Inferno was released on Friday, and I really like it. It’s definitely an evolution of the BoC sound, but still works within the soundscape they pioneered 2+ decades ago. This album features drums on select tracks in a way their previous albums didn’t—tracks like Blood in the Labyrinth, All Reason Departs, and Arena Americanada put them much further forward than I remember. The sound of this album is much more….upbeat? than Tomorrow’s Harvest, their last album. I’ve currently been streaming it, but once I’m past the first-of-the-month bills, an out-of-network cancer checkup bill, and prep for IH Nationals, I’m going to buy the CD (remember those?)
The weather here has been absolutely perfect since the rain broke last week, and I spent as much time as possible outside not sweating and not freezing. I can see why people visited California and never left. The tomatoes in the greenhouse continue to thrive, which makes me stupidly happy. I took advantage of the weather to rent a tow dolly and swap the Scout 800 for the CR-V at Brian’s garage, and I’m happy I didn’t have to sweat my ass off to get it done.
I heard Regret by New Order at the pharmacy earlier this week and haven’t been able to shake it. Back in the day I had no idea this was the same band that released Blue Monday or had any connection to Joy Division; they were completely off my radar until I was in college. (Remember, I was raised in the State of Classic Rock, in the county of Hair Metal). This song features Peter Hook’s bass melody prominently, which is As Things Should Be, but another great song off this album is World (Price of Love), where he’s conspicuously absent.
Related: one of the books on my library list is Shadowplayers: the Rise and Fall of Factory Records, which chronicles the birth and death of their music label—and the Manchester club they essentially underwrote.
Here’s the first release from Inferno, the upcoming BoC album. On first listen, I really like it. The beat is a lot more central to this track than any previous work they’ve done; I was always a huge fan of the Big Beat electronica genre, and I would love to see them lead the charge into a new era of solid groove. I tried to preorder the album last week but it timed out on me, so I’ll try again today.
The internet can be a wonderful thing sometimes.
This clip is from a 1982 French cop movie called Le Marginal, starring Jean-Paul Belmondo. The featured car is claimed to be an original 1966 Shelby GT500, heavily modified, and driven in the movie by the star himself. The hero car was saved, restored, and sold in 2023. I like a lot about this car, except for the rear taillights.
…countless researchers have shown that many of the most meaningful forms of real-world creativity and invention depend less on solving well-defined problems than on figuring out what the problem is in the first place.
In 1964 a study on creativity was done where researchers watched how 31 artists approached a still life, and split their approaches into two different types: problem-solving and problem-finding. The former spent their time working on the outcome, while the latter spent their time finding and formulating a visual problem. The researchers then went back five years after graduation to see where the students took their careers:
The artists who used a problem-finding style while in school were far more successful five years after graduation. Of the 11 students who were the least problem-finding in approach, eight had dropped out of art altogether.
This tracks with my personal experience in art school: those of us who embraced MICA’s freshman-year philosophy of learning how to think instead of learning how to make art seem to be more successful in our careers.
This is an excerpt of a longer video starring a guy named Yung Lean, who is some kind of Swedish rap star. The song is forgettable but the choreography is amazing; leave the sound off if it gets annoying.
This is a clip of a quartet busking in Asheville, NC, featuring a woman known as Abby the Spoon Lady, who does an incredible job of adding color and style to the percussion. There are many other clips of her available on YouTube, but I like the bluegrass featured here—even though the sound kind of sucks.
I’ve had a number of different songs buzzing around my skull over the last couple of weeks, but this one flew in and stuck itself directly into my cerebral cortex.
Back In The Day, one of the first of a handful of MP3s I yoinked from Napster was a copy of this song. It still rips.
BoC might be teasing new music, according to the internets; apparently a bunch of mysterious VHS tapes have been released from Warp Records, their label, featuring audio samples that sound vaguely Boards-adjacent. It has been over a decade since they released Tomorrow’s Harvest, which is way too damn long.
The XX played their first gig together in 8 years in Mexico City this weekend. They are awesome and this is long overdue.
Jeez, this story gets worse and worse. Brady Ebert, the Turnstile guitarist who left the band in 2022, was just arrested for running over the lead singer’s 79-year-old father with a car and driving away, leaving him with two broken legs. He’s being held without bail on charges of attempted second-degree murder and first-degree assault.
Heavy Metal Suicide, by the humorously named Ringo Deathstarr. Their music spans several genres, from shoegaze to throwback alternative metal—this track being a good example of the latter. Their albums have been hit or miss for me, but each one has contained at least two or three good tracks, making for a good back catalog. See also: Guilt, Stare at the Sun, and Two Girls.