I’ll totally admit to having a soft spot for Christmas music, whether it’s pop, alternative, or classical. Even during my retail and warehouse years, and especially during the HMV years. I never quite got all that cynical when it came to hearing holiday music. On the contrary, it usually gets me in a good mood, even when the streets and the malls are packed with far too many people.
Wishing all and sundry the best of the holiday season! Thanks for sticking around Walk in Silence all this time! 🙂
Personal: Eighth grade into ninth grade, going from Junior High to High School. A long-awaited, much-needed change of pace, setting, and mood. After nearly fucking up my educational track by getting an F — in English, of all things, thanks to boredom, inattention and distraction — I get my shit together and become a middling student for the rest of my school years. Not nearly as inept socially as I was in junior high; I embrace the fact that I’m a nerd and a weirdo.
Writing: Headlong into the Infamous War Novel project. Still finding my way through it, with multiple false starts, outtakes, and notebooks. Somewhere along the line I come up with the brilliant idea of creating an outline via a set list of music, and it all starts coming together. Eventually I’ll start a draft that will take me about two years to finish, in between music listening, homework and social life. A few unrelated snippets written at this time that don’t really go anywhere.
Music: Listening to a lot of Top 40 countdowns on the weekends while listening to rock radio during the week. Music collection still small but expanding thanks to used record stores and trips to the mall. Creating mixtapes from stuff off the radio in high gear now. I start cataloging these mixtapes on a steno pad. [Decades later I use this same list to recreate the mixtapes on mp3.] Probably one of my favorite eras of pop music in the 80s…a lot of really great stuff came out between 1985 and 1986.
The downside to owning guitars, especially in places where the weather has notable temperature and humidity changes, is that they can go quite out of tune very quickly. Every six months or so I need to retune them. And I’ve been playing them for long enough that I can tell when they’re just a bit off. It’s not fun when you’re strumming a few chords and that one string is painfully flat.
One of the other downsides is having to restring them now and again. I’ll be honest, I don’t restring nearly as often as I should. I haven’t restrung my acoustic bass probably since I bought the thing, so the strings had lost their sheen as well as their resonance quite some time ago. I spent Sunday putting new ones on it, and let me tell you, it’s one hell of an awkward process. I’m used to restringing my electrics, which are easy to do. Acoustics are a bit tougher, because you’re not only working around a bigger body while you’re winding the string around the tuning peg mechanism, but you’re feeding the other end through a hole in the bridge and holding it there with a plastic peg that you hope won’t come flying out into your eye.
Anyway…once the new strings are on and secured, there’s the few weeks where the guitar sounds all too trebley and twangy. Or worse, when you’re in the middle of playing and the string slips just a little bit from its tuning peg or its bridge, and you jump back in case that G ends up flying loose and lacerating you.
But once everything settles and you get used to it all, everything is just fine.
For some reason the above Stereophonics track popped into my head the other day. It’s one of their older tracks from Just Enough Education to Perform (such a wonderfully acid way to describe a hack writer, I think). They’re an excellent Welsh band that sort of fell into my lap during the HMV years and I’ve been following them ever since. They just came out with a new album a few weeks ago (Scream Above the Sounds) which is definitely worth a listen.
Here’s a few tracks I think you might like from them as well. Go and check them out!
I do blather on about alternative rock quite a bit on this blog, don’t I? Well, considering that it’s been a major part of my life for over thirty years now, I’d say I’ve earned the right to keep blathering.
It occurs to me, though, that I don’t give enough time to some of my other favorite styles and genres. I’ll mention them in passing, especially when I’m doing my new release round-ups, but I don’t dedicate nearly all that much blog space. I should probably do something about that.
I don’t often mention it, but I also listen to a lot of electronic music. I tend to lean more towards the chill-out / ambient / moody stuff, of course, considering I’m definitely not what you call a club-hopper. I find a lot of remixes tedious and little more than a keyboard preset left running for ten minutes (with maybe a few seconds of the original recording thrown on top somewhere in minute eight), and I find the bass drops and overmodulation of dubstep kind of ridiculous. [In fact, overmodulation really irritates me because it just sounds like unprofessional crap. But hey, that’s just me.]
On the other hand, I find Primal Scream’s Screamadelica an absolutely PHENOMENAL album that everyone should have in their collection. It’s a perfect blend of psychedelic hippie rock and 90s UK techno. I also particularly love the 90s trip-hop of Massive Attack, Tricky and Sneaker Pimps.
That’s not to say I don’t like the loud stuff. I jumped on the Chemical Brothers bandwagon pretty early during my HMV days. I find Aphex Twin weird as hell but amazingly creative. I love Lords of Acid‘s sexy freakishness.
