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.
Today we’re taking a quick look at Tortoise’s Standards LP as it faces off against Perfuse 73’s Vocal Studies + Uprock Narratives.
By the end of this week, I’ll officially be in my 50s (okay, 51, but still), and as we go through these records, I keep telling myself to view them through the lens of 26-year-old Kevin. In other words, do they hold up today? Would they have landed with me back then? And the answer is invariably… it depends. Some sound better than ever. Some have been a goddamn delight. Some weren’t my bag then, but are now. For others, it’s vice versa. And so it goes.
Both of today’s records are new to me. I know the name Tortoise, but they’ve always been just outside the periphery of my listening universe. None of my fellow travelers were into them either—at least as far as I know—so I don’t think I would’ve heard them secondhand.
Doing a little reading, I found an interview with two of the band members on Drowned in Sound, where they talked about how they road-tested some of these tracks before they were done (rad!), and how it made “them rock out more. Made ’em get more solid, then we went back and reworked the ideas and maybe re-recorded the songs or whatever.”
Okay, cool. All of that is ticking boxes I want ticked.
Then we get to the reworked part. Maybe it’s post-rock? Math rock? Serious Music People™ would call this “adventurous” or boundary-defying. To my ear, it all just comes across as noodling. Feels like they decided to break (genre) boundaries and try their hand at every genre going. And I mean… okay.
“Eros” just gave me a headache. I’m sure at one point someone sat listening to it, solemnly nodding their head, but it’s just a jumble of bleeps, bloops, and—well, I’m not sure what the other sounds are.
“Six Pack” — we finally see something kinda sorta resembling the outline of a structure, but this scaffolding is brittle, and the risk of the song careening off the side is always right there, which makes it a less enjoyable listen than it should be. Maybe at this point, I’m just gun-shy.
“Eden 2” has got a nice beat and some flow, but all the sonic side quests constantly threaten to overtake it. Are we ever going to get a chance to catch a nice groove and ride the wave, or is this the point?
“Monica” — okay! Now this I can get into.
“Blackjack” sounds like something from a Bond movie—not derogatory. Hot damn! Maybe there’s hope yet!
The record ends with “Speakeasy.” It’s not terrible, but it took too many detours to get here. Standards was a standard-issue indie record from an era full of them. This would’ve easily been lost in the shuffle back in the day, and even repeatedly forcing myself back to 2001, I can’t see myself playing it more than once. Doing it today was plenty.
Back in the day—and I mean back in the day compared to ’01—people used to sell demos out of trunks. Maybe they still do this? Aspiring rappers would hawk their wares. Aspiring DJs would sell what we called “jeep beats,” which were essentially mixtapes of various beats and scratches—both to show what they could do, but more immediately, something for those aspiring rappers to spit their lyrics over. Think a rougher version of Endtroducing.
I have no idea what Prefuse 73 was doing in ’01—this is literally the first time I’m hearing of him or hearing this record—but I can’t get past the idea that this is something of an homage to that era and those artists. It feels like a collage, with bits and pieces from every corner of the game pasted onto the board. To be clear, there are plenty of tangents and noodles here, but whereas they felt distracting on Standards, here they feel like they’re right where they’re supposed to be.
There are some detours on Vocal Studies + Uprock Narratives, but mostly it’s solid beats that make it easy to find something to hold on to. “Eve of Destruction” has ambient-adjacent sounds, but they’re brief. Maybe too brief? Am I showing my age here? Doubly so on “7th Message.” It’s meditative, but also a solid groove.
So yeah, messy in spots, sure, but this is the kind of record where when it locks in, it really locks in—and that’s more than enough to keep me coming back.
Bottom Line: Gonna be Perfuse 73 for me…
Any thoughts on either of these records? Agree/disagree with my take? Sound off in the comments!
We’re in for a treat today, as Lavender Sound (Max Freedman)takes the wheel and shares his take on Kylie Minogue’s Fever LP.
Today, as part of the Best Album of 2001 series, Lavender Sound (Max Freedman)is back to share his take on Kylie Minogue’s Fever album. He previously covered Björk’s Vespertine.
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 Lavender Sound and his interview series over at the Creative Independent!
