I’ve been a long-time fan of the Manchester band Elbow. They’re high on my ‘I will buy anything they release’ list of bands. Guy Garvey has a distinctive voice, slightly tired yet sonorous, and his use of wordplay is absolutely wonderful and I wish I could write like he does.
Every now and again I think of the series of videos they’d dropped during the height of the COVID pandemic, which they cleverly named elbowrooms, featuring the band (and sometimes guest musicians and vocalists) performing some of their beloved songs via shared video. By far my favorite is their take on “Lippy Kids” from their 2011 album Build a Rocket Boys!, featuring not only four of the five band members but a full choral section!
When I think of the pandemic years, I often think of these videos, because they were part of a time when the world was going in a strange direction and somehow communities came together, locally and otherwise, if just for a little while to remind us all that we’re in this together.
I’ll return to those elbowrooms videos every now and again, just to lift my spirits.
It’s been quite some time since I’ve actively listened to Radiohead, especially during my writing sessions. During the Belfry days, The Bends and OK Computer would get a lot of play, but the last time I played them a lot while writing was back in 2016 when A Moon Shaped Pool came out. [Has it really been that long since their last album?]
I think part of it is because I was working on different projects at the time. In Rainbows came out when I was writing the trunked Love Like Blood. I’d just started working on the multi-year revision work for the Bridgetown Trilogy when The King of Limbs dropped, but by that time I was obsessing over several other bands and Radiohead kind of fell by the wayside. The ever-increasing gap between albums caused a bit of a distance for me as well.
Now that I’m working on the ADoS remaster, however, I’ve been tempted to do another revisit of those albums. I’ve been a longtime fan literally since “Creep” dropped here in the US in early 1993, and I’ve picked up most of the members’ solo releases as well. Perhaps this is the perfect time!
I mean, yeah, I’m trying not to be overly (or overtly) political here on this site, but sometimes extenuating circumstances call for it. Heard this Beastie Boys track other day on KEXP, one you rarely hear on the radio these days as it’s a rather downbeat track and not one of their Big Hits, but I remember hearing this a ton on WFNX when Check Your Head came out in early 1992. It’s my favorite Beasties album and this is my favorite track of theirs.
Anyway, the KEXP deejay the other day pretty much said what I’ve been thinking lately: this second go-round is mask-off. They’re not even trying to hide it this time. And as A said a few days previous, we knew what happened last time so we’re ready for whatever bullshit he brings along this time out. We’re far more prepared to fight back, and more decisively at that.
They can call us names and spew and inspire hate towards us, and it still hurts just the same. But something’s giving this time. They’re ignoring it at their peril.
I’ve seen better days than this one I’ve seen better nights than this one Tension is rebuilding Something’s got to give Something’s got to give
That Fuckin’ Guy might have returned to Washington, but he’ll do the same as he did last time: a lot of noise, a lot of hate, a lot of bigotry…but very little to show for it. He can write up executive orders but they’re as powerful as a letter to the editor these days.
We can be aware of what he’s doing and stop him when necessary.
My friends circle on Discord has come up with something nifty as an alternative to the dreaded New Year’s Resolution that never seems to stick. Instead of declaring I will quit a bad habit or I will learn a new craft or I will lose weight or what have you, the idea is to come up with something you already like (or love!) to do but don’t always give yourself a chance to do it for one reason or another. Do it once a week for fifty-two weeks simply for enjoyment!
I got to thinking about it and I thought: I have four guitars collecting dust because I don’t pick them up all that often. I’d even bought new strings for the two six-strings (one acoustic, one electric) about six months ago but never got around to putting them on! So I figured, why not? Once a week I’ll pick up the guitar and either learn a new song, or write a new one! I do enjoy doing both, I’ve just not given myself the time over the last few years.
Sure, I’ve mentioned how annoyed I am with myself guitar-wise because when I do pick them up I end up playing the same handful of songs, and that gets boring really quickly. My dad used to do that on his piano and he enjoyed it, but I also really enjoy the creativity of learning or writing a new song and I haven’t done that in a LONG time. I want to do more than just play the same songs, I want new sounds to surface, just like when I write my novels!
