Tag Archives: 2004

Twenty Years On: Summer 2004

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I think it was around this time that I started running out of gas while writing The Balance of Light. [For those playing along, I’d stalled right about where Poe follows Denni and Amna up to Trisanda in Act 3. I knew how to end the book…I think I was just afraid of it this huge years-long project finally coming to an end and doing a crap job of it.] To clear my head I’d started working on the vampire novel more often.

Weirdly enough, I think I was just running out of things to listen to…? There’s this strange era between 2004 and 2007 where I’d lost interest in indie radio. It could be that I was stuck between the lingering effects of alternative metal on one end of the spectrum and indie folk that was a little too esoteric on the other, and neither were really resonating with me. That, and a lot of my favorite bands were in between albums so I wouldn’t hear from them for a while longer.

Danger Mouse & Jay-Z, The Grey Album, early April 2004. Looking at my mp3 collection, 2004 was the peak of the initial mash-up wave, and this one is bonkers fun: DM’s decision to take Jay-Z’s The Black Album and The Beatles’ white album and create something new could have been terrible but instead it’s surprisingly enjoyable and highly amusing. Allegedly both Jay-Z and Paul McCartney thought it was great!

Ambulance LTD, LP, 6 April 2004. This band sadly came and went too quickly, releasing only two EPs and a single album, but it’s all worth checking out. I played the hell out of this record in the Belfry at the time, especially the great opener “Yoga Means Union”.

tweaker, 2am wakeup call, 20 April 2004. Chris Vrenna’s second album remains one of my favorite albums of that year, and it got all sorts of play the entire summer. It features vocals from Robert Smith, Hamilton Leithauser and David Sylvian, and a hauntingly gorgeous instrumental track featuring Johnny Marr that I’ve embedded above. Highly recommended.

Prince, Musicology, 20 April 2004. In between all the funk-heavy NPG Music Club albums he’d dropped for the last couple of years, this was a surprise mainstream hit that got considerable airplay both with the title track and “Cinnamon Girl”. It felt like a record on par musically with Sign ‘o’ the Times for me.

The Beta Band, Heroes to Zeros, 4 May 2004. Their last record’s title may have hit a bit too close to home considering they were no longer indie critic darlings at the time, but that didn’t seem to bother them any with this oddball collection.

The Magnetic Fields, i, 4 May 2004. The fun thing about Stephin Merritt and his many projects is that you can never really take him all that seriously, even when he’s writing breakup songs. Between his basso profundo voice and his quirky and self-effacing lyrics, you can’t help but like him. “I Thought You Were My Boyfriend” was a college radio favorite.

Mission of Burma, ONoffON, 4 May 2004. Their first new album in multiple decades, three of the four original members come back with a loud and blistering record that successfully captures their chaotic post-punk sound that influenced so many others. The fascinating thing is that there’s also an element of quietness here as well, inspired by the members’ time in much calmer bands.

Secret Machines, Now Here Is Nowhere, 18 May 2004. This was another favorite of the year, and an album that got a ton of play during my writing sessions for its deep dive into hard rock tinged with eclectic prog and maybe even a bit of psychedelia. This one earned them a small but highly loyal fanbase that remains to this day and even spread to the side project School of Seven Bells. Highly recommended.

The Fall, 50,000 Fall Fans can’t Be Wrong: 39 Golden Greats, 8 June 2004. A near-perfect sampler of a band with a convoluted discography on several different labels and an always-shifting membership. It’s oddly missing songs from I Am Kurious Oranj however, the 1988 album that helped them gain considerably more popularity in indie circles.

My Chemical Romance, Three Cheers for Sweet Revenge, 8 June 2004. You either love this band or you hate them. For me, they were a band I disliked at first but heard “I’m Not Okay (I Promise)” and “Helena” so much on WHMP that they grew on me. Not quite goth, not quite alternative metal, not quite emo, but somewhere in between.

The Killers, Hot Fuss, 15 June 2004. I’ll be honest, I wasn’t the biggest fan of this band at first, and the breakthrough single “Somebody Told Me” just kind of bounced right off of me as too glam and too alt-rock-goes-disco for my tastes, but the more I heard the other singles the more I liked them, and finally bought it when I heard “All The Things That I’ve Done” which remains one of my favorite songs of theirs.

The Cure, The Cure, 29 June 2004. I’d mentioned this one earlier when I blogged about the band’s 2000s-era releases, and at the time I really wasn’t sure how I felt about it. I liked it, especially the darker-edged songs like “Lost” and “The End of the World”, but its sound was just so unlike them that it was a bit of a hard listen.

