Tomorrow the band releases their 16th album Carnaval de Luz, and the critical response so far is that it’s one of their best recent records. Granted, there have always been the haters and the naysayers (and the ‘how dare they force a new album on me’ whiners who still won’t let it go twelve years later), but for those of us who have been fans since the beginning, it’s always a pleasure to see and hear new music by this band we’ve grown up with.
I’ve been a fan since the beginning thanks to WAAF and WAQY playing “I Will Follow” so many years ago. They’d found a kindred spirit in Boston radio early on, which quickly spread across Massachusetts to other rock stations, making my home state an early stomping grounds. It also helped that MTV picked them up quickly as well, especially with the October and War albums. By the time The Unforgettable Fire came out in 1984, I was obsessed, wishing I’d had the cash to pick up all their singles and back catalog. By the time The Joshua Tree came out in 1987, even all the jocks in my high school loved it, I secretly laughed at the fact that I’d gotten to them well before they did. Score one for the music nerds! Heh.
I haven’t heard much from the new album other than the already dropped singles like the above, “Silencio” and “Street of Dreams”, but I like what I’ve heard so far. They’re a much older band and they’re allowed to chill out a bit these days, but prefacing this new release with not one but two stellar EPs of great tunes proves that they haven’t lost any of their power. Once I have this new one downloaded I’m sure I’ll be giving it repeated listens!
I’m still going through the Legacy Soundtrack list and I’ve reached the autumn and winter months of 2001, and I’ve realized a few interesting things. One is that I can definitely confirm that I was working down in the basement on a daily basis by then and doing most likely around 500 to 800 words a night on A Division of Souls. Another is that I’d made the very smooth transition from sating my music fix at HMV to my weekly stops at the Newbury Comics in downtown Amherst. And a third is that I was definitely reading a hell of a lot more than I ever had, even more than my school days. [I was terrible about it then, most likely due to undiagnosed ADD. It wasn’t until probably the late 90s when that changed, mainly due to voracious comic reading which led to oh hey I’m writing science fiction, maybe I should read some as well, which in turn led to very frequent visits to Barnes & Noble and elsewhere.]
To get through everything — focusing on the writing, immersing myself in the genre and the universe I was creating, and dealing with current events — I did what I always did, and that was listening to music. It was a solace I needed at the time, and it was also a perfect anchor when I needed to narrow my focus. The below albums were those that dropped on or around 9/11 and were constantly on rotation at my desk.
Ben Folds, Rockin’ the Suburbs. The title track became my unofficial personal theme song as well as the title for my LiveJournal when I got one a few years later. It’s a rather somber album compared to his earlier works but still quite enjoyable.
Bis, Return to Central. I’d been familiar with their cutesy-punk ‘teen-c power’ sound but this was a more mature synth-pop sound that worked really well for them. I loved this record and played it a ton during the writing of A Division of Souls.
P.O.D., Satellite. A lot of bands released albums right on 9/11 that sadly fell into obscurity due to terrible timing, but this one survived that, actually becoming a huge success (partly thanks to heavy play on MTV). I’d been a fan already but this is a hell of a great record.
Curve, Gift. I’d been a fan of this band since my college days and though this would end up being their final album release, it was a hell of a great way to go. This was perfect music to listen to during my writing sessions.
The Verve Pipe, Underneath. Their last for RCA before their extended hiatus, this album should have been a much bigger hit because it’s got some absolutely lovely songs on it like “Only Words” and “I Want All of You”.
Ian Brown, Music of the Spheres. This one’s much more musical and pop oriented than his oddball solo debut Unfinished Monkey Business, and with that it’s an easier listen. “F.E.A.R.” is a great opening track and one of my favorites of his.
Lamb, What Sound. They were pretty much already an “I will buy anything from them” band by this point and I nabbed this one quickly. It’s a great moody record, and the track “Small” ended up being an influence in Denni’s opening scene for The Persistence of Memories.
