A la recherche des disques perdues
Mar. 24th, 2007 11:59 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
pseydtonneI've been ripping my CD collection to MP3. This had led me to listen to albums I haven't played in several years. I've dodged these albums for one reason or another: some talk to a person I haven't been in years, some just suck and I need a reminder every couple years.
Since I listen to the most music when I'm in the car, my car's disc changer had been a major filter for my music options until this project got underway. I have a six-disc changer with a penchant for temper tantrums (as I've discussed before, this does not mean it has a tantric temperment). I've tried cleaning the lens but that doesn't seem to be the problem: maybe the shock damper is worn out or the laser's tracking is sloppy. In any case, it's annoying to load the discs, so I don't tend to change discs except every couple months.
Since some albums only have one or three good songs, those albums haven't been worth giving three months of possible air time. Of Montreal's Cheery Peel is the epitome of this: it has one great song on track one, "Everything Disappears When You Come Around". After that the album tapers down to boring pretty quickly and eventually ends. I bought the album because I hear that one track on the radio and really liked it. I consider that song a bait-and-switch tactic on the part of that band and its record label.
In fact, the song had encouraged me to see them live in 1997. They were on a bill with some other Kindercore bands (the Essex Green was one of the other two) and they pissed me off. Not only were they too cool to play their potential hit: they played as if they just noticed there was a crowd in front of them, which pissed them off and they wanted to return the favor. They had this sampler playing a loop of someone harumpfing in arpeggio and they would turn that back up between songs instead of telling us the names of songs or giving any hint that we'd paid to be there.
During that show I met a kid from Edinburgh, a rare event in upstate New York. We agreed heartily this show was an insult to our ears. The Edinburger mentioned a band he loved, Super Furry Animals, and I became an SFA devotee soon after that day.
I think it was this show more than any other which drew me towards the new generation of singer-songwriters coming out at that time. They got called "folk" but there was rarely anything that had to do with social strife. It didn't matter: they were living in their cars and telling good stories. They were genuinely happy to see a crowd show up. They appreciated a free meal from a fan and they weren't in a hurry to get back to making a split seven inch with I Am The World Trade Center.
Yes, that's the real name of a band that was on Spinart or Kindercore or one of those prissier-then-thou faux nerd labels of the time. Yes, that band existed in the Nineteen Nineties under that name. It was just lame then but it's squick-inducing now.
As you can tell, I can get lost in tangents just thinking about a single example. You can get some idea why I had avoided listening to this one album, although that's probably the most visceral example.
Some albums I skip only because they don't work well in the car. I love Boards of Canada, but their introspective electronica does not work as well when I'm driving to work. A track such as "Aquarius" on Music Has the Right to Children is hypnotic: it sounds like it took a year to mix because it's so damn well composed. In turn, it's so good that I prefer to hear it on headphones and catch every tiny nuance. Cops notice when you drive around with headphones, so I save that for times without a steering wheel.
Before my trip to Austin, I bought some albums I didn't like. This was when Tower went under and the Virgin closed on Mass Ave. I grabbed some of the shiniest album packaging still left on the rack, thus I wound up with a VNV Nation album that could either make an excellent throwing star or be put in a microwave in need of destruction. I bought that album Stars of CCTV because I figured I would see it in record stores until I bought it anyway: it was boring.
I had also bought yet another Lambchop album and got disappointed yet again. Kibo noted the album cover was designed by extreme incompetents, so it doesn't qualify as shiny. The singer and author really doesn't know how to speak up and doesn't seem to mind. I can now understand why the record label had no idea what to do with the band: the lead guy may be wearing a lacrosse helmet but holding no stick. I want to like Lambchop because it's abnormal storytelling. However, I have a real problem when I have to max out my stereo volume to find out a song really has a minute and a half before the lyrics start and the background tune is so quiet that you can hear the rest of the car's electrical system as feedback. Add that to a disc changer I still can't always tell if it's unable to track a song and I am wasting time playing with fast forward and rewind as if I were using the tape deck.
In turn, I had been ignoring my disc changer because it had a stack of album duds and I had driving to do. The iPod has become far more dominant in my life. In turn, I can make a playlist of single tunes I like while still having the rest of the album around for other occasions. If I need more Splashdown sprinkled with fake ads from Paul and Storm, I have everything ready.
