This past week, I was on vacation. When asked, the easy answer would be “I didn’t go anywhere,” but that’s not entirely true. We went all over the place; we just never left the state.
I’ve mentioned it previously, but even after living here for over 20 years, I still don’t have to go too far to feel like I’m in another country (and depending on how “red” it is, another universe). Go far enough afield and even the radio stations can feel foreign in their own way.
Even where we were, there were plenty of choices, including one that seemed purpose-built for Parrot Heads that got lost on the way to living their best (salt) life and wound up on Lake Michigan instead. I like Buffett, but man, I heard more than my share.
You would also be (pick one: horrified/surprised/delighted) to know that Bon Jovi is still in heavy rotation in some spots.
Miss the Slippery When Wet era? NE Wisconsin’s for you!
But!
In an era of automated playlists and robo-DJs, these stations feel anachronistic…and like sweet relief. Yes, even the ones that are, in theory, talk radio, but in reality just an angry guy shouting into the void from the antenna on the horizon. No matter how much iHeartRadio (or Brendan Carr) tries to tell you otherwise, the airwaves still belong to the people, and there’s still some people-powered stations, too.
Stations like this are the last stand against the Telecommunications Act of 1996. These over-the-air Alamos holding the line against automation and misinformation are usually found on the left side of your dial, and traveling through their range is all the better because of ‘em—even when they play “Livin’ on a Prayer.”
KA—
On to the music…
No Bon Jovi, but this week’s human-powered playlist features brand new tracks from Hazel English, Office Dog, The Tubs, Wishy, and more. Wisconsin’s well represented (in a good way!) with sounds from Red Pants and Heavy Looks. Our friends Tamara Casey and Patrick Fellows are also here with “Bad Decisions” and “Seen it All” respectively.
100 lifetimes ago, I worked in a record store. The manager wouldn’t let us play Liz Phair’s Exile in Guyville, and instead tried to helpfully suggest…Shawn Colvin.
In hindsight, it wasn’t the worst choice. But at the time, it seemed kinda awful? Colvin just wasn’t writing stuff like this:
And the license said you had to stick around until I was dead But if you’re tired of looking at my face, I guess I already am But you’ve never been a waste of my time It’s never been a drag So take a deep breath and count back from ten And maybe you’ll be alright
Look, there’s no denying Phair’s talent, but when Exile came out, owning it felt like a very performative thing to do. Girls liked it because it represented the “f**k you” they’d wanted to say for years. Guys bought it ’cause they wanted those girls to… like them.
None of that is fair to Phair, whose only crime was putting together a record with an openness, vulnerability, and ferocity we’d never seen before. Lost in titillating lyrics about BJ queens and f’ing and running were a searing indictment (and mild hit) about the music scene (“Never Said”) and a track about the fine line between being friends and lovers and how that often becomes a tripping hazard (“Divorce song”). Not for nothing, Hrishikesh Hirway’s Song Exploder podcast did a great episode breaking down the latter.
We all caught up with her eventually, and Exile In Guyville long ago earned its rightful place in the alternative rock canon. The record turns 33 today and still seems a bit ahead of it’s time.
Tell me: what do you think?
KA—
On to the music…
Besides Phair, this week we’ve got a few old faves from VU, Material Issue and The Police. There’s also a ton of fresh tracks from the likes of Hawk and Steel, Kelz, Julia Jacklin and feeble little horse.
Today we’re taking a quick look at records from Unwound and Lovage.
Mike Patton contains multitudes. For every weird or abrasive track he’s been on (i.e. anything by Mr. Bungle), there’s been an equal number of straight up rockers, ballads, or smoothed out tracks.
He’s also no stranger to concept albums (see again: Mr. Bungle). Nor is Nathaniel Merriweather aka Dan the Automator, aka one half of Handsome Boy Modeling School. The two of them team up with singer Jennifer Charles and Kid Koala to record the one and only Lovage release, Music to Make Love to Your Old Lady By.
The record’s as low key as you might assume, with a lovesexy vibe, some sensuous beats, and Cinemax-level lyrics. It’s also a record that attempts to straddle the line between sincerity and comedic irony. You can’t go more than a verse or two without tripping over a double entendre. it’s louche all the way down, including the cover art inspired by none other that Serge Gainsbourg’s Nᵒ 2 LP.