KA—
Even shimmering gold hot pants couldn’t break Kylie Minogue in the United States. After the Australian pop icon ditched everyday pop lyricism and production for sleeker, more trip-hop-indebted introspection on her sixth album, 1997’s Impossible Princess, she pivoted back hard to highly accessible pop with 2000’s “Spinning Around,” kicking off the cycle for her seventh album, Light Years, with the music video with the legendary hot pants. And yet, despite Kylie dominating the U.K. and Australian pop charts from her 1987 debut album Kylie onward and “Spinning Around” handily going to #1 in both countries, it didn’t even touch the Billboard Hot 100. It had all the musical ingredients necessary to be her first big U.S. hit since Kylie’s “The Loco-Motion,” which went to #3 here in 1988 (though two prior covers of it, by Little Eva in 1962 and Grand Funk Railroad in 1974, both went to #1): Kylie rides a disco-funk arrangement into pure ecstasy and sounds equally commanding whether she’s singing into the skies or coming on all sultry. It’s basically the platonic ideal of a pop song, and yet, nothing. Nada. Zilch.
Something shifted when Kylie’s “Can’t Get You Out of My Head” arrived the next year to introduce her eighth album, 2001’s Fever. Not only did “Can’t Get You Out of My Head” reach #7 in the U.S., but it also went to #1 in every other country where it was promoted. From the wordless “la, la, la / la, la, la, la, la” chorus to the playfully cyborgian beat and Kylie’s enraptured yet close-to-the-chest vocal performance, it’s about as hypnotic as pop music gets. With one song, she finally had the world under her spell, so much so that Fever went on to sell over a million copies stateside.
I think there was a hunger for music like Fever by the time it arrived on October 1, 2001. About seven months prior, Daft Punk’s Discovery brought French house, a clear influence on “Spinning Around,” to the masses, and at points, Fever is steeped in the genre too. Two of its greatest highlights, “Love at First Sight” and “In Your Eyes,” might as well be Bangalter/Homem-Christo productions, what with their flickering guitars and glorious choruses that explode forth from their tightly wound verses. But if Fever were just a repeat of territory Kylie had traversed, it would’ve been uneventful. Instead, the album abounds with silky, computer-perfect beats that both gradually seep and vigorously hammer right into the cerebellum. The music’s robotic energy only emphasizes the humanity in Kylie’s smooth, sensual vocal performances, and the rich production and hook-packed melodies won over even some rockist skeptics in 2001. Poptimism was a few years away, but Fever was helping to plant the seeds.
And how could it not? The joyously brash thump and shuffle of “Give It To Me,” with a euphoric chorus awash in massive vocal harmonies, is sugar in song form. The title track’s Neptunes-like low-end is as menacing as it is alluring, with the fever Kylie sings about inevitably infecting your ears, mind, and body too. (The song’s metaphor of a crush as a fever is about as lyrically innovative as Fever gets, and the fact that the album goes so hard despite its merely passable lyrics is a reminder that pop music’s effectiveness can sit entirely in its sound if what’s being sung isn’t full-on cringe.) “More More More,” which opens the album, latches on right away with synthetic toms that sound like they’re a tad on the fritz, only locking in further with a slinky bassline, gleaming synths, and Kylie’s liberated vocal performance.
And these aren’t even the singles! Seriously, the run of singles from this album is just insane, as are the music videos released to promote them. “Can’t Get You Out of My Head” is, of course, Kylie’s signature song, but just as iconic is the mega-cleavage hoodie-minidress she wears in the video full of humanoid-looking dancers in tracksuits pulling off all kinds of striking choreography. Few people have looked as genuinely joyous as Kylie does while she dances throughout the “Love at First Sight” video in which, even though she’s just wearing a simple white tank top (and, wildly, cargo pants). Her aura jumps out from the arrays of brightly-fashioned, brightly-wigged dancers who are, yes, dressed like cyborgs. A similar enthusiasm and commitment to her performance radiates from everything she does in the humanoid-heavy “In Your Eyes” video, even though its lighting is much darker.
“Come Into My World,” both in terms of its visuals and its music, is something else entirely. I still can’t quite figure out how Michel Gondry made the video happen even though he previously directed at leasttwo videos with similar special effects. It’s just Kylie walking the same circle in Paris four times, but it’s also so much more: Each time she completes a lap, another version of her, wearing the exact same outfit, appears, and with each lap, the chaos around her — bikers brawling, a mattress thrown out of a window — swells further, elevating the drama and hilarity. I’m tempted to read the video as a commentary on how, when things recur, they often intensify, because that’s the magic of so many pop songs and especially “Come Into My World.” Its verse-chorus-bridge song structure, with each refrain bursting brighter than the last, is nothing new in its form, but as the synths plink and tremble and Kylie breaks out her innermost seductress, she achieves irresistible pop perfection.