Sloan, Pretty Together. This is probably my favorite of their albums because it’s just so lovely and warm and a joy to listen to. Not to mention “I Love a Long Goodbye” being one of my favorite track of theirs! This was a great album to put on if I wanted music but not necessarily one that related to my working on Division.
Just a quick fly-by to say that I am currently enjoying my vacation time off this week by sleeping in, getting a bit of exercise walking around the neighborhood, and going to see the absolutely amazing Wildwood which everyone really should see in the theater.
I’ve been describing this album as “120 Minutes circa 1987″, as I can’t help but compare it to some of the best jangle pop and college radio rock I listened to back then. I’ve been playing this one constantly in the office and I keep wanting to come back to it.
This London band has been around since 2020, but only came to my attention last year with the teaser single “Don’t Want to Know” which sounds so much like the stuff I’d hear on WMDK and WAMH back in the day like The Dream Syndicate, Love Tractor or REM.
Their debut album In Purgatory just dropped on the 16th of this month, and I highly recommend it. There are so many great tracks here that fit perfectly on indie radio, and I’d even say that this is a contender for my favorite album of the year.
I’ve been thinking lately about how the eternal on-ness of global connection has given way to the loss of self to some degree. Now, I’m not necessarily saying that the incredible ease in which I can go online and find something I’m looking for is inherently bad — just that I often remember and kind of miss that it wasn’t always this easy to fall down a rabbit hole. And I’m not necessarily saying that this global connection is breeding some kind of conformity, because if anything, it’s done the exact opposite and opened several social avenues for people who might not have had this access in the past.
I’m just saying that if I’m passive about this global connection, that I just let it wash over me with minimal reaction or emotional resonance, then all it’s ever been is a white noise distraction and a folly.
Right now as I’m writing this on late Sunday afternoon, I’m listening to Radiohead’s Kid A, an album released twenty-six years ago this month, and I recall buying it on cassette at Newbury Comics in downtown Amherst, and listening to it on the way home. Driving through the back woods of central Massachusetts on a cold afternoon, the New England foliage just reaching its peak. I’m looking forward to getting home to work on A Division of Souls on my PC in my parents’ basement. We had the internet back then of course — it was dial-up and the local phone lines wouldn’t upgrade for another year or so — but I was more focused on writing my new novel instead of futzing around online. I saved that for the late nights on weekends when I had time to kill and nobody to accidentally disconnect me.
I say this because I find it morbidly fascinating that I can listen to Kid A and am immediately connecting with the music on a deeper and closer level, as I hadn’t had as much distraction, nor was I fully plugged in and mainlining sounds from hither and yon. I’d given myself more time and patience to resonate with the music I surrounded myself with. And then I’ll put on, say, A Moon Shaped Pool from 2016, and it’s much harder for me to connect. I know what it is, and it’s not that I’ve lost interest in the band. It’s because in those ensuing ten years, I’ve ingested so much music, most of it passively or merely in passing, that that resonance isn’t nearly as strong.
Is it because my memory is almost full? Or is it because I’ve rewired my brain so much over the years that the connections aren’t as easy to revisit? I’ve been going through my library and ‘retiring’ a good portion of it — saving the secondary backup but deleting it from the main source drive — in order to rectify this. I think of it as selling my old physical copies at record stores back in the day, getting rid of the excess to lighten the load a bit and maybe get something back from it.
Why do I want to reinvest in this ‘resonance’, as I keep calling it? Well, it’s because that’s the primal reason for me loving music in the first place. A song that sings to me. A style or a genre that inspires or influences me in one way or another. It’s still there, I know it is, it’s just become so much harder to reach because of this passive intake and its ensuing clutter.
I remember making this one at the tail end of my years at HMV, and I’ve come back to it recently when I’ve been working through the Mendaihu Universe Legacy Soundtrack list. It was made in early August 2000 when it was clear that I wasn’t long for that store. My quality of work hadn’t changed, at least not in my view, but that was my then-boss’ issue: I apparently was too set in my ways and couldn’t (and wouldn’t) bend to his will. You’ve all heard the story of our frequent arguments leading up to a final “you need to quit or else I’ll fire you” confrontation.