Sometimes it works, sometimes the punchline fails to land. Did we really need yet another fucking record with skits in it? Long time readers may recall that this is a pet peeve of mine, and in the land rush to CDs taking place in the early aughts, somebody somewhere thought this would be a great way to fill out the newly available space on LPs (Spoiler: It’s not). “Love that Lovage, Baby” at least has Damon Albarn on it, so there’s that, I ’spose. And it borrows heavily from Donna Summer’s Love to Love You, which is great. Nevertheless…
(exhale)
Going the other way, the chemistry between Patton and Charles gets harder to ignore with each track. Is this a bit they’re both really committed to? Maybe it started out that way and blossomed into something real? Beats me, but it’s smoldering like lava the whole way through the record. Even at the end on “Archie and Veronica,” which is about (*checks notes)… banging a corpse?! Okay then.
All that aside, the record’s real superpower are the beats. When it comes to taking samples and building a soundscape, Dan the Automator is one of the best to ever do it.
Shame that Lovage was a one-and-done project. The premise only has so much runway, but these three (and friends along for the ride) are clearly in their element and having a good time. And with a title like this how could they not be? You were expecting a dirge?
You know that internet trend where someone’ll post “Don’t ask me to explain it, but…”?
Yeah. I don’t know how to explain it, but Leaves Turn Inside You couldn’t have come from anywhere but where it did. It’s extremely Olympia-coded and feels like the latest model to roll off the K-Records factory floor. That’s neither derogatory nor regressive.
I happen to like that sound and Unwound’s got it for days.
There is a certain melancholic detachment that comes with existing in a place where it rains a lot. I don’t mean the overt, back of hand on forehead type stuff. It’s just how a lot of PNW’ers are (I say this as a native). Whether it’s the minutes-long drone on “We Invent You” that kicks things off, or the icy synths (synths! from Olympia!) on “Treachery” that reframes things, that mood is all over the record and well, it fits.
For all the jangle (again: Olympia) and subtle vocals, there’s an undercurrent of tension that the listener can never quite shake—this is not something to play when you’re out on the water with the boys! But it is something you’ll want to have close by when you’re in the mood for something brooding and engaging in equal measure. It’s heavy without feeling oppressive.
In ’01 I was in a dead era as far as going to shows, but I could swear I’d seen them before. there was an time where I basically lived at the X-Ray Cafe and they had a ton of shows there in ’91-’92. Surely I’d been there for one of ’em? I wish I could remember! Time seems to have faded my memory (along with my hearing). No matter. Unwound is a great PNW band and Leaves Turn Inside You is an easy record to fall in love with. Just don’t ask me to explain it.
Bottom Line: After a few days of records not quite landing, we’ve arrived at what’ll be a tough call for me. Lovage strikes me as the sort of band we’d listen to on the way to see Unwound. On my bracket I cheaped out and went for the latter as they’re the higher seed. My vote today? I honestly don’t know. It’s gonna be a game time decision…
Any thoughts on either of these records? Agree/disagree with my take? Sound off in the comments!
A Monthy Python castmate, Elvis, and several world cup soccer players all walk into a $100 million cage…
It sounds like the start of a bad joke, doesn’t it?
If I told you they were there to play in a 3v3 8-team single elimination goal tournament, all to the sounds of a (then) 34-year-old song remade by a Dutch artist best known for working on Tomb Raider, it’d just get weird, right?
The Scorpion KO tournament was part of an award-winning ad campaign, with star players competing in a secret tournament onboard a ghost ship.
Former Manchester United Star Eric Cantona was more emcee than referee, and the entire thing was directed by Monty Python’s Terry Gilliam.
That tournament spawned local versions worldwide, with an estimated 1–2 million kids participating worldwide.
The campaign was a huge success, with Nike president Mark Parker commenting, “This spring’s integrated football marketing initiative was the most comprehensive and successful global campaign ever executed by Nike.”
The game might’ve come easy, but the soundtrack? Not so much.
