After checking back through, I have managed to determine that this is the seventh and therefore final post of Album Week 2019! What a journey. What a stupid, stupid journey.
Album Week 2020, if society is still standing, if there is still a Blogger to make posts into, if life still animates my bones and organs, if it is the will of God and I am graced with the strength and wherewithal to keep on going--Album Week 2020 will be better. It has proven more difficult than I had anticipated for me to approach the subject of music in broader terms than "I make it, and particular recordings of it have great personal significance".
Something to work on.
*
Leaving a Mountain Goats album for last, a last which is also seventh, is really playing into my own hands. Speaks a lot about me as a person who creates and person who makes choices and a person who derives great significance from the numbers of things, their own choices, and the act of creation both in a subjective and in a sense relating only to the absolute. So my own hands are adversarial in this situation.
What I mean to say is that I often choose to make things harder for myself than they need to be. Instinctively and deliberately, in ways large and small, I put a little spin on life to give the whole act that little "fuck you, Joseph" it so lacks.
The only salvation that I have is that all of this is pointless. And that the absolute relates absolutely to the particular, and the particular subjectively to the absolute. Those things.
*
Why is it important to have a copy of All Eternals Deck? It isn't. But if you ever did come into possession of the CD in its jewel case, new with all its liner notes, and you read those liner notes at a wooden table by a kitchen window with a fifth of whiskey in front of you like an hourglass and they contained your tarot, unpullable and fake, a gift from a stranger who somehow knew what you needed and brought you real medicine for a physical ailment, and somewhere down the line you lost them, you might be tempted to go out and reclaim what you had lost.
These days, in this time in which we live, it's so deceptively easy to go out and replace what was, especially if you're not particular about the conditions and are able to identify the active catalytic objects: a bottle of whiskey and a the liner notes to All Eternals Deck. Probably Maker's Mark. We liked Maker's Mark, we liked picking the wax off before cracking the bottle. It's easy to get a bottle, no problem, and they're all full of the exact same molecular arrangements. All the CD's have the same binary etched onto their surface.
That's only when what matters is the poison, and the poison is the same. Taken through the mouth, taken through the eye, taken through the ear. The poison is the same.
Medicine doesn't really operates like that. You can try to force it to, though.
Final analysis, whether anything is toxic or healing is in the dosage, and the condition of the system.
*
Lost my first copy of this album in a friend's car somehow, left my replacement in the pocket set into the back of the driver's seat of my old Subaru when I sold it to some dude for a hundred and twenty bucks and him having to tow it outta my driveway, and the third one I left in the CD changer of my Honda last summer when I sold it for four hundred, letting myself be screwed over a barrel in the interest of getting the thing over with quickly. I was in a manic frenzy of unburdening.
When the album came out I was losing a lot of stuff too, but not on purpose.
*
This took all fucking day and into the night and it's trash! Not even any frigging good at all.
Therefore, hey! Got a great idea, based on how much time and energy I've sunk into this: part two of my post about All Eternals Deck will be the first post of Album Week 2020. I made it too hard. I will cheat if necessary to make it good next year, I'll write it ahead of time and edit for quality and completeness, or I'll just have notes or something but when AW2020 kicks off it will be, if not worth it, at least fully concluded. I made it too hard and it's less than professional and pointlessness did not save me but check it out: I do not give one fuck.
Sincerely, sincerely I cannot bring myself to give a limp dick's flop.
ALBUM WEEK 2019 MOTHERFUCKS
WASN'T READY
I ADMIT THIS
*
Looking forward immensely to regular production. This self-consigned musical purgatory I was not prepared to handle has remembered to me the simple joys of carelessly rattling off fripperies and being very dramatic. Can't wait to get back to not knowing what's supposed to happen. I was thinking of maybe doing other projects like Album Week for other parts of the year but AW has proven as much and perhaps more than the blog can support in terms of rigid rather than spontaneous continuity.
It did its job, though. Been able to pull some stuff off the backburners and do some basement work. In this mixed metaphor, the backburner stuff involves material life things that have been happening that I been trying to get a handle on how to talk about and describe. The basement represents thinking, not necessarily consciously about writing but not unrelated to writing in general, but usually not related to the blog; the stuff that books are made of, and the stuff that you think might be too real for books but let's keep writing and we'll see what there is to see.
Anyway, real talk next post, but I might take the weekend. Fuck it, May's not gonna be a month with a ton of posts. Wanna get this right, and weekend shifts really thrash me these days.
