The PC has been fixed and updated (yay!) but in the meantime I’ve fallen a little behind in my writing (boo!) so I’ve been frantically trying to catch up (blerg!). Doing what I can when I can, though, and making sure I don’t stress out over it all. And I’m not stressed! Which is good, right? Even when I’m trying to squeeze some words out before or after a busy shift at the Day Job?
Anyway. Been listening to a lot of new tunes lately, such as the new boygenius record (fittingly entitled ‘the record’), and it’s quite good! It’s been getting a lot of positive press and high-grade reviews. And let’s be honest, a group with Lucy Dacus, Phoebe Bridgers and Julien Baker in it has no business being half-assed now. Three phenomenal songwriters writing flawless alternapop. I highly recommend it.
WELP. Looks like the PC in Spare Oom has gotten to the point where I need to a factory reset. I probably needed to do it anyway as it’s been acting up in various ways over the last several months. Nothing big…until now. Previously the internet would disconnect, or I’d suddenly be super low on memory, but lately weird things have been happening like one single program eating up 98% of the CPU usage, or File Explorer seriously lagging.
I mean, it could very well be that a recent update got hosed (such as a driver download crashing due to said internet disconnect) or I somehow acquired some malware somewhere along the line. Mind you, other than the odd problems, everything ran totally fine once I ran a few cleaning apps. Until it happened again.
So anyways, this means that yesterday afternoon I decided to do take the plunge and do that factory reset after all. I’m not too worried about it, considering that this is the very first time I’ve done it for this PC in the three (four?) years I’ve had it. Having problems at this PC’s age is rather impressive, actually.
Which sadly means that I’ve given you this boring post instead of something about music! Oh well. Hopefully things will be back to normal soon!
So what have I been listening to lately while writing MU4? Lots of things! I’ve mostly been focusing on newer releases these last couple of weeks, and this is what’s currently on rotation:
Flyying Colours, You Never Know, released 17 March. A sort of Slowdive-meets-dreampop hybrid that’s a little more bouncy than shoegaze but still moody enough to keep me enthralled. I’ve been looking forward to this one since hearing the first single “Goodbye to Music” on KEXP.
Depeche Mode, Memento Mori, released 24 March. I was curious as to what this new album would sound like, and it kind of reminds me of Ultra melodywise, but the sound is more like Construction Time Again. It’s definitely a somber affair for many reasons, but this band has always fit perfectly in that niche.
The Church, The Hypnogogue, released 24 February. The band lineup has definitely changed over the years — Steve Kilbey is the lone original member at this point — but their signature sound hasn’t changed at all. This one’s very much like their previous records, very moody and experimental.
The Reds, Pinks and Purples, The Town That Cursed Your Name, released 24 March. I’ve recently found out that this local band has been getting play on KEXP, which makes me extremely happy!
Secret Machines, The Moth, the Lizard and the Secret Machines, released 24 March. Recorded not that long after 2008’s self-titled album but never released, the band finished it off recently. It’s quite unlike any of their other albums, more of a noisefest than a melodic adventure, but it’s perfect background music for my sessions!
U2, Songs of Surrender, released 17 March. A forty-song mix to tie in with Bono’s memoir, it’s full of reimagined recordings of both hits and deep cuts. Many of them also have updated lyrics (per Bono, he felt these new words are closer to what he envisioned for each track). Still, it’s a great set!
Sorry for the lack of quality entries this week! Meant to get something up here today but my PC had an update that didn’t update correctly and it’s causing everything to be kind of wonky. Going to run some diagnostics and turn the unit off while I go to work today to give it a rest. Hopefully it’ll be back to normal this evening.
It’s that time of year: throwing Revolver on the speakers and doing our taxes. I’ve been playing that album every year when I file, and this time out I have the added enjoyment of listening to the full Super Deluxe Edition while doing it!
I’ll hopefully have something more substantial to post on Thursday!
Back in the spring of 1986, I remember being excited whenever I heard a Beatles song on the radio, especially if it was one of my favorites like “Rain”. (The song in fact does show up on one of my ‘radio tapes’ from summer of the previous year.) Back then, the idea of a song being twenty years old felt like a lifetime ago, its release five years before I’d been born. When you’re growing up, songs like that just seem so…distant.
Here in 2023, the music of twenty years previous was the music I listened to in the basement of my family’s house while I wrote The Persistence of Memories, what made the mixtapes I’d play on my commute to and from the candle warehouse, what cds I’d buy at Newbury Comics in downtown Amherst. This is music that still shows up on my playlists, like Sleeping with Ghosts and Hail to the Thief and Absolution and The Matrix Reloaded.
