New Sounds: Cosima

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I love finding a new musician to latch onto.  Sometimes it’ll be a track that I’ve heard on the radio station I’m listening to.  Other times it’ll be a featured artist at a music blog.  And yes, sometimes it’ll even be a band that randomly started following me on Twitter.

It was an article from September in the music blog The Line of Best Fit that introduced me to Cosima, a singer from the UK whose songs are haunting but lovely in that Cocteau Twins-meets-Massive Attack sort of way.  I keep coming back to them, wanting to hear them again.

She’s just getting started — she’s only got a few singles and an EP out right now — but I highly recommend picking it all up, because it’s all phenomenal stuff.  Her new track “To Build a House” is her best yet.

Go and check out her music.  Highly recommended.

Writing Session Tunage: What Next?

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NOTE:  HEY KIDS!  Speaking of writing, I have an e-book coming out this Friday!  The Balance of Light, the third book in the Bridgetown Trilogy, will finally get released in just a few short days!  Come on over to Smashwords and check it out!

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anime-writing-gif

Of course, you all know that I almost always have some sort of tunage going during my writing sessions, especially when they’re back here in Spare Oom.  Even as I type this, I’m listening to Elbow’s latest album, Little Fictions.

You also know that there have been certain go-to albums that I’ll play, especially if I’m working on something related to the Mendaihu Universe.

But now that that particular project is complete…now what should I listen to?  Good question.

Meet the Lidwells! is about a musical family, and once I get to the bulk of the writing of this project, I’m sure I’ll be listening to a lot of 90s alternapop to fit with the band’s sound.  I’ve got a lot of that stuff in my collection, thanks to my time at HMV, but I can also let SiriusXM’s Lithium station do the work as well.

Other than that, my project options are wide open.  I’m thinking maybe a standalone Mendaihu Universe book or two.  And for some reason, I’ve decided that I need to listen to a lot of LOUD music for those.  The plot ideas I have for these involve a lot of emotional and societal tension, so something twitchy and irritable would fit quite nicely.

Something like the alt-metal of Caspian for instance:

…or something nice and crunchy from Deftones.

I’m sure I’ll temper it with some quiet moody stuff like I always do.

Either way, it’s time to change up the writing session soundtrack big time.  I’m not sure what I’ll be listening to in particular, but I’m keeping my options open.  Some of my favorite writing session albums come to me purely by accident — an album I haven’t heard in years that just happens to fit the mood of the scene, or a new release that clicks with me right from the first listen.  I still absolutely adore Failure’s Fantastic Planet (it’s still on my gym mp3 player after all these years), but I’ve got to start listening to more than just the same things.

Recent Music Purchases, January Edition

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Hey there!  Here’s some tunage I’ve picked up over the last few weeks.  Hope you enjoy!

Dropkick Murphys, 11 Short Stories of Pain and Glory, released 6 January.

Gone Is Gone, Echolocation, released 6 January.

The XX, I See You, released 13 January.

The Flaming Lips, Oczy Mlody, released 13 January.

Colony House, Only the Lonely, released 13 January.

Alex Clare, Tail of Lions, released 20 January.

Captain Wilberforce, Black Sky Thinking, to be released 27 March. [Special email list early bird download!]

More than just the music.

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jonzbox

The trusty Jonzbox — before the internet, this radio showed me what the rest of the world was about.

I was thinking about this yesterday, during the furor over Trump’s administration suggesting cutting the funding for ‘frivolous’ things such as the National Endowment for the Arts.  I mean, aside from my anger and annoyance that, once more, the arts gets the shit end of the stick while other things get overfunded.  [You know my feeling on that: ‘oh, we don’t have the money to support arts at your high school…but god forbid we get rid of football!’]

It occurred to me that there are numerous reasons why I got into college rock, and in effect fell headlong in love with alternative rock, a crazy infatuation that sticks with me thirty years later.  It’s more than just the sound of the music.  Sure, a big part of it was that it introduced me to a circle of great friends that I’m still connected with to this day. And it’s more than realizing that I could be a goofy self-professed nonconformist in a small town high school.

