In honor of Tops’ new album Bury The Key being released yesterday, I’m featuring one of the tracks, “Falling On My Sword,” as the Saturday Night Video this week.
“Falling On My Sword” is my favorite among the early singles from this LP and probably the one that most closely matches the 70’s prog rock-inspired cover art. It’s a bit of a left turn for Tops. Based on their previous work, you would think anything born of a seventies influence would be more in line with late-decade disco (and the remainder of the album features some of that).
The tempo on this song will mess with your sense of equilibrium. It speeds up and down mindless of whether or not you are packing your Dramamine. The fuzzed out guitars bring a level of sludge previously unheard in the indie pop band’s music and the bassline sounds like being chased by a demon.
I don’t harbor many regrets in my life, but there are a few shows that I wish I had attended. When Tops played locally with Men I Trust a couple of years ago, I missed it due to my frustration with Ticketmaster and their service charge shenanigans. I refused to purchase tickets simply on principle. I’m so glad I get another chance to see the band.1
I still have to get out to see Men I Trust at some point. What a split bill. ↩︎
Brothers Evan and Quinn Seurkamp, who primarily make up the Ohio band The Laughing Chimes, call upon the hauntings of the Appalachian foothills of their native state as inspiration for their gothic jangly post-punk. There is a wistfulness appropriate to the rust belt and its faded glory that pervades their album Whispers in the Speech Machine.
“High Beams” is one of the catchier, more upbeat tracks on the album. The vocals call to mind Peter Murphy and the keyboards add some sparkle. One can imagine this is what Bauhaus might have sounded like after indulging in some Special-K.
Hunter Tice (a man after my own heart) writes for Christ and Pop Culture about the importance of physical media in a world that is increasingly detached from the material when engaging with art.
An increasing reliance on digital micro-conveniences results in digitality becoming a powerhouse vehicle of mindless consumption and physical disengagement. As our culture endorses digital consumption in more facets of life, it inherently devalues the significance of physicalness. That has incredible implications on how society functions, including how we perceive the world of media and artistic expression.
Flipping from album to album, song to song, I keenly feel that detachment. The absence of the physical makes everything so ephemeral, in many ways more forgettable. Like Tice, if you had told me in high school I would have access to most of the world’s music at my fingertips at nearly all times, I would have died of shock with a smile on my face. What could be better?
It turns out something is lost in unfettered access to everything. Meaning that is attached to objects that delight us with what they provide decreases. Memory is attenuated.
I just bought a new cassette player for the first time since the early 90s, when I had a Sony Sports Walkman. I adored that device, but it was stolen out of my locker with my friends' Kiss Me, Kiss Me, Kiss Me tape inside (sorry Billy). Hopefully, the experience lives up to the fondness I recollect.
Bandcamp is finally adding a feature that I, and other like-minded enjoyers of music have been wanting for some time. The new ability to create playlists feels like it aligns with the ethics of the service, which is mostly a good thing, but the focus may be a bit too heavy in that area.1 Bandcamp describes the feature as, “Like digital mixtapes.” There’s not much need to describe how it works, everyone is familiar with the concept of playlists and this feature appears to do exactly what it says on the tin.
The new playlist feature from Bandcamp
Ultimately, I don’t think you’ll see these playlists proliferating. Though I would rather believe otherwise, I have to think that getting widespread adoption of playlists comprised of purchased music will be an uphill battle. The fact that all music comprising these digital mixtapes has to be purchased in contrast to the all-you-can-eat streaming models will limit their reach. I personally prefer to buy the albums I really like on Bandcamp.2 My playlists usually contain tracks from albums that I’m not necessarily going to purchase, though. You can buy individual tracks on Bandcamp, but I’m not in the habit of doing that. Other profiles I visit seem to indicate most have the same patterns of buying. It may be a challenge to get users buying single tracks. We’ll see if this feature makes that method more appealing.
Unless I’ve missed it, there doesn’t seem to be a way to embed these playlists in webpages, which is one of the most useful features of Bandcamp, and one of the best ways to evangelize your favorite tunes. Not to mention that it’s probably one of the primary ways to get people to the site to purchase music.