Twenty Years On: Spring 2004

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I often say that 2005 was the year of major change in my life (getting married and moving twice and all, among other things), but it really started in 2004. I’d met A online and by the summer we were constantly running into each other on LiveJournal. I was writing The Balance of Light at the time and having a terrible time with it, and writing a vampire novel as a way to distract myself. I’d head to my first Worldcon that autumn when it came to Boston. I’d quit buying comics cold turkey when my go-to comics store closed up shop, and I even started thinking seriously about looking to find my own apartment. Life was changing whether I was ready for it or not.

Musically I’d latched onto LAUNCHcast, a sort of proto-Spotify site where one could curate a playlist by way of a ratings system. [And given that my house was in a radio desert, I couldn’t always listen to WHMP or WFNX at the time unless I was in the car or using my stereo upstairs.] Given my music obsessions, it wasn’t long before it provided me with the kind of indie and electronic rock I enjoyed so much.

The Crystal Method, Legion of Boom, 13 January 2004. I’d completely forgotten there was an album between this one and their mega-selling Vegas (the one with “Busy Child” and “Trip Like I Do” on it), so I thought I’d try them out again. This one got a bit of play in the Belfry during my writing sessions.

Air, Talkie Walkie, 20 January 2004. This band is on the ‘I will buy anything from them’ list, and this one became a huge favorite of mine that year, getting a lot of play all around, not just during writing sessions but my occasional road trips as well. I loved that it retained the dreaminess of their Moon Safari album yet sounded futuristic.

Stereolab, Margerine Eclipse, 27 January 2004. Another band I was woefully behind on in terms of collecting at the time, I liked playing this one on the weekends when I had my hours-long writing sessions.

Yes, The Ultimate Yes: 35th Anniversary Collection, 27 January 2004. I’d always been a huge fan of this band, though everything I owned of theirs was on scratchy used vinyl, having acquired them over the years in dollar bins, heh. This was a great full discography-so-far collection that was quite a pleasure to listen to.

The Walkmen, Bows + Arrows, 3 February 2004. Long before Hamilton Leithauser showed up on indie radio with his solo and collective projects, he was the lead singer of this great indie band that got a ton of play on LAUNCHcast and college radio with the song “The Rat”. Highly recommended.

Incubus, A Crow Left of the Murder…, 4 February 2004. Sure, you hear those same two or three hit singles from this band on alternative rock radio these days. Back when this came out, the singles “Megalomaniac” and “Talk Shows on Mute” got a ton of play on alternative radio, but sadly this album tends to be forgotten for the most part. It’s one of their most tense and dense records though, and well worth checking out.

Franz Ferdinand, Franz Ferdinand, 9 February 2004. Yes, that band with that song! They’ve always been a bit of an oddball band that slid between arty post-punk and groovy glam and somehow made it not just fresh and new, but made it irresistibly catchy as well.

Junkie XL, Radio JXL: A Broadcast from the Computer Hell Cabin, 10 February 2004. One of my favorite records of the year, this is a two-cd collection of electronic rock and house mixes and a thrill to listen to. Released just a few years before Tom Holkenborg focused mostly on film scores, this one’s highly recommended.

Audio Learning Center, Cope Park, 26 February 2004. This not-quite-grunge rock band from Portland were big on the moodier pockets of the genre, leaning a bit more towards emo and post-rock in some places. They only dropped two albums (this is the second) but they’re well worth checking out. This one got a lot of play in the Belfry.

TV On the Radio, Desperate Youth, Blood Thirsty Babes, 9 March 2004. I picked this one up mainly due to the fact that every music critic out there were getting their minds blown by this record, and they weren’t wrong. I wasn’t entirely sure what to make of this band at first, considering their sound back then was a bit difficult to describe. But the track “Dreams” was just so emotionally dire that I knew then that this was a record I’d enjoy.

The Vines, Winning Days, 21 March 2004. Their second record after the critically acclaimed Highly Evolved was a bit of both ‘more of the same’ and ‘heading further into psychedelia’ and while it wasn’t as popular as their debut, it was just as enjoyable to listen to.

The Standard, Wire Post to Wire, 23 March 2004. I latched onto the track “Even Numbers” via LAUNCHcast and I picked this one up soon after I’d heard it maybe twice. They were another Portland band made out of former members of other local indie groups, and this was their third and most popular album. This one got a lot of play in the Belfry as well.

Jem, Finally Woken, 24 March 2004. This quirky British singer had a minor hit with the trippy “They” single that got a lot of play on the local indie rock stations and kind of labeling her as a one hit wonder in the process, but the rest of this album is well worth checking out. To me she was like Alison Goldfrapp only a lighter and trippier.