The more I thought about it, the more I realized that college rock, and in effect college radio, made me realize there’s a much, much bigger world out there than what was being given to me.  In the afternoons on through the late evenings in 1987 through 1989, I’d hear the brutalist electronic dance music of Belgium, Slovenia and Germany, the Thatcher-era malaise of the UK, the high weirdness of Californian experimental bands, the several versions of American punk, right alongside the local collegiate sounds of Boston and the Pioneer Valley.  Sure, I loved what I was hearing, but I wasn’t just listening to everything that was played; I tried to understand the emotions and the meanings behind it.

Years later, and I have the internet at my fingertips.  As of this moment, I’m listening to Radio BDC, an online station on the opposite coast, playing a song by a band from Denver.  My current music purchases include bands from London, Oklahoma, Boston, Tennessee, and Los Angeles.

Why do I bring this up?  What has this got to do with anything?

Well, this is because apparently I’m an elitist..  Or a snowflake.  Or a libtard.  Or an overly sensitive, politically correct cuck.  Or whatever the hell else they want to call me.  At least that’s what the self-proclaimed Deplorables want to label me.  In 1988 I was probably called a fag a few times by the local jocks.  In the 90s I was a slacker.  In the 00s I was un-American.  And this decade I’m a lazy-ass looking for a handout.  [I mean, really, people.  Why are you so proud of being deplorable?  When Denis Leary sang “I’m an asshole, and I’m proud of it”, he was making a joke.  In fact, I’m 99% certain he was making fun of people like you.]   And there’s one thing conformists hate the most, and that’s the square peg that won’t fit into their mold.

Call me what you want, I don’t care.  I’m proud of the fact that I’ve kept my eyes and ears open to new things, thanks to those formative years.  I may have made a few mistakes, said a few stupid things, but I’ve owned up to them eventually.  I’m a work in progress; I don’t want to be stuck in a mold at all.  Nor do I like to be passive, not like I once was in my preteen years.  I hate being easily influenced.  I hate being ignorant.

This is why I keep my eyes and ears open to new things all the time.  Music, books, movies and TV, news, whatever.  Seeing things from different points of view is not an elitist action at all.

It’s about learning what the world is truly about.

 

Ultrasound’s ‘Everything Picture’

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In the last few years of my run at HMV, I was given the go-ahead to do special orders for customers, as well as order the occasional import.  This came in handy when NSYNC released the single “Bye Bye Bye” some time before the No Strings Attached album; I knew it would be a huge seller despite the price, so I had them order a good hundred or so copies.  They all sold out within a few days.

Around that time, I’d been reading all the reviews in the British music magazines and catching up on bands that may or may not break here.  One of my favorite finds was a five-piece called Ultrasound, whose sound was a fantastic cross between crunchy guitar-led Britpop (very similar to Kaiser Chiefs, predating them by at least a few years) and seventies psychedelia, with a bit of Pink Floydish prog in there as well.  They released a handful of singles and one album, Everything Picture, before breaking up.  [They would, however, reconvene twelve years later for a second album, Play for Today, and have just released a new mini-album at the end of 2016.]

It’s a sprawling album, twelve long tracks stretching an hour and a half over two cds (most of the tracks are around six or seven minutes long, with the last track featuring a truly epic freakout that lasts a little over 21 minutes plus a two-minute hidden track!).  Due to its length and wide scope, many critics found it bloated and meandering, but despite that, it reached to number 23 on the UK Albums chart, and it’s remained a fan favorite.  I for one loved that it was a long album; a sort of The Beatles only with fewer and much longer songs.  I dubbed it onto cassette and listened to it constantly whenever I drove around New England.

The single “Stay Young” is one of my favorites from this album.  It’s a wonderful rock anthem from the loud-soft-loud school, a twenty-first century rewrite of “My Generation” in a way.

The track “Aire & Calder” is another favorite.  I love its driving beat and folksy melody that evokes the feeling of riding a caravan through the British wetlands.  [Aire and Calder are two rivers that meet up near Goole and Castleford just outside Leeds; both towns are name-dropped within the song as well.]

The album still holds up well nearly eighteen years later.  I can see where the critics were frustrated, as it slides all over the place, changing moods and sounds constantly (again, much like the White Album), but taken as a whole, it remains a strong record from start to finish.