I think about this a lot, now that I’m older and especially now that the history of rock music has expanded and evolved since its early days in the late 50s (at least when it was starting to be called that, at any rate). I read a lot of music histories and biographies these days and this sort of things slides into the consciousness of my mind.
The fact that I was around and paying attention when so much popular music history was made, from the late 70s onwards. That when I started paying attention to what was being played on the radio as a preteen, FM had finally sprinted past AM as the most popular radio band (around 1978), music videos became more than just a rare specialized form of promotion (late 1981), and so many of its players and originators were still around, still clubbing and still releasing music.
This doesn’t make me feel old, far from it. Quite the opposite. It makes me feel glad and lucky as hell that I’ve been around to witness as much of it as I have.
I’m sure I’ll have a lot more to say about this down the road, but for now I’m just going to say that this is partly why I’m still as much of an obsessive music nerd as I am. Not for fear of missing out, but because I’m utterly fascinated by so much of this history as it’s happening. New sounds, new productions, new imagery. As well as the circularity of styles; the resurgence of shoegaze, the evolution of electronic music, the new generations of punk, and everything in between.
It’s been a while since I’ve listened to Delerium. It’s a not-quite side project of Bill Leeb and Rhys Fulber of industrial band Front Line Assembly, leaning more towards ambient, almost new-agey electronica, quite the opposite of their harsh and twitchy main project. You might remember them from back in the 90s when they had a surprise hit with Sarah McLachlan and “Silence” — definite a song of its decade, complete with Enigma-esque Gregorian chant, grooving mid-tempo beat and dreamlike keyboards. That song and the album it came from (Karma) did in fact get a lot of play in the Belfry, and “Silence” does make an appearance on the second volume of the Songs from the Eden Cycle mixtapes.
The project is still active, sliding out an album every couple of years in between FLA releases. Their sound has definitely evolved some, but is still firmly anchored in that classic dreamlike new-age/ambient moodscape. The new album Signs, which just dropped earlier this month, is a stellar record that feels like a return to their best forms, with some quite lovely songs that fit perfectly here in Spare Oom and MU4. I’m quite happy to have them back on my Eden Cycle playlist again.
I seem to have finally caught a cold and gotten a fever for the first time since I started the Day Job last March. That’s actually a pretty good run! I’ve had a few days where I was running on fumes (these were usually the midday 11:30 to 8 shifts) but this is the first time in quite a while that I called in sick and taken the day off! I also have today off as well, and hoping that the cold/fever has already broken by the time this posts, as A also has the day off and we were planning on going out to do stuff.
Either way…going to take the rest of the week off and recuperate. See you next week!
This one’s a long one…a three-taper made in late Spring 1998 in the middle of my stint at HMV Records. This was kind of a transitional time for me — purging old personal drama, starting a brand new science fiction novel and writing more songs and poems, working down in the Belfry at night, going on long road trips, learning how to get rid of all that negativity from the first half of the decade. I stopped hiding and started living again, especially now that I could once again afford to do so.
This mixtape got a lot of play in my first car — a 1992 Chevy Cavalier I’d named the Mach V, in which I’d recently had a tape deck installed — and contains a mix from two sources: the current playlist of WFNX which I’d listened to constantly to and from work, and the extreme expansion of promotional copies of cds that I’d begun to acquire at work. Some songs are alt-rock radio standards today (Flagpole Sitta, The Way) while others are loved deep cuts (Playboys, Fall On Tears), Belfry regulars (God Lives Underwater, Superdrag) and soundtrack songs (mostly from Great Expectations, which I listened to on the regular).
Out of most of the multi-tape mixes, I think this one holds up as one of the best. It’s consistent with only one or two filler tracks, and it contains quite a few of my favorite late 90s tracks.
[Only one track missing and not available on Spotify: Foo Fighters’ cover of Gerry Rafferty’s “Baker Street”, placed between Goldfinger’s “This Lonely Place” and Tonic’s “If You Could Only See”.]
Nothing all that new to say today, sorry. This week’s Day Job schedule has been kind of weird and full of mid-shift hours, and I’m trying to make it a new habit not to force myself through blog posts and writing sessions if I don’t have the time or the spoons for it. Being healthy and all that.
In the meantime, please enjoy this new tune from my favorite super-local band. That building on the album cover is about three streets away from my apartment, and I have walked past that red Karmann Ghia many times!
