I think this came out right around the time K Records was
sending us something new from Jeremy Jay like once a month. Jeremy Jay was so
boring I got to the point where I lost some faith in my beloved K Records. Or
at least quit getting around to whatever they sent to the KJHK music office.
This 7” is good though! Desolation Wilderness has a sort of dreamy Galaxie 500
quality about them that I really enjoy. There’s more of a pop edge (of course),
and “No Tomorrow” is a hazy and lovely little song. Of course, I namedrop Galaxie
500 and then notice that the little promotion sticker on the front sleeve lists
Galaxie 500 as an RIYL. The more I listen, the more obvious that influence
becomes and while it’s nice to be reminded of something (the ability to draw
comparisons is one of the top-drawer skills of any music writer) if it’s too
much it kind of gets to “Why don’t I just listen to Galaxie 500?” territory.
B-side “Pacific Palisades” is less effective, and pairs the gauzy vocals buried
in the mix with a shitload of reverb. I don’t know exactly what is being
reverberated (I’m assuming guitars) and there are some synthesizers in there
too but ultimately it’s a tone piece that stagnates. “No Tomorrow” is really
nice, though.
The Descendents are my favorite punk rock band. I don’t have
to think about it, and I haven’t for ten years. Milo Goes to College is an unfuckwithable landmark in my musical
history. Everything can be traced back to that album. It was poppy, it was
clever, it had angst. The bass playing was technically proficient enough to
seem crazy great but also fun enough that when I bought a bass guitar in high
school I learned to play by printing out the tabs for all the songs on Milo Goes to College and jumping right
in. I never really got the hang of the bass guitar, but I never stopped loving
the Descendents. Their latest album—Cool
to Be You, from which the first two songs on this EP are culled—came out
the second semester of my senior year of high school just as I was branching
out from punk after a deep incubation of a couple years. It was perfect timing
because I revisited Milo Goes to College
and all my favorite tracks from their discography. (Other than Milo Goes to College, I sort of played
pick-and-choose from the rest of their albums and came up with about an albums
worth of tiny masterpieces. “Get the Time,” “Silly Girl,” “Clean Sheets,” and
“She Loves Me” pretty much cover the 35 years the band has been in off-and-on
existence). Despite spreading six albums over 35 years the quality pretty much
stays the same. There’s something ageless about these guys. Forever young, some
shit like that. I also admired the fact that they were all just normal dudes
and Milo really did go to college. The
title track is probably the most political the Descendents ever got (the EP and
album Cool to Be You dropped in early
2004, the year Bush was reelected) but it’s still good. Trademark style and all
that. The first Descendents song I ever heard was “Wienerschnitzel,” which is
about 16 seconds long and features the band placing an order at the titular
restaurant at rapid-fire speed. These guys just sand about your usual shit and
somehow managed to do it really well. They sang about fishing, biking, food,
heartbreak, coffee, more heartbreak, and more coffee. They always sound like
they really just don’t give a fuck but in that sweet way you want bands to not
give a fuck. They’re not trying too hard because they don’t have to. And that’s
what I always loved about them. And that’s why I love this EP. The other track
on the A-Side—“Nothing With You”—is just a simple, totally fucking sweet love
song (“I don’t wanna move/ I’ll just sit here in my living room/ See what’s on
the tube/ While I’m hanging out with you”). “Here With Me” is more of a sad
love song and “I Quit” is basically Milo’s reasons for quitting the band so
frequently over the last three decades. The Descendents could put out an album
next month and I feel like it would still be good, like all their albums. All and Enjoy are a little spotty, but All,
Everything Sucks and Cool to Be You are
solid and now that they’re reuniting again for festival shows, I’m holding out
hope for another record because they very obviously know how to work their
melodies and very obviously love playing together.