A stranglehold on a certain feeling

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As I dive once more into the 80s music nostalgia, one band I plan on checking out is Ultravox.  I’ve always heard great things about them (both the John Foxx and the Midge Ure years), and I even owned the greatest hits and Vienna albums, but I never actually sat down to listen to them very closely.  Chalk it up to being one of those bands I’d hear on the radio or MTV but could never find their stuff at the mall.  [And when I did see them at the various record stores, often I’d be reserving my money for something else I was looking for.]

This past Christmas I finally got their box set The Albums 1980-2012 (aka the Midge Ure era), and during our visit to southern California this past weekend, I stopped in at Amoeba to pick up the John Foxx era box, Island Years.  These cover all but two 90s albums (Revelation and Ingenuity, essentially keyboardist Billy Currie with a newer lineup) and only the latter box contains single sides and ephemera, but th0se are easily acquired online if I’m further interested in completing the discography.

I do love the career-spanning box sets, especially the ‘album collection’ ones, as it gives the new listener — or like me, the once-passive fan who wants to hear more — the ability to check out a band’s discography at a relatively decent price.  I’ve bought quite a few of these over the years: Roxy Music’s The Complete Studio Recordings, Nilsson’s The RCA Albums Collection, Lloyd Cole & the Commotions’ Collected Recordings 1983-89, and The Boomtown Rats’ Classic Album Selection, to name a few.  Not all of them are complete (there’s often a few items missing, like a cover or a live track or a b-side), but they’re complete enough to provide an excellent overview.  Sure, they can be expensive, but sometimes you can find a great deal.  Some are even available as mp3s, cutting the cost almost in half sometimes.

I’m looking forward to listening to these two Ultravox boxes!

Down the Rabbit Hole Again

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Every time I think I’m escaping the rabbit hole of 80s college rock and moving on, I end up slinking back in again!  Well, this time I’m not working on a related writing project…I’m just enjoying the music this time out, while I wait for new releases to come out.

Plus, I get to listen to some of my radio mixtapes from back in the day!  It was a little over thirty years ago that I decided to put a blank tape in my Jonzbox and let it record 30 to 45 minutes of whatever WMUA was playing that evening, just to get a taste of their playlist.  I’d just bought a six-foot retractable antenna for the radio, which boosted the signal considerably, so I could go nuts at any time of day.  Soon I’d expand to other stations, with WAMH becoming my home base for the rest of the decade.

By early 1987 I’d changed things up in my bedroom.  It had gotten a new coat of paint, I’d gotten rid of some furniture I’d grown out of, and my radio had moved across the room to the top of the bookcase, where the few books that I had were slowly being shoved out to make way for my growing cassette collection.  I was hanging out with the Vanishing Misfits gang, which meant that a goodly amount of my collection at the time was borrowed albums dubbed onto tapes of questionable quality and age.  But hey, as long as I had the tunage, that’s all that mattered!

Interestingly, I only made one college radio tape that year, but I think it was because all my hard-earned money was going to buy albums down in the Pioneer Valley!  I did make a few mixtapes that year, though, mainly commercial radio stuff, but by the end of that year I was itching to make more.  I had one of my buddies who was into the hardcore punk/metal scene (he also introduced me to Slayer’s Reign in Blood…at catechism class, no less!) make me a mix on the back of a cassette dub I had of The Sisters of Mercy’s Floodland (my favorite album of the moment and possibly my number 2 favorite of the year, just under Music for the Masses).

Thinking back, 1987 was definitely a sea change year on multiple levels for me.  Changes in friendships, tastes in music, personal and emotional outlook.  My writing was still crap, but it was better crap than what I’d been writing just a few years earlier.  Hell, I was even changing the way I looked, letting my hair grow longer (no more 80s spike, thank god), wearing concert tees and pins of alternative bands.  Taking myself a bit more seriously.  Sure, I had a hell of a lot more growing up to do, but that was the year it took hold.  I was no longer the annoying nerd trying to fit in.  I was the kid with the Walkman, listening to bands you’d never heard of.  I was the kid who spent his study periods in the library, writing away in a notebook.  It was the year I’d finally figured myself out and didn’t give a shit what anyone thought about it.