A real ceiling shaker.

I'm not gonna pretend I'm sharing anything groundbreaking when I say the new Joyce Manor album is generally a ton of fun, but I'm really glad I no longer work in an office with floors thin enough for the people below me to hear just how hard my foot stomps against the floor as my leg bounces up and down uncontrollably under me desk to the masterful melding of beat, melody, and make-me-wanna-dance energy of its opening number "I Know Where Mark Chen Lives."

This ain't gonna solve the world's problems, but it might make your work week a little more bearable. And since this clock in at just under 2 minutes, I reccommend you put this on repeat for maximum positive effect.

A hot tune from way back to warm you up on a frigid morn.

Sadly, I missed Clip Art's first show in over 10 years las weekend. I learned about it too late to attend, but it did spur me to dig back through the catalog of Andy Rosenstein's one-man band (he's always been the sole consistent member, supported by a grab bag of amazing Chicago musicians). 

Clip Art was one of those groups I was gonzo about, and I still remember the first timeI heard the song "Dead Letter." I think Andy had given me a CD-R of his first EP, or maybe it was just a few songs that would go on to form that EP. Anyway, while I knew him as a talented sideman at the time, I confess the contents of that CD-R unexpectedly knocked me sideways. It's not like I wasn't used to hearing my incredibly talented social circle create great music, but this was some great music. And since then it has always sightly frustrated me that Rosenstein didn't get the more widespread acclaim I thought he deserved.

Hopefully his show last weekend will inspire him to release some more music, but even if it doesn't I hope that your giving the tune "Dead Letter" a spin blow will whet your appetite to dig deeper into his catalog, and spread his amazing songs a little wider into the world.

Ashes And Diamonds is the missing link I'd been looking for.

Ashes And Diamonds: Bruce Smith, Daniel Ash, and Paul Spencer Denman
(Photos by Chelsea Miller, Regan Catam, and Stuart Matthewman)

In the ’80s I got into a really heavy Love And Rockets phase. Both the comic book and the band, but for this post I’m talking about the band. My high school girlfriend introduced me to their music and it sent me down a rabbit hole of reading and searching out all things Bauhaus, Tones on Tail, and Bubblemen; import cassette tapes and 12” singles; and an effort to connect the dots between all the varied sounds and trace them back to the three men—Daniel Ash, David J, and Kevin Haskins—who spanned all those different musical outfits various configurations.

 

I saw Love And Rockets play in the late ‘80s as they toured their self-titled 4th album—with The Pixies opening!—and as they teetered on the edge of what appeared to be stardom, I eagerly awaited the next album. 

 

And waited. And waited.

 

And while there was no new Love and Rockets album in sight, when Daniel Ash released a solo album in 1990 I bought it immediately and was let down by its collection of hushed ballads, but since it was a solo album I figured he was just exploring more personal whims while Love And Rockets proper worked on their next masterpiece. And what a masterpiece it might be! Though some rumors claimed the band was exploring a jazz direction (hinted at on recent b-sides from the time) I convinced myself that would be fine as long as the jazzier numbers were nestled alongside louder rockers.

 

And I waited some more. And then some more. And neither jazz nor rock ensued…

 

Then, seemingly suddenly after a 5 year wait, Love And Rockets finally released Hot Trip to Heaven and…it was a disappointing album more interested in half-baked club beats then the waves of melody and guitar I’d been hoping for. I understood the direction, having already been through similarly sounding but more rewarding wild ride with Psychic TV, another fave of mine, but it felt like Love And Rockets was working a sound that had already run it course, an unusual position for 3 guys like that to be in, in my personal opinion.

 

I never stopped being a Love And Rockets fan, and dutifully bought every new release after that, but I had to admit that they seemed more interested in avoiding the sound that I had loved than producing anything along those lines again. And I got it; they’d been around a long time and in quite a few influential groups already and preferred to follow their own interests instead of delivering on fan expectations. It’s the deal you agree to when you become a fan of an artist instead of a fan of a sound.

