A few friends have decided to spend 2009 listening to some albums and writing about it. No doubt this is an endeavour we’ll fall behind and half-heartedly catch up on every so often, or give up on entirely, but what the hell. It sounds like fun and writing about music is good practice for me. If the whole idea sounds deadly dull to you, I recommend ignoring every post with Project 365! written in front of it. Read my other exciting posts instead!
So. I’m not using the “one unheard album every day” approach that Dan has adopted, nor Seb’s “every album on my iPod”. I’m going for one a day, but being a bit looser. I’m mostly going for stuff I’ve not heard before, but I’m also going to occasionally write about something I’ve not heard in ages, or that I love. I figure the less strict the rules, the more likely I am to stick with this. So here’s Jan 1st to Jan 9th. Oh, and I should probably admit that this is 9 albums from the period, rather than one from each specific day. Shh. I will cheat a lot more.
1 – fIREHOSE – fROMOHIO
It’s taken me an unforgiveably long time to listen to fIREHOSE, given that this is Mike Watt’s band formed shortly after the death of Minutemen colleague and life-long friend D. Boon. Anyway, fROMOHIO is three albums into the band’s career, and since I’ve not heard debut Ragin’, Full On and only listened to follow-up If’n once, I’m not in much of a position to say whether this album represents them settling into a sound or whatever. What I can say is that this is indisputably a Mike Watt album. It’s full of excellent basslines, and the songs are recognisably written with a bit of Minutemen flair. It’s also evidently not the Minutemen: there are more country influences in this, and Watt’s bass is less distinct when not accompanied by that high-end buzzsaw guitar sound Boon always used. Still, I like it. I’ll have to listen to it a lot more before I really appreciate it, I think, but for me this was true of a lot of what the Minutemen did too.
2 – La Dispute – Somewhere At The Bottom Of The River Between Vega And Altair
I discovered La Dispute fairly recently after randomly opening lots of MySpace pages from PunkNews. Unexpectedly, a week later I found that two other members of Wrecktheplacefantastic had recently discovered and liked them. This is weird, but cool. Anyway, La Dispute have an incredibly earnest vocalist who does screams and desperate-sounding sing in equal measure (as well as spoken word on two EPs). Their music is fastloud/slowquiet screamo which is a bit like a less explosive Saetia. There’s more to it than that, though… some of the rhythms underpinning their songs are great and really unexpected. I’m trying to make more comparisons but I kinda can’t. It’s a lot cleaner and tighter than early emo bands but it’s got more honesty and passion than a whole swathe of shit commercial haircut bands. What the hell. This is really creative post-hardcore and the lyrics are amazing. If the style of vocal delivery doesn’t bother you (I think that will be a problem for some people, but fortunately I very rarely find myself annoyed by a style of singing).
3 – At the Gates – Slaughter of the Soul
When I was young, I used to listen to a lot of rubbish metal. And I mean rubbish metal. This isn’t rubbish as in “I think Metallica suck” or “I listen to metal so extreme mere mortals will experience melted faces”, but just a bit naff. I own both a Static-X album AND a Powerman 5000 album. I bought a Papa Roach CD single when they first appeared. That sort of thing. Anyway, for a good few years I lived in happy equilibrium with chest-pounding brain-deadening nu-metal, and then I stopped. Years on, I thought “why don’t I listen to metal any more? It’s not like I didn’t come across lots of good bands in that time.” And so now I am officially Making An Effort. First stop: the magnum opus of the Swedish band credited with kick-starting the popularity of melodic death metal, which is apparently quite popular these days.
Anyway, having listened to this I am thinking… well, it’s really good. The riffs are intense and the melodic dimension really appeals to me because I can’t get enough of that shit. It’s great to stick this on while I’m doing something else, tap toes and nod my head. If I was drunk and at a club maybe I’d even throw myself around a bit. But listening to it again I’m remembering why I stopped listening to metal. I just can’t seem to find any emotional connection to it. That’s probably not the point, but it does mean that no matter how much I may like the music, it’ll never be that important to me. Maybe it works better if you listen to it and sit there reading the liner notes as you do.
4 – Compilation – The Shape of Flakes to Come
I told you I was going to talk about albums I’d heard before. This is one of them. How could I, or indeed any self-respecting “orgcore punker”, not have heard the definite No Idea Records sampler, which characterises the landscape of that beautiful scene of that shitty town to which I have never been. Hi, Gainesville!
Released circa 2003, it has songs by the bands you’d expect to see at the time – Against Me!, Gunmoll, Planes Mistaken for Stars, Fifth Hour Hero, combatwoundedveteran, Army of Ponch, Small Brown Bike – but also some little surprises, like Atom & His Package covering a Radon tune (as well as a song by Radon themselves), Exeter’s Annalise, Whiskey & Co., and the perpetually obscure Panthro U.K. United 13 (seriously, what is it with Panthro… and Unitas… and Black Cougar… and House on Fire… listen to these bands, assholes!).
