One weird downside to living in the Bay Area in the summer, specifically on the west side of San Francisco, is that it’s often overcast, highly humid and stuck somewhere in the mid-50s — and there’s also a high chance of various allergens floating in the air to give me a migraine. All this adds up to me feeling sleepy and lazy most days.
So yeah, that’s my excuse for not being entirely on point with my writing, journaling and blogging recently.
Hopefully I’ll have my head together a bit more next week.
I really don’t know of any other fans of The Wolfgang Press, one of the earliest 4AD signings from their early 80s origins, but I was introduced to them via “Cut the Tree”, a gloomy dirge off the label’s seminal Lonely Is an Eyesore compilation, and I loved their bleak post-punk sound. They seemed darker and more avant-garde than Joy Division, less about driving beats and more about making one hell of a weird noise. Their evolution is a fascinating one, finally hinting at an unexpectedly funky sound with 1988’s Bird Wood Cage, which brought them to the amazing and groovy 1991 album Queer which remains one of my favorite albums of the early 90s.
They’d broken up after 1995’s peculiar yet interesting Funky Little Demons and little was said about them other than 2001’s Everything Is Beautiful, part of 4AD’s 90’s-00’s run of best-of mixes, and a 2020 Record Store Day EP called Unremembered Remembered featuring post-Demons demos for an abandoned follow-up. They’ve all had their one solo projects since then.
The new album, A 2nd Shape, drops on 27 September, and I am totally looking forward to it!
…I often think about this particular song by The Clockworks, which remains one of my top favorite songs of the last five years.
Why does this song remind me of the pandemic? Actually it’s the video.
There’s a day-end drone shot of the Bay Bridge here in San Francisco at around the 2:20 mark (and again at 3:05) that brings up the memory of my thirty-mile commute to and from Concord in the East Bay, and whenever I see it in this video, I wonder if my car is somewhere in that shot, heading westward into the city at the end of yet another hellish day. Even though the band released this track in late 2021, at least a year after I’d quit that particular job, the song perfectly encapsulates what that job had been doing to me over the last decade.
This was also around the time I’d been listening to KEXP almost religiously at this point, already an Amplifier (I still donate to them on a monthly basis!), and this track had gotten some major airplay, and I don’t blame them for putting it on heavy rotation as it’s still a hell of a banger. That station got me through a hell of a lot over the last five or so years.
It’s been over four years since I left that job in March 2020 (and I’m still glad I did), and a few years since the peak of that particular pandemic wave (and I’m still wearing a mask to work and still Covid-free) (knock on wood), so this song definitely emulates a feeling of weariness and uneasiness for me, reminding me that none of us really know what the hell was going on at the time, or how long it would last.
Oof. Sorry I don’t have much to say here today, as my day job schedule is kind of heavy on the back end. In the meantime, I’ve been revisiting my U2 collection lately and remembering how much I still enjoy them. I’ve always liked them from the beginning (I actually remember seeing the “I Will Follow” and “Gloria” videos on early MTV), but I didn’t really get into them until the 1984 album The Unforgettable Fire, specifically the title song, which remains one of my favorite early tracks of theirs.
I decided it was time to semi-retire the Listen/Walk in Silence/Untitled triad for a bit once more as I felt I was starting to pigeonhole myself with the mix moods. I’ve instead revived another mixtape series I’d started ages ago, the Re:Defined mixes, which have a much looser feel to them. Hope you enjoy it!
Ooh, this is lovely! This was a teaser single dropped a few months previously by the band Orcas before they released their new album How to Color a Thousand Mistakes this past week. [This is also their first album in over ten years!] They’ve got that dreamlike echo-heavy electro sound similar to Washed Out and Beach House, but lean a little more towards post-rock instead, so doing this Church cover in that style is quite unexpected yet intriguing. I’ve been listening to their new album on Bandcamp lately (and it’s in the cart to be purchased soon), so now I really want to check out what their other albums sound like!
When every choice that I make is yours Keep telling me what’s right and what’s wrong Don’t you ever stop to think about me? I’m not that blind to see that you’ve been cheating on me
Every now and again I think about this song, especially during tense political climates. Sure, it’s a song about a failing relationship, but sometimes you can read lyrics different ways. Sometimes this particular lyric pops into my head whenever I hear conservatives go on about how much they know what I need. Despite never asking ahead of time for my input.
Which is why I’ve stopped listening to that party quite some time ago.
[And as an aside, I absolutely love the piano work on this track. One of my all-time favorites.]
No, not the John Lennon solo track (though I do quite like it, and definitely the cover of it that Sponge did back in ’95). I’m talking about isolated tracks. It’s something that pops up on my YouTube searches of Beatles-related things, and it’s always fun to listen to them. I’m not entirely sure what these posters use to separate the tracks, but I love that even a seasoned fan like myself will hear something new and amazing every time I play one.
For instance, this video of “Oh! Darling” features a vocals-only track that really pushes up Paul’s throat-shredded singing, as well as the slight slap-back echo they’d used for it to give it that 50s feel.
This video of “Helter Skelter” is interesting as well, including a section where you can distinctly hear the guitar going waaaay out of tune as the song progresses from all the hammering it’s getting.
…or this one of “I Want You (She’s So Heavy)” that reveals just how truly bluesy this song is.
…or just how goldang funky “Hey Bulldog” is.
There’s even video out there of songs from the rooftop concert, like “Dig a Pony”!
But this one is by far my favorite: the isolated strings and horns for “I Am the Walrus”. If anything, you should give this one a listen just to show how amazingly creative George Martin was as an arranger. The swoops and intricate phrases that you might not notice in the original are front ant center.
They’d gotten a bit of publicity a short time ago when they’d gotten inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame — and they definitely earned that spot and then some — and the band has been mentioned on social media off and on since then.
And it occurred to me that I haven’t sat down and properly listened to this band in ages! I’ve always been a fan of their years on IRS Records, having owned Document and Eponymous on cassette and dubbed the rest from my high school friends, and I think it’s fair to say that The Flying Bohemians (my ‘band’ of the time, heh) owes a huge debt to them as well.
Actually, I’ve been thinking lately that I haven’t done a deep dive on a lot of my favorite bands from the 80s in a long time — REM, The Church, Depeche Mode, The Cure, The Smiths, Wire, and so on — and it’s always tempting to do a blogging-along of the relistens, similar to what I’d done with the Beatles some years ago.
Is this another oh god he’s sliding back into the 80s again thing? Maybe not this time. Those were focused on years rather than bands…this time it would be focusing on discographies. And lord knows how much of a completist I am, heh.
July is usually a slow-ish month for new releases, so I’ve been catching up with some of the albums that have dropped in the last couple of months, and News of the Universe from La Luz has been getting considerable play here in Spare Oom, specifically the very spacey “Strange World”. It kind of reminds me of Ladytron and Stereolab in a way, with its retro synth sound and psychedelic melodies. And it’s been stuck in my head for at least a couple of weeks!