So for the first two weekends, I allowed myself a related option: let’s start by putting on those new sets of strings. The acoustic was relatively easy, but restringing the Gretsch electric (see above, and pardon the dirtiness of the frets) was a bit of a chore, given that they’re held on there via the Bigsby bridge (aka the built-in vibrato bar) and a lot of tension, but it got done and it sounds great!
And just to make sure it was in tune, I taught myself the basic chord progression to REM’s “Radio Free Europe”, inspired by having just finished reading Peter Ames Carlin’s biography The Name of This Band Is REM. Learning that Peter Buck is self-taught and figured out his style by playing along with records — exactly how I did it — gave me the inspiration to keep going with this.
The aim here is not to be professional, or even release anything on Bandcamp or whatever (although I won’t rule it out if it sounds halfway decent), but just to revisit what I loved best about playing with The Flying Bohemians and jeb!: the pure enjoyment of musical creativity. Anything more than that will be a bonus.
This was definitely an interesting year for music! We had several ‘comeback’ albums from musicians who hadn’t had a studio release in over a decade — not just the Cure, but The The, The Softies and The Wolfgang Press — and we also had several excellent anniversary reissues popping up as well.
While my listening habits pretty much remained the same, I was super excited by the news that my favorite station, KEXP, would start broadcasting here in the Bay Area! We’ve desperately needed a good alternative rock station for years (I’m sorry, Live 105, but you are not cutting it even despite recently rising from the ashes), and they’ve always had a super strong fanbase here. So far they’ve been quite successful!
Musically I found myself leaning towards electronic and shoegaze once again, but that’s not to say I was firmly entrenched; the local label Slumberland has been consistently putting out some brilliant jangle pop and lo-fi gems and I’ve become a loyal fan. Still, a lot of non-KEXP listening was focused primarily on moods and vibes this year, mainly for a need of soundtrack music while working on Theadia, my first space opera.
So! Without further ado, here’s my official end-of-year playlist/mixtape for your listening enjoyment!
This one’s a long playlist/mixtape collection of 129 songs so I’ll spare you the list here. So instead, on with my favorite releases of the year! This time I’m merely listing them in alphabetical order as I tended to enjoy all of these equally, with the bolded title being my top favorite of the year. As I’ve mentioned quite often, these were albums that got a lot of play here in Spare Oom, whether on days off or during writing sessions.
ALBUMS Bastille, “&” (Ampersand) Bibio, Phantom Brickworks (LP II) Coldplay, Moon Music Elbow, AUDIO VERTIGO Four Tet, Three GIFT, Illuminator Hooverphonic, Fake Is the New Dope Kelly Lee Owens, Dreamstate La Luz, News of the Universe Linkin Park, From Zero Ride, Interplay The Cure, Songs of a Lost World The Fauns, How Lost The Reds, Pinks & Purples, Unwishing Well The Softies, The Bed I Made The The, Ensoulment Torres, What an enormous room Underworld, Strawberry Hotel Various Artists, Everyone’s Getting Involved: A Tribute to Talking Heads’ Stop Making Sense Various Artists, Red Hot Org Presents TRAИƧA
SINGLES Bad Bad Hats, “My Heart Your Heart” Corridor, “Jump Cut” deary, “Selene” DIIV, “Brown Paper Bag” Elbow, “Things I’ve Been Telling Myself for Years” English Teacher, “The World’s Biggest Paving Slab” GIFT, “Later” Girl and Girl, “Hello” Kamasi Washington, “Prologue” Kelly Lee Owens, “Love You Got” La Luz, “Strange World” Orcas, “Under the Milky Way” Orville Peck & Beck, “Death Valley High” Ride, “I Came to See the Wreck” RÜFÜS DU SOL, “Music Is Better” The Cure, “And Nothing Is Forever” The Fauns, “Doot Doot” The National, “Heaven” Torres, “Collect”
REISSUES American Football, American Football 25th Anniversary Edition Cocteau Twins & Harold Budd, The Moon and the Melodies Cranes, Collected Works Vol 1 Garbage, Bleed Like Me Deluxe Edition George Harrison, Living in the Material World 50th Anniversary His Name Is Alive, How Ghosts Affect Relationships 1990-1993 Hugo Largo, Huge, Large and Electric: Hugo Largo 1984-1991 Ivy, Long Distance 25th Anniversary Edition John Lennon, Mind Games: The Ultimate Collection and Mind Games: Meditation Mixes Kristin Hersh, Hips and Makers 30th Anniversary Edition New Order, Brotherhood (Definitive) REM, We Are Hope Despite the Times Seal, Seal (1994) Deluxe Edition The Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band, Still Barking (1967-1972) The Dream Academy, Religion, Revolution and Railways: The Complete Recordings The Police, Synchronicity Super Deluxe Edition
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So what do we have coming in 2025? Good question. So far I know we have new albums coming from Franz Ferdinand, Ringo Starr, Sharon Van Etten & The Attachment Theory, Doves (!!), Manic Street Preachers and Mogwai. Stay tuned!