L’arc~en~Ciel, Smile, 31 March 2004. I’d been a fan of this band since hearing “Spirit Dreams Inside” at the tail end of the 2001 Final Fantasy movie, but alas they were always super hard to find unless I was willing to spend thirty dollars on Japanese imports. This was one of their first American releases and featured one of their best hits and their most popular, “Ready Steady Go” (which at the time was also the opening theme for the anime show Fullmetal Alchemist).

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Q2 coming soon!

Listening to 2000’s era Cure, Pt 4: the Deluxe Editions I

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After the promotion of The Cure and the Curiosa Festival had come and gone, the next phase was about to begin: a massive reissue of their early catalog. While this may not have been all that important in the UK where they’d stayed on the Fiction label for years, in the US they’d appeared on several: the indie PVC, A&M, Sire, and eventually an extended stay (complete with minor reissues) on Elektra. This would finally bring the majority of their discography together on one label, with its original packaging.

The new reissues of their back catalog began of course with their debut album Three Imaginary Boys in late 2004. Most Americans knew most of its tracks from the US collection Boys Don’t Cry or via the import. [I’d bought the original version at Al Bum’s in Amherst probably in early 1987 and much preferred this one. It flows much better and the band’s early gloom is much more prevalent here.

The bonus disc of this reissue would of course include the singles “Boys Don’t Cry” and “Jumping Someone Else’s Train”, both post-album stand-alone singles, though surprisingly it did not contain their debut single “Killing an Arab”, though that was most likely due to its questionable source material. Still, it did contain several demos and outtakes that are quite fascinating to hear.

The next three album reissues would appear all on the same day: Seventeen Seconds, Faith and Pornography, in late spring 2005. The first two had been released at different times in the US, including as a double-disc two-fer called Happily Ever After, which I owned on cassette.

Seventeen Seconds expanded on their post-punk sound and added a pastoral feel to their sound, thanks to the melodic bass lines of new members Simon Gallup and the keyboards of Matthieu Hartley. This album definitely feels like something you’d listen to alone, on headphones, sometime around 2am. It was a huge inspiration to my writing in the late 80s and got a ton of play late at night. The extra tracks on this reissue are more focused on live recordings, some of which would show up on the cassette version of the live album Concert.

Faith, on the other hand, was a much darker affair. It too is perfect late night listening, but it leans more towards isolation and loneliness. There are two faces here: the anger and tension of songs like “Primary” and “Doubt”, and the atmospheric fog of “All Cats Are Grey” and the title track. The original cassette had included the twenty-seven minute (!!) instrumental track “Carnage Visors”, which they’d recorded for an animated film that would play before their live shows. This epic is included on this reissue, along with several studio outtakes and live tracks, as well as the non-album single “Charlotte Sometimes”.

Pornography, on the other hand…is not an easy album to listen to. Hartley had left, leaving the band as a barebones trio that only added to the album’s sparseness. They took several steps further down into the bitterly cold abyss, well past the darkness of Faith. Depression, desolation and entropy abound on this record. Is it any wonder that this was in super heavy rotation on my Walkman in the late 80s, then? While it’s not as violently dismal as, say, The Downward Spiral, it could probably be seen as its goth equivalent. Interestingly enough, its closing title track (like “Hurt”, come to think of it) hints at a sense of strained hope. This too features a lot of studio demos and live tracks.

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Are these reissues that you must have in your collection? Well, if you’re a huge fan like I am, then yes, definitely. The remastered tracks sound great, and the extras are all sorts of fun to listen to. For completists they are missing a few things here and there, such as a few single-only b-sides (which, to be fair, were easily available on the Join the Dots box set), but it’s worth checking out.

Coming Up Next: the final three reissues of the decade

Listening to 2000’s era Cure, Pt 3: the self-titled album

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Interestingly, this album hardly gets any notice or play on the radio nowadays. Most commercial stations stick with “Love Song” or “Pictures of You” or “Just Like Heaven”, all released during their 80s heights. At the time, however, it was a long-awaited and extremely welcome return for a much-loved alternative band that was now picking up new generations of fans.

The slow-build track “Lost” sets the tone and the sound for the album: somewhat dissonant, a bit uncomfortable, and a lot heavier in sound. Where Robert Smith usually emotes a feeling of detached misery in his older works, this track is more of a primal scream, something he hadn’t really let himself reach since perhaps Pornography (and even then, that album was more a deliberate loss of sanity than the fear of losing it).

A few tracks later with the single “The End of the World”, he embraces that alterna-poppy catchiness the band perfected with 1992’s Wish. While the track seems upbeat and fun, there’s a darker edge to it, both sonically and lyrically. Even the video for it is of two minds: fanciful and nightmarish. This track got considerable play in the summer of 2004 on alternative radio.