From its videos to its actual music, Fever was cutting-edge pop in 2001, and it still sounds distinct today. Its impact was clear in the years to come: Without it, Madonna probably would’ve avoided the DJ-set feel of 2005’s Confessions on a Dancefloor, and Britney Spears’ 2007 pop bible Blackout might have sounded too strange for mainstream acceptance. All kinds of pop musicians today cite Fever and Kylie in general as an influence, especially Dua Lipa, whose nu-disco sound on 2020’s smash-hit Future Nostalgia is a direct heir to “Love at First Sight.” I mean, hell, its 2021 reissue even has a track named “Fever.”
And yet, for all Fever’s impact and innovation, not everyone agrees with me that it’s Kylie’s best album. Depending on who you ask, that’s Light Years, Fever’s R&B-infused 2003 follow-up Body Language, 2010’s Aphrodite (think Fever if Stuart Price, who produced Confessions on a Dancefloor, worked on it), or 2023’s Tension, on which Kylie embraced the nu-disco genre she helped birth and found a whole new legion of young fans some 35 years into her career. “I’m a star, babe, babe, babe / Do this all day, day, day,” she chants at the outset of Tension’s title track. She’s always found endless elation in her music.
On Fever, for the first time, the whole world got to feel it.
Bottom Line: I think many people might be surprised to learn that I am unironically and unabashedly a Kylie Minogue fan. From the S.A.W.- fueled debut record through the more refined sound in the mid-90s and beyond, I’ve always found something I like on each of her records. Fever has the added bonus (?) of my associating it with one of my favorite trips overseas. Visiting Malta in early 2002, “Can’t Get You Out of My Head” was literally everywhere (Natalie Imbruglia too, for that matter, but that’s a story for another time). Listening now, 25 years on, I’m surprised at how well it holds up. Kylie for the win.
Thank you again to Max for today’s post! Please be sure to check out more of his work over at Lavender Sound! Any thoughts on this record? Agree/disagree with Max’s take? Sound off in the comments!
Today we’re taking a quick look at ‘Get Ready’ by New Order
It took 8 years to get the band back together for what would ultimately be their final record in their original form. Get Ready isn’t a bad album; it just feels like watching a show that ran for a season too long. With the exception of “Crystal,” and ”60 Miles an Hour,” I’m not sure I could ID any other track by sound alone. It just never established itself in my head.
“(the title) could mean anything or nothing. I thought it was just nice; New Order, Get Ready; ‘cause we are, we’re getting ready for the next phase of our musical lives both physically and mentally, so it’s quite a simple thing but it’s very pertinent
~Peter Hook
In hindsight, part of that is because I was — and am — so invested in the band’s earlier work. 8 years is a long time, and if you’re still enjoying the band’s “old stuff,” it’s easy not to put much stock in a new release with a new(er) sound.
I seem to be in the minority here, as it was well-received by many critics, with David Browne of Entertainment Weekly describing it as a “stunning and confident return to form.” It had guests such as Billy Corgan and Bobby Gillespie.
Get Ready had all the ingredients to top this list, and yet…
Open hearts, empty spaces Dusty roads to distant places But all the time when I’m alone I think of you and how you’ve grown Far and wide, sweet and simple Jehovah knows that I’ve been sinful But if Jesus comes to take your hand I won’t let go, I won’t let go
Recorded in the wake of manager & longtime friend Rob Gretton’s passing, this feels like a goodbye as the band moves on to its next chapter.
Bottom Line: Sure, this might not be my favorite record by the band, but it’s New order! There might be a universe where I vote against them, but this ain’t it.
Tell me: Any thoughts on this one? Where would you rank Get Ready? Sound off in the comments!
Today we’re taking a quick look at Life Without Buildings’ Any Other City.
When I listen to a band like Life Without Buildings, I think about the music, sure, but mostly I think about the listeners. There are a lot of bands that exist today only in the memory of those lucky enough to be able to say, “I was there.”
LWB feels like one of those bands you found through a friend of a friend, or maybe even their roommate. They were playing in the back of some garage in a plumbing warehouse, or on the fourth floor of a walk-up, and you had to say a secret phrase to get in.
You could still sometimes smoke indoors in those days, but you’d stand near an open window to be cool toward everyone else. It smelled like humanity, but you equated that with a good time, so it never fazed you. Any physical media was nearly impossible to come by. Maybe somebody had a burned CD they’d lend you. Maybe.