But yeah, for the most part, I’m more the laid back guy who’ll lose himself in a really cool groove. [For the record, I’m not a listener who uses additives (so to speak) during my listening. I tried that once and found it irritating as hell.] I love to listen to this sort of stuff, especially during my writing sessions, because more often than not it creates a positive, consistent mood that works well with my mindset when I’m working on projects.
So yeah…maybe it’s time I started talking about more electronic bands here in the future!
Ages ago when I had a long-ass commute halfway across the state of Massachusetts on a daily basis, I’d always have tunage with me. Mind you, my old Cavalier (and later my Firebird) only had a tape player, so a lot of my traveling music was my older tapes or, more often, my mixtapes. That kept me sane, made the time pass, and gave me a soundtrack for when I was pondering what I’d do next in my writing.
Nowadays my travel tunage is on two mp3 players. Much easier to carry, thankfully. I bring them on vacation for in-flight entertainment or background while I’m working on revision. I bring them to the gym for something to listen to while I’m on the treadmill.
I’ll switch out what’s on those players every now and again, depending on my mood. One of them is filled with releases from this year, while the other usually contains an ongoing soundtrack to whatever writing I’m working on. Since I’m not going anywhere on that treadmill and the view is mostly of the ongoing construction across the street, I’ll let my mind wander so I can think through issues I’ve been having, or play out a scene I’ve been planning to write. This works out quite nicely, actually.
Lately we’d been looking into buying a new car. Ours is a 2004 Civic that, while it’s still running strong and has less than 60k on it (thank you SF transit!), I can definitely feel that it’s aging. It’s getting worn out. While A has been looking into the specs and whatnot — she’s more knowledgeable about cars than I am, I will admit — my only major request is that it has a decent stereo, and perhaps a USB outlet so I can plug said mp3 players in so we can listen to our own tunage. Secondary requests, of course, are that I can fit into the car without needing to get into a yoga position, has minimal blocked vision, and that it can climb the hills of this city without significant rollback. Everything else I can adjust to.
So on Friday, we went shopping, and came home (after some delay and some unexpected shenanigans) with a 2018 Honda Fit. It definitely hits all my requests and more, and I’m looking forward to getting used to tooling around town in it. At present we’re just waiting for the dealer to finalize all the DMV paperwork (they’ll take care of the plates/sticker/etc for us), and on Monday we’ll call our insurance guy to update the information. I love it so far.
Now I just need to make an inaugural mixtape for it. 🙂
October was a somewhat quieter release month (and my wallet thanks the record industry for that), but these releases were no less awesome. Here’s a few albums I picked up…
Liam Gallagher, As You Were, released 6 October. Yes, I am still willing to admit I’m an Oasis fan (as well as a Blur fan, but that’s another post entirely), and I’ve followed both Gallagher brothers post-breakup. Liam, the snotty kid brother, is no longer recording under the Beady Eye moniker, and it seems he’s finally shed his Beatles/Jam hippie-mod hybrid leanings. The new solo album is strong and confident, much like post-Be Here Now Oasis.
Hans Zimmer, Blade Runner 2049 score, released 6 October. I’ve been getting into scores lately, which is kind of a new thing for me as an avid listener. Zimmer does a fantastic job updating the sound originated by the classic 1982 SF film, providing a bit of warmth to an otherwise dark setting. [For the record, I had a few issues with the film scriptwise but overall I quite enjoyed it.]
The Church, man woman life death infinity, released 6 October. One of my favorite bands from the 80s is still going strong, and still fiercely independent in their sound. This is one of their spookier albums by far.
Beck, Colors, released 13 October. I can always count on Beck to release one of two kinds of albums: either a beautiful heartbreaking serious album (like Sea Change and Morning Phase or an off-kilter weirdo album (like Odelay and this one). I’ve come to really appreciate his musicianship over the years, and “Dreams” is definitely one of my favorite recent singles of his.
St Vincent, Masseduction, released 13 October. St Vincent finally returns with a new album, and it’s even weirder than her last. This one took me a few listens to get into for that reason, but it’s just as solid as her previous work.
Stars, There Is No Love in Fluorescent Light, released 13 October. I can always count on Stars to come out with a laid back alt-rock album with no pretension or bombast, and they write such lovely melodies. One of my favorite albums of this month.
The Sound of Arrows, Stay Free, released 27 October. This Swedish electronic band is a new find for me, but I love them already. They’ve been described as a mix of Pet Shop Boys and M83, and I think that’s spot on. About halfway through my initial listen I realized this could very well be the style of music to listen to for my next writing project.
Last Friday saw the release of a major compilation from the Who entitled Maximum As & Bs, featuring nearly all their singles from their first release as the High Numbers to their most recent.
I’ve been a somewhat passive Who fan in the past, knowing most of their more famous songs from listening to classic rock radio as a youth, but I never really followed them too closely until years later. I found them very similar to the Kinks; they were an acquired taste and you kind of had to understand their very British influences in order to really appreciate them.