--JL
Friday, May 24, 2019
Wednesday, May 22, 2019
#173
Real quick before I go on with Album Week 2019, I'll letcha in on how reading has been happening. You like that, you like when I talk about the books I'm reading.
Precipitation's done for now. Got the window open to let in the breeze.
Well, I like writing about them, baby. What we have here is a case of synergy. Let's hunker down.
*
Just about halfway through the pages of Kierkegaard's Philosophical Fragments, which is to say I have read the original translator's introduction and the introduction by the commentator which took ninety-seven pages and am about fifty-two pages into the text itself. I have only about fifty-eight more before I am done with the book and then there are the roughly hundred and seventeen pages of commentary. I'm not sure if I'm going to read them this time around. I liked his intro enough to do it, but come on. Not a big "coulda been done with this already" guy, but the math on this is damning and Kierkegaard writes accessibly by my lights, really seems like excess.
Due to misunderstanding about a copy of Coyote Blue by Christopher Moore, I read it in its entirety so I could return it to a coworker only to be told that it was mine to keep. It was a pretty dang good book--and as an added bonus, my typing those words marks the end of a whole teenaged-to-adult life with a prejudice against Christopher Moore on the basis that his books look stupid and annoying and he seems stupid and annoying and the very first page of one made me hate him when I was a teen so I have never read one of his books till now, to show my coworker that I have an open mind. The book as an aesthetic object still drives me crazy, it looks bad and stupid and they made it ugly and hateful and painful to the eye and mind, but he is a real, real smart dude and a skilled and funny writer and the book's content skips and kills and frolics like its titular creature/totem (never does trick you, though). Great stuff, I'll read more in future.
Read Distance Mover and Don't Come In Here by Patrick Kyle. That's everything I could get my hands on, everything collected and bound I'm pretty sure (I mentioned reading Roaming Foliage I'm pretty sure, I know I mentioned Black Mass and it all started with Everywhere Disappeared) and it checks out: genius-level ouvre, can't wait for Death of the Master to drop, raise no monuments to the living and all but Patrick Kyle is a living king.
Also read the first couple pages of Death World by Harry Harrison. I'll get back to that soon.
*
Okay! Album Week. Album Week 2019. What fucking day is it? How many of these have I done?
*
It is raining outside. A beautiful rain. Silver light, thick heavy drops coming down even. Further south this business was a fucking shitstorm, floods everywhere, railroad tracks high in the air, the gravel beds they rested upon washed away completely in deluges that tore people's homes from where they sat and washed them away down the street, windblown chunks of roof coming to rest in what branches remain to the trees.
Few were injured. Truly incredible. Yesterday there were tornadoes all over the place; not many people hurt then either. Miracles happen, they demonstrate video evidence of miracles, and we just keep on going like nothing is real. That's part of the overarching miracle, I suppose.
*
My dad's recording of Handel's Water Music got lost somewhere I think, so I can't determine the details of my formative recording of the composition. I can't even think of it right now, in my mind. I forget how it goes. Sad.
*
Bob Dylan's "A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall" is a great song. I've never heard the studio recording, only outtakes. That's how I like Dylan, by and large. Some of his studio stuff is okay, but I like The Gaslight Tapes and stuff from No Direction Home and old live recordings and stuff like that. I read Chronicle vol. I, appropos of nothing. Talk about a book that changed nothing in my life. Unlike "A Hard Rain's A Gonna Fall". Unlike "Moonshiner". So forth.
*
Rain's slacking off already, after an hour. I stared out at it and watched it fill floodplains over the asphalt and burst crystal fireworks on the corner of the roof the garage building.
You know what's a good album? Having everything be totally quiet and listening to the rain fall on the world.
*
Precipitation's done for now. Got the window open to let in the breeze.
--JL
Tuesday, May 21, 2019
#172
Oh! Oh hey, blog. The blog I write, allegedly. Didn't see you there. Didn't see you there behind the tall, imposing cardboard cutout of a steaming cup of coffee, like a revenant from billboard concerning coffee from the middle nineteen-nineties.