This led me to this evening, when I sat down after a long day of reinvesting in my need to create music (I'm saving that story for the next post). I wanted to cover some javascript lessons and drain my laptop's battery. I put on Electro-Shock Blues by eels, a disc I've barely touched since the Clinton administration.
I listened to this album a lot when I lived in Utica. It's about various shades of mental illness and death, mostly told in the first person. It has a very wry sense of humor, meaning you may want to drink rye and cry the longer you listen. Listen long enough and you can have flashbacks of your worst depressive episode. I'm. Not. Kid. Ding. I wind up with images of driving through yet another a gloomy rain storm on my way home from working at the bank.
This takes me back before I'd worked out a real plan to get out of what felt like perpetual teenagehood without the direction. Why would I even want to listen to an album that would make me think about those horrors? Why do I want to remember the weekend I first listened to that album and rode yet another train to meet yet another online love interest and wind up looking stupid for it? Why did it take me 3.5 years to get my shit together when college was so easy?
Of course I couldn't stop listening. I was on the verge of crying. I started writing this post several hours ago because I needed to feel something other than sadness. I am grateful not to be 21 anymore, not to be uncertain why I should be alive, not to think the world has rejected me, not to think the "Most Likely to Succeed" I got voted in high school was a farce.
I like to think I needed to go through that phase if only to keep me from ever having another one. I started having adventures and successes. I started seeing what it would take to enjoy my life and took action to realize that potential. I hear an album and realize I am not going into that pit even though I may be recalling the pit for a minute or two.
Just as I have been rediscovering emotions and sounds I've sealed in plastic since the Nineties thanks to my iPod, I have also found songs I'd downloaded that turn out to be from albums I want to buy. Hot Hot Heat's "Make Up The Breakdown" is one I want to pick up. I'd heard the radio track "Bandages" and liked it enough. Then I found other tracks and liked those a lot more. Now I want the rest of it. Similar things have led me to fill up my Dismemberment Plan and Squarepusher collections. I may be aging, but my taste in odd music grows and growls happily.
-content to be the last Death From Above 1979 fan on the planet, Dante
Since I listen to the most music when I'm in the car, my car's disc changer had been a major filter for my music options until this project got underway. I have a six-disc changer with a penchant for temper tantrums (as I've discussed before, this does not mean it has a tantric temperment). I've tried cleaning the lens but that doesn't seem to be the problem: maybe the shock damper is worn out or the laser's tracking is sloppy. In any case, it's annoying to load the discs, so I don't tend to change discs except every couple months.
Since some albums only have one or three good songs, those albums haven't been worth giving three months of possible air time. Of Montreal's Cheery Peel is the epitome of this: it has one great song on track one, "Everything Disappears When You Come Around". After that the album tapers down to boring pretty quickly and eventually ends. I bought the album because I hear that one track on the radio and really liked it. I consider that song a bait-and-switch tactic on the part of that band and its record label.
In fact, the song had encouraged me to see them live in 1997. They were on a bill with some other Kindercore bands (the Essex Green was one of the other two) and they pissed me off. Not only were they too cool to play their potential hit: they played as if they just noticed there was a crowd in front of them, which pissed them off and they wanted to return the favor. They had this sampler playing a loop of someone harumpfing in arpeggio and they would turn that back up between songs instead of telling us the names of songs or giving any hint that we'd paid to be there.
During that show I met a kid from Edinburgh, a rare event in upstate New York. We agreed heartily this show was an insult to our ears. The Edinburger mentioned a band he loved, Super Furry Animals, and I became an SFA devotee soon after that day.
I think it was this show more than any other which drew me towards the new generation of singer-songwriters coming out at that time. They got called "folk" but there was rarely anything that had to do with social strife. It didn't matter: they were living in their cars and telling good stories. They were genuinely happy to see a crowd show up. They appreciated a free meal from a fan and they weren't in a hurry to get back to making a split seven inch with I Am The World Trade Center.
Yes, that's the real name of a band that was on Spinart or Kindercore or one of those prissier-then-thou faux nerd labels of the time. Yes, that band existed in the Nineteen Nineties under that name. It was just lame then but it's squick-inducing now.
