Blind elevated their ethereal sound into a more mature exploration of the imperatives of existence. It’s more subdued, at least from a production standpoint, but finds its niche in luminant melodies and the band’s elegant yet spare musical arrangements.
I’ve written about The Sundays before; they are one of my favorite bands of my college years. This is a thoughtful retrospective of their second album, which came out in 1992 with a different vibe from their first record. Melancholy, yes, but still beautiful and inspiring. I wish they’d continued making music together, but we have three excellent albums to look back on.
I’m happy to see Mogwai have released a new album, and happier still to see Pitchfork (yes! they still exist) gave it a good review. Glad to see my favorite Scottish post-whatever band still going strong, and from what it sounds like, pushing some new boundaries.
Where they once reveled in disrupting ominous quietude with explosive outbursts, these days, they’d rather redirect tense energy into uplifting expression. As such, a band that once offered apocalyptic mayhem has become a source of comforting consistency as the real world turns evermore turbulent.
I was happy to stumble on a $5 copy of Come On Die Young at a secondhand CD store this summer, and definitely need to update/complete my discography.
First, let me say I have NO idea how this song got stuck in my head this week. This is by a prog/thrash rock band called Dream Theater, and it came out way back in the late 90’s, at a time when I was most adjacent to hair metal. I remember the metalheads at high school speaking reverently about the shredding skills of the lead guitarist. It’s the only song I know by this band, and it’s their only song that reached Top 10 charting position (which is probably how I first heard it). It’s got some good ideas but like most prog/thrash bands of the time, the songwriting never coalesces into something complete. It starts and stops and every time it settles into a groove they switch time, switch the beat, or leave the phrase for something completely different in tone. I’m irritated to even admit it’s stuck in my head, but here we are.
Maybe I can offer a chaser to wash that out of our heads. I was watching a video the other day that used a track for background music which I really liked, and tracked it down. It’s by a band called Cigarettes After Sex, and the track is called Apocalypse. This band is all vibe; it’s slow tempo, surf-tone guitars and moody keyboards drenched in reverb.
As usual, this album is six years old, but I’m just getting to it now.
This week’s entry I blame solely on a podcast I was listening to the other day, which was reviewing A View To A Kill, one of, if not the worst of all the James Bond movies, featuring an ancient Roger Moore. As my contemporaries might remember, the theme song was composed by Duran Duran, who were on the downslope of their popularity at that point. This was right after they recorded Do They Know It’s Christmas and several members of the band spun off into the Power Station (which yielded two very good singles).
Anyway, here’s a cheesy video for your viewing displeasure:
Here’s a review that left me scratching my head: The Verge ran an article asking if there’s a heavier album than Sleep’s Dopesmoker. This incongruity is not unlike a cooking website running a review of new luxury SUVs. To her credit, the author did her research, and the other artists she compared are legit: Electric Wizard, SunO))), and Bongripper, as well as several others I’ve not heard of before. Ultimately she decides on a live album from a band called Hell, who I’m not familiar with, but Dopesmoker will always be the high water mark in my opinion.
I’ve found that most modern metal has become super annoying, where the “singing” is nothing more than some guy gargling razor blades, the drums are cranked to 180BPM, and the compression has jacked the waveforms so close to the margins that it just becomes white noise. I prefer some sort of melody somewhere in my music, or at least a beat I can get behind. The last good metal album I really enjoyed was by a band called Windhand, which was slowed down, super heavy, and tuned super low—but had a great mixture of melody and riffage. Sadly, they have been on hiatus since 2018 and I don’t know if they’re going to release a new album. And I’m still waiting for True Widow to release some new music—their last album was great.
Paste Magazine ranks its 50 best albums of 1994. The music of our youth is truly the best music; there are some bands on here I’ve never heard of, which is why these stupid lists are sometimes valuable.
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.
By all accounts, the recent Jane’s Addiction tour has been canceled after Perry Farrell attacked Dave Navarro in the middle of a song, and had to be dragged off the stage. Reading some first-hand accounts from fans who posted video of that show, the consensus is that the band sounded fantastic but he sounded like shit, was drinking heavily through the whole show, and was dropping verses in the middle of songs. His wife immediately went on social media to attack the band, and today they announced the tour was dead.
Having read about him and his treatment of the rest of the band I can’t say I’m surprised, but I’m bummed out for them. I would love nothing more than (and would, frankly, be more interested in) the three musicians touring together with a guest vocalist, just to hear them play live together.
They sound awesome, but good goddamn, we’re getting old.
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.