Billboards aren't really about coffee anymore. They have transformed into glaring screens of swirling aggressively-colored and aesthetically sterile pontillisms, spewing the possessive white light that drains their content of any human warmth and shows only the mercenary rapine of trying to sell actual drive-up plastic surgery, as well as fifty other products, experiences, or notions (such as local wine, such as a safe bed free of parasites, such as a strip club near an airport, such as the services of a lawyer whose only drive seems to be to see you compensated beyond your wildest expectations [this is not a claim I have ever found very probable], such as the Word of Our Lord as it Relates to a Political Issue, such as an exceptional Mickey D's, such as the heroism involved in attaching yourself to the armed forces, such as the services of a powerful chiropractor*, such as a radio station you could listen to**) in an unresting loop, every hour of every year.
*
Not only has Album Week--fucking got-damned fricking Album Week 2019, worst decision of the month no question--put something of a damper on my workflow, my productivity overall has been a standstill due to life changes and emotional restructuring. Heavy work! Think of my spirit-body as a long and many-tiered bridge, with little construction gnomes all athwart it in their masses, busily shoring up the infrastructure and making plans to deal with new demands, with the fresh prognostics.
Each carries in their gnomy little hand a steaming cup of coffee.
*
On top of this, I had in fact written a high-effort post on the twelfth of this month--still a four-day lapse, one day longer than I like to take it. When I went to publish it everything went wrong, and I made the wrong decision in a dispassionate and unforced way, like very calmly I made the decision to click the wrong button, clicked again to confirm that I had intended to click the wrong button, and lost the whole post.
I had written at length about inevitability, and loss (losing records, discographies, whole music libraries, parts of yourself you didn't know you lost and parts of yourself that almost killed you in the very conscious losing), and accepting the grief of your fate with love and whatever joy you can. The irony was such that I could not be mad, could only confront the evidence of my own mind and hand and accept that I had written that post in order to destroy it. For the poetry of it? Who knows! I'm marinating in it.
Thought I dealt with it pretty well on the spot, chuckled at myself a bit, but it has been thirteen days and I haven't so much as approached a text field, so if by engaging that great irony and frustrating loss I intended to test myself I feel that I have fallen short. Got shook. I'll have to either change my generative procedures to more closely guard against loss or stick to my guns and continue to live on the edge of loss, grow into the individual that can pass that test whenever called upon.
These are the existential problems that life is all about. That, and hot beverages in the morning.
*
ALBUM WEEK
2019
CONTINUES
STILL
Ride the Lightning by Metallica is a truly great record, one of the best ever made by anybody anywhere. You can do what you like with this information.
*
There! There, blog. Let the healing begin.
--JL
*irl bonemancer.
**Catholic radio, Evangelical radio, some varietal of Protestant radio, some truly Christocult shit, the perennial local top forty station and the obligatory slot for some dude that calls himself "'Sick' Mike" whose voice sounds like Guy Fieri and Sam Kinison fucking each other hard after snorting up big rails of crank near some train tracks and when you look him up as a joke he's got a wikipedia page and is on the board of the local symphony orchestra and jazz society and is heavily involved in local charitable efforts and funding public programming and has a pretty insightful blog with like pictures of his kid sometimes so you feel this stupid connection with this goon who's got one of those smirks that looks as though someone pushed their pink chewing gum up and to the side as well as in when they stuck it on some surface. He seems like a good father to his daughter, and also like his skin was steam-cooked and has a good honest snap to it when it splits, revealing homogeneous ground meat. What music does he like? Hard to say; his CD collection is spread out throughout the (huge) house in various shelving units and his wall of records is very properly four walls, stuffed with vinyl, but all that plays on his station is nu-metal from the mid-aughts and stuff like Breaking Benjamin and Godsmack and Muse. His "opinion" segments and audience participation rituals are not things I like to discuss on Factually Pointless.***
***now I will have to write about that kind of stuff even though I would rather not. Not today, though.
Billboards aren't really about coffee anymore. They have transformed into glaring screens of swirling aggressively-colored and aesthetically sterile pontillisms, spewing the possessive white light that drains their content of any human warmth and shows only the mercenary rapine of trying to sell actual drive-up plastic surgery, as well as fifty other products, experiences, or notions (such as local wine, such as a safe bed free of parasites, such as a strip club near an airport, such as the services of a lawyer whose only drive seems to be to see you compensated beyond your wildest expectations [this is not a claim I have ever found very probable], such as the Word of Our Lord as it Relates to a Political Issue, such as an exceptional Mickey D's, such as the heroism involved in attaching yourself to the armed forces, such as the services of a powerful chiropractor*, such as a radio station you could listen to**) in an unresting loop, every hour of every year.