“The music was a real monkey wrench. We just could not land the right track to pull it together. If you turn the audio off and try to follow this thing, it’s pretty hectic beyond the colours of the jerseys. There was just no obvious tone or tenor. We tried rock, metal — dark, intense stuff — but it didn’t really underscore what we were seeing.
“We talked to all sorts of music producers, contracted a band, some hot producers. They brought in stuff to play, and we were very polite, but I remember thinking, ‘Oh my God, this is a disaster’.
Somehow it all worked out in the end, with the song’s remix charted in dozens of countries, hitting #1 in several.
Do you remember this commercial (or the 2002 World Cup)? Who ya got for this tourney?
KA—
On to the music…
This week what’s old is new again with a killer remix of New Order’s “Spooky.” We’ve also got some (actually) brand new tracks from Wishy, Vienna, The Mountain Goats, and Boston’s Good June. A great setlist to either liven up your commute, play on a road trip or soundtrack your next soccer tournament.
Today we’re taking a quick look at Ruby’s Short Staffed at the Gene Pool as it faces off against Missy Elliott’s Miss E: So Addictive!
Imagine, if you will, a world where, instead of venturing to America’s Dairyland, Shirley Manson decides to make a record with, say, Tricky or Thievery Corporation. Feel free to substitute Curve’s Toni Halliday here if you prefer.
If you squint hard enough, you can see it—and when you do, you’ll have a pretty good idea of what Short-Staffed at the Gene Pool sounds like. Instead of Manson, we get Lesley Rankine, late of Silverfish (instead of Angelfish…another parallel?).
In case that didn’t work, the short version is this: full-voiced female vocals, sometimes chanteuse, sometimes vixen, pouting and preening and snarling over synth grooves and post-party sounds.
The sounds? They’re as varied as the vocals they support. Together with producer Mark Walk (Skinny Puppy), they hit on everything from trip-hop to rock to Latin-ish grooves (“Lamplight”), which, to torture the analogy, feels like a slinkier version of Garbage’s “Queer.”
Some of it delves a little too far into the bleeps and bloops for my taste (“Cargo”), but the good far outweighs the bad here. Indeed, the very next track, “Sweet Is,” reminds me of the poppiest sides of Stereolab or even Pizzicato Five.
Really, whatever genre they venture through, they never forget to bring along a groove. Prioritizing the hook (writ large) takes this from a record that “forces you to pay attention” (read: not very good, but I hope there’s something in there) to something equally at home soundtracking the after-after party, your commute, or a dinner party with the coolest people you know.
Maybe even one in the Dairyland.
I’d never heard a Ruby record before just now. Oddly, I’ve heard Missy Elliott countless times. Yet the score for Short-Staffed and Miss E was a 0–0 tie.
“Get Ur Freak On” was—and is—an inescapable anthem, but I couldn’t name a single other track on the record. And fair play to Elliott—I had to laugh when I heard her let us all know about giving us “some shit that you never heard before.” I mean, it works on so many levels.
Anyway, I don’t know enough about hip-hop to speak on it intelligently, so I’ll just say this: Elliott and her partner in crime, Timbaland, come out of the lab with a very distinct sound each time they work together. I’d say when they get back to what they know, that’s when the record works best. When Elliott tries to veer into ballad territory, it stumbles.
I don’t know if it represents the Hampton Roads scene broadly speaking, or if they created it and everyone followed. Probably the latter. Whatever. She’s got bars for days, and there’s no shortage of beats here to make you scream “Hollah!
Bottom Line:Short Staffed… is the sort of record I like to root for, and anything can happen, but I think it’s going to be Missy Elliott in a rout.
Any thoughts on either of these records? Agree/disagree with my take? Sound off in the comments!
Best Record of 2001 Day 58: The story of an unappreciated pop masterpiece and the demise of a great band that never got their due.
Cover art courtesy of Velocette Records
Good morning!
For the last guest post in Round 1, Matty Ctakes the wheel and shares his take on Beulah’s The Coast Is Never Clear.
If you ask him, Matt Carlson will likely answer that he’s “a musician.” That’s of course very true-I’ve been lucky enough to hear him play. But he’s also a writer, podcaster, hosts a radio show, runs a record label, and more. And that doesn’t even touch on the work he does here on the platform with What Am I Making. If you ask me, he’s someone who’s work you should check out- there’s something there for everyone.
