Listened: Tuesday July 27
I love Highway 61 and there are a lot of personal experience things I could tell you about it, except, because of needing to protect the innocent and not so innocent – I can’t. All I can say is “Intense discussion of Bob Dylan records – getting people laid since 1962.”
Listened: Tuesday July 27
I love Minus the Bear! Woody’s brother Glen introduced them to me. Their music is really catchy, pretty, and modern-sounding. But I have one beef with them – their album titles, on this their debut album, are freaking stooooopid. And, on top of that, have nothing to do with the content of the song. I give you:
“Thanks For The Killer Game Of Crisco Twister”
“Hey, Wanna Throw Up?”
“Booyah Achieved”
What the hell is that? Why must you sabotage yourselves this way?? No one wants to randomly buy an album with incredibly dumb names like that. Take yourselves more seriously!! Just a little?
Apparently they took that advice, because later albums have less dumb song titles. Thank god.
Listened: Tuesday July 27
The Vines are one of those 90s bands of the moment that were hot for only one album and then disappeared. I had barely listened to Highly Evolved until now.
It sounds a lot different from what I was expecting. I thought it was all shouty pop. But a lot of it is really dreamy indie music, almost like the Shins(!) in parts (Autumn Shade). Then there are also the shouty parts (In The Jungle), so I wasn’t totally mistaken. Even the pretty parts aren’t that memorable after you’re done listening, though. Sadly, I don’t have a lot of desire to listen to this in the future.
Listened: Tuesday July 27
Before the project I had barely listened to Hey You, though I had heard quite a few songs at Ben’s shows several years ago. I’ve figured out that I was mistaken – the modern slide downward in Ben’s music hadn’t started yet with this album.
There are a lot of good songs here (Dirty Mind and Chills to name a few) and he’s still funky and sweet without being cheesy and lazy like some of the later albums (though the album cover is a little cliche for my taste – ooooh, he’s such a complicated puzzle). I need to listen to this more and appreciate what’s here.
Listened: Tuesday July 27
After I was blown away by A Hard Day’s Night on PBS as a teenager, the next week they showed Help. While A Hard Day’s Night is very much a “serious film”, Help is just pure 60s silliness and fun. It was a great experience to get both sides of the Beatles coin so quickly.
The album shows even more maturity than A Hard Day’s Night and it’s only a been a year between the two. John, Paul, and George are all getting super strong as songwriters and singers (the harmonies are infectious) and the Dylan influence is creeping in on songs like You’re Got to Hide Your Love Away.
I remember listening to this in the mornings as I was getting ready to go to school when I was 16. It’s a reminder of a simpler time in my life.
Listened: Tuesday July 27
Heartworm was another very cheap purchase I made because I had heard it was good. And it is! The music is of the Ned’s Atomic Dustbin style of 90s rock.
The singer is often very conversational in his lyrics. There are stories of mental illness, spousal abuse, and Bono, but it doesn’t come off as too much sharing, which is hard to do.
Listened: Tuesday July 27
The Heartfelt is another fine musical introduction by Woody’s brother Glen. If you like The Postal Service, you will like Figurine – it involves some of the same people. It’s a little more blippy, but of the same ilk.
The lyrical subject matter is basically love and technology. Specifically instant messaging and space travel, mixed with some self loathing. An awesome combination if ever there was one!
Listened: Friday July 16, Monday July 26
Since high school I’ve always loved Love Will Tear Us Apart, but I didn’t dig deeply into Joy Division for many years. I bought a best-of CD at one point, but I didn’t really “get it.”
Then I saw Anton Corbijn’s Control and everything changed. Anton Corbijn is a great rock photographer whose work I have loved for a long time. He’s most famous for pictures of U2 (the cover of Joshua Tree for example) and was close friends with Joy Division and the many people from that scene back in the day. Therefore, the film (his first feature, believe it or not!) is really a labor of love, due to Corbijn’s familiarity with the people and the music. It’s a brilliant film that shot me right into the heart of the time period and the story. The actors playing the band members even learned to play together as a band, which blows my mind a little.
After I saw the film I got Joy Division – the energy of their shows, the bleak beauty of their surroundings, the hotbed of creativity and influence coming from that part of England at the time, the medical struggles, the relationship problems, the wealth of creative output that was snuffed out when Ian Curtis took his life. Control helped me live through all this as if it happened yesterday. The incredibly appropriate use of Atmosphere for the end credits sequence will stay with me for a long, long time.
After I saw the film, I wanted to own as much Joy Division as I could, and this 4 disc box set contains all the officially released albums and b-sides, as well as some unreleased and live stuff. Listening to all 4 discs straight is a bit taxing, but well worth the time. It’s clear how much this short-lived band influenced much of alternative rock to come – until I heard their whole catalog I didn’t realize how much Joy Division influenced early U2.
This was definitely a game changer in my musical landscape and I suspect those kinds of events are becoming farther and farther apart in my life, so it’s always great to realize it’s happened.
Listened: Friday July 16
Badly Drawn Boy sounds like he’s been plucked out of the 1970s and thrust into the 21st century. He sounds like Nilsson or most of solo John Lennon. He doesn’t write anthems, or even really stories, just mellow grooves. Supposedly one of his heroes is Bruce Springsteen, but I don’t hear his influence at all.
I think I let Have You Fed the Fish go too soon – it’s actually quite good and I should go back to it more often.
Listened: Friday July 16
The Hardest Way To Make An Easy Living is the album when the Streets started talking about his “famous person” problems versus everyguy problems. But he is talented enough at storytelling that the details aren’t important – I still get exactly where his emotions are coming from.
Also, his everyman work ethic is still clear – his raps are well written and perfectionist. When You Wasn’t Famous is a brilliant observation – dating another famous person puts him on the same level as they are, and therefore it’s just as hard to impress the girl as when he was a nobody. Never Went to Church is a touching eulogy for his late father. And after all this, he still takes a lot of drugs. He’s still the same old Mikee Streets.
Emily's Albums A to Z 