Pitchfork has been doing a weekend series where they commission reviews of older albums, featuring an eclectic mix of genres, artists, and selections. In a strange bit of synchronicity with my last post, this weekend they covered Donald Fagen’s The Nightfly, a solo album released right after Steely Dan released Gaucho and broke up. It’s a great review, and adds a lot of color to the album I wasn’t aware of. There are several classics on this album: IGY, New Frontier, and the title track are all equal to any of Steely Dan’s best output, while some others are a fraction of that quality. The Nightfly was one of the first ten CDs I bought in the late 80’s—I already had several Steely Dan albums on cassette and I decided I wasn’t going to buy stuff I already owned. Right after this, both Fagen and Becker went dark for a couple of decades, and I didn’t reconnect with their later output.
I’m sitting in front of our living room hi-fi system, listening to a used vinyl copy of Aja by Steely Dan on the turntable I brought back from the dead. The turntable itself is a Technics SL-0033, a really nice midrange deck with automatic start and stop. It’s playing through a Denon head unit I saved from the side of the road (really, no kidding), a pair of Mission bookshelf speakers—also saved from the side of a different road, on a different day—and a KLH subwoofer saved from my parents’ basement. I’d like a little more treble response out of the high-end; Aja is an excellent reference record to test out sound, and the high frequencies are too muddy for my taste. I can’t adjust the subwoofer frequency cutoff like I can with the Polk unit in the den, this being a lower-end brand. I turned the Loudness feature on and jacked the treble up, and that made a little bit of a difference, but still not quite where I want it. There is another subwoofer gathering dust in Mom’s basement; I’ll check to see if the circuitry is adjustable, and maybe that one will find its way back to Maryland.
Following up on the thinking I was doing about my old iPhone the other day, I used the email address assigned to the basement server to create a new Apple account, and used that to sign into the phone. This way the two machines were happy to talk with each other, and it didn’t fuck anything up on my current iPhone (using the same email address tells Apple you want to mirror the two devices, so you wind up with apps on the old phone that don’t work and no room left to add music). Once I got it connected and loading music, one of the other things I wanted to do was see if I could add it to the list of devices shared in my iCloud account, so that I could see it with Location Services. Because the iPhone is only on OS 12.5.8, it took a bit of finessing, but I was able to get it in the list and visible on my newer phone. With 64GB of storage, it’s a very fancy iPod, but it’s free and it works, so I’ll keep filling it with tunes.
This week’s earworm is Dominoes by The Big Pink, who had a moment back in 2009 or so. I don’t know if they’re still around (too busy to do a Google search right now) but I dig the beat of this song—I miss good heavy drums in current music.
Folk Implosion, Free to Go. Lou Barlow was the original bassist for Dinosaur Jr. up until he had a falling-out with J. Mascis and spent the next decade and a half writing kiss-off songs to his old bandmate. He also formed Folk Implosion along with his solo work and created some really good music. About twenty years ago they made up and have been making music together ever since. Full disclosure: the first Dino album after Barlow left is one of my all-time desert island discs.
This tune is good but frankly, Natural One is much better. However, this is the one currently stuck in my head. I don’t make the rules here.
Man, I could not be happier for these kids. Baltimore REPRESENT
Man, I miss this era: Consequence of Sound gives us a list of the 60 best albums of 1996. There’s so much good stuff here, and some stuff I’d either overlooked or forgotten about. I have to go back and revisit Dr. Octagon, Silver Jews, Acid Bath, Tortoise, and Polvo.
I’ve posted this song here before, but I absolutely love the groove to this song. This is a live version from eight years ago, and the vocals are slightly flat, but I still dig it. I would love to see True Widow live.
I played music on my little purple iPod Mini during the last two hours of the ride home, and Undertow by Lush got stuck in my head. At the time this album came out I wasn’t all that into Lush but over time I’ve come to appreciate the shoegaze harmonies this band specialized in.
This is Never Enough, by The Cure. This appeared on a comp album they put out called Mixed Up, where they had a bunch of different artists re-imagine earlier work, and was an extended version of a new single. My roommate bought the album and I had this one track on heavy repeat back in the day. All of the current streaming versions are different than the one I remember—the one on the cassette was a little shorter and simpler, and I like that one best.
Ooof, this is a tough one. Mark Lanegan (of the Screaming Trees, Queens of the Stone Age, and an extensive solo career) did a cover of Alice In Chains’ Nutshell about six years ago: a song about addiction—but really, what AiC song isn’t about addiction? He dedicated it to the memory of Layne Staley and Mike Starr, who both overdosed at different times. Lanegan and Staley were good friends, and Lanegan was also an addict, and was apparently clean—but died of unknown causes two years after recording this.
He’s singing in a completely different voice here—I didn’t recognize him at all without the rough growl, and his clean voice is achingly beautiful. I’m always wary of pedal steel, but his accompanist is masterful—she’s just perfect. What a beautiful tribute.