Well, I suppose this was inevitable. Then She Did… was the song they were playing the other day when the show blew up, and I was thinking to myself as I watched the footage, “damn, that sounds good.” And then it got stuck in my head. Long ago, when the album first came out, I used to play along to the second side under the influence and this was one of my favorite grooves.
This is a reasonably good live recording from 1990 when the full band was still together and playing tight. What I would give to have seen them at their peak.
I’ve had the groove to How to Handle a Rope going through my head for the last four days. It’s a great groove—tons of low-end bass matched with a filthy guitar sound that’s perfect for driving a car very fast down a lonely stretch of highway. This tune was on my “Driving” playlist across multiple long-dead iPods back when we ripped our own CDs and made playlists. I miss this era of QotSA very much: guitar, drums and bass in a room thick with bong smoke and few fucks to give.
If you’re going to have something stuck in your head, make it a good something. Earlier in life, Bowie was always a complete mystery to me; I love his music, but high school Bill had no entry into what he was singing about or what any of it meant; all I knew was that 70’s Bowie was scary and there was still something strange and mysterious about Let’s Dance-era Bowie. A good song is still a good song, and this one is a banger. Fun fact: Luther Vandross is one of the backing vocalists.
I got sucked down a rabbit hole a couple of days ago by a YouTube interview with the Smashing Pumpkins about recording Siamese Dream, and that led me to other songs he’d recorded for Gish, and now I have Tristessa on repeat in my head. Gish is a fantastic album, one of my desert island discs, and one I need to source the remastered version of to re-rip to MP3. My copy is tinny and treble-heavy, and I’d like a version with more of the bottom end restored. Anyway, this tune has a great groove and I’ve always loved it.
This one has been in my head for a couple of days, so there you go: Mexican Moon, by Concrete Blonde. This is one of those CDs I don’t ever remember buying but somehow wound up with; it’s not their best album (that’s Bloodletting, which had Joey and Caroline, which are both fantastic) but this song is absolutely beautiful. Johnette Napolitano had an incredible, individual voice.
Somehow this one popped up in my brain today and hasn’t left: Eurotrash Girl, by Cracker. A good band who never really followed up with another record as good as Kerosene Hat, unfortunately; this album was on solid rotation the year I graduated college, and Low was the soundtrack to a summer painting houses. I’ve always loved the mixture of rock and country stirred together in this band—just enough twang to make things work.
This is an old one but still a good one. Blonde Redhead, Spring and By Summer Fall. I picked this album up years ago at the library and had it on solid repeat for weeks, and it never gets old. For some reason it crept back into my head the other day and hasn’t left.
On heavy rotation this week in my brain: Atlas, by Battles. Formed from the ashes of several other like-minded bands, Battles is an experimental math-rock group who has released albums sporadically over the last 20 years. Atlas is a single from their first album in 2007, and it defies description. I originally fell down this rabbit hole when YouTube suggested a video of early math-hardcore band Helmet playing live in 1994; their second album Meantime was on heavy rotation in college, and their original drummer went on to co-found this band. This song and the video are amazing.
There’s rain pattering against the windows right now, in spite of the forecast that called for cloudy skies but no rain. I’m waiting out the wet stuff so that I can go back outside and continue truck-based activities in the hope that I can wrap things up this weekend. I took the day off yesterday to rest up a little bit and cover some errands, which was a good strategy in hindsight.
I had a set of new Invisalign trays waiting for me to pick up for a week; about a month ago I put in a new top tray and it clearly Did Not Fit, so they re-scanned my mouth and made some new ones for me. I’ve got 27 more to go, which means I may be done with these (barring any adjustments) by October or so.
Sometime in January I noticed the wood threshold between the office and living room had shrunk, leaving wide gaps between it and the floor planks. The mice in the ice room have been busy despite the bait I’ve left them, and our terrier mutt has been worrying at the gaps for several months now. I have a thin strip of oak I have to cut down to set into these gaps, but I have to wait until she can go outside, as the table saw in the basement scares the crap out of her. The other night she woke me out of a sound sleep to jump off the bed into the darkness. Groggy, I got up to investigate and found that Bella had caught a mouse, brought it upstairs to show us, and was releasing it to play when it snuck under the door to escape. Following her instincts, Hazel immediately chomped it. I picked it up with her empty water bowl and hurled it out into the backyard. Hopefully, now that it’s warming up, the mice will evacuate and we can go back to normal levels of anxiety.
Meanwhile, I had the radio on in the garage the other day and this song from the ’80’s came on, and now it is stuck in my head and it is not even the best song on this album and I am kind of in hell:
ill peach, BLOOM. Dumb name for a band, but a good track. I like the beat, and the bridge at 2:01 is a lovely transition. Gives me some strong Metric vibes, minus the guitar. The rest of the album is hit or miss, but they have a couple of other good tracks from earlier EPs available.
The runner-up from last week:
Acopia, This Conversation is Getting Boring. Much more downtempo, but another good groove. I wish the bass was better quality; the sound is flat and sounds just a hair late on the rhythm and not in a good way. Other than that, excellent.