I am of course working today (our store only closes on Christmas Day), but thankfully it will be a morning shift, and will most likely entail a few regulars coming in having forgotten cranberries or extra cream or something. Then there’s Black Friday tomorrow, which usually isn’t too bad.
In the meantime, I’m going to take it easy and enjoy the day and the food. See you next week!
Alas, I did not have the time, nor the inclination, to make any mixtapes this year. I’m pretty sure I’ll still do my year-end playlist/mix, but other than that, I just never got around to it. But that’s okay! This isn’t the first time I’ve gone through a musical dry spell. Between 2006 and 2011, I only made eight mixes in total — two of them were for someone else, and the last was when I’d decided to resurrect the year-end mix.
The main reason for not making one? Well, I’d hinted at it late last year when I’d wanted to spend more time listening the albums I downloaded rather than focusing on the discography completism spiral I’d fallen into over the last couple of years. I felt too disconnected from the music in my own library and wanted to change that. So over the course of 2025, I gave my favorites some more repeat listens. Got to know them a bit better. Found a few singles and deep cuts that caught my attention. Not to mention revisited a lot of my favorite albums from recent years, with the occasional deep dive into an oldie but goodie. And I replayed a lot of albums during my writing sessions!
The other reason for not making one is because I just hadn’t had time or the ability to listen to them other than at my desk. There’s also the fact that we’d recently moved and
So, will I be making more of said mixtapes in 2026? We shall see. I’m not going to confirm or deny at this point. If I’m in the mood for it, I’ll do it. If I do, I might try revisiting the style of my oldest mixes by allowing older songs, something I haven’t done in ages. [A lot of my most recent non-writing-soundtrack mixes usually stick to newish releases from the last few months.]
Either way, the point isn’t just to make the mixes, but to enjoy the tunes I put on them. And I think I’m finally on the way back to that point.
The above was the first Christmas song of the season to be heard at work the other day. Yes, I know Thanksgiving is still a week away, but this is actually right about on time for my store. The holiday music pops up sometime in mid-November, just a few songs here and there mixed in with the regular playlist we have, and will only go full-on 24/7 on Black Friday.
And for the record, the first Christmas song I actually noticed being played in-store somewhere was this past weekend at World Market, and they were playing Cocteau Twins’ version of “Frosty the Snowman”. Not a bad choice!
Anyhoo…it’s that time of the year, and I’m down. I actually quite enjoy holiday music, even at work!
I’ve said it before, I do love how the current generations of bands have decided to learn from 80s post-punk these days, and Detroit’s Ritual Howls has chosen to latch themselves specifically to Red Lorry Yellow Lorry and Bauhaus. The noisy guitars, the high treble of the drums, and the growly bass of the vocals, it all works out amazingly well.
They recently dropped their sixth album Ruin a few weeks ago on Halloween, and it’s been getting some play during my writing sessions these last few days. It’s definitely bringing me back to those goth and industrial shows I’d listen to on college radio back in the day.
I was introduced to Too Much Joy by my friend Chris back in 1990 when the major label reissue of their second album Son of Sam I Am dropped, and I was immediately hooked. At that point in time I was still listening to far more doom and gloom music than I really should have been listening to, and TMJ was refreshing, noisy and funny but without being too absurdist or corny. I put this cassette in my Walkman quite a lot near the start of my sophomore year when I needed a pick-me-up. Later on in the summer of ’91 I would see them live at the Hatch Shell, where I very nearly got hit by flying glass. Whee!
It’s not a brilliant album by any means, and they’re firmly entrenched in the ‘punk band that definitely doesn’t take itself seriously at all’ genre, but instead of going the meathead drunk-and-partying route, they took the intellectual Gen-X ennui-and-irony route, which caught the attention of several kids my own age. While it never got enough major airplay, they were a firm favorite on alternative radio and retained a loyal fanbase. Years later in 2020/2021 they reunited and have released two new albums since then.
The album ran the gamut between the ‘bad karma thing to do’ action of making fun of bums, to being traumatized by clowns…
…to singing about reincarnation (a song I still know all the words to!)…
…and not just a cover of an LL Cool J song….
…but a cover of the weird-yet-catchy classic by Terry Jacks.
So why a major reissue of an album from 1988 and reissued in 1990? Simple: after thirty-five years, the rights to their breakthrough album finally reverted back to them. They’d gotten the quite-aged masters back and got them cleaned up, and they sound fresh and vibrant once more.
Pure silliness, but I highly recommend this album because it’s just that much fun.
I do have a soft spot (heh) for industrial music. I don’t listen to it all that often, but I’ve loved it since I first heard those dance beats, clanky percussion and crunchy guitars in the late 80s with bands like DAF and Front 242 and Skinny Puppy and Ministry. Which means I was into it well before all those sci-fi action films of the 90s used this genre for all those martial arts fight scenes! [Looking at you, Mortal Kombat and Matrix movies!]
I used to see KMFDM at the indie record stores all the time, which is a surprise considering Wax Trax! releases (the label they’d been on for years) weren’t always easy to find. They’ve been around since the early 80s themselves, starting out in Germany and eventually emigrating to the States. I’m pretty sure I’d heard one or two of their songs on WAMH back in 1988-89, as there was an industrial/techno/EBM show that would play stuff like this.
I owned only a few of their CDs back in the day, but I’d throw them on now and again when I needed the boost for something that would fit the Mendaihu Universe’s more tense moments that I was writing at the time. [Interestingly enough, this is the kind of music Alec Poe would listen to, which goes quite against the laid back aura he puts out through most of the trilogy. It’s all under the skin and hidden away with him.]
They’re still around these days, having dropped an original album (Let Go) early last year and a revisit of an older album this year (Hau Ruck 2025). They may not get a lot of airplay, but they’re definitely an interesting band to check out.
The other day on the way back from Costco we’d heard her single “Retributions of an Awful Life” from her 2023 EP A Comforting Notion and it occurred to me that she’s definitely someone I should listen to more often. Why? Because she somehow manages to capture what goth and post-punk sounded like in the late 80s and early 90s — a good ten years before she was born, mind you — and embraced that sound fully. Sometimes she sounds like mid-80s Siouxsie & the Banshees, and sometimes she sounds like early Garbage. And sometimes she sounds like Liliput. It’s all a wild mix of that cold and dark post-punk that I still gravitate to all these years later.
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