The words—and work— below the jump are all his, and I’m beyond grateful he let me share this article with everyone! I think you’ll dig it. When you’re done here, please be sure to check out more of his work!
KA—
2001 was a pretty damned good year in music.
The charts were littered with a variety of styles from Radiohead, Jay Z, The Weezer, and more. There were breakout records from The Strokes, Aaliyah, The White Stripes and The Shins. Radiohead’s Amnesiac topped many best of lists for the year.
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It was an exciting time of variety and energy. There was bandwidth for all of these records to coexist with one another in a vibrant ecosystem of diversity and experimentation.
Your local college station very liked played new songs from Low, Nick Cave, Bob Dylan, Missy Elliott, Gorillaz and Muse. It feels like a lifetime ago.
Seeing this landscape for sounds getting attention in 2001 makes it all the more puzzling how a record as brilliant as Beulah’s The Coast Is Never Clear could be missed in its own time, and then simply forgotten.
Beulah first came to prominence in the indie rock boom of the mid to late-nineties. Formed in San Francisco, CA by Miles Kurosky and Bill Swan, the band forged a sound from the sun soaked harmonies of The Beach Boys, syrupy melodies and the voice of an unreliable narrator weaving us through the California twilight at the end of the century.
Robert Schneider of Apples In Stereo heard a cassette of some early demos and offered to master the band’s first album Handsome Western States, which was released in 1997.
The lo-fi affair was a nice debut effort, but was bolstered by Schneider’s connection to the Elephant 6 Collective, and the blossoming success of Elephant 6 label mates, Neutral Milk Hotel. The connection with Elephant 6 would stick for better or worse, despite the fact that Schneider mastering the album and a 7” single were band’s only affiliation with the legendary collective.
The follow up, a decidedly more mid-fi sounding effort, When Your Heartstrings Break arrived in 1999. In addition to better sonic quality, there was a leveling up in the songwriting and arrangements on this second record. Instead of a sophomore slump, Beulah seemed to be surging.
The opening strains of Hello Resolven set the scene of The Coast Is Never Clear in cinematic fashion. Sickly sweet strings and a ghostly ethereal bell ring out to the vocal refrain,
“Wake up the king/Wake up the queen/Everybody laugh, everybody sing/It’s over . . . it’s over.”
What follows is a Southern California sunshine record that feels as though it were ghost written by Raymond Chandler. Despite overt poppiness oozing from nearly every note and arrangement, The Coast Is Never Clear is the perfect example of what Tom Waits once called, “Beautiful melodies telling me terrible things”.
Perhaps the best example of this can be found in the chorus of album highlight, Gene Autry. The song is ostensibly the tale of a journey to the west coast in a quest for self discovery and renewal. What follows is a conclusion summed up by the hooky chorus, “The city spreads out, just like a cut vein/Everybody drowns sad and lonely, alright”.
We can change the scenery but we cannot change the core of ourselves by relocation alone. The echoes of loneliness and desperation are littered within the words of these songs, all while the grooves pour out easy to swallow melodies and harmony.
On A Good Man Is Easy To Kill, Kurosky sings,
And when they cut out your lung You said we could all breathe easy The hole swallowed your heart When they drilled holes in your skull And screwed that halo to your head Did you think you could fly?
It’s hard to know if the song is about Kurosky’s own personal health struggles, of which he has had many, or if this the tale of a friend, a partner, or complete fiction. In the end, it’s a song of survival and refusal to go quietly into that good night. Something Beulah is also struggling to do. Maybe the band itself is the hole in the heart.
The song title is of course a nod to the great southern gothic master Flannery O’Connor, and her famous story, A Good Man Is Hard To Find. Much like O’Connor, lyricist Kurosky takes a normal form, and turns it on its head.
For O’Connor the form was the short story. For Beulah, it’s a sunny pop song inflected with a stark honesty and darkness that is both jarring and easy to overlook. It’s a crafty way to deliver a brilliant and multileveled work. It’s also easy to miss just how brilliant it actually is.
After some label mergers, and various corporate machinations, Velocette Records released The Coast Is Never Clear in America on the auspicious date of September 11, 2001.