My hope was that when Bandcamp finally got around to adding playlists, they would be creative about the capabilities they could offer. This implementation is about as straightforward and bare bones as it could be. It seems they’ve focused more on protecting the IP to force people to open their wallets than making a compelling feature that will spur usage.
The emphasis is still on ownership and people paying for the music they consume. For instance, users can only listen to a track 3 times, by default, without shelling out some money to own it. ↩︎
Ideally on a physical format, which on Bandcamp gives you access to high-quality digital versions of the purchased tracks. ↩︎
In June, I hope to see long-time indie pop favorites Tennis on their farewell tour. The husband and wife duo of Patrick Riley and Alaina Moore are calling it quits after an impressive run.
The pair made this statement regarding the end of their time as Tennis:
It became clear that we had said everything we wanted to say and achieved everything we wanted to achieve with our band … We are ready to pursue other creative projects and to make space in our lives for new things.
It sounds like a standard, almost corporate-like goodbye message. When they were promoting their just-released 7th album Face Down In The Garden, though, they were a bit more candid about the challenges they had faced.
The inspiration for new work came while we were still on the road touring Pollen. We felt a clear pull to write new music, but ran up against a series of bizarre setbacks. We blew tires and lost an engine. I developed a chronic illness. We took a doomed voyage that culminated in an attempted robbery at sea. Fragments of songs that first arrived like gifts from the universe later refused to be completed. Our days were awash in major and minor crises that dragged the album out endlessly.
Touring would seem to be particularly difficult under some of the circumstances they described. They have certainly toured prolifically. I was supposed to see them at the Haw River Ballroom when Covid-19 came along and spoiled those plans and many others. It also sounds like there were plenty of problems to interrupt the progress of making an album.
“At The Apartment” is the first track on Face Down In The Garden and it sets the mood for the rest of the album, which hits a melancholy note fitting for the band’s send off. The video is a live version of the song recorded, you guess it, in an apartment. It features frequent Tennis collaborator and one of my favorite indie singers, Molly Burch, on backup vocals. This may be the closest thing we get from Burch to new music.1 Of course, this may be one of the last few videos from Tennis, as well.
Burch tore up her recording contract with Captured Tracks last year and is now running a program to support adults with disabilities through the creation and use of art. ↩︎
Just as I’m starting to get back into vinyl records, one of the format’s proponents, a popular record club called Vinyl Me, Pleaseis shutting down.
Since launching in 2012, Vinyl Me, Please has offered boutique, collectible record pressings to a subscriber base paying as much as $654 a year for the highest-tier membership, as The Denver Post’s John Wenzel reported last month. The article traces the period of instability back to the firing, in March 2024, of three senior staff, whom the board of directors allege had conspired to divert company funds to build a pressing plant. Cameron Schaefer, the company’s former chief executive, said he believed that he and the two others had been fired to save on severance.
At least the accused were (allegedly) trying to do something that would benefit the record industry!
I was a part of a record club called Sounds Delicious that put out cover albums by some of the most recognizable independent musicians. The club offered some extremely well done slabs of vinyl. A couple that come to mind were The Pains of Being Pure At Heart reimagining Tom Petty’s Full Moon Fever, a master class in how to adapt a rock touchstone into indie pop and Frankie Rose covering The Cure’s Seventeen Seconds with all the appropriate adoration.
With Sounds Delicious, which is still taking orders, but hasn’t put anything out in a long time, the rate of releases was always spotty. Delays and apologies were abundant. The proprietors are a wonderful husband and wife team who really believe in the concept but it seems like a real logistical challenge to make work.
I hate to feel like I’m just getting old and only able to appreciate music from my youth. I’m still open to new music and find much to enjoy in the output of the current generation of music. However, I suppose like anyone, I do have a soft spot for the soundtracks of my younger days.