*
Not only has Album Week--fucking got-damned fricking Album Week 2019, worst decision of the month no question--put something of a damper on my workflow, my productivity overall has been a standstill due to life changes and emotional restructuring. Heavy work! Think of my spirit-body as a long and many-tiered bridge, with little construction gnomes all athwart it in their masses, busily shoring up the infrastructure and making plans to deal with new demands, with the fresh prognostics.
Each carries in their gnomy little hand a steaming cup of coffee.
*
On top of this, I had in fact written a high-effort post on the twelfth of this month--still a four-day lapse, one day longer than I like to take it. When I went to publish it everything went wrong, and I made the wrong decision in a dispassionate and unforced way, like very calmly I made the decision to click the wrong button, clicked again to confirm that I had intended to click the wrong button, and lost the whole post.
I had written at length about inevitability, and loss (losing records, discographies, whole music libraries, parts of yourself you didn't know you lost and parts of yourself that almost killed you in the very conscious losing), and accepting the grief of your fate with love and whatever joy you can. The irony was such that I could not be mad, could only confront the evidence of my own mind and hand and accept that I had written that post in order to destroy it. For the poetry of it? Who knows! I'm marinating in it.
Thought I dealt with it pretty well on the spot, chuckled at myself a bit, but it has been thirteen days and I haven't so much as approached a text field, so if by engaging that great irony and frustrating loss I intended to test myself I feel that I have fallen short. Got shook. I'll have to either change my generative procedures to more closely guard against loss or stick to my guns and continue to live on the edge of loss, grow into the individual that can pass that test whenever called upon.
These are the existential problems that life is all about. That, and hot beverages in the morning.
*
ALBUM WEEK
2019
CONTINUES
STILL
Ride the Lightning by Metallica is a truly great record, one of the best ever made by anybody anywhere. You can do what you like with this information.
*
There! There, blog. Let the healing begin.
--JL
*irl bonemancer.
**Catholic radio, Evangelical radio, some varietal of Protestant radio, some truly Christocult shit, the perennial local top forty station and the obligatory slot for some dude that calls himself "'Sick' Mike" whose voice sounds like Guy Fieri and Sam Kinison fucking each other hard after snorting up big rails of crank near some train tracks and when you look him up as a joke he's got a wikipedia page and is on the board of the local symphony orchestra and jazz society and is heavily involved in local charitable efforts and funding public programming and has a pretty insightful blog with like pictures of his kid sometimes so you feel this stupid connection with this goon who's got one of those smirks that looks as though someone pushed their pink chewing gum up and to the side as well as in when they stuck it on some surface. He seems like a good father to his daughter, and also like his skin was steam-cooked and has a good honest snap to it when it splits, revealing homogeneous ground meat. What music does he like? Hard to say; his CD collection is spread out throughout the (huge) house in various shelving units and his wall of records is very properly four walls, stuffed with vinyl, but all that plays on his station is nu-metal from the mid-aughts and stuff like Breaking Benjamin and Godsmack and Muse. His "opinion" segments and audience participation rituals are not things I like to discuss on Factually Pointless.***
***now I will have to write about that kind of stuff even though I would rather not. Not today, though.
Wednesday, May 8, 2019
#171
Post number one hundred and seventy-one! Such a cool number. It's Album Week 2019, so I won't blather on, but the foremost thing is that the number one hundred and seventy-one is an anagram of the number one hundred and seventeen. They are not anagram numbers, which is its own thing. Just anagrams of each other.
*
Being into a particular album with all of your friends at once is a special thing, kind of a social supersigil. Like you're all flying the same invisible flag, and wearing the same invisible patch over your hearts. It may happen a great deal that a few of your friends are into the same album, that maybe three of you have a special thing about the same album, that you and one other person in the group are having a freakout over the same album, that people have acquaintances and friends and family members outside of the group with whom albums are being shared and subsequently disseminated throughout the group. Standard activity. Fragments clashing, accepted by some and rejected by others. Codes inscribing themselves into a mainframe or failing to penetrate firewalls.
Standard thereby is that a whole group of friends may be into a set of the same songs, a blanket woven from the preferences and suggestions of several souls, drawn from a wide range of different sources, and used to cover a whole web of interrelation. A floating playlist whose notes swirl around a connected pack of human beings and pierce their hearts in turn to get a thread through, to bind them. Magic is that simple, and that irrevocable.