Hope everyone has a great 2025! See you in the next year!
When we started the year, the last thing I expected was for several of my favorite bands — and ones that influenced me greatly in my teens — to suddenly resurface and release brand spankin’ new albums! These days you’d expect a surprise reunion single, but not a full-on project! Still, these reunions made for a very interesting an highly entertaining year of music.
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The The, Ensoulment, released 6 September. Matt Johnson had been doing soundtracks for the last several years, but after a few one-off singles and a two highly successful comeback tours, he dropped his first rock album since 2000’s NakedSelf to high praise. This new album interestingly reminds me of his first album Burning Blue Soul, focusing more on moods and experimentation.
Hinds, VIVA HINDS, released 6 September. We were able to catch this wonderfully fun band from Madrid at Outside Lands a few years back, and after a long wait they’ve returned with an excellent record full of indie rock gems like “Boom Boom Back” (which features Beck, who seemed to show up all over the place this year!).
Sea Lemon featuring Ben Gibbard, “Crystals” single, released 9 September. This indie band leans heavily in Death Cab for Cutie territory yet with a slight shoegazey twist, so it’s no big surprise that DCFC’s Ben Gibbard shows up on this duet that got a ton of play on KEXP.
Robyn Hitchcock, 1967: Vacations in the Past, released 13 September. This is essentially a tie-in record for his memoir of the same name, a book telling the story of his youth, having just moved to a small who-knows-where town in England and started attending a boys’ school. It’s a year of musical inspiration, personal awakening and coming of age, and this soundtrack of sorts is mostly a cover album of the songs of that era that changed his life.
bloococoon, bloococoon, released 13 September. Every now and again, one of the DJs on KEXP will drop a completely random song that someone suggested from Bandcamp or elsewhere, and more often than not it’s a mindblowing track that sense several listeners towards the site to listen and/or purchase. This noisy shoegaze band was one of my favorite finds this year.
Hugo Largo, Huge, Large and Electric: Hugo Largo 1984-1991, released 13 September. Not too many people remember this band from the college-rock era, but they were a surprisingly creative and influential quartet that may have partially inspired quietcore. REM’s Michael Stipe was a major fan, not only giving them publicity but showing up on their first album as well. This is a two-disc collection featuring both of their albums plus a selection of rarities.
Nilüfer Yanya, My Method Actor, released 13 September. One of my favorite finds of 2022, she’s an indie guitarist who seamlessly blends rock with a bit of hip-hop and trip-hop and ends up with a sound that’s both catchy and quirky. This was a great follow-up record and the single “Like I Say (I runaway)” gets stuck in my head.
Mixtape/Playlist, Re:Defined 2404, created 19 September. This one got a fair bit of play for a good month or two, and I really like how this one flows, even with its occasionally surprising track selection.
