As Boring As It Gets
Let's Abolish "Greatest" From Our Vocabulary
Here's the deal: I'm going to talk about a tweet for a little bit. I understand that's not something anyone likes to hear but I promise to make a larger point about the way we think and talk about music. Then I'll tell you about some music that I've been enjoying a lot lately, as a treat.
Basically every day there is a tweet about music that riles everyone up. People spend the rest of the day complaining about it and making other egregiously annoying posts until they get tuckered out and move on to the next piece of slop. Obviously, this is not a productive or healthy use of anyone’s time but the crazy train’s been off the rails for a while so what can you do? Here is Monday’s:
Now, I will start by saying that I usually enjoy Jack’s posts and he has a couple podcasts that are okay but not really my thing. I don’t really know what possessed him to go Eric Alper Mode but nobody bats 1.000 online. I’m going to choose to ignore the Greatful Dead mention as spending any time considering them as the best band in US history will just piss me off.
The idea that there is such a thing as a greatest band is a totally flawed premise, full stop. There is just no way you will ever get a group of people, especially an audience as large as Twitter, to agree on any one artist. I really dislike the word "greatest" especially in these contexts because what you are basically doing is rationalizing your "favorite" as a quasi-objective fact. You don't have to do that. It is perfectly fine and healthy to just have your favorite be your favorite and that's yours and nobody can take that away from you because that's your opinion and that's your love and it does not matter what other people think about what you love at the end of the day, really. I understand wanting other people to like the stuff you do, but to make them agree that you are correct for it is unnecessary.
As thought leader Mike Johnson has said: legacy is a fake concept. There doesn't have to be a greatest band. Plenty of bands are great and you can listen to as many as them as you like. I do not really understand why we have the impulse to sort and rank and debate art this way, but I've done it too! I contributed to a bunch of year/decade-end lists for Merry Go Round where we numerically ranked albums. I made a one through one hundred ranking of my favorite albums from the 2010s that is collecting dust in my Google Docs. We don't have to do that anymore—I don't want to be Skip Bayless.
Cut Copy - In Ghost Colours
My friend reminded me about Cut Copy last week so I listened to In Ghost Colours. Then I listened to it again. And again a few more times. What a wonderful album by an unfairly forgotten band! On the whole, I prefer Hot Chip's body of work to Cut Copy's but not to a point that justifies the gulf of appreciation these two have received. In Ghost Colours is better than every single Hot Chip album but nobody talks about them. I didn't even talk about them until right now. I'm part of the problem! Fuck!!
This album cooks front to back with a litany of bangers ("Feel the Love," "Lights & Music," "So Haunted," "Hearts on Fire," "Far Away") and yes, there are too many interludes, but cut them some slack: they're Australian. Highly recommended revisiting if it's a been a while. If you've never listened to them, please do!
MJ Lenderman - Boat Songs
This thing has really dug its hooks into my brain. I discovered this album on Twitter a few months ago via a post of the album art captioned something along the lines of "why did he make this the album art?" Well, I wanted to find out too! Despite looking like a PC music release, the songs on here are slacker rock and alt-country according to rateyourmusic.com. Those classifications seem about right; it sounds like drinking beers on the porch with your friends and the sun is maybe a little too hot but in a good way. I really, really love this album. It took me a bit though. Opener "Hangover Game" is one of my absolute favorite songs of the year and had me so stoked for the rest of the album. The rest of the album doesn't really sound like "Hangover Game," a lot of the tracks lean more towards the alt-country end of the spectrum and those took me longer to fall in love with. But now, I love them all, aside from the "SUV" "Under Control" pairing in the middle which is just okay to me. This album is a massive step up from his back catalogue in my opinion and his recently released single "Rudolph" is signal that he agrees and is going to continue pursuing this sound which I am extremely excited about.
Bar Italia - Tracey Denim
Warm blanket album. None of the songs stand out in particular but many of them have moments that I would consider elevated events. If you held me at gunpoint and asked me to recite any of the song titles I would be riddled with bullets, but in my opinion that's what makes this an especially strong album. Good albums can and nearly always do have standout tracks but those songs are kind of distracting and can take me out of the experience. I've found this especially true when listening to an album for the first time and all the sudden a song you've heard a million times starts playing. Today I was listening to Parliament's Mothership Connection for the first time and "Give Up the Funk" was a borderline jump scare. I've heard that song so many times but this was the first of my own volition. Not even fully of my own volition really since I didn't expect to hear it. Anyways, I quite like this Bar Italia record and am impressed at the ways it somewhat re-contextualizes that 90s slacker rock sound without sounding stale or ripoff-ish. Or maybe it does, I don't know —I'm not terribly familiar with their influences.
Kylie Minogue - Padam Padam
This song really took me by surprise. I've never taken the Minogue pill (I recently listened to Fever for the first time. There's good stuff on there but mostly it's just an ok album) but three different DJs I like and Charli XCX have all said great things about "Padam Padam" so I decided I had to hear it. Holy moly. I had this queued up with a handful of other tracks I was trying for the first time as I walked to get ramen a couple Saturdays ago. When "Padam Padam" started playing I was immediately in the tank for it. Around 50 seconds in when the beat gets nasty it literally stopped me in my tracks and my jaw involuntarily dropped a bit. I can't really put a finger on what is so arresting about this song for me as it's not really doing anything novel or crazy but it is just so good at what it's doing. Last.fm says it's my fourth most listened to track of the last 365 days. I don't know why or how really; padam :)
Donnie & Joe Emerson - Dreamin' Wild
I vividly remember listening to this album for the first time. It was 2019, and I was delivering pizzas. Dreamin' Wild appeared on my radar because I was mildly obsessed with the Light In The Attic record label thanks to their reissue series highlighting old Japanese ambient and city pop. They were reissuing this album and I listened to the single "Baby" and was blown away. About 20 seconds into the opener, "Good Time" I was convinced I was listening to one of my absolute favorite albums. Normally I am not so easy to please but for whatever reason, driving down Burnside that night I felt like I was about to have an incredibly special experience falling in love with this record. The next track, "Give Me the Chance" was, ironically, when I mostly gave up on the hope that this was one of my new favorite albums. It's a perfectly good song but signaled to me that maybe this album made by two teenage brothers in rural Washington who convinced their father to build a state-of-the-art recording studio on the family farm wasn't exactly gonna be an all-timer. I think I was more enamored with the ridiculous story behind its creation rather than the music itself. I don't recall any other tracks after "Baby" standing out to me on that first listen and according to last.fm I didn't listen to the album in full again until this month.
I revisited Dreamin' Wild because there's a movie about it coming out. I really can't imagine the movie being any good, but Walton Goggins plays one of the brothers so in that sense I'm glad it exists. The story behind the album is truly wild (sorry) so I can't fault movie executives for trying to wring a movie out of it, but somethings can just be a documentary or a nice long-form article. Anyways, I quite enjoyed re-listening to this and would recommend you give it a spin. It's just a nice consistent burn with some nice guitars.
Thanks for reading. Right now I’m listening to the recording of the Fishmans’ last ever live performance. It’s available on streaming and it’s called 98.12.28 Otokotachi no Wakare. Next, I’m going to listen to Weyes Blood’s last three albums. I love her. Have a nice Wednesday or whatever day you're reading this on.