 

So, imagine my surprise last year when the album Are Forever by Ashes And Diamonds landed in my inbox, a new “supergroup” of sorts led by Ash, and…the “Love And Rockets” album I’d been waiting for since 1989 seemed to have finally burst into existence!

 

Are Forever is the spiritual successor to Love And Rockets, of that I have no doubt. And it somewhat confirms my belief long ago that is was indeed Ash willfully avoiding replicating the sound that had made his old band so popular just prior to the dawn of the ‘90s. But whatever reservations he must’ve had about that sound seem to finally have been shed, and I couldn’t be happier.

 

Well, I might’ve been happier had this come out 35 years ago, but that’s young me griping; old me is happy to have this sonic sequel finally arrive. I would’ve written about this earlier, but I confess I kept waiting for the album to pop up on Bandcamp before doing so, since I’ve grown to believe that’s the superior platform to link reviews to since you can easily test drive the music and then buy it if you dig it. 

 

Today I noticed it is indeed on Bandcamp now! So now you have all the words above to set scene, and the album below to finish the picture for you.

 

Spin it. Dig it. Buy it and have it…for forever!

Holy moly Blackwater Holylight!

Photo by Magdalena Wosinska.

I've enjoyed Blackwater Holylight's music for a few years now, and dug last year's If You Only Knew quite a bit. The darkly atmospheric metal racket the band's members conjured up on that album seemed like it'd make for a great, slamming basement set if I ever had the chance to see them live. (This is a high compliment.) 

But on this year's Not Here Not Gone, out at the end of this month, the band does one of those quantum leaps from being a strong genre contender to being a great band.

Sorry for the brevity of my thoughts here, I was listening to this at work and was like holy heck why did I put off listening to this until today? and don't want you to make the same mistake. Get a taste below the whet your appetite until you can get your fill on January 30.

There is no correct answer, only honest responses.

I posted the below personal thought on Threads and Facebook for fun over the weekend, with a little bit of an additional intro on the Facebook version making it clear this was a thought meant to spur good-natured conversation, and that there are obviously no "wrong answers." When writing the mini-post I decided to add a few additional parameters to make the query a little more interesting, since I am not a fan of posting things that elicit disagreement over creating conversation. I actively avoid writing posts meant to simply "spur engagement" and little more. I'm always more interested hearing other people's actual thoughts instead of warring responses.

In the whole Beatles v. Stones v. The Who debate, I realized I love and respect all 3, but evaluate the question based on both studio and live configurations.

The Beatles were superior in the studio, but their fame obstructed them ever becoming a great live band; the Stones were dependable in studio and onstage, but seemed overly predictable to me; while The Who developed into a group that exploded both inside and outside of the studio with impressive consistency.

So for me, it’s The Who. 🤘🙂

Overall, I was really happy with everyone who took the time to reply to my little thought with an answer, and while the vast majority of responders seemed to understand this was meant as fun, with 100% of Facebook respondents being absolutely delightful, I noticed that there were a small percentage of responders on Threads that seemed to have only read the first couple of words and the final lines, ignoring the nuance of the parameters that drove me to my personal conclusion. As a whole though, I loved scrolling through all the comments, even the ones that called me an idiot for choosing The Who as my personal favorite.*

Also, the number of people that answered "The Kinks!" made me smile. 

*It's worth noting that of course think The Beatles are the most influential of the three bands; it would be silly to argue otherwise, and I do love the vast majority of their ground-breaking catalog. But when it comes to having the strongest personal impact on me, it is The Who. And of course, when it comes to full career catalogs, it will always be David bowie for me, but he arose after being influenced by The Beatles, The Stones, and The Who. 

Memento mori, memento amoris.

It wasn't until I rewatched 28 Years Later last night in preparation for seeing  28 Years Later: The Bone Temple this weekend that something really crystallized for me.