Life Without Buildings was a short-lived, mathy art-rock band from Glasgow fronted by Sue Tompkins. The band was named after a B-side by Japan. That they were one-and-done, studio-wise, only adds to the lore, though there’s a live album out there too. Makes it easy for the completists, I ‘spose.
The most distinct part of Life Without Buildings is Tompkins— or rather her vocals, which can be talk-singing, spoken word, or a (much) drier version of Cocteau Twins’ Liz Fraser’s wordplay. When she says, “No details, but I’m gonna persuade you,” on “PS Exclusive,” you have no choice but to believe her. And she’s right.
The songs are repetitive, but never boring. It’s art-rock, but never pretentious. I suspect none of them really felt precious about any of it, which is part of why it works. Sure, they walked so bands like Current Affair and Dry Cleaning could run, but what I hope they realize is that in 2001 this was a risk. And a novel one at that.
A quote from Reddit sums it up:
Formed a band in college, released one 10/10 album, and then broke up never to play again” is the only acceptable indie-band trajectory. All other bands are posers, nepos, or tryhards, sorry.
That’s worth a chuckle, but I’m not sure I 100% co-sign. Besides, Tompkins hasn’t totally vanished — she can be found on a couple of Sleaford Mods tracks — but this band ended exactly the way it always was destined to. Some movies should never have a sequel.
If you don’t like this on the first pass, give it another spin. And maybe a third. At some point, they’re going to persuade you.
Bottom Line: This was up against Firewater’s Psychopharmacology, which seems to have a lot of champions in the best Album community. I liked it well enough, but not enough to vote against Any Other City.
Any thoughts on either of these records? Agree/disagree with my take? Sound off in the comments!
The longest-running parlor game for music fans might be arguing about which era of Van Halen is the best.
A close second: what song defines your generation?
The answers are almost always a tell: Boomers might point to The Beatles, The Stones, or Dylan. Gen X often lands on something like “Smells Like Teen Spirit.” Millennials, Gen Z, and Gen Alpha…well, the answer gets fuzzier. That’s probably also a tell. (Spoiler: I’m old.)
Writing for NPR recently, Hazel Cills flipped the question a little, asking instead: Can an entire generation be defined by one song?
To me, a definitive millennial song can’t just be a song that failed to reach listeners beyond my specific generation (those born between the years of 1981 to 1996, to pick one of the possible date ranges demarcating the cohort). It also can’t simply be a hit that was popular with a huge swath of millennials. For a song to be definitively millennial, it also has to speak to the millennial identity. Millennials have been saddled with many of those simplistic stereotypes listed above, but also a lot of harsh realities….The music culture that defined our coming of age, from the early 2000s to the mid-2010s, went through its own massive disruptions that influenced not just listeners but also artists: the rise of illegal downloading and the streaming culture that came after, social media platforms like Youtube and Myspace that birthed a new generation of stars, the invention of MP3 players like the iPod and the explosion of festival culture. Millennial music, regardless of genre, embodies the collision of these realities.
One can make the same case with supporting arguments for whichever cohort you choose, and while I have my own ideas on what “Has” to be the song of my people, I don’t know if an entire generation can be distilled down to one track. It’s a fun exercise, and for GenX there’s certainly no shortage of 5-star candidates, but it also encompasses a group born between 1965 and 1980. Can you paint an entire generation with a broad brush? Probably not, but it doesn’t stop us from trying.
Still, it’s a fun exercise—and maybe that’s the point. While we’ll likely never reach a consensus or land on a definitive answer, the conversation itself tells us something about how we hear music and how we see ourselves.
It will not surprise you to read that this playlist is extremely Gen X-coded, with tracks from Sonic Youth, Luscious Jackson, and more. There’s also a nod to older cohorts with George Harrison and Lindsey Buckingham in the mix, and of course a ton of brand new tracks from the likes of The Maureens, Van Chamberlain and Long Relief.
Side A is tracks 1-14 (ends with “Greensburg”). Side B is tracks 15-27.
Other sources: Apple | Qobuz | YouTube Music | Note: Both YT & Qobuz are missing a couple of tracks this week.
Now it’s your turn.
Any new releases or shows you’re looking forward to? Whatcha got? Share your thoughts in the comments!
Today we’re taking a quick look at Yeah Yeah Yeahs self-titled EP.
Yeah Yeah Yeah’s self-titled, 5-song EP was self-released on their own Shifty label in 2001.
