Latest Entries In My Musical Brain-Diary
You’ll surmise that I haven’t yet gotten started on the current musical year (Cut Copy is at the front of my musical brain-queue, I promise), but these diary pages still give off a fresh odor.
Grace Jones – Nightclubbing (1981)
This is how it must have sounded when the poor artists of New York City got rich and famous at the turn of a decade, but still couldn’t shake that haunted feeling.
Wu-Tang Clan – Enter The Wu-Tang (36 Chambers) (1993)
I make halfhearted forays into rap from time to time (as a listener, I mean), and here now is an album that could make a rap convert of me. No one told me (or maybe I wasn’t listening) how spartan and beautiful these productions are. I feel I grew up with the infamy of ODB, but the Wu-Tang solo careers have told us that he was never the defining member: these are some of the least dirty and bastardy musicians I’ve heard.
Hall & Oates – The Very Best of Daryl Hall | John Oates (RCA, 2001)
They never doubted they’d be a songwriting team to rival Lennon & McCartney, and even if they conquered hearts one song at a time, their pop ascent is most evident in the way these songs demand to be heard in bulk, and not as random, innocuous snatches of radio, supermarket and movie trailer ubiquity.
Ride – Going Blank Again (1992)
Our leader Jack Rabid sometimes speaks of “Going Blank Again-era Ride.” I’m still sorting out what sets this apart from Nowhere-era Ride, what makes it singularly influential, but already Blank is certifiably lunatic (bouncy, diffuse, I mean) next to Nowhere‘s high, high density and total sense of purpose.
R.E.M. – The Complete Works
I’m entirely unable to keep any critical distance from R.E.M., and for that I’m (not very) sorry. The quality (or qualities, I should say) of Collapse Into Now will define what my life means for the rest of this year, so in preparation I’ve listened to most (and soon all) of their albums in recent weeks, to remember what my life has meant so far. I’ll always want to know what’s on Michael Stipe‘s mind.
Patti Smith – 1974-78; Just Kids (memoir, 2010)
And to know what’s on his mind, you have to know what’s on her mind.
Dennis Cooper – Try (novel, 1994)
Hidden inside the story of Ziggy, a teenager who writes I Apologize, “A Magazine for the Sexually Abused,” is some of the best Hüsker Dü criticism I’ve read. The magazine’s namesake is described as “a raucous, fierce, kind of confused, pretty rant against the way the world works that’s so appropriate to his current situation it’s almost hilarious.” Bob Mould is (Deerhunter muse) Cooper’s muse.
Captured Tracks
Like Slumberland Records before it, this Brooklyn label guarantees that the noisy pop and shoegazery it provides will be truly vital, not cursory rehashes of good old days. Don’t let flagship band Wild Nothing obscure other nice offerings, in particular Minks (the heady pop matter of whose new By The Hedge matters), Beach Fossils, Grass Widow, Aias, Girls Names, and the next band everyone will love, Veronica Falls (although it’s the Trouble Records 7” of “Found Love in a Graveyard,” and not the Captured Tracks version, that has the miraculous “Stephen” as its b-side. I have a dream where I listen to that song every day for the rest of my life and all my worries melt away forever.)
Twin Sister – Color Your Life (2010)
My most sinful omission from last year’s top ten list, Color Your Life represents the hope of weird pop music in the age of the internet. The best journey money can’t buy.
Billie Holiday (for Teddy Wilson & His Orchestra) – “Things Are Looking Up” (1937)
It is the nature of an unhappy artist like Billie Holiday that her happiest songs are also her saddest: “My depression is unmistakably through…” Today it is this song that moves me, tomorrow it will be another.