When I first heard Middle Cyclone, my first response was:
“More like Middling Cyclone.” I
thought this because after falling deeply in love with Neko Case’s previous
album—Fox Confessor Brings the Flood—I
had high expectations. And I was enough of a dipshit to realize that my
expectations had been met. The thing with Middle
Cyclone is that it’s a long record. Or at least feels like a long record (the last half hour of the thing is just
crickets and night noises, so maybe that adds to my perception that this is a
long player in every sense of the word). Since Neko Case is pretty much Jenny’s
favorite artist hands down (we are seeing her in Lawrence in October and every
couple days she alerts me to this fact), I bought her this and Furnace Room Lullaby on vinyl for our
anniversary. We listen to this one a lot on trips back to Kansas and every time
I hear it, the more I like it. Still, it took until I listened to it on vinyl
(the album is split over two LPs) that it really clicked. By segmenting Middle Cyclone into bite-sized chunks
songs I’d totally ignored really popped. “This Tornado Loves You” and “People
Got A Lotta Nerve” were my early favorites because they are the most
straightforward, catchy numbers, but the middle part of the album kind of
blended into a haze until “I’m an Animal” blew me away. But “Fever,” “Polar
Nettles,” and “Magpie in the Morning” are these gorgeous little tunes. It’s not
like you even have to be patient to enjoy them; you just need to be able to
shut down and enjoy. Jenny’s favorite song on the album is “The Pharaohs,”
which is another track I had ignored until she played it a thousand times. It’s
outstanding and has a similar tone to Fox
Confessor standout (and my favorite song of 2006) “Star Witness.” It’s got
a mythic feeling, with knock-out lines like “You kept me wanting, wanting,
wanting like the wanting in the movies and the hymns/ I want the Pharaohs but
there’s only men.” Speaking of the writing, it’s great. But what else did you
expect? Neko Case has a gift for weaving her songs together with wit and a deep
emotional understanding that I feel is somehow underrated given how goddamn
cool she seems. The more I think about that blend of humor and sadness makes
her cover of Harry Nilsson’s “Don’t Forget Me” make a whole lotta sense (“I
miss you when I’m lonely/ I miss the alimony too”). Anyone else writing a song
about a tornado in love with a girl, chasing her from county to county leaving
a wake of destruction in its path might write something gimmicky but Case just
leaves you with that heavy feeling in your chest. Sure it’s a metaphor, but
it’s told so literally and the images are so vivid and violent that the whole
thing is just devastatingly electric. The album is laced with a theme of Mother
Nature’s Fury/purity (most notably on the Sparks cover “Never Turn Your Back on
Mother Earth,” the aforementioned “This Tornado Loves You,” “People Got a Lot
of Nerve” right down to the goddamn crickets at the very end). And tornados. So
many tornados. It’s an outstanding piece of work.
Kill Rock Stars/Dischord, 1994
Acquired: Love Garden, Used, 2008
Price: $1
The DC in Delta ‘72’s blood is undeniable. My first thought when putting the 7”
on was “Is this on Dischord?” I checked. It’s on Kill Rock Stars but KRS would
have been my second guess. TWIST. It’s a collaborative release between the two
labels! Delta ’72 bring edgy post-grunge alt-rock to the (turn)table. “On the
Rocks” is a murky mess of booming drums, screeching female vocals, and has a
farfisa playing out some eerie organ tones to make the whole thing feel a
little unsettling. The first track on the B-side—“Got a Train to Catch”—is a
lot more palatable. Again, it’s pretty straightforward noisy mid-90s indie rock
but that track (in addition to the farfisa which adds a unique texture to the
band’s sound) has a harmonica that pops up halfway through and though John
Popper ruined the harmonica for EVERYONE in the 90s, it’s kind of awesome here.
John Prine – German
Afternoons
Oh Boy, 1986 Acquired: Half Price Books, Used, 2013
Price: $3
The 80s still can’t kill John Prine! The telltale cornball flourishes are still
smeared on bits and pieces of the recordings, but Prine still shines through
like the golden boy he is. He sounds older here. Tired, maybe, I’m not quite
sure. But it really perfectly suits “Speed of the Sound of Loneliness,” which
basically proves my theory that no matter how middle of the road a John Prine
album is there’s at least one song that is a certified all-star jam. The album
sounds like a lazy afternoon put to wax. I am listening to it at 10 in the
morning the day before the Fourth of July. I have nothing to do but sit here
and think about how much I love John Prine. Once a week some middle-aged dude
will come into Half Price Books and talk about John Prine. It’s weird how often
it happens. Usually they see the two-CD set of Great Days that presides over the CD section, but sometimes someone
comes in looking for his CDs (which we never get in) and I’ll immediately be
like “I’ll help you!” and then they’ll tell me how they saw him in Chicago or
Milwaukee or some other northern Midwestern burg and how, oh boy, he’s a hoot.