Still, I’d hoped I’d last longer at the store because it was one of my favorite jobs I’d ever had. [To this day I still have the occasional dream about it, twenty-six years on.] Because of this, there seems to be a slight feeling of melancholy in this mix. Not one of spiraling gloom like the mixes I’d made back in my teen years, but one of things coming to an end. The energy here is muted for the most part, with only a few songs reaching any high octane.
I remember listening to this one a lot in my car during my weekend road trips, but also when I started heading down to the Pioneer Valley more often, considering I’d be starting a new job down there soon enough. After several years of heading east towards the metro Boston area, I’d be returning west to my old haunts of central Massachusetts; quieter, calmer, and definitely a shorter distance. I had to remind myself that this wasn’t going to be about attempting to relive my late 80s past but creating something new.
So while I was sad that I was leaving HMV, I was looking forward to starting a new chapter. One that meant a new day job, but also meant a much-needed revitalization of this science fiction trilogy that I’d been hammering away at for a few years already.
SIDE A: 1. Richard Ashcroft, “A Song for the Lovers” 2. Doves, “Sea Song” 3. The Dandy Warhols, “Godless” 4. BT, “Satellite” 5. Stone Temple Pilots, “Sour Girl” 6. Porcupine Tree, “Last Chance to Evacuate Planet Earth Before It Is Recycled” 7. Belle and Sebastian, “Don’t Leave the Light On Baby” 8. Moby, “Porcelain” 9. Black Box Recorder, “The Facts of Life” SIDE B 1. The (International) Noise Conspiracy, “Smash It Up” 2. Longpigs, “Blue Skies” (not available on Spotify) 3. Lit, “Over My Head” 4. BT, “Never Gonna Come Back Down” 5. Eve 6, “Promise” 6. Everclear, “Wonderful” 7. The Dandy Warhols, “Nietzsche” 8. Catherine Wheel, “Sparks Are Gonna Fly” 9. Badly Drawn Boy, “Another Pearl” 10. The Urge, “It’s My Turn to Fly” 11. Cypress Hill, “(Rock) Superstar”
I remember stumbling upon the “Pop Stars” single back in 2018 not via YouTube but the various gifs that popped up on social media back then, and I was intrigued: this was really well done animation in a style that was quite different from most things I’d seen around then, and dang it if that track wasn’t a banger that got stuck in my head constantly! I was even more fascinated when I learned they were a musical tie-in with the League of Legends game universe, each character with a full background, gameplay and so on. And through them I learned about the K-Pop band (G)I-DLE (known as i-dle these days) and Madison Beer. Who new that I still had a soft spot for well-crafted pop? I even posted about them back in 2020 when the EP came out.
A year and a half later they would follow up with a great EP called All Out that would also get a lot of play here on my PC. After that, the pandemic kind of put that project on hold while LoL focused on other in-game videos, their annual World Championship festivities (and their theme songs from bands like Linkin Park and others), and the two seasons of the animated series Arcane.
That is, until yesterday, when the above brand spankin’ new single and video dropped, and all the LoL fans lost their collective minds. The foursome look a bit different now, and they’ve brought on two new singers for the English parts, but they’re just as badass.
I’ve got multiple early opens at the day job this weekend, I need to focus a bit on the next Bridgetown Trilogy remaster, and I’m also getting over the one-two punch of flu and Covid vaccines, so I’m afraid I ran out of time for a blog update. I’m hoping I’ll be a bit more with it next week. See you then!
Let it be known that I got my first senior discount yesterday. At my own day job, no less.
Mind you, I’m only fifty-five this year, but that was enough for me to start getting a ten percent discount every first Wednesday of the month. That first time only got me maybe $2.50 off total, but some of my senior customers ended up with a sweet deal of ten, fifteen, even twenty dollars off because they bought quite a bit.
This has nothing to do with my music blog, other than that I had “When I’m Sixty-Four” in my head when I was first informed of this new deal at the shop. Heh.