It’s unlikely that the unfortunate timing of the album’s release led to its under—appreciated status, but it cannot have helped. It was also lost in a sea of great records by bands with more momentum and greater resources than Beulah.
While this record holds its own against great albums of the era like Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, The Soft Bulletin and And Then Nothing Turned Itself Inside Out, this was a band without the necessary foundation in place and the proper amount of luck and resources to get their just desserts.
The film A Good Band Is Easy To Kill is an unflinching, but fascinating look at the final tour for Beulah. The tour takes place in the wake of the band releasing their fourth and final album, Yoko. It’s a make or break moment for Kurosky, Swan and co.
Spoiler alert: They don’t make it.
It’s a great look at a very good band making terrific records and still not being able to make it work. And this was in a time when it was far easier to make it as an independent musician than it is a quarter century later.
Kurosky went gone on to release an excellent solo record called The Desert of Shallow Effects in 2010, but Beulah has remained dormant since 2004. There has been recent talk of a follow up to that record on varying social media accounts, but nothing has surfaced as yet.
As a songwriter and singer, I am in awe of The Coast Is Never Clear. It’s a masterwork of storytelling, soundscapes and songwriting. It’s a record I wish I had been a part of. My band The Stick Arounds even recorded a version of Gene Autry and we play it often at our live shows.
They say that “if you build it, they will come”. Beulah is living proof that they might not, but it’s worth building it anyway.
Cheers,
Matty C
Thank you again to Matty for today’s post! Please be sure to check out more of his work over at What Am I Making! Any thoughts on this record? Agree/disagree with his take? Sound off in the comments!
We’re in for a treat today, as Sam Colttakes the wheel and shares his take on Radiohead’s Amnesiac LP.
If you’ve been here for a minute, you’ve seen Sam’s work before. He and I did a Top 100 Series, are part of a group that shares our year-end lists, and, of course, have a monthly series on, well, whatever we find interesting.
You likely also know my feelings on Radiohead, and Sam’s quest to get me to come around on them. The TL;DR for new folks: he loves ‘em, and I don’t. But he’s also a helluva writer I’m lucky to get to “collab” with every month, and for as much as I give the band shi*t, I can’t think of anyone who’ll give the record its due more than him.
The words—and work— below the jump are all his, and I’m beyond grateful he let me share this with everyone! I think you’ll dig it, too. When you’re done here, please be sure to check out more of his work at This Is a Newsletter!
KA—
Supposedly made up of tracks that were recorded during the Kid A sessions, Amnesiac has been derisively called “Kid B,” and while there’s some truth to that statement, it’s also underselling the album a bit. In the aftermath of releasing a decade-defining alt-rock masterpiece, Radiohead spent years tearing apart their sound, reconstructing it, then found themselves with a deluge of material once the pieces started to fall into place. Kid A was the spearhead of their reinvention, carefully assembled as a statement of intent—one of alienation, disillusionment, and paranoia in an increasingly digitized and atomized world.
As a companion album, Amnesiac is the schizophrenic inverse: While it’s not Frankenstein-ed out of discards, it does serve as a catch-all repository for everything that didn’t suit the more controlled tracklist of its predecessor. The band once described Kid A as the equivalent of starting a forest fire from a great distance, while Amnesiac is standing at the center of the blaze. This is certainly not an immediately appealing album like The Bends or In Rainbows, but it pushes Kid A’s electronic experimentation to more anxious lengths. Amnesiac fills the vacant, desolate void within Kid A with a harrowing and offbeat freneticism. It’s more of a dark nebula than a shining star, reminiscent of Joy Division’s Closer, David Bowie’s Low, or other atmospheres of gloom.
For a band with an impeccable record of providing quality album openers, “Packt Like Sardines in a Crushd Tin Box” is particularly noteworthy, kicking off with these clanging hollow percussions and cold, desperate synths before Thom Yorke’s droning voice repeats “I’m a reasonable man, get off my case.” The transition to “Pyramid Song” is a bit jarring, but it’s an all-time Radiohead track; disquietly haunting and depressingly beautiful, and the way it descends with ghostly falsettos and ethereal strings is spine-tingling. With its razor-sharp groove, “I Might Be Wrong” is Radiohead’s interpretation of dance music, a nerve-wracking, anxiety-inducing bassline complemented by a jerky, jangling guitar riff. “Knives Out” is somewhat of an olive branch to everyone who thought the band had abandoned guitars completely, but because of its relative normality, it sounds the most alien of any track on Amnesiac, despite it being an odd endless rush forward without a chorus and seemingly beginning mid-riff.
