All the good aliens have left the planet. And now this news. Fair winds and clear skies, Dolly.
Massive Attack just announced the release of new music in 2026, available digitally. Their last full album release was 2010.
The show was awesome. It was more than I expected, and sounded fantastic. My ears are still ringing.
Update: A quick interview with 3D about the ideas behind the tour and the album at 20. I have a lot of respect for him and for the questions he’s asking through his music.
Jen and I got a text from our friend Pete, who informed us that Massive Attack has postponed their tour due to illness. No idea yet on when the new shows will be, but they’re going to let us know on the 14th.
I got a Facebook notfication that Massive Attack and Thievery Corporation are on tour together, which is basically a concert full of WIN. unfortunately they are only playing at select small venues, none of which are within a 5-hour driving radius of our house.
Uh-oh. The Onion AV Club gives the latest Massive Attack album a C+, which is pretty underwhelming, and Pitchfork gives it a 5 out of 10. I’ll buy it regardless, but I was hoping for a better critical reception. (Pitchfork gave 100th Window a 5.1 and I love that album, so this is all relative.)
Update: Meh. A few good tracks, and a few filler tracks. I’d say a 5 of 10 is deserved. seems to be getting better as it goes, though.
About five years ago I made a mental decision to document all of the songs that get stuck in my head. This might be hard for some people to understand, but when I get something in my head, it usually takes a couple of days for it to wash out, and there’s no telling how it’s going to get in there in the first place: it could be playing on the loudspeaker at the grocery store, it could be used in an Instagram reel, or it could be something that just pops in there. I was curious the other day and decided to make a list of all of the earworm songs I’ve made note of on this site, which was a lot more than I thought it was, 88 in total to date. There are only a few I’m embarrassed by, but typically I’m not in charge of these things.
- Never Enough, The Cure
- Wire, U2
- Regret, New Order
- World (Price of Love), New Order
- Angel, Massive Attack
- Geek Stink Breath, Green Day
- Heavy Metal Suicide, Ringo Deathstarr
- Iris, Goo Goo Dolls
- Fu Manchu, Mongoose
- She Drives Me Crazy, Fine Young Cannibals
- Falling Hard, Crystal Method
- Ladytron, Destroy Everything You Touch
- Dark Neccessities, Red Hot Chili Peppers
- Lights Out, Royal Blood
- Phantogram’s Howling at the Moon
- I’d Really Love to See You Tonight, England Dan & John Ford Coley
- Auto Pilot, Queens of the Stone Age
- Hands All Over, Soundgarden
- Outshined, Soundgarden
- Burden In My Hand, Soundgarden,
- Something’s Always Wrong, Toad the Wet Sprocket
- Light Design, Turnstile
- Never Enough, Turnstile
- Wires, Red Fang
- Blue Light, David Gilmour
- True Widow, Theurgist
- Dreams, Beck
- Daymom, Drop Nineteens
- You Can’t Quit Me Baby, Queens of the Stone Age
- Pull Me Under, Dream Theater
- Apocalypse, Cigarettes After Sex
- A View to a Kill, Duran Duran
- Love Spreads, The Stone Roses
- Then She Did…, Jane’s Addiction
- How to Handle a Rope, Queens of the Stone Age
- Young Americans, David Bowie
- Tristessa, Smashing Pumpkins
- Mexican Moon, Concrete Blonde
- Eurotrash Girl, Cracker
- Spring and Summer, Fall, Blonde Redhead
- Atlas, Battles
- Armageddon It, Def Leppard
- ill peach, BLOOM
- This Conversation is Getting Boring, Acopia
- Beautiful Disaster, 311
- Inertia Creeps, Massive Attack
- My People, The Beaches
- Dirty Movies, Van Halen
- Cemeteries of London, Coldplay
- Council Skies, Noel Gallagher’s High Flying Birds
- She Sells Sanctuary, The Cult
- Afterlife, Arcade Fire
- Welcome to the Pleasuredome, Frankie Goes to Hollywood
- Valerie Loves Me, Material Issue
- World Impact, Drug Church
- Sometimes, My Bloody Valentine
- Need You Tonight, INXS
- Golden Brown, The Stranglers
