The Music Box.
Entries about the music I like.
Pinegrove – Pinegrove on Audiotree Live
In this piece, I navigate the intricate soundscapes of Pinegrove's Audiotree performance, set against the backdrop of the bustling city and its ubiquitous cafes. My exploration of indie studio sounds, alongside an introspective study of key indie bands, unravels a tale of life, hope, rejection, and the unending rhythm of the urban existence.
Basement – Colourmeinkindness
I don’t believe I’m in a position to share any facts about the band Basement except that, in the 2010s, they played lightly distorted mildly noisy alternative rock. And that in 2012, they recorded an album called Colourmeinkindness, which has a sound that serves as a great backing track for the part of one’s life that’s punctuated by deeply introspective walks in the blistering heat.
12 RODS – My Year (This Is Going To Be)
12 RODS sit high on the list of all-time favourites I never expected to hear from again; in fact, until a week ago, they perhaps sat atop that list. A week ago, that is, when they released their latest single, My Year (This Is Going To Be), and announced an album to be released later this year, their first since 2002’s Lost Time.
Lady Gaga – The Fame Monster
The hypermodel before me sticks her arm out a couple feet to take what must be an immaculately captured self-portrait that’d put Van Gogh’s to shame. In doing so, she reveals her pronounced wristbones, bony arms, pale and sunken pits, textbook indicators of poor nourishment.
Nouvelle Vague – Nouvelle Vague
The one thing that kept her going through a set was the promise of a beer, some fries, and a big burger on the other end. As she breezed through one lounge cover after another – from a smouldering rendition of Love Will Tear Us Apart through an absent-minded interpretation of Making Plans For Nigel to a non-punk version Teenage Kicks – all she would visualise was that meal: bar food on bar china.
Radiohead – The Bends
You’re in mainland Europe – somewhere in the continent’s northwest. Alone in an English pub run by the English, frequented by the English. Most brownfolk with a sense of history would likely find much of the imagery here discomforting, but most would overlook it. The pub’s been playing the Bends, all the way from Planet Telex on; this is a strange sort of place.
Nothing – Tired of Tomorrow
Sitting in the world’s most absurd café after completing the world’s most meandering walk, your phone suggests you listen to Nothing’s Famine Asylum off of their 2020 album, The Great Dismal. You’re reminded of an earlier album by the same band as a beskirted post-Soviet NFT scamster asks a vaguely Mediterranean dad-bodied man wearing a deep blue TOMMY JEANS tee to take a photo.
Bartika Eam Rai – Bimbaakash
Not all sadness is the same dad, he was trying to explain to his ageing father. Pa had spent much of the mid-seventies damming one of India’s major rivers with other ‘sons and daughters of the newly independent nation’. Come rain, come sleet, they bored through terrain, mixed concrete, fixed slabs, built barricades against portented landslides.
Weezer – Weezer (Blue Album)
The thing nobody seems to ask about the boy who cried wolf is why Bubby would do such a thing. What would prompt an otherwise standard-issue ten-year-old – likely even-tempered and straight-laced – to, on seemingly unconnected days, run through his village screaming about a wolf he’s seen? Aesop blames it on boredom and naughtiness but eventually faults the kid.
Talk Talk – Spirit of Eden
Of course it isn’t fair that if you were to split the world’s population in two halves, you would find 4 billion people, on the one hand, who give more than they’re given in return, and 4 billion, on the other, who are given more than they give. Of course it isn’t fair that there’s no real reason for this except the inherent unfairness of the world, what it means to be.
Sunny Day Real Estate – Diary
Inch by inch, then mile by mile, they corrode the core of you. Eating away at what some say is a soul while others disagree; who’s to say whose story adds up? Your dreams are set in concrete and glass, towering all around you. You – dwarfed, hunched over, lurking in the shadows – become one with them. All in or nothing, depending on which side of the bed you last graced.
Failure – Fantastic Planet
On an often-wobbly bicycle she would trudge up a hill to attend course codes 105, 214, etc. from eight o’ something to one o’ something else; at about one forty-five, she’d speed back on that jittery hunkajunk to her matchbox room for a lunch of boiled peas and an afternoon spent reading. Math school has always had its share of storytellers: among integrals, divs and curls.
Dry Cleaning – New Long Leg
Your calves age you: each muscle, each sinew, a record of every mile you’ve walked, every minute you’ve milled about, every kilogram of excess weight you’ve carried. Lately I’ve been thinking about how the human body serves as a map of one person’s journey through time and space. I've also been listening to Dry Cleaning's New Long Leg, 2021's best post-punk album.
Angel Olsen – Aisles EP
Listening to Angel Olsen’s Aisles has me thinking about the stories we tell ourselves and each other. Something about these slow-burning covers of 80s hits like Safety Dance and Forever Young makes me jostle with the why-are-we-here and why-do-we-do-the-things-we-do variety of questions. Or maybe I was contemplative to begin with and just happen to be listening to Aisles.
Magdalena Bay – Mercurial World
At some point in the history of the now-old internet, the late night drive entered the collective consciousness. Its soundtrack: a long list of waves including chillwave, retrowave, vaporwave and simpsonswave. Why are our daydreams filled with ill-defined late night drives? And why do albums like Magdalena Bay’s Mercurial World remind us of these drives we’ve never had?
Omicron Records // Apoorva Raagangal
As someone interested in Apoorva Raagangal's soundtrack, not the film itself, I can speak to the high quality of the music. However, listening to the record really does make me wonder: why are old recordings so treble-heavy? The standard answer is that magnetic recording and 1970s-era microphones just couldn’t catch low frequencies. But why?
Omicron Records // The Velvet Underground, Nico – The Velvet Underground & Nico
Nothing related to the Velvet Underground will shake me like the first time I heard 1967’s Velvet Underground and Nico. The introductory celesta notes of Sunday Morning leading to the frantic shuffling of Waiting for the Man. The hands on the shoulder and shake-shake-shake of Venus in Furs, and the slightly-adjacent-to-pop stylings of Run Run Run and There She Goes Again.
Omicron Records // John Coltrane – Blue Train
Given my being down with what appears to be Omicron, if I were to write anything at all, it would have to require little to no looking at a screen. This is great for confessional rambling to the sound of John Coltrane’s classic, Blue Train, but useless if you actually wanted to know anything about Blue Train, other than the fact that it is among my favourite jazz records.
Thoughts on the Associates' Party Fears Two
On Party Fears Two, the Associates’ Billy Mackenzie makes 1 odd vocal choice after another; he takes chances that would be recommended by neither vocal coach nor armchair music nerd. But it’s because of these choices that when I try to describe the sound of the single, I think not to say early new wave, or minimally arranged proto-eighties, or melodic synth-based post-punk.
Culture // Music of the Week / Aug 22, 2021
This week's playlist is about culture. Culture isn’t the language you speak. Culture is holding the door open for the person walking behind you when there’s nobody on the other side to prostrate over your generosity. Culture is living within your means. Culture is attempting to buy respect or love or loyalty when you can’t be arsed to earn it.