Love it. “I Just Want to Dance With You,” “Linda Goes to Mars,” and a mega-bluegrass-ified
version of “Paradise” (originally appearing on his eponymous debut) round out
the hits. The rest of the songs are good in the way John Prine’s songs from the
80s are pretty good.
Acquired: Half Price Books, Used, 2013
Price: $1.50
Not even the 80s could kill John Prine. Well, his music at least. The
production on Aimless Love is slicker
than ever, with that distinct 80s gloss that shows up and makes the drums sound
like drum machines and the pianos sound like synthesizers. The album isn’t
great by any means (nor are any of his albums from the early 80s) but its good
and I think you could argue that it’s better to make a few great albums and a
million good ones than to make one masterpiece and a million shitters. Or I
suppose they would even out, but considering that I champion consistency and
see it as a highly valuable trait in all aspects of life (and Fantasy Baseball,
of course). John Prine is nothing if not consistent. You know what you’re
getting every single time and there are always a couple tracks on each record that
are bound for some career retrospective years down the line (or the spectacular
Great Days anthology, which I try to
push onto co-workers whenever it shows up at the store). “Aimless Love” and
“Unwed Fathers” are basically the same song. I don’t know how I didn’t notice
this, considering that they’re within a track of each other on Great Days. “Unwed Fathers” is Aimless Love’s little masterpiece.
There’s a syrupy quality to the title track and other tracks that made Great Days (“The Oldest Baby in the World”
and “People Puttin’ People Down”) that “Unwed Fathers” subverts with its
skewering of the male species. Lines like “But unwed fathers/ They can’t be
bothered/ They run like water through a mountain stream” and “Your ddady never
meant to hurt you ever/ He just don’t live here but you got his eyes” provide a
nice counterpoint to the general sappiness of the rest of the album (but hey,
at least the sappiness is enjoyable enough).
XL, 2013
I think I was probably too harsh with Contra.
Or maybe I wasn’t, I haven’t listened to the album since I reviewed it in 2010.
I referred to it as milquetoast and suburban and background music. I also wrote
“I’m hoping it’s a sophomore slump because I want Vampire Weekend to make
another record full of killer pop songs that are so good I don’t care that
they’re copping African rhythms or whatever.” That was three-and-a-half years
ago. I’ve mellowed out a bit. I’m still a bit of a wanker but I feel like I’ve
gotten better at avoiding the hype machine after spending my entire tenure at
KJHK living inside of it and, as music director, piloting the whole fucking
thing (or at least that’s how I thought of it). I lived in trends, the next big
thing, and that’s why when I graduated I listened to nothing but the Lemonheads
for six-months straight.
Shortly after the release of their debut LP, I had a chance
to interview the band with a friend of mine in the basement of Liberty Hall
before a show. There is an audio file of that clumsy interview floating around on
KJHK’s webserver (or better yet, it is gone forever. I never transcribed it). I
was already a fan, but despite bassist Chris Baio’s bulldoggish attitude any
time I said the word “hype” or “blogosphere,” Ezra Koenig was a total
sweetheart and I came away understanding that they really weren’t faking. That
though I didn’t have very much in common with these east coast boys who dressed
like preppies, their hooks were pure, their songs were catchy, and their lyrics
weren’t just a bunch of silly bullshit. They had a sense of humor but never got
jokey. They were fresh.
Modern Vampires of the
City feels like more of a successor to their eponymous debut than Contra (although I suppose the three fit
together and illustrate an evolution that is important to judging the band’s
work as a whole). It is a violently elegant pop record, and I’m not just saying
that because of the harpsichord that pops up and really makes everything sound
like a wonderful period piece. The melodies are both immediate and subtle. They
are catchy enough to get stuck in your head with enough muscle to get better
and better upon repeat listening. Which is why “Step” is the perfect first
single. It almost sounds lazy. The
song is so spare at times, with Koenig singing just through some light drums
and a sleepy bass line. But then there’s the harpsichord, and the
pitch-shifting that adds so much texture to the record. “Step” succeeds because
it sounds both nostalgic and futuristic.