The Cure, “Alone” single, released 26 September. If you’ve been a fan of this band for any length of time, you’ll know that Robert Smith will constantly report that the band is either breaking up or finishing up a new album, and then nothing will happen for a good few years. They’ll even hint at completely new tracks during their ongoing tours, though they never quite surface…until now. No one expected a brand spanking new Cure single — their last having surfaced way back in 2008. And it wasn’t just a one-off either…
Linkin Park, “Heavy Is the Crown” single, released 26 September. This band chose to reconvene even after Chester Bennington’s passing back in 2017, with the addition of Dead Sara vocalist Emily Armstrong joining in. The end result is an excellent heavy track very similar to their Meteora-era work, a single written specifically for the 2024 League of Legends Championship. [I don’t play LoL, but I’m a huge fan of their worldbuilding and their consistently brilliant soundtracks and music tie-ins (especially the k-rock quartet K/DA).] It’s great to have them back.
The Wolfgang Press, A 2nd Shape, released 30 September. Now this was a band I did not expect to reunite! They’d broken up way back in 1995 after the great but largely ignored Funky Little Demons album. I found it fascinating that they chose to return not to the groove-oriented rock of their latter years that had given them some success, but even further back to their noisier and experimental early years. They’re not for everyone, but they’re definitely one of my favorites.
While February may not have been as exciting or mind-blowing as January, it did contain its own stellar releases that I often returned to over the course of the year. I was still kind of getting my head back on straight around this time, spending most of my mental focus on reworking Theadia into a much better novel and prepping Queen Ophelia’s War for eventual release.
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The Last Dinner Party, Prelude to Ecstasy, released 2 February. I’d heard many critics giving this one a very positive review, and having only heard the teaser single “Nothing Matters” (on KEXP, natch), I was pleasantly surprised by this record. I was kind of expecting one of those MTV-ish alternapop bands (and this single is very much in that style) but there’s so much more going on that I found myself intrigued.
J Mascis, What Do We Do Now, 2 February. He’s definitely channeling his early 90s Dinosaur Jr sound here, the lighter and more radio-friendly stuff that made them so popular in the first place, but that’s what makes this album so fun! Regarding the above video, I admit I’m not a big fan of AI per se, but I do appreciate the few artists who have been using it to create freakishly weird and possibly drug-influenced images like this, and somehow it makes sense to have J singing over it!
Brittany Howard, What Now, released 9 February. The Alabama Shakes singer’s latest solo record is full of blues and funk dialed up to 11 this time out, and it’s a great listen. Yet another record I got into via KEXP, of course.
IDLES, TANGK, released 16 February. I’ve been a fan of this band for quite a while now, and it’s all due to their full embrace of loud and relentless punk rock in the old school sense. They’re not about the speed, however, but the power behind their songs. Even with a ridiculously fun and light-hearted track like the single “Dancer”, they reel you in and take you for a wild ride.
Geographer, A Mirror Brightly, released 23 February. I’ve been embracing a lot more local groups over the last few years, including this quirky synthpop one-man band. We got to see them a few years ago at Outside Lands and really enjoyed them. His songs are mostly quiet and contemplative yet still full of danceable grooves.
Whitelands, Night-Bound Eyes Are Blind to the Day, released 23 February. I’ve also been listening to a lot of shoegaze pop lately as well (no big surprise there), and this band definitely has that drenched-in-reverb sound I love so much. As expected, this is another great album to listen to while writing.
The Dream Academy, Religion, Revolution and Railways: The Complete Recordings, released 23 February. The first of several reissues this year that captured my attention. If you loved “Life in a Northern Town” as much as I have, this collection is definitely worth checking out. It features not just their three albums but several b-sides and rarities as well. Highly recommended.
Curve, Unreadable Communication: Anxious Recordings 1991-1993, released 23 February. Recently someone on Threads asked about trying out different shoegaze bands, and I suggested they sample this band. They lean more towards the My Bloody Valentine style of wall-of-guitar sound than the dreamlike reverb of Slowdive, but they remain one of my favorite bands of the early 90s. This is an excellent collection of their first two albums, the first EPs, and several remixes and b-sides. Highly recommend this one as well.