For a whole album to nail a whole group in the head all at once is a rarer thing, provided you have in mind a group of friends whose tastes, preferences, and ideas cover a disparate range. I've never hung out with a bunch of people who are just like me and like everything I like and dislike everything I dislike, so I can only think of perhaps only one album that has taken everyone I am close to at the moment into its belly.
Don't remember which album it was. Something embarrassing I'm protecting myself from, probably; must be bad, because I'm not very sorry about liking the stuff I like. Whatever it was, I remember how it felt to be a teenager and ride around town listening to it. It is difficult to be a teenager, you're fucking feral, helpless not to broadcast everything you're feeling which is literally everything so no one thing is correct, and the tendency of existence to radically amplify renders you constantly vulnerable to ever-more complicated and acute forms of despair.
So when a bunch of teenagers are all in a good mood, even blissing out, at the same time, it's one of those legitimate miracles. Albums can do that, they have that power of suspension, that ability to gather together and lift up.
*
Yo, I didn't moisturize my hands yesterday! What an ultramaroon.
--JL
*
Being into a particular album with all of your friends at once is a special thing, kind of a social supersigil. Like you're all flying the same invisible flag, and wearing the same invisible patch over your hearts. It may happen a great deal that a few of your friends are into the same album, that maybe three of you have a special thing about the same album, that you and one other person in the group are having a freakout over the same album, that people have acquaintances and friends and family members outside of the group with whom albums are being shared and subsequently disseminated throughout the group. Standard activity. Fragments clashing, accepted by some and rejected by others. Codes inscribing themselves into a mainframe or failing to penetrate firewalls.
Standard thereby is that a whole group of friends may be into a set of the same songs, a blanket woven from the preferences and suggestions of several souls, drawn from a wide range of different sources, and used to cover a whole web of interrelation. A floating playlist whose notes swirl around a connected pack of human beings and pierce their hearts in turn to get a thread through, to bind them. Magic is that simple, and that irrevocable.
For a whole album to nail a whole group in the head all at once is a rarer thing, provided you have in mind a group of friends whose tastes, preferences, and ideas cover a disparate range. I've never hung out with a bunch of people who are just like me and like everything I like and dislike everything I dislike, so I can only think of perhaps only one album that has taken everyone I am close to at the moment into its belly.
Don't remember which album it was. Something embarrassing I'm protecting myself from, probably; must be bad, because I'm not very sorry about liking the stuff I like. Whatever it was, I remember how it felt to be a teenager and ride around town listening to it. It is difficult to be a teenager, you're fucking feral, helpless not to broadcast everything you're feeling which is literally everything so no one thing is correct, and the tendency of existence to radically amplify renders you constantly vulnerable to ever-more complicated and acute forms of despair.
So when a bunch of teenagers are all in a good mood, even blissing out, at the same time, it's one of those legitimate miracles. Albums can do that, they have that power of suspension, that ability to gather together and lift up.
*
Yo, I didn't moisturize my hands yesterday! What an ultramaroon.
--JL
Tuesday, May 7, 2019
#170
Album Week continues today! I need to moisturize my hands. They're not as bad as they were a little over a week ago, when they could have passed for those of a corpse, but the whole point is to stay ahead of these things.
I use Badger Balm For Hardworking Hands. It is organic and comes in a little metal tin, and on the side it says THIS STUFF WORKS. When appraising the product, this simultaneously hilarious and no-nonsense statement struck the bargain. It does, too. And the badger on the lid is just the handsomest little chap.
*
The cover of the AC/DC album Highway to Hell has some men on it, and one of them has devil horns and is holding his own devil tail as though it were his penis. I guess this album tells you enough about itself in this way. This album is a stupid dude thing in a very accented sense, almost in the way of being an archetype, but it does not lose the fundamental stupidity. So without making the error of inserting any gravity, of taking itself seriously at all, it is transcendent'ly libidinal, honest, funny, and scary.
Angus and Malcolm Young are straight-up good guitarists. Listening to the guitars on this record is like eating delicious crispy fried seafood, all juicy and steaming. Having a problem with these guitars is a definite sign that you're a fair hike up your own ass. If that offends you, I am glad that it does. You need to unclench your guts enough to let your balls drop, then find someone to ferociously make out with and slowly, richly make love to as Touch Too Much oozes out of the speakers like flaming sex honey.
That's basically what this album is all about.