So of course during the course of Friday afternoon I streamed the collection from Amazon, and found it quite fascinating. Like most bands from the 60s (yes, even the Beatles), the band flailed around for a few years trying to find their footing. There’s a lot of mod posturing and moon-June lyricism going on in the early tracks. They managed to get past this most of the time, thanks to Pete Townshend’s wit and amazing riffs, John Entwistle’s thundering bass lines, and of course Keith Moon’s manic drumming. Roger Daltrey’s of course a great singer, but those first couple of years are a bit shaky for him; it felt like he was trying too hard to fit his powerful voice into quiet songs. By the time they came to Tommy, though, they were a powerhouse and a rock radio staple.
[Granted, their concept album era of Tommy and Quadrophenia isn’t for everyone. I myself find both projects a little too ridiculous, but they both contain some stellar songs that stand on their own amazingly well.]
This compilation is quite long, covering multiple decades (and is essentially a cd/digital repackaging of the singles box sets they released recently), so you may want to take it in a cd at a time, but it’s definitely worth checking out.
Last Friday saw the reissue of the fantastic 1986 album by the Smiths, The Queen Is Dead. The expanded package includes a lovely remaster of the album itself, with the addition of numerous demos from that era, single b-sides, and a live performance at Great Woods in Mansfield MA (of course mislabeled as “Boston”, as is normal for that venue). The cd package also includes a dvd of the Derek Jarman mini-film, as well as a hi-fidelity remaster of the album.
The Queen Is Dead became my favorite Smiths album soon after I picked it up, which, if I recall, was not that long after I ordered their final album from Columbia House. It’s their most solid and consistent album that’s not a singles compilation, in my opinion. While some love the brutalism of Meat Is Murder or the doom of the debut (or the poppiness of Strangeways, Here We Come, for that matter), the consensus is usually that TQID is their best moment. The songs are tight, exciting, and playful. Johnny Marr’s guitar work here is top notch, and Morrissey is clearly having fun being the smartass intellectual lyricist.
I almost always gravitate to this album over their others. While I love nearly all their work, this one is the most positive and uplifting, the most fun to listen to, even with the one-two punch downers of “I Know It’s Over” (mother, I can feel the soil falling over my head…) and “Never Had No One Ever” (I had a really bad dream / It lasted twenty years, seven months, and twenty seven days…). They’re balanced by the silliness of “Frankly Mr Shankly” and “Vicar in a Tutu”. The lead title track is an amazing kick-ass jam and is one of their hardest, loudest tracks they ever committed to tape. [The reissue offers a ‘full version’ that goes on for nearly a minute longer.]
If you’re a passing fan of the band, I do suggest picking up this reissue; its remaster provides the album with a much fuller, warmer sound (the original mix suffered from too much treble and loudness, at least in how I’ve heard it). I’m also happy that they provided us with the original twelve-inch crossfade of the two b-sides “Rubber Ring” and “Asleep”, which makes the two songs connect in a very Abbey Road medley sort of way.
Finding new music to listen to isn’t always easy. As I’ve mentioned before, commercial stations tend to have a set rotation so we hear the same core songs over the course of a few months, with maybe a new track popping up every now and again. But it’s rare for that new addition to the playlist to immediately get a lot of play right away.
In a way, the same can be said for listening to college radio. While those stations often don’t have the set rotation setup, they can also be a bit too leftfield, playing nothing but obscurities and outsider music. It’s fun to listen to if you like that sort of thing, but that sort of stuff doesn’t really resonate with me.
I tend to go somewhere in between; I’ll listen to college radio for part of the day (my home station lately has been Boston College’s WZBC, though I’ll slip over to my other favorite, Santa Clara University’s KSCU, later on), but then I might switch over to Boston’s RadioBDC or one of the SiriusXM stations. Somewhere during all that listening, I’ll catch a new song that will catch my attention.
I’ll also stop by some of the websites that are streaming new albums. NPR features an interesting selection, as do a few others. I’ll also check out albums that I can stream through Amazon Prime (one of the main reasons I signed up for it, actually); I actually use that site extensively on New Release Fridays to check out the new stuff and decide if I want to explore the bands further or not.
Interestingly, I’ve found some favorites via social media as well. Sometimes a random band will follow me, and I’ll always give them a quick listen and follow back if I’m interested. This is always fun, because these bands and musicians tend to be more low key yet absolutely fantastic. I’ve picked up a number of albums from bands this way.
Here’s a few of my favorite finds over the past year:
FiFi Rong (followed me on Twitter)
Of Verona (followed me on Twitter)
The DROiDS (followed me on Twitter)
Pia Fraus (suggested by AllMusic.com)
Cosima (suggested by Stereogum and The Line of Best Fit)
Walk In Silence 