And so we approach the end of the year, and it’s time once again to take a look at some of my favorite albums and singles! As always, the playlist is all over the place: old favorites, new discoveries, dreamlike grooves and dense walls of sound. KEXP was once again the impetus for my finding and downloading a lot of these albums.
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SPRINTS, Letter to Self, released 5 January. “Up and Comer” got a lot of airplay on KEXP at the beginning of the year, enough that I just had to see what the rest of the album was about, and I was not let down. It’s post-punk in the classic sense, full of restrained twitchiness without going off the rails with messy abandon, which can sometimes be the downside to classic punk rock.
Nailah Hunter, Lovegaze, released 12 January. Hunter defies multiple genres in her music; it’s not quite indie rock, not quite new age, not quite David Lynch-style creepy jazz, but an otherworldly mix of it all. You’re never quite sure where the songs are going to go, yet they still transport you into an alternate reality of calm contemplation and unsettling displacement.
The Fauns, How Lost, released 19 January. This is one of the first albums of the year that struck a chord with me and stayed in my playlist throughout most of it. Partly due to the unexpected yet lovely cover of Freur’s synthpop classic “Doot Doot” but mostly because I’ve been leaning very heavily on the shoegaze these last couple of years. And yet they’re also steeped in that snythpop groove as well, a mix that works perfectly and lands right my wheelhouse. Album closer “Spacewreck” is one of those dreamy epic ballads that hits me right in the feels. This one got a lot of play while I worked on Theadia.
Sleater-Kinney, Little Rope, released 19 January. This band’s evolution has been a fascinating one, veering from riot-grrl punk to noise pop to jangle and swerving to moody contemplation. This record appealed to me because of its lighter touch yet still refusing to let up on the tension.
Green Day, Saviors, released 19 January. The sad thing about commercial alternative stations like Live 105 here in San Francisco is that they’ll premier the new song by this band, and yet a month later it’ll disappear only to have Dookie-era singles remaining on their playlist. And this is a local band!! While this may not have hit everyone’s buttons, it’s a good example of a band that refuses to go quietly and does so by remaining strong and doing what it does best.
The Umbrellas, Fairweather Friend, released 26 January. One of my favorite uber-local bands (they’re here in the Richmond District, as I recall), this jangle-pop quartet takes inspiration directly from classic indie bands like Beat Happening (complete with a lead singer with a deep and sonorous voice) and writes super fun and catchy tunes that are loved both by fans and critics alike.
Ty Segall, Three Bells, released 26 January. Segall has always been a bit of a weirdo (and a prolific one at that) with a sound that’s not quite Flaming Lips and not quite Pere Ubu yet somewhere in between. And yet he’s quite reserved and contemplative on this album, revealing yet another level of his style that you can’t ignore.
The Smile, Wall of Eyes, released 26 January. Thom Yorke and Jonny Greenwood (and Tom Skinner) have been keeping busy with this side project of theirs, releasing not one but two full albums this past year. The unsettling “Bending Hectic” had been released as a teaser single at the end of 2023, and the ensuing album was just as strange and compelling.
TORRES, What an enormous room, released 26 January. She’s been around for over a decade now, but it’s only recently that I finally got into her music, first with 2021’s Thirstier (which got a lot of play on KEXP). This newest follow-up feels more cohesive and demanding than that previous album, especially with its hooky and in-your-face single “Collect”. This album also got quite a lot of play in Spare Oom during my writing sessions, and it’s one of my favorites of the year.
Mixtape/Playlist, Re:Defined 2401, created 30 January. I actually started making this one in the latter half of 2023 as a Walk in Silence mix, yet I couldn’t quite figure out why it wasn’t entirely gelling for me. After the new year I realized the issue was that I was constricting myself, trying to force a mix that wasn’t appealing. A few tracks got dropped, a handful thrown in, and a renaming made it work! I’d used the Re:Defined moniker in the early 00s as a way to give these mixes more breathing room with several kinds of styles and sounds. I’m glad I did, because these ended up getting a lot of play!
Walk In Silence 