Some of this is Radiohead at their least compromising. The backing track for “Like Spinning Plates” is a backmasked version of another song that hasn’t been released yet, and Yorke’s rising vocals syncopate with the abstract soundscape, making it feel apocalyptic and strikingly moving. “Pulk/Pull Revolving Doors” is the skeletal backing track as an attempt to record the already-fabled “True Love Waits,” but with all its melody stripped out so it sounds like a robot repeatedly banging its head against a wall. The jazz-tinged “You and Whose Army?” and “Dollars and Cents” have crescendos that carry the same gloomy power as OK Computer but reshaped into something more of a free-form jam sesh.
Amnesiac isn’t necessarily a challenging album as much as it’s disorganized and dense, flipping itself around and over its head with every subsequent song, taking you through the gamut of Radiohead’s different sounds. There’s no convenient cohesive harmony, just a collection of screams colliding into one another and forging a new context through the cacophony. It pulls the listener from one extreme to the other without pause, except for the interlude “Hunting Bears,” which offers a moment of quiet amid the maelstrom.
This album certainly deserves at least some of the criticisms directed towards it. It’s an unhinged mess that swings wildly in quality, endlessly compared against its big brother and losing in obvious ways. But even a lesser Radiohead project—it ranks sixth in my personal rankings—is still a very good album. Even at its most alienating, meandering, or downright messy, much of it is perversely interesting and positively bewildering, making for an enjoyable and revelatory listen.
Amnesiac isn’t really a grower as much as it’s a grab bag of fragmented ideas that offers something different each time you put your hand in it. It’s the release that most explicitly states that Radiohead was done with being a straightforward rock band, or anything other than some guys trying to make the most interesting soundtrack that reflects the tenor of its time.
Bottom Line: Amnesiac is the #6 seed in this tourney, and is up against Whiskeytown’s Pneumonia, which sits at #123. I might not like Radiohead, but I am a fan of a sure thing. Thom Yorke & co it is.
Thank you again to Sam for today’s post! Please be sure to check out more of his work over at This Is a Newsletter!
Any thoughts on this record? Agree/disagree with Sam’s take? Sound off in the comments!
In All Things Must Pass, the bittersweet post-mortem of Tower Records, they eventually come to the part of the story when the wheels really started to fall off.
The part where the banks come in and decide they know what’s best — that they know more than those who spent their lives building the chain.
Like every other takeover of a sinking ship, a few of the wrong things got tossed overboard. Things that are deemed superfluous, but mean a lot to a lot of people.
In aviation, that usually means outsourcing the ground handling or ticket counters. In the case of Tower Records, it was the scrapping of their in-house Pulse magazine. A magazine my music nerd friends and I used to ride our bikes across town to get copies of. A magazine whose every word we’d pore over.
Why am I writing an elegy for a long-gone magazine?
Because one of the best parts of Pulse was its Desert Island Discs feature. In each issue, they’d ask people to imagine being marooned, and what they’d want the soundtrack to be. We’d read every word in the magazine, but only after skipping to this first. Every list either confirmed that someone had the best taste ever or that they were a heretic. In those days, there was no middle ground.
And maybe that’s the allure of these sorts of exercises. The rush of confirmation or incredulity is tough to resist. To paraphrase Rick James: judgment is a helluva drug.
But so too is making these lists. The decision…The indecision… Did I make the right picks? Is this really what I’d want? What would the people back home think? Did I bring something that’ll make me sing loud enough to get the attention of a passing trawler? How does a record player work in a place with no power?
Tell me, what do you think?
KA—
On to the music…
A couple of my choices are on here, but I also love the idea that my next pick could be right around the corner. I know it sounds a bit silly, but to me that’s exciting.
Kevin Sent 