- No Time To Die, Billie Eilish
- Ocean Size, Jane’s Addiction
- Giant Peach, Wolf Alice
- Brushed, Quicksand
- Nothing to See, Miya Folick
- Maria También, Khruangbin
- Fight Test, The Flaming Lips
- SWEET75, Sleigh Bells
- Shotgun, Soccer Mommy
- New York, Richard Ashcroft
- My Own Worst Enemy, Lit
- Lies, Chvrches
- Glamour Profession, Steely Dan
- Guilt, Ringo Deathstarr
- Around the World, Daft Punk
- Music Sounds Better With You, Stardust
- Japan, Tycho
- Don’t Waste My Time, Sault
- Cosmonauts, Quicksand
- Valerie Loves Me, Material Issue
- Two Urns, Windhand
- Party in the USA, Miley Cyrus
- Falling Hard, The Crystal Method
- Sometimes, My Bloody Valentine
- Cure for Pain, Morphine
- You Made It, DJ Shadow
- Here’s What’s left, RJD2
- Saturdays, Cut Copy
- Everybody’s Gotta Learn Sometime, Beck
- One Too Many Mornings, Chemical Brothers
Reading multiple stories about how AI demand has made hard drive, GPU and RAM prices all skyrocket, I decided to pull the trigger and upgrade my laptop to something that will handle video editing better than the one I’ve currently got. This is an M2 Macbook Air that I bought three years ago, and I made the mistake of only speccing 8GB of RAM. It’s been a solid machine, but it has a few quirks I dislike (mainly software-related) and it just chugs when I’m working with heavy video files. I specced out a new M5 Air with 16GB of RAM last week, and with a trade in on my current machine I should save about 1/3 of the total cost. However, the order is currently stuck in processing—what was supposed to be in stock locally is now estimated to be here between May 15-19.
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Interestingly, when I look at the stats for IK here, my daily numbers have jumped up to about four times where they used to be a year ago, and when I compare that with the Scout journal, those numbers have dropped. My guess (and I need to do a lot more digging in my server logs) is that I’m getting hit by the AI bots, who are scraping the site for content. I would have expected that the Scout journal would be hit just as much, but apparently not.
I’ve had the drumbeat and bassline of Angel by Massive Attack stuck in my head for the last three days. I was fortunate enough to see them live in 2019 during the Mezzanine 30th Anniversary tour, and this was more powerful in person than the recorded version, if that’s possible. Being able to see Horace Andy and Liz Fraser sing their tracks live was incredible.
I finished ripping the entire contents of one of Rob’s disc changers this afternoon. As of this point, there are 396 albums digitized, for around 117 GB of data. About halfway through I gave up on trying to get the discs back in to the player in the exact order they came out—it was just too difficult to do, and because of the way the carousel is made, I wouldn’t be able to get all the discs out unless they came out in batches. So they’re now stacked on two spindles I made with some dowel from the basement, and I’ll find someplace safe to store them until I can get the cases from Karean. 
Because he stopped buying CD’s in the early 2000’s, as we all did, the collection is an excellent cross-section of music from the 90’s, plus a sizable chunk of classic jazz, a score of classical discs, and more than a dozen CD’s with my handwriting that I’d ripped for him—Thievery Corporation, Massive Attack, Supreme Beings of Leisure, and other downtempo and trip-hop albums.
W00t. Tickets have been purchased for the Massive Attack show at the Anthem on March 20, and our friend Pete is coming with us!
Jen and I are going to the Gilah Press open house this evening to look at pretty pretty letterpress, drink some drinks, and meet people. Then we will go out and have a drink together at a bar like two adults! I DON’T REMEMBER WHAT THIS FEELS LIKE.
Elsewhere in the world, shit is burning down, people are being shot, and politicians are still lying. Maybe I’ll have more than one drink and call us an Uber to get home.