As much as 28 Days Later was a horror movie, its sequel really has more in common with the Station Eleven TV series as a meditation on the importance and beauty of human connection, punctuated by occasional scenes that read more as suspense thrillers than anything approaching terror. And like Station Eleven, 28 Years Later is filled with some really breathtaking bucolic imagery.

Seriously, the number of internal whoahs that erupted as I took in some of the scenery continued to surprise me.

And while I didn't cry as hard during the rewatch as I did in the theater this first time I saw 28 Years Later, overall the film had a more deeply emotional resonance for me this time around. Whoulda thunk a zombie franchise could be so masterfully malleable to surprise me in entirely new ways every time I engage with it? But hey, ain't that the whole point of creating art?

I have no idea what's coming next, but I'm incredibly eager to see what new direction the third film takes!*

*And, as always, look forward to enjoying movie theater nachos at 10:30 in the morning, the way they were meant to be enjoyed.

 

Coming soon to a TV screen near me!

As many people recently seem to be realizing that they miss physical media, I’m one of those few that never gave it up! I keep all my outdated media formats and pile on as the new ones come out. Personally, I’ve always preferred having a library at my fingertips, and avoided dependence on the whims of streaming platforms. It’s not that I eschew all digital media, I just prefer to own my own copy of something (which is probably why I love Bandcamp so much…download those WAV files and save ‘em, just in case)!

I’m also now the kind of person that will immediately preorder something that catches his eye, and the last few weeks there have been 2 reissues coming to Blu-ray or UHD (whichever you prefer) that I couldn’t hit “buy” on quickly enough.

One is a sentimental favorite; a deeply flawed film that I have a soft spot for anyway…and not just because the title character's original comic book incarnation gave me my 1995 AOL email name...and the name has stuck to me since.

The other is a film that made a huge impact on me as a kid, being the first R-rated film I watched at home with my parent’s (begrudging) explicit permission. It’s also one of those films that has long deserved but eluded the super deluxe treatment, complete with tons of extras, so I am really looking forward to the day this package shows up in my mailbox.

I've also got a new reissue of Donnie Darko heading my way near the end of this month, and that's on top of the recent spate of full-run Blu-ray and DVD sets of television shows I've long loved that have been piling up on the to-watch list, so even if all the streaming services were to spit out crud for the next few months, I've got plenty to keep me busy for a quite a while. Woo hoo!

Ten years later, David Bowie's final album is still challenging and thrilling...

Screenshot via the internet Archive

Ten years ago today I published what I didn't realize at the time would be the last review of a new David Bowie album I would ever write.

You can only see the review via the Internet Archive these days, since the Chicagoist archives disappeared from the internet a few months ago, and I have lost hope they'll ever return. But I'm still proud of this piece, though it does bring back a flood of memories. I would leave for a vacation in San Miguel de Allende a few days after this was published—news broke of his death in the night before I left—and I spent that week haranguing every bar I was in to play Blackstar over and over, along with other selections from the Bowie catalog. It wasn't as depressing as you might thing, and quite honestly not a single person ever asked the various bartenders to turn it off in favor of something more conventionally upbeat.

In the decade singe then we've seen plenty of reissues, repackaging, and unreleased material from Bowie hit the market, and I certainly have mixed feelings about some of them. However I'm mostly pleased to have been able to enjoy the stream of Bowie-related material that has been released since his death. 

But it's still hard to live in a world where Bowie will never produce anything that's brand new.

Updated 2:20 p.m. I just finished reading Chris O’Leary's new entry about the song "Blackstar" from his indispensable Pushing Ahead of The Dame blog, and he closes the excellent piece with the tease that there are in fact a few final unheard Bowie recordings. And he summarizes my thoughts on this so perfectly I must share his writing with you:

A final perspective. There are five new David Bowie songs, songs that we know nothing about, not even their names. We may never hear them, but we know that they exist. Let them be unheard. Let this be our gift to the future. There will never be a last David Bowie song if there are always five more to come. The end of the David Bowie story is that it doesn’t end. There will always be another chapter to write. An old-time ambassador, may he forever keep pushing ahead.