As you can tell, I can get lost in tangents just thinking about a single example. You can get some idea why I had avoided listening to this one album, although that's probably the most visceral example.
Some albums I skip only because they don't work well in the car. I love Boards of Canada, but their introspective electronica does not work as well when I'm driving to work. A track such as "Aquarius" on Music Has the Right to Children is hypnotic: it sounds like it took a year to mix because it's so damn well composed. In turn, it's so good that I prefer to hear it on headphones and catch every tiny nuance. Cops notice when you drive around with headphones, so I save that for times without a steering wheel.
Before my trip to Austin, I bought some albums I didn't like. This was when Tower went under and the Virgin closed on Mass Ave. I grabbed some of the shiniest album packaging still left on the rack, thus I wound up with a VNV Nation album that could either make an excellent throwing star or be put in a microwave in need of destruction. I bought that album Stars of CCTV because I figured I would see it in record stores until I bought it anyway: it was boring.
I had also bought yet another Lambchop album and got disappointed yet again. Kibo noted the album cover was designed by extreme incompetents, so it doesn't qualify as shiny. The singer and author really doesn't know how to speak up and doesn't seem to mind. I can now understand why the record label had no idea what to do with the band: the lead guy may be wearing a lacrosse helmet but holding no stick. I want to like Lambchop because it's abnormal storytelling. However, I have a real problem when I have to max out my stereo volume to find out a song really has a minute and a half before the lyrics start and the background tune is so quiet that you can hear the rest of the car's electrical system as feedback. Add that to a disc changer I still can't always tell if it's unable to track a song and I am wasting time playing with fast forward and rewind as if I were using the tape deck.
In turn, I had been ignoring my disc changer because it had a stack of album duds and I had driving to do. The iPod has become far more dominant in my life. In turn, I can make a playlist of single tunes I like while still having the rest of the album around for other occasions. If I need more Splashdown sprinkled with fake ads from Paul and Storm, I have everything ready.
This led me to this evening, when I sat down after a long day of reinvesting in my need to create music (I'm saving that story for the next post). I wanted to cover some javascript lessons and drain my laptop's battery. I put on Electro-Shock Blues by eels, a disc I've barely touched since the Clinton administration.
I listened to this album a lot when I lived in Utica. It's about various shades of mental illness and death, mostly told in the first person. It has a very wry sense of humor, meaning you may want to drink rye and cry the longer you listen. Listen long enough and you can have flashbacks of your worst depressive episode. I'm. Not. Kid. Ding. I wind up with images of driving through yet another a gloomy rain storm on my way home from working at the bank.
This takes me back before I'd worked out a real plan to get out of what felt like perpetual teenagehood without the direction. Why would I even want to listen to an album that would make me think about those horrors? Why do I want to remember the weekend I first listened to that album and rode yet another train to meet yet another online love interest and wind up looking stupid for it? Why did it take me 3.5 years to get my shit together when college was so easy?
Of course I couldn't stop listening. I was on the verge of crying. I started writing this post several hours ago because I needed to feel something other than sadness. I am grateful not to be 21 anymore, not to be uncertain why I should be alive, not to think the world has rejected me, not to think the "Most Likely to Succeed" I got voted in high school was a farce.
I like to think I needed to go through that phase if only to keep me from ever having another one. I started having adventures and successes. I started seeing what it would take to enjoy my life and took action to realize that potential. I hear an album and realize I am not going into that pit even though I may be recalling the pit for a minute or two.
Just as I have been rediscovering emotions and sounds I've sealed in plastic since the Nineties thanks to my iPod, I have also found songs I'd downloaded that turn out to be from albums I want to buy. Hot Hot Heat's "Make Up The Breakdown" is one I want to pick up. I'd heard the radio track "Bandages" and liked it enough. Then I found other tracks and liked those a lot more. Now I want the rest of it. Similar things have led me to fill up my Dismemberment Plan and Squarepusher collections. I may be aging, but my taste in odd music grows and growls happily.
-content to be the last Death From Above 1979 fan on the planet, Dante
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Date: 2007-03-25 03:35 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-03-25 06:15 pm (UTC)entirely unrelated
Date: 2007-03-28 05:20 am (UTC)stupid livejournal taking away html. bah!