I never actually owned a copy of Unrest’s Perfect Teeth, even while being devoted to the Teen-Beat record label that put out some of their catalog and was owned by founding member Mark Robinson.1 I had a Teen-Beat mug to match my t-shirt. Back in those days, though, we had to buy albums and I only had limited funds, so I purchased the B.P.M compilation from the band instead of Perfect Teeth (which I don’t regret).
Perfect Teeth is a representative artifact of its era, and still influential now. In the case of standout track “Make Out Club,” it’s difficult to find jangle pop that’s so frantic yet so laid back. The title of the song became the basis for one of the first ever online social networks. The stylistic representation is all over the map on the record, though. It’s not just indebted to C86.
In addition to being an enjoyable listen, this is an artifact that says as much about the early 90s indie scene as any university-sponsored archeologist could ever dig up.
I tend to place a great deal of emphasis on harmony between the different parts of my life. When there is some sort of discontinuity, it vexes me. This can play out in pretty serious cognitive dissonance.1 It can also filter down to less consequential choices. One struggle I’ve always had is around media formats for music.
I like to be able to experience my music in the same way for any given release. At times, this has been very difficult. Back in the 90s, for example, it was common for indie bands to put out 7" record singles but only release their albums on CD. That drove me nuts. Occasionally, I was placated when labels would collect a group of previously vinyl-only singles on CD. There were gaps, though, and when you wanted to create a playlist listening experience, you had to turn to the versatile cassette tape. Vinyl, compact disc and cassette all had their strengths and weaknesses. It always felt like there were tradeoffs to be made with any choices.
One of the major changes in the musical landscape recently (apart from the overabundance of availability due to streaming) is convergence. Just about everything is now available in a digital format, residing on a hard drive somewhere. Digitization has been a great equalizer and been a great enabler for the musically promiscuous among us. However, there are still reasons to prefer analog recordings and physical media.
Roon’s announcement of the Roon Relay technology and its compatibility with the Victrola streaming series of turntables adds a bridge between the digital and analog worlds. The implementation is laid out in a review of the Victrola Sapphire, the flagship turntable in the streaming series.
Roon Relay allows you to stream your vinyl in hi-res Flac format. This enables use cases like listening to your records streaming from your phone on a set of headphones in an entirely different space from where the vinyl is spinning. It also allows you to put all of your music into the same format.2
In the early aughts, my perspective on music media was that vinyl would become the premium format, with CDs unable to differentiate themselves from what came across the intertubes. This is indeed what happened, but now it seems easier than ever to combine the strengths of physical media and cloud assets.
It’s worth noting that you don’t have to shell out $1300 for the Sapphire, as Victrola has other turntables in its streaming lineup that have the same capabilities.
Ask me some day (though maybe not today) about how I view the role of the church in contemporary politics. ↩︎
Though it won’t save the stream as flac files, but there are other tools to do that. ↩︎
For this Friday Night Video, we’re going back a way, to the mid-nineties. Smashing Pumpkins had released Mellon Collie And The Infinite Sadness a fittingly grandiose title for an ambitious and widely varied double-album. At the time, I heard the first single, the “rat in a cage” song, and I thought this latest effort wasn’t for me. I actually went out and sold my Smashing Pumpkins CDs, which I had been collecting since shortly after the release of their debut, Gish.
It wasn’t until later that I found out there were some strong tracks on the third official record from the band. “1979” is a well-loved classic. Even Pavement covered the song, and they had their own song with the lyrics, “I don’t understand what they mean, and I could really give a f**k,” referring to SP.
Billy Corgan’s voice on studio recordings can sound as sweet as honey, but rarely comes off the same way live. It can be a bit shocking. I remember Smashing Pumpkins performance on SNL after the release of Siamese Dream. As soon as the vocals came in on “Cherub Rock,” I found myself thinking I had somehow been deceived by the uncanny magic of studio wizards.1 The delivery had an abrasiveness that, while not absent in the official album recordings, was placed more deliberately in certain spots. Compare the studio version of “1979” from the video to this fairly recent performance of the song on the Howard Stern show.
The video for the song features teenagers in their element — living bundles of chaotic energy, pure recklessness, unconstrained lust and spontaneous violence. Corgan, sporting a wispy mustache, surveys the scene from a car, with a mixture of delight and passive detachment.