I pretend that I’m some kind of purist. A wonk bemoaning the
fact that none of the music these days has guitars and it’s all a bunch of
dipshits standing in front of laptops. And here Vampire Weekend have made one
of the best indie rock records of the year and nothing is real. The live drums
have been sequenced and programmed to death, the vocals are frequently
manipulated, and the EQs have been clipped and manipulated to soften
everything. But the songs come through so well. The melodies are what matter,
and you can tell the band spent hours and hours trying to make them shine as
best as they possibly could. Sometimes I feel like the great records are the
ones that make me realize I’m wrong about something. The first time I listened
to “Ya Hey” I fell back onto the futon halfway through the song and just
listened. I stopped tinkering with my fantasy baseball team and just sat back
and listened to the music. I never do that. I have a sort of amendment in my
constitution of musical appreciation that says if a record can get me to put
down everything and just listen, it has done something magical. It’s a sad
relationship to have with music, but holy shit, when something cuts through the
multi-tasking haze of my brain and really makes me stop and go “Goddamn, that
is a fucking great,” that’s what I live for. The more I listen to Modern Vampires of the City, the more
that keeps happening.
Matador, 2013
Kurt Vile always reminds me of the worst time in my life. That would be the
summer after I graduated college. 2009. I’d just met the girl I was going to
marry and I had absolutely no prospects. No job. Nothin’ but a girl who loved
me which is really always enough pretty much. But I was dicking around. I was
freelancing for the Pitch and that ruled but it was still college mentality.
Adulthood was foreign at the moment. And then one of my best buddies Chris Bianculli
got me a job at the property management company he worked for. First
Management. They own a bunch of real estate in Lawrence and I heard the dude
who owns the company has a giraffe or an elephant and a private jet. Some
serious fucking moneyed guy. Anyway, I got a job doing move-out inspections,
apartment cleaning and move-in inspections. I tried to hang on and at least
have a ten-hour a week job to hang on to until I found something but the hours
kept vanishing. Eventually Chris got fired for some nebulous reason and the
person hired to fill his role managing the Canyon Court apartment complex in
West Lawrence was totally out of touch. The first day I worked there she had
left this note that instructed me to post all these fliers on every door of every
apartment at Canyon Court but specifically instructed me NOT to throw all of
them in the trash. It might have read like a joke if it hadn’t implied that I
was some simpleton and was just going to say “fuck what my boss told me, I’m
gonna play pool all day because there is a pool table literally twenty feet
from my desk.” So I wrote her a note. It basically said “I think what you wrote
here was really condescending. Why would you even imply that I would throw
these fliers in the trash? I was paid to do a job and I am going to do that job
and I think it’s kind of messed up that you implied that I wouldn’t do the job
I was hired to do.” So I put up the fliers in the summer heat and went back to
work. Work basically consisted of waiting for residents to get locked out of
their apartments and charging them $25 to get let back in. It was a shitty
place but I did it because I didn’t have a job. The rest of the job mostly
consisted of playing pool and putting up balloons. I was still pretty annoyed
with the new manager, and since she specifically instructed that I put up
balloons I used the office’s helium tank to pump up like fifty balloons and I
daisy chained them with ribbon and made a monolith of balloons out by the pool.
I should note that the tone of her instructions was pretty horrible and that my
note really wasn’t that bad. OK, it was pretty bad. I was totally in 22-year-old
fuck you mode, but really, she had it coming. Because if you just took over an
apartment complex and you want to win the trust and respect of your underlings
you don’t get all I AM THE BOSS AND YOU WILL RESPECT ME on them. Because that
is some stupid shit they probably teach you in business school. I don’t know. I
never went to business school and I could probably out-manage any of these
fucking pretenders at this point in my life. But anyway, I got fired for my
transgressions. It was a beautiful firing. Grandiose and full of fuck you. A
firing I never thought I would have because I am usually such a dutiful
employee. Always on time, always eager to learn and eager to help. Once when I
was working at the Chase Court Apartments KU Basketball legend Sherron Collins
got locked out of is apartment and I let him back in for free! I knew I should
have charged him, but who charges a local hero a fee to get let back into his
shitty overpriced apartment that is probably being covered by the University
anyway? Not this guy. When I was doing move-in inspections at Apple Croft (the
lowest-rent of all First Management’s properties dubbed “Crapple Loft” by
pretty much everyone because it was a dump) I encountered a German exchange
student who was baffled by the amount of roaches in his apartment. The roaches
were myriad. I’m talking climbing up the walls, climbing on the ceiling and
navigating the carpeting. He had mattress cased in plastic wrap leaning up
against the wall and the roaches had managed to find a way inside and were
climbing all over the mattress.
