#mwe day 28: Unwound - Leaves Turn Inside You
Unwound turn serious and subdued. Not that they weren’t artsy before, but gone is the quality of effortlessness. This sounds like work. Autumn has come, the air is chilly, the sidewalk tree boxes’ leaves are turning yellow.
#mwe day 26 - The Future of What
day 26 2/3 - Repetition
day 27 1/3 - Challenge for a Civilized Society
I'm tired boss and I decline to manufacture any insights or poetic comparisons until tomorrow when I listen to *Leaves Turn Inside You*.
#mwe day 24: Fake Train
day 25: New Plastic Ideas
(Passing over in silence)
#mwe day 23: The Smiths
I wish Johnny Marr had written the vocal melodies because Morrissey just perches on the fifth of the scale like it's a falconry glove and it gets BORING
✂️ Reel Around the Fountain
#mwe day 22: Tropical Fuck Storm - Fairyland Codex
Survivalist cranks in their recording bunker, merely surviving. Twin guitar leads like two steak knives carving up your seared brain meat. Witnessing the doings without hope. You never see them 'cause they don't come around.
#mwe day 21: Arthur Russell - Love Is Overtaking Me
Archival release of home-recordings spanning country & western, folk, soul. Elegant songcraft, tastefully arranged but still with some weirdness. An album I can tell will reveal more richness each listen.
RIYL Michael Hurley
attractive, intelligent, and yet not feckless or childish or superficial or otherwise morally compromised by his good fortune like others I could name. And so far I feel only gratitude and excitement for everything he and his supremely talented bandmates have already given us.
3/3
N.B. I’m fascinated by what creativity looks like when it’s unleavened with shame, failure, deprivation, and all the usual psychic wounds. Cameron was blessed in innumerable ways; supported and loved afaik,
2/3
#mwe day 20: Geese - Projector My reluctance to engage with an artist’s “juvenilia” could not have been more misplaced. The “early” Geese were already great—free with structure and harmony; vocally less dynamic and vulnerable than the Cam we’d come to know.
1/3
#mwe day 19: Luna - Penthouse
Like the dreamier end of YLT fronted by a more laid-back Jonathan Donahue. Tom Verlaine agitates. (Like Helvetia, this is another continuation band. Could I have made a theme week out of it? Mojave 3, Spectrum, Damon & Naomi...?)
#mwe day 18: Down Colorful Hill
Makes demands on the listener's time and patience that aren't rewarded. Oh, you're making an observation or having some kind of feeling? Fascinating. (I actually like RHP I, so this might be a set/setting effect. Better luck tomorrow, I guess.)
#mwe day 17: Magnetic Fields - Get Lost
I regret the daily schedule is such that I can't give this album the unhurried attention it Merrits. I have only my first impression, of melodies comfortably tailored to my ear. Easeful rhymes, a confiding tone the right amount of maudlin.
#mwe day 16: Helvetia’s Junk Shop
Vaguely moody indie rock, well-played, thoughtfully arranged, fitfully interesting. Ymmv.
The opener, a Rocketship/Built to Spill hybrid, is the highlight. Not until late track “Portugal” did I remember this is a Duster offshoot/continuation.
#mwe day 15 - Stone Flower
Opener headfakes you into thinking this is just more bossa Van Gelder a la Wave, then of a sudden we're in Basil Kirchin land. Mostly instrumental, save two. Electric piano prefigures 70s Blossom Dearie. In sum, a chilled, tangy caipirinha.
#mwe day 14: Ween - Quebec
The mood is flippant; the method is pastiche; the rep is “the Coen brothers of alt rock.” But the effect is that of a lesser stoner-courting Adult Swim show. It bounces off me.
✂️ I Don’t Want It
#mwe day 13: Speaking in Tongues
#talkingheads week day 5
I like the tom-tom in "Once in a Lifetime"; you could say I'm in the tom-tom club. Bootsy P-Funk tells us the essence of funk is to return to the 1, just as the D-plan would return to the "Crosseyed" sound on Change. But this is not my 1 and I shall not return. [2/2]
#mwe day 12: Remain in Light
#talkingheads week day 4
More fool I to count out bouba too soon. Things click together like a Hellraiser puzzle box. My ears perk up halfway through "Born Under Punches"; some aleatory blip-bleeps anticipate J. Greenwood's Max-chopped guitar. [1/2]
despair for you
#mwe day 11: Fear of Music
#talkingheads week day 3
I do notice the inventiveness of the arrangements, the pains taken to avert clichés. But I am a melody-first guy, and the compositions often neither compel nor stick. Hence my fave: the straightforward, sentimental "Heaven."
#mwe day 10: More Songs About Buildings and Food
#talkingheads week day 2
Had a vision of Devo’s “Whip It” as a colossus in the desert of the future, a Great Attractor pulling new wave into its immense and terrible arms. At its feet swims a Big Mouth Billy Bass
✂️: Warning Sign
#mwe day 9: Talking Heads ‘77
#talkingheads week day 1
77: the absolute victory of kiki over bouba. *Possibly* this band could have used a Colin Moulding figure, someone chillpilled enough to offer the listener a breather. “I’m tense and nervous and I can’t relax”—you don’t say!
#mwe day 8: Gillian Welch & David Rawlings—Woodland
Soothing late work from a pair of master craftsmen whose medium is *Americana tropes*. “I only want what we had,” they sing in duet, but I believe they’ve still got it!
RIYL: Adrienne Lenker; the “nicer” Neil Young albums
#mwe day 7: The Lonesome Crowded West
Tried to get on the wavelength by painting the foyer without ventilation, but this mouse continues to escape me. How about a melody to wash down the yelps? Picks up in the last third, but by then my interest is as cashed as a Coke can pipe.
#mwe day 6: Al Stewart - Modern Times
Al nudges his way into the pantheon of Fey Scots, singing as though he always floats on an inch of air. Doesn’t quite transcend its Times, but it would have been an appealingly wry alternative to Eagles, etc. in 1975—the Year of the Tiger.
#mwe day 5: I, Jonathan
Jonathan Richman’s mind is the happiest place on earth, his voice a vessel for charm and simple gratitude. A shadow of melancholy only makes the effect more pure and vivid. I want to hug this album.
RIYL: Jens Lekman, Lou Reed, magic hour at the beach
#mwe day 4: Ian Matthews - Valley Hi
Pleasant country-folk-rock from the original Fairport co-frontperson. The position of “English Marty Balin” no longer available, he attempts to become “the English Gene Clark.” Falls just a bit short.
Recommended if: you consider mids loud
It’s giving gentleman farmer who swings. It’s giving the guy John Cale’s wife told Cale not to worry about.
RIYL: early Pink Floyd, Robyn Hitchcock, the novels of Richard Brautigan
✂️ There Is Loving, title track (2/2)
#mwe day 3: Kevin Ayers - Wharevershebringswesing
Review: he do what he please, and he do it with ease. Erstwhile Soft Machine-er’s chief assets are his inventiveness—this is pop music *as play*—and his state of total relaxation. It’s giving louche eccentric. (1/2)
#mwe Day 2: Elvis Costello - Blood & Chocolate
Review: he’s not disappointed, he’s just mad.
I cannot stress enough how anachronistically not shitty this sounds for a mid-80s mainstream rock record.
RIYL: other EC albums, and (honestly) Rilo Kiley
✂️ Home Is Anywhere; I Want You
