site.

Just to make things easier this once: this title comes from a song by the Jayhawks, and it's actually the title of the song as well as the opening line of its chorus. Here they are performing the song at Ocean Way Studios (I don't know which one, though I'd hazard at guess that it's the Nashville one), and you might be able to see that this is only appropriate as a song to follow a brief mention of the Byrds:

Had I Known You Better Then, I Would've Said Those Three Ol' Words -- Daryl Hall/John Oates's Abandoned Luncheonette

While I do try to keep (negative) reputations from influencing what unfamiliar things I will listen to, it does mean that they're often things I won't go after quickly. Artists with a reputation for flaccid or sneer-inducing pop I tend not to judge near so harshly, but not knowing which will really strike a chord with me means I'm wary of touching any of them without some point of familiarity. Mix in the fact that, my current and varied and peculiar knowledge notwithstanding, I used to have no idea who wrote or sang this song or that one and it doesn't help much. Of course, those who were at a point of absorbing a lot of those facts when artists were regularly and visibly releasing music can say, "They did..." and hum or sing a few bars, sometimes even just name a song and things will fall into place. Recommendations when I stumble into something, too, can help with this.

One day a few years back, I was flipping through a crate of duplicate and unwanted records my father had, taking what I wanted for myself. After picking out the known quantities--a copy of my favourite Beach Boys album (Surf's Up) as well as the double-LP reissue that combined their later album So Tough by "Carl and the Passions," named for a pre-Beach Boys group Carl was in, packaged with Pet Sounds; The Association's Greatest Hits; and newly-appreciated-to-me Sparks' debut under that name, A Woofer in Tweeter's Clothing (they were called Halfnelson and released a self-titled debut under that name, but renamed themselves Sparks and the album was reissued as eponymously as that instead), I was left sorting through mostly obscure disco, pop, and electronic music, the dance/electronic end very much derived from the taste of one of his friends. Things like Michael Garrison's 1979 debut In the Regions of Sunreturn, which is out of print even on CD, or Larry Fast's 1975 debut as Synergy, Electronic Realizations for Rock Orchestra, which is an utterly fantastic album that made the charts in its day--#68, anyway--but is sort of lost today. There were some other in-between sorts of known quantities like Golden Earring's 1975 album Switch, sandwiched between 1973's Moontan (which spawned the huge hit "Radar Love") and 1982's Cut (which spawned the other big hit, "Twilight Zone").

There was one other album that managed to jump out at me, simply because it looked a bit odd, had names I knew, and had those names arranged in a peculiar fashion:

A New Update on Old Thoughts

I've finally amassed enough bits and pieces that I feel I should update a few odd old thematic, non-band-specific posts.

I stopped to write about strange, often abrasive voices once, and there are some peculiar voices I did not mention, and one I was unfamiliar with myself, that was mentioned to me outside the comments there.

First was one I'd heard about repeatedly anyway, and then a friend told me was a perfect example of peculiar voicing after that article. I picked up a few of her albums on and around Record Store Day, and discovered that, indeed, her voice is odd, though, as is often the case with me, didn't faze me beyond recognition of its oddity: Kate Bush.

She had a huge hit with "Wuthering Heights" (which was apparently an achievement in many senses, as the first self-penned female #1 in the UK), which should make it clear enough what's odd about her voice:

It's operatic in the dramatic sense, and otherwise filled with that kind of melodrama that fits and describes her music appropriately.

Well, Son, A Funny Thing About Regret Is...

..."That it's better to regret something you have done than something you haven't."

An appropriate lyric beyond the fact that it's from the album in question: I've said that immediate first impressions are unhelpful, and so I tend not to do them--few (if any) of my rules are hard and fast. I'm breaking that totally and completely right now--or, well, near enough to it.

In celebration of an upcoming "holiday" of sorts, as well as an increase in pay and a more palatable job and things like that, I went out to the last stores I'd not visited recently, namely the Nice Price Books in Chapel Hill, CD Alley (I know, isn't it surprising I hadn't been there?) and the Edward McKay in northern Raleigh. I managed to fill a bunch of gaps as well as start myself on a few paths I'd been meaning to over the course of time anyway.

One of those, I'm going to preface with a bit of peculiarity: I have a strange relationship with labels. Record labels, I mean. I have some I trust almost implicitly (DeSoto springs to mind), some I'm pretty sure I trust, some that give me genre indications, some that make me wary, so on and so forth. But I've often developed these impressions with no overarching awareness of a label's work. I identify them with a single artist I know, or work backward from the first artist I saw on the label. In this case, that's the "problem" in question. In my days on eMusic when I first began attempts to expand my horizons, I started going alphabetically, so I ended up with one band before any other: !!!. Yeah, that's their name.