Their decidedly garage-punk sound featured guitarist Nick Zinner, drummer Brian Chase, and no bassist. No matter; even in these early days, everything orbits around frontwoman Karen O. Her vocals are hard to pin down– she coos one minute, screams the next (see also: the entire chorus of “Art Star”), and occasionally works in a sort of disaffected monotone
The synths and more polished sound would come in time, but here they’re still incubating, and it’s very much rough around the edges. Whether that was because they were still finding their legs or an intentional aesthetic choice, the end run is the same. Nick Zinner’s riffs do a lot of weight-bearing. They’re basic, but that’s all that was called for here.
The first thing we hear is Karen O repeating “the bigger, the better” on “Bang.” Signing to a major… Fever to Tell (or It’s Blitz!- whichever’s your fave)…a bazillion kids being introduced to “Maps” by whoever picked it while playing Rock Band and then being bewildered by the rest of their catalog…and so on. That would all come in time.
But it all starts here in peak “Meet me in the bathroom” New York… You don’t need to know this is their first EP to know it’s some of their earliest work. And like anything, if you stare too long or overthink it, you can find nits to pick. But it’s ‘01 in the hippest quarters of NYC. Who tf has time for that?!
This is up against Lightning Bolt’s Ride The Skies, and I gotta tell ya, I’m really struggling to reach for positives here. I know there’re plenty of noise rock people out there, but this is not my tribe. Nothing wrong with that, of course. We like what we like! But god damn this whole thing felt like a test. It probably didn’t help that I was listening at work. At any given time I have 6 monitors, two radios, a teletype printer, and about 30 tabs open, and it can feel like what this record sounds like.
There’s a spot on “The Faire Folk” where I thought the noodling was reminiscent of AC/DC’s riff on AC/DC’s Thunderstruck. That was about all I could salvage from this.
Bottom Line: Karen O & co for the W.
Any thoughts on either of these records? Agree/disagree with my take? Sound off in the comments!
Cover art courtesy of Sympathy For the record Industry
Good morning! Today we’re taking a quick look at The White Stripes’ White Blood Cells
I catch myself whenever I hear Seven Nation Army ring out from the soccer stand. What a song to co-opt! How odd that a band that’s not exactly obsessed with fame still has 1000s of people singing that song 20+ years on. Is there anyone else in that rarified air? My bemusement aside, Elephant is a solid record. How so much sound can come from two people is beyond me, but here we are. Other than some backing vocals, it really is just the two of them. Meg White’s drumming is simple (and simple is never easy), and Jack White’s guitar (and piano) take us from soccer stand fodder to swamp flats on tracks like “I Want to be the Boy to Warm Your Mother’s Heart.” It’s a no-skips record, even if not everything would sound good being yelled from a terrace.
If Elephant is what put the duo on the map, White Blood Cells is what lays the groundwork. I can almost guarantee at some point today someone will work “masterpiece” into the discourse or refer to it as art. The latter is true- all music is art. The former? Mmmm…I don’t know.
Fair play to “Fell In Love with a Girl “; it’s one of the best singles we’ve come across in Round 1. It’s loud, euphoric, and the kind of messy that says, “I want you to think this didn’t take any effort, but we spent days making it that way.” That sort of disheveled sound taps the same roots that DBT’s Southern Rock Opera did earlier in the week, as well as the likes of MC5 (which, I mean, sure. The White Stripes are from Detroit after all.)
Contrived or not, that simplicity works here—and as mentioned above— simple is never easy. Ask your favorite drummer. As a reformed one myself, I never miss a chance to defend Meg White from people that say “she’s not that good.” First, she’s more talented than 99.99999% of the people that say this, and second, see above. Playing a rudimentary style is easy…for about a minute. Doing it consistently and in a way that matches Jack White’s all-over-the-place stylings is anything but.
Did people do this with VU’s Moe Tucker? Maybe, but I doubt it. Look, I can be as snarky as anyone, but the boo boys can fuck off into the sun with all that.
(Exhale)
The sneering hipster take from Serious Music People ™ is that the basic, stripped-down style is a deficit. Really, it’s their superpower. Sometimes you just want some teeth and something that’s unapologetically loud…. even tracks like “I’m Finding It Harder to Be a Gentleman” and “The Same Boy You’ve Always Known” both of which which, I guess, count as slower tracks here, still have a little intentional grit and edge to ‘em. “We’re Going to Be Friends” is a bit too twee for this record, but people love it, so (Kanye shrug).