As usual there’s a song by the Usuals at the end. I only ever hear the Usuals at the end of compilations. I must listen to more by them. I may forget again.
5 – Big Black – Songs About Fucking
I’d always been aware of Steve Albini being a significant figure in “the music industry” (a partially true misconception that would no doubt have infuriated Big Black-era Albini) but was never aware of any of his bands. He was a producer-figure, and thus not of interest to ignorant ol’ me. After reading Our Band Could Be Your Life this changed quite a bit. Holy crap was the young Albini… well, a total asshole. And a brilliant firebrand. The sort people music needs more of a lot of the time. Just don’t get around them.
Anyway, this is the first Big Black I’ve heard. I’d been told not to expect much, and that I’d probably listen to a few songs and then shelve it. The reality is that I fucking dig this. Sure it’s not a quarter as abrasive as it would have been back in the day, superceded many times by much nastier, harsher music. But this helps – having heard a lot of deliberately unpleasant noise, Big Black sounds like a much more tuneful affair to me, and it’s a lot easier to appreciate the tunes rather than being equal parts pushed away and drawn in (surely the intention at the time). I love Albini’s fundamentally nasty lyrics and vocals, as well as the drum machine that sounds like a goddamn drum machine, not a drummer in a tin.
Next step: Rapeman?
6 – The Pavers – Beautiful
This is just an EP, and I listened to it a lot in 2002 and 2003 after it came out, but I’ve decided I wanted to include it because I don’t think many people know the Pavers, which is a shame. They’re a pop-punk band formed by Scott Reynolds in the very late 90s. Scott Reynolds, for the non-nerds among us, was the vocalist with ALL between ’89 and ’93. Pavers were never one of those bands that would blow you away, but they were one of those bands that were good enough that you’d fall a little in love with a few of their songs, and even if you forgot about them for a while your pleasure at finding them again would make up for it and then some. This just happened to me!
’57 Franklin’ is my favourite tune from this EP. ‘Beautiful’ and ‘Tacoma Narrows’ are also good. There’s also a fairly amusing answerphone message song that I have tried to use as an actual answerphone message in the past. Sadly, mobile sound quality means it just comes out as a fuzzy mess.
Somewhere I have a Pavers picture vinyl, I think The Return to the Island of No Return, which I must now dig out.
7 – Action Pact – Punk Singles Collection
Sometime in 2007 I read Ian Glasper’s Burning Britain: The History of UK Punk 1980-1984. It was a difficult book to get through, to be honest, because I didn’t live through the scenes it described, and only knew a select few of the bands it covered. But if there’s one thing I’m determined about, it’s being a massive nerd when it comes to punk rock, and so I persevered. I put together a list of bands that sounded worth checking out (most of the UK punk scenes of the era mostly revolved around being hated by everyone, sniffing glue, having no hope, and not being very good at music, so when bands stick out they really stick out). Action Pact were one of them, and having listened to this compilation put together in 1995 by tireless punk archivists (okay, label) Captain Oi!, I’m glad I wrote them down. The music’s full of all the sneers and English accents you’d hope for, but these guys ‘n gal could hold a tune together well and they wrote some good ones. The best include ‘London Bouncers’, about the notoriously violent and aggressive thugs who provided ‘security’ to venues in the ’70s and ’80s; ‘Blue Blood’, about the parasitic Royal Family; and ‘Rockaway Beach’, a not unexpected Ramones cover with dual male-female vocals.
8 – The Weakerthans – Left & Leaving
I had forgotten how goddamn good this album is. For some reason I had remembered the music being very slow and understated and dull, rather than pacey and full of delicious power chords. When coupled with John Samson’s beautiful punk poetry, beautiful songs are the inevitable result. I’ve been reminded why I used to love the Weakerthans, and of my shame in never having tracked down any of their other albums.
9 – The Cribs – Men’s Needs, Women’s Needs, Whatever
Thanks to my near-total ignorance of goings-on in pop music I’d never knowingly heard the Cribs before listening to this. I almost didn’t – it just happened to follow some other songs in my iTunes unplayed filter. I’m glad it did come on, though, because this is indie rock which happily sticks in a lot of punk rock chops. It’s toe-tapping good, and I was lying in bed reading at the time. Seriously, dancing under a duvet in a non-copulative fashion is fun! There are loads of decent tunes on here but Be Safe is the one that immediately sticks out to me because it sounds a little bit like Arab Strap. Except clearly not. I’m not sure if repeat listens will see me get tired of this album, or if some of them will grow into favourites.
[...] it In addition to Project 365! (see yesterday’s post for more on that) I’ve decided to have a crack at a meme that I’ve seen bouncing around LiveJournal and [...]
[...] Previous posts in the series: Albums 1-9. [...]