Not too long ago, I posted about a shoegaze cover of a music charts staple from decades ago and, well, I was sorely tempted to do it again.
I came across a YouTube channel for a service called Musora which bills itself as “the ultimate music lessons experience.” Musora offers a subscription which will help you learn to play an instrument and your favorite songs. For $20/month (with an annual subscription), you gain access to a suite of interactive practice tools and a community of like-minded students.
In the video from Musora that I stumbled upon (algorithms can be helpful), shoegaze band La Lune is challenged to reimagine Fleetwood Mac’s “Dreams” on the spot. I’ve listened to “Dreams” quite a few times recently, so I was instantly drawn to the concept and this particular setup. The video features the band constructing their version of the song and then executing on their vision. It’s hard to call a shoegaze version of a classic rock standard a “straight cover.” However, La Lune maintain the darkly sweet intent of the original while bringing the “reverb, dissonance and distortion” that are features of the genre. It feels like a perfect update to the Fleetwood Mac classic. Though there is some discussion about how the vocals will be done during the planning section, bassist Olivia Wells handles the duties with aplomb.
Vancouver’s La Lune is new to the scene, with only an EP, Disparity, that was released this year to comprise their discography. Though the lead track starts out with accoustic guitar, the EP quickly proves its shoegaze bona fides, with crushing walls of distortion and epic dynamics. The title track is a harrowing, almost claustrophobic slice of dreampop.
Madonna’s most well-known album, Like A Virgin just celebrated its 40th anniversary.
Like A Virgin was the first record I owned, given to me by my parents for my 9th birthday. The subject might have been a bit mature for me at that age, but it hardly mattered because I promptly broke the stylus on the family turntable. I couldn’t even listen to my gift. Of course, the hit songs from the record were all over commercial radio, anyway, so it wasn’t like Madonna’s tunes were hiding in obscurity.
The record survived me growing up and came with me throughout moves and changes. I still rotate it, and it still sounds fantastic (probably because I couldn’t wear it out when I was younger). The contributions of Nile Rodgers, who was fresh off producing Let’s Dance for David Bowie, played a major part in shaping the pop greatness of the album. Rodgers wasn’t sure about the collaboration at first, though.
When he was offered the producer gig, he wasn’t immediately sold, because some of Madonna’s peers bemoaned that she was a “totally self-centered bitch” who was a painful collaborator. But he said yes and, upon them linking up, found the budding superstar to be a “true professional.” “If you don’t love these songs, we can’t work together,” Madonna told Rodgers upon showing him the demos she’d made with Bray. “I don’t love them now,” Rodgers responded, “but I will when I’ve finished working on them!”
My favorite track is “Angel,” which the early American shoegaze band Drop Nineteens covered on their 1992 album Delaware. The shoegaze version is noisy and has a blistering intensity that turns the smoothness of the original into an assault on the senses. Drop Nineteens, which only recently got back together to release new music, still place the song in their live sets.
Roon Audio has a new feature that should delight headphone lovers — OPRA (Open Profiles for Revealing Audio). OPRA is an open-source repository hosted on GitHub that contains precisely crafted headphone curves for different headphone models (and you get an equalizer, and you get an equalizer…).
I love Roon, although I’ve had my share of technical challenges — today I need to bring up two issues on the Roon Community forum. The ability of the platform to continuously innovate ways to give audio enthusiasts a better experience is impressive.
Recently, I had a conversation with a colleague about music. I had gone to see one of my direct reports' bands, and they were really genre-hopping. I told her about the experience and mentioned that they blended such far-flung musical styles as punk, hip-hop, and shoegaze. She said she loved shoegaze, but when I asked her if she was going to the Slowdive show, she confessed that she hadn’t heard of them. I was a bit shocked, since I would consider them just below My Bloody Valentine in the pantheon of shoegaze progenitors. I asked her what shoegaze bands she was into and she mentioned Emma Ruth Rundle, whom she described as metal/shoegaze.