This band has always been polarizing, mostly, I think, because their records bring out the worst in the Rock Guy™ and Hipster tribes. So be it. In the meantime, with its mix of blues-y tracks and face melters, White Blood Cells will still be a punchy record that locked in the pair’s style.
Bottom Line: This is the #3 seed in the tourney, and I can’t see it slowing down anytime before Round 4 where it’ll likely face off against Kylie Minogue. Today it’s up against Squarepusher, who seem like almost an afterthought in comparison. Took the safe bet on this one; my bracket pick and vote will be for White Blood Cells.
Any thoughts on either of these records? Agree/disagree with my take? Sound off in the comments!
Today we’re taking a quick look at Ladytron’s 604 as it faces off against At Dawn by My Morning Jacket.
There was a time when I would buy records based solely on the label. Dischord never missed. 4AD? Odds were high you’d love what they were issuing. K Records? Whether or not it matched my tastes was up for grabs, but you could bank on it being something quirky, and that screamed “Olympia.” Wax Trax! was the gift that kept on giving for a kid who was both into hardcore and synth pop. The late ’80s and early ’90s were wildly dissonant for me musically. Nettwerk was right there too, with offerings sometimes less for the dance floor, more toward the after-after-after party. I was always happy to take a flyer on these types of records, even if I didn’t bat 1.000.
Seeing Ladytron’s 604 was on Nettwerk, I was surprised I’d missed them. Turns out that just the reissue was on the label, but that doesn’t explain how I’d missed the band entirely. I guess by ’01 I’d tuned everything out, even stalwart genres like synthpop.
Reading up a bit, I kept seeing “electroclash” tossed around, and maybe it’s just me, but I’m not seeing it. What I am seeing is a band whose members 110% have a Kraftwerk record or two in their collection. Stereolab as well, right down to the dueling female vocalists—and stylings—in Mira Aroyo and Helen Marnie. They’re cooler than you, but don’t flaunt it. The sort of icy personality that would also definitely let you bum a dart. Tracks like “CSKA Sofia” are a bit of spacy noodling, but “Paco!” is pure uncut new wave, and I’m here for it. You could’ve told me this was released in ’89, and I would’ve believed you. It’s the sort of thing I spent a lot of time listening to while riding the bus downtown to places like Dudley’s (RIP) to pick up some import or another. Same story with Playgirl and Discotraxx.
In fact, I could swear I’ve heard these all before. They’re just vaguely familiar enough to convince me I have, even though I know otherwise.
At 16 tracks, it’s a bit too long. There’s an incredible 10–11 track record in here. Some of the padding feels like a mandate to flesh out the song count to “fill” the CD (were we still doing this in ’01? I can’t see any other reason why “Laughing Cavalier” made the cut.), but the good far outweighs the bad.
I’m bummed I missed this before, but I’m happy to have found it as part of this challenge. This is one I’ll definitely be returning to.
I can tell you that had I heard My Morning Jacket’s At Dawn in 2001, I would’ve had no time for it. I had no taste for this sort of woozy Americana jam-band stuff. Times change. It’s not bad! “Lowdown” reminded me of those slow summer mornings where it’s already humid, but the searing heat hasn’t yet kicked in. If I had a front porch, I’d sit out there and listen to this sort of thing while watching the world go by. “Xmas Curtain” has a nice slide guitar (or steel pedal, who knows?) that, in ’01, would’ve had me spraining my finger by smashing the fast-forward button. 25 years on, and I find that sort of thing endearing… in limited doses. It works here.
Similar to 604, there is a 10-track “10” in here somewhere. A couple of tracks went straight onto my playlists, a few were objectively pleasant— if not for me—and a couple left me shaking my head. Put your lighters down, this is not a ballad band. I will be fine never hearing “If It Smashes Down” or “I Needed It Most” again. I would’ve scotched this in a hot second 25 years ago, and almost did just now. Sorry, not sorry. Tracks like the aforementioned “Lowdown” and “Just Because I Do” are what they do best.
Bottom Line: So! We’ve got two wildly different new-to-me records whose only common ground was the year of release. On paper, this should be a lock for Ladytron. Once a synth kid, always a synth kid. But My Morning Jacket was better than I was expecting. If I’m honest, I’d be okay with either of these going through to Round 2. We could do worse.
Looking at my bracket, I have Ladytron pegged as winning Round 1. Apparently, I’d already taken a flyer on 604. Hopefully it pays off.
Any thoughts on either of these records? Agree/disagree with my take? Sound off in the comments!
Kevin Sent 