On never losing your edge because you've never found a home.

LCD Soundsystem at Hollywood Bowl, photo by me.

I was thinking about LCD Soundsystem's "Losing My Edge" the other day—as is the wont of most middle-aged men, I suppose—and realized my read of the song, and here my sometimes embarrassingly intense identification with its seemingly tall tales, is based in loneliness and not the realm of the ultra cool.

For years I felt bad for identifying with the song to much, since so many others view the song as a tongue-in-cheek takedown of the hippest cat in the land. But I realized that to me, the song is evidence of an extremely lonely existence, narrated by a man never at the center of the scene, but constantly drifting through scenes. This isn't the tale of someone so cool he is at the center of every monumental happening and historical trend, it's the perspective of someone with no constant community, who finds himself drifting into these situations through his constant but never fruitful search for belonging. 

You generally can't experience a ton of disparate experiences when you have a solid social circle or are rooted in a found family, because those roots help keep you somewhat grounded and on a firm path. Then there are those of us eternally cursed to surf the edges of endless different scenes with the bittersweet payoff being we actually do get to experience fractured planets of history firsthand, but it's only because we are constantly in a wobbling and ever expanding orbit, doomed to never have a true home to call our own. 

Some meandering thoughts about legacies that aren't mine to open up the year.

I was listing to the forthcoming Ulrika Spacek album in the car yesterday, and halfway through it my girlfriend turned to me and said it was the most Radiohead-sounding album not by Radiohead she'd heard. I had been thinking something similar, but more along the lines of that this is what an album by a band in love with a handful of latter-era Radiohead songs instead of the band's full breadth of work would sound like. If Paloalto's self-titled 2000 album was a resurrection of Bends-era Radiohead, Ulrika Spacek's EXPO is what someone unfamiliar with their pre-Kid A work might come up with.

Radiohead are clearly now a bedrock in the musical landscape and for most bands Radiohead has always existed as a part of their life. There is no pre-Radiohead world for them. I mean, Radiohead can tour whenever they feel like it despite not having released a new album in about a decade now, yet still sound very much of the now, and not like some legacy act. So I respect their rightful place as demigods in most musician's playbooks.

I started doing the quick mental math and almost choked upon realizing Radiohead has now been around actively for over 35 years. It doesn't seem like it could possibly be that long to me! To put that in context—or at least my personal context—when The Who reunited to resurrect Tommy after their first break-up a few years earlier, it was right around the time of that album's 20th anniversary. So they had already broken up once, and their with their most influential output was arguably long behind them by that time. It didn't stop me from shelling out what to me was a ton of dough for the pay-per-view performance they did and savoring that VHS tape for years. But The Who were very much a legacy act by then, and they'd only been around a total of, what, 25 years!

I don't know. That kind of blew my mind and made me realized how much our perspective (and expectations) of rock bands have changed over the years. I'm also starting to feel my age insofar as it relates to how most other people relate to this stuff, despite my relative inability to get sentimental about single periods in time since it's all been a continuous stream to me with little slowing down or stopping. I might not have seen it all, but I have seen a lot.

Anyway, to close the loop here, don't read my opening observations of EXPO as slight incitements. It's a pretty nice little album and I think a lot of people will dig it. If Radiohead's not gonna make Radiohead music any more, it's still fun to hear someone who is. 

Programming note: This little site is already one of the more long-running blogs still in existence, and I've decided this year will see my return more regular posting. So expect more fragmented thoughts like the above as I just share what's rattling around up there without worry too much about it being particularly concise or focused. I'm done letting my fear of not framing my thoughts perfectly get in the way of me posting my thoughts at all. Y'know what I mean?