The conversation caused me to make a mental note to check out Rundle. I had heard of her playing a metal festival in Asheville (which was postponed after the devastation of Hurricane Helene). What I heard wasn’t what I had expected, since it sounded to me more like post-rock than anything. The first album I looked at, EG2: Dowsing Voice had song titles like “Brigid Wakes To Find Her Voice Anew. The Little Flowers and Birds Show Themselves.” It was like a game of how to tell me your music is post-rock without telling me your music is post-rock. Next, I came across the On Dark Horses album, which really connected with me. Rundle often seems to do more acoustic psyche-folk these days, but this album was different.
Rundle has a dark aesthetic which, at least on On A Dark Horse, pairs well with the primal post-rock rhythms. There is a bit of desert noir in the mix. “Darkhorse” is a particular favorite, its shifting, moody instrumentation serves as a vehicle for Rundle’s powerful and plaintive vocals. When I listened to the album, I was recommended Russian Circles and Mazzy Star. That is as sure a sign as any you are in the right track.
Here, Rundle performs “Darkhorse” and “Control,” two standouts from On A Dark Horse, with a full band.
Emma Ruth Rundle - Full session | Highway Holidays TV (YouTube)
Recently, a friend on Mastodon asked followers about their first cassette purchase. I had no trouble recollecting getting Starship’s Knee Deep In The Hoopla when I was in the fourth grade as my introduction to the world of music on tape. I wore that tape out playing the all-too radio friendly songs like “We Built This City” (some might say the song was pandering — the shoutout to all the cities hasn’t aged well). Following that popular anthem in the track sequencing was “Sara,” a ballad at a time when that was almost a separate genre within a genre. Rock bands used to touring arenas had their slower, more romantic songs interspersed with the more upbeat anthemic fare on their records.
The rocker vs. the ballad dynamic was perhaps never more obvious than on hair metal albums. The rockers were dangerous, lecherous and debauched while the ballads were tender and romantic. The ballads were always fewer in number, but reminded fans — especially those of the female variety — that even the baddest boys (the ones with most Aqua Net and makeup) had a softer side.
Noble Oak’s “Eveningstar” is a balled in the rock tradition. Like Starship’s “Sara,” the song has an sophisticated urban sheen with its immaculate mix of keyboards and guitars. The lyrics flirt with unabashedly straightforward metaphors around love and loss. Lines like “the memory of you becomes a shining light, when you were in my life,” would have sounded perfect in the earnest and overdramatic eighties.
The creative forces behind Ginger Root have a concept for a show featuring one actress (it’s all they had the budget for). Their Japanese protagonist changes looks and activities often to keep people of the world glued to their sets. In the end, it seems, what suits her best is rockin' out.
The song “There Was A Time” itself has a breezy 70s feel, with a healthy dose of tropicalia in the mix and a smidgen of psychedelia. There is a warped cassette haze on the whole track that wouldn’t sound out of place in the heyday of chillwave a little over a decade ago (this could be due to the Toro Y Moi influence). Ginger Root’s mastermind, Cameron Lew, describes the project as “aggressive elevator soul.” “There Was A Time” is a fun listen and matches the rest of the currently available tracks from the upcoming Shinbangumi in style.
In Paul Simpson’s review of the new album from the Houston-based Khruangbin (sorry, no link), A La Sala, he acknowledges the fact that they’ve moved past their influences into a sound all their own.
While it was easier to point out the key influences in the band’s sound on their earlier records, from Thai funk to Afro-pop to flamenco, by now it’s just easier to identify the group’s atmospheric guitars and steadily paced snare slaps as sounding like Khruangbin.
At this point, Khruangbin sounds entirely unique, and as this piece from Ryan Bradley explains, they are hard to imitate.