*
Have a good Tuesday, everybody. Album Week 2019.
--JL
I use Badger Balm For Hardworking Hands. It is organic and comes in a little metal tin, and on the side it says THIS STUFF WORKS. When appraising the product, this simultaneously hilarious and no-nonsense statement struck the bargain. It does, too. And the badger on the lid is just the handsomest little chap.
*
The cover of the AC/DC album Highway to Hell has some men on it, and one of them has devil horns and is holding his own devil tail as though it were his penis. I guess this album tells you enough about itself in this way. This album is a stupid dude thing in a very accented sense, almost in the way of being an archetype, but it does not lose the fundamental stupidity. So without making the error of inserting any gravity, of taking itself seriously at all, it is transcendent'ly libidinal, honest, funny, and scary.
Angus and Malcolm Young are straight-up good guitarists. Listening to the guitars on this record is like eating delicious crispy fried seafood, all juicy and steaming. Having a problem with these guitars is a definite sign that you're a fair hike up your own ass. If that offends you, I am glad that it does. You need to unclench your guts enough to let your balls drop, then find someone to ferociously make out with and slowly, richly make love to as Touch Too Much oozes out of the speakers like flaming sex honey.
That's basically what this album is all about.
*
Have a good Tuesday, everybody. Album Week 2019.
--JL
Saturday, May 4, 2019
#169
Album Week! Album Week 2019! Ugh.
*
Today's album will also be selected at random from my CD case and in an identical manner.
Ratatat's Magnifique, eh? Well. That's pretty easy. Guess I have nothing to grouse about, really.
This album is very creamy. Tracks two, three, five, seven, eight, and nine are the best tracks. Some people might find the structures a touch repetitive, especially in track eight. That's cool. I think it's all good. These dudes make very pleasing sounds, they know good sounds to make.
A good time to listen to this album is when you want to go kind of bonkers but have to sit pretty close to absolutely still. It is of course fine music for the club or bumpin' house party. A good state of mind for this album is a craving for complex flourishes and a desire for electronic tones that sound strained and squeezed out in very pleasing ways, like the notes are escaping situations of extreme smothering pressure to reach your ears and are liquid and graceful and urgent as a result. Water squeezed from someone's cupped palms. Also if you seek beats that rely on light taps and clacks more than thuds and strikes, this and other Ratatat albums are a fine place to look.
Also it is good driving music.
*
Wilco is some of the best driving music. Sky Blue Sky is the exact album for driving a loved one to the airport as the sun is getting ready to come up.
Woo! Bonus album ideas. Value for money.
*
Hey! Hey. Notes=Tones. Anagram. That's pretty cool.
*
I have things going on that are much more interesting to me than albums right now, but that is actually what Album Week is for; to give the blog a job that isn't to do so much with me. At a juncture in which I could use the privacy and self-protection afforded by placing a project at the center of the wild roll of the dice that is filling in this text field.
Maybe the next one will be a little more high-effort? It's just, the massive advantage of not getting paid by the word or competing with a thousand other greasy musical vultures is getting to just say whatever pops into my head; don't have to drive or puncture sales, match tone, prove anything, or even make a salient point.
When you get right down to it, there is no need.
--JL
*
Today's album will also be selected at random from my CD case and in an identical manner.
Ratatat's Magnifique, eh? Well. That's pretty easy. Guess I have nothing to grouse about, really.
This album is very creamy. Tracks two, three, five, seven, eight, and nine are the best tracks. Some people might find the structures a touch repetitive, especially in track eight. That's cool. I think it's all good. These dudes make very pleasing sounds, they know good sounds to make.
A good time to listen to this album is when you want to go kind of bonkers but have to sit pretty close to absolutely still. It is of course fine music for the club or bumpin' house party. A good state of mind for this album is a craving for complex flourishes and a desire for electronic tones that sound strained and squeezed out in very pleasing ways, like the notes are escaping situations of extreme smothering pressure to reach your ears and are liquid and graceful and urgent as a result. Water squeezed from someone's cupped palms. Also if you seek beats that rely on light taps and clacks more than thuds and strikes, this and other Ratatat albums are a fine place to look.
Also it is good driving music.
*
Wilco is some of the best driving music. Sky Blue Sky is the exact album for driving a loved one to the airport as the sun is getting ready to come up.
Woo! Bonus album ideas. Value for money.
*
Hey! Hey. Notes=Tones. Anagram. That's pretty cool.
