Noise
Headlights Pointed At The Dawn
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 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.
Post Dreams
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.
Like A Virgin
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.
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.
On Dark Horses
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.
Noble Oak - Eveningstar
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.
Noble Oak - Eveningstar (YouTube)
One Actress And A Melon
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.
Ginger Root - “There Was A Time” (YouTube)
Shinbangumi by Ginger Root will be released on 9/13/2024 by Ghostly International. The cloud vinyl version includes a pop-out paper building!
Sharing Is Caring
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).
Mariya Takeuchi
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.
Mariya Takeuchi - Plastic Love (YouTube)