The next track, “Anniversary”, is my favorite from this album, and it’s a perfect example of The Darker Cure Sound: a nightmarish crawling through Smith’s gloomier lyrics, driven not by a slow build but by the irritation it causes. You want to know where it leads, whether there will be a major lift in the song, yet it never quite gets there, on purpose.

The next single, “alt.end”, is similar to “The End of the World” in that it’s catchy as hell…and just as dark. It too sounds like something off of Wish, working that light/dark dichotomy as far as it can go.

Oh, and remember that Dragon Hunters song I mentioned in the previous entry? Here’s the original song it was based off of, released in the UK as the alternate to the “alt.end” single. While it’s not nearly as catchy, it’s a solid track that works well.

All told, the album is one of their strongest, and also one of their most unique sounding, considering that they’d chosen Ross Robinson as a co-producer — he’s more known for producing alt-metal bands like Korn, Slipknot and At the Drive In. While the band is no stranger to heaviness (Pornography) or widescreen theatrics (Disintegration), this is the only one that sounds so bare-bones and yet so sonically intense.

They promoted this album via a massive touring festival called Curiosa, a multi-stage, multi-band day long experience that included several other bands influenced by (or were favorites of) The Cure: Mogwai, Interpol, The Rapture, Muse, The Cooper Temple Clause, and more. I got to see their stop at the Tweeter Center in Mansfield MA (still known as Great Woods back then), with a perfect seat just in front of the lawn area. I loved pretty much every single band I saw that day, even ones like Cooper Temple Clause who I’d never heard of (and bought their CD right after their performance). I of course didn’t quite stay for the entirety of the Cure performance as it was getting late and getting out of their parking lot is a nightmare (not to mention it’s an hour-plus drive back to central MA), but by then I was exhausted yet extremely pleased.

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Next up: The Deluxe Editions

Listening to 2000’s era Cure, Pt 2: Hits, Dots, and One-Offs

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While Bloodflowers was a great album, it wasn’t my favorite of their latter years. I think part of it was that it came out at a time when my time at the record store was coming to a close, but it was also that it simply just didn’t resonate with me as deeply as some past albums had. Still, this sparked off a slow but steady stream of increased visibility. They were constantly on tour at the start of the decade, and followed it up with a number of collections and appearances.

The band released the Greatest Hits collection in late 2001 as a contractual obligation to the Fiction label. It features many of their best known tracks, chosen by Robert Smith himself, and also two new tracks: the poppy “Cut Here” (the title an anagram of the band name) and the perky “Just Say Yes” featuring Saffron from Republica. It’s by no means a must-have collection, but it’s a good place to start, and also a good mix for those not interested in a discography deep dive. The expanded version features a second album’s worth of the same songs, this time recorded acoustically.

Smith kept himself busy by appearing on a few albums, many of which are definitely worth checking out. He provided vocals on the great track “Perfect Blue Sky” on Junkie XL’s Radio JXL: A Broadcast from the Computer Hell Cabin — an expansive two-cd collection of upbeat radio-friendly electronic tracks and expanded house instrumentals. This album is one of my favorites of 2003 and also features vocals from Saffron, Dave Gahan, Gary Numan, Chuck D, Terry Hall, and more. It also features the groovy reimagining of Elvis’ “A Little Less Conversation” which had showed up in 2001’s Ocean’s Eleven. It’s a record worth picking up.

Also in 2003, he featured on…a Blink-182 album?? Sure, why not? The punk pop trio called The Cure one of their influences, and he features on the track “All of This”.

Then in spring of 2004, he featured on the second album by tweaker, drummer Chris Vrenna’s collective project. The album 2am wakeup call is about Vrenna’s wife’s insomnia so much of the record is dark and moody…but not necessarily gloomy. I listened to this album incessantly for most of that year, not just in the Belfry during my writing sessions (I was writing The Balance of Light at the time) but during my commutes to work. I highly recommend checking this record out.

Backing up a few months, The Cure also released the box set Join the Dots: B-Sides & Rarities 1978-2001. It’s a four-disc collection that proves that these oddities weren’t just throwaways or one-offs. Their b-sides, like “Just One Kiss”, “Breathe” and “The Big Hand”, could be just as amazing and memorable as their album tracks and singles, and even their soundtrack and compilation offerings like “Burn” (from The Crow soundtrack) and the cover of Depeche Mode’s “World in My Eyes” (from For the Masses) are great. It’s worth checking these out.

But wait! There’s one more thing! One that often gets overlooked!

They also did the theme song for the French animated series Dragon Hunters by taking their track “Taking Off” (which would show up soon on their next record) and repurposing it into this fun and boppy theme. This one doesn’t show up on any greatest hits, reissues or box sets (at least not yet anyway), but it’s easy to find online.

Coming up: finally, another new album!