*
I have things going on that are much more interesting to me than albums right now, but that is actually what Album Week is for; to give the blog a job that isn't to do so much with me. At a juncture in which I could use the privacy and self-protection afforded by placing a project at the center of the wild roll of the dice that is filling in this text field.
Maybe the next one will be a little more high-effort? It's just, the massive advantage of not getting paid by the word or competing with a thousand other greasy musical vultures is getting to just say whatever pops into my head; don't have to drive or puncture sales, match tone, prove anything, or even make a salient point.
When you get right down to it, there is no need.
--JL
Friday, May 3, 2019
#168
Album Week! Haven't written very much about music for this blog, because my last and hopefully properly dead and unfindable (haha what a fun dream) blog was supposedly about music. It was only conceptually attached to music, but I did write a lot about music, since that is something I like to do.
Well, liked to do. Eventually a disgust in myself and in what I was doing surged over me with such force that my very bone structure altered slightly.
Running around with bands and being in bands and engaging with scenes is something I walked away from very decidedly. Even playing my own music and composing and putting out my own stuff has become questionable to me and perhaps something I will walk away from as well. Shit has gotten to where I listen to less music than I ever have in my life.
Music is one of the best thing about life, though, no question, and as I've been feeling like I've neglected music, which made me sad, I thought I'd write down some thoughts about some albums over the next seven posts.
Album Week! Fuck art, music is hateful. Strap in.
*
This first album was selected by grabbing my big binder full of CD's, whapping it open on my lap, and jabbing a finger at it with my eyes closed.
Thelonious Monk with John Coltrane.
Clearly I am being tested.
What the fuck am I supposed to say about this record? Two dudes who play their instruments in a singular fashion they essentially invented themselves get together in the Five Spot Club. At one point John plays the chorus of one of those marchy obnoxious folk tunes they make you learn in elementary school (or did he just like, do a reveille? I forget, he inserts something, at any rate) in the middle of one of his spattering solo runs, which he had used to hint at the fact that he might do that. Then he does it and you're like "wow, man, you actually did it". Thelonious Monk is Thelonious Monk. Dude's a mega genius and does no wrong on the keys, the way that dude interacts with the keys is a special thing. Snare drum is very pronounced in the mix. It's Art Blakey, everything with the drums is perfect.
It's fucking good. You should listen to it. Coltrane's not doing any of that shit where it seems like he's having an actual vitriolic fight with his sax but he is twisting the limits of tone. Mostly they're just having fun. An easy, smoky kind of night, complex shit is happening but it's not screaming about itself. Play it before dinner, you can dance to this one.
--JL
Well, liked to do. Eventually a disgust in myself and in what I was doing surged over me with such force that my very bone structure altered slightly.
Running around with bands and being in bands and engaging with scenes is something I walked away from very decidedly. Even playing my own music and composing and putting out my own stuff has become questionable to me and perhaps something I will walk away from as well. Shit has gotten to where I listen to less music than I ever have in my life.
Music is one of the best thing about life, though, no question, and as I've been feeling like I've neglected music, which made me sad, I thought I'd write down some thoughts about some albums over the next seven posts.
Album Week! Fuck art, music is hateful. Strap in.
*
This first album was selected by grabbing my big binder full of CD's, whapping it open on my lap, and jabbing a finger at it with my eyes closed.
Thelonious Monk with John Coltrane.
Clearly I am being tested.
What the fuck am I supposed to say about this record? Two dudes who play their instruments in a singular fashion they essentially invented themselves get together in the Five Spot Club. At one point John plays the chorus of one of those marchy obnoxious folk tunes they make you learn in elementary school (or did he just like, do a reveille? I forget, he inserts something, at any rate) in the middle of one of his spattering solo runs, which he had used to hint at the fact that he might do that. Then he does it and you're like "wow, man, you actually did it". Thelonious Monk is Thelonious Monk. Dude's a mega genius and does no wrong on the keys, the way that dude interacts with the keys is a special thing. Snare drum is very pronounced in the mix. It's Art Blakey, everything with the drums is perfect.
It's fucking good. You should listen to it. Coltrane's not doing any of that shit where it seems like he's having an actual vitriolic fight with his sax but he is twisting the limits of tone. Mostly they're just having fun. An easy, smoky kind of night, complex shit is happening but it's not screaming about itself. Play it before dinner, you can dance to this one.
--JL
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