Music now exists primarily within the stream, which is to say passively: We turn it on, like a faucet, and out pour songs representing some mood, or emotion, or any of the other words we used before we had “vibes.” Perhaps it’s an aura, like “chill.” Or a vague, evocative mind-set, like “always Sunday.” The tap turns and out pour songs we already liked, along with burbles of what is a little new and different yet fits in beautifully. This is the arrangement in which “Khruangbin vibes” excel. Such music is extremely slippery, genrewise. (Is it psychedelic lounge dub? Desert surf rock? The sound you hear inside a lava lamp?) As such, it pairs well with a huge span of music, across genres and eras; it has a kind of algorithmic inevitability to it. But this slipperiness also means that quite a lot of the bands now producing Khruangbin-vibesy music are entirely forgettable.
The consensus on this album among critics seems to be that this is sort of a return to their roots for Khruangbin, embracing the power of a more deliberate groove. The single, “May Ninth,” which was released before the proper album dropped, is a sweetly soporific, minutes until midnight slow jam with an intimate feel.
The whole album is cohesive, so it’s easy to take a song like this as a statement of intent. Listen to the entire record and you’ll probably find yourself in agreement. You’ll also most likely feel a lot more mellow.
In many ways, though not in all, it’s gotten much harder to share the music you love with others. I was reminded of this a couple of days ago. For my wife’s birthday, my sister made her a playlist on Apple Music. This was thoughtful and kind, but unfortunately, we don’t have Apple Music. So my wife had to copy down the tracks that made up the list and find the songs to make her own playlist on Qobuz.
Back in the day, when you had a crush on someone, or simply wanted to spread the gospel of superbad tunes for getting down, you made a mixtape. If the recipient of your tape had a cassette player (which everyone did — they were standard government issue), they could listen to your creation until their heart's content. Or until the tape wore out (this is a real thing).
Austin Kleon has returned to the practice of making mixtapes, buying sealed cassettes in bulk, then taping over the music on them and creating his own covers. It has become a monthly ritual for him. I'm assuming those creations are for his own personal enjoyment, though, as there is only a slight chance that anyone else will have a cassette player to play back the contents. Kleon gets around the sharing limitation by making a YouTube playlist that showcases the songs from the mixtape.
While a YouTube playlist is an inventive way of capturing the contents of your mixtape so that others can partake of your bespoke musical tastes, even that method has its limitations. The most obvious of which is the fact that not all the music you want to share will necessarily be available on YouTube. Admittedly, though, YouTube does have a lot of even obscure music. Search for something like celebrated Chinese blink-and-they're-gone shoegazers Baby Formula, and their limited output is available in full.
However, it can be difficult when the songs are taken off a full album stream and divided into chapters. Additionally, you are relying on the kindness of strangers with names like MrTurboExteme to upload your favorite stuff. Otherwise, you're out of luck.
If you have purchased music outright, ironically, it's even more difficult to allow others to partake. I can share a playlist with my wife on our Qobuz plan, but I can't include songs that I've bought through Bandcamp that aren't found on the streaming services.
It seems, that even with the ease of embeds and streaming music, we are missing something with the switch from physical media. It's not dissimilar from books. We used to be able to share a book with a friend after we had read it to spread the love. Now, we're DRMed into keeping things to ourselves (at least some of us — I have to admit to preferring ebooks on my Kindle). I'm immensely grateful for the ease at which I can access just about anything in the history of recorded music, but we are definitely making some tradeoffs in our embrace of bits and bytes to carry art.
The song for this video is from 1984, but the video was shot just recently. Originally not a huge seller, "Plastic Love" by Mariya Takeuchi has been growing in popularity over the last 40 years. It fits in with the 80's Japanese genre, city pop, and has come to be a defining piece of that style of music. Jason Morehead describes city pop as "a slick blend of jazz, pop, and funk that emerged during Japan’s economic boom in the ’80s and celebrated an upscale, cosmopolitan lifestyle." I like to think of city pop as the cousin of sophisti-pop, which arose in the UK around the same time period, has the same elements of new wave, pop, jazz and soul and matches the polished to a sheen production of city pop.
"Plastic Love" the song has all of the sonic staples that made Japan a neon-permeated fantasyland in the 80's. The video has the neon, but also a nod to the 70's (dig the disco ball) as well as a high-end contemporary feel to it.