“This
is really messed up,” I told him. “I’m going to get someone in here right
away.”
He
just laughed. “In Berlin, apartments are much worse,” he said in his immaculate
accented English. He poked at one of the roaches under the plastic wrap over
the mattress and I ran back to the office at Chase Court to get the manager to
send the exterminator out. Most of the apartments at Apple Croft had roaches.
Most of the apartments had black mold too. I reported this problem and they
just sent out Patrick the maintenance guy to paint over the black mold with
white paint. Done and done. Apple Croft was also home of the pool where all of
my friends and ex-friends notoriously went skinny-dipping. An absolute dump
through and through.
But
I lost the thread. The point is, I was trying to make a stand for what was
right and just and trying to make management see things through my eyes and
they flat out refused. The next Monday, on the day of the all-staff meeting, I
was called into the Chase Court office. I was met by the manager of Chase Court
(who I’m fairly certain was the highest manager there was who didn’t own a
Mercedes/exotic pet) and the new manager of Canyon Court who I had oh so
recently reprimanded. I was promptly fired. I knew I was going to get fired
because I’d been specifically instructed to come in early. I told Jenny I was
probably going to get fired for what I’d said to the new Canyon Court manager
and she didn’t seem too upset because it wasn’t a real job anyway. I got in the
car and Kurt Vile’s Childish Prodigy was
in the CD player and it was just starting over. Track one. “Hunchback.” It only
took me five minutes to get to Chase Court from our apartment on 22nd
and Tennessee and that song got me pumped up to get fired for the very first
(and I can only assume last) time. I went in cool as a cucumber, had my
transgressions recited to me and told the Chase Court manager what I thought of
what was happening. I told her that I thought it was bullshit, and that what
the Canyon Court manager had written was bullshit and I stood by the helpful
notes I’d left on the weekend instructions. I awkwardly pried the keys off of
my key-ring. I really should have taken them off before hand because that just
made things weird. I threw them on the table, told them to “get bent,” and
walked out the door. I reentered the office and told them both I was sorry I’d
said “get bent,” and that I’d always wanted to say that to somebody and it just
happened to be them and that I understood completely why I had been fired.
In
the parking lot I ran into my bro Mark. Mark and I had started at the same
time. Both of us had been hired to clean apartments and not so explicitly let
go at the end of turn. I slapped hands with him and told him what had happened
and wished him good luck. A solid dude, through and through, forever and ever.
He wished me luck and I left to the rest of Kurt Vile’s Childish Prodigy.
Four
years later, I’ve managed to work my way up into the management team at the
Half Price Books in St. Paul. Lately, I’ve been driving to work listening to
Kurt Vile’s latest album Wakin on a
Pretty Daze and every morning I drive to work I can’t help but think of
getting canned because Kurt Vile immediately makes me think of music to get
canned to. It’s a beautiful thing. It’s music for the people who understand
that the world works in a specific way and that the way the world works is
never a way they’re going to work with. It’s a big fat fucking game, and I
think Mr. Vile gets that. To me, his music always feels like a big fuck you to
everybody. He just does his thing, rambles on, and then goes on his way.
There
is plenty of rambling here, more rambling than ever even. Childish Prodigy is still my favorite record of his because it was
so messy and so built on Kurt Vile becoming a bona fide Singer/Songwriter with
capitals. Smoke Ring For My Halo had
a few tracks I loved but mostly I got bored. At first, I got bored with Wakin on a Pretty Daze until I listened
to it a dozen times on the way to work. There was something transcendent about
listening to the quasi title track at 7:45 in the morning and waiting for
trains to pass on my way to a job where I felt like I was doing legitimate good
work. Where no one is going to fire you for sticking up for yourself. I’ve
always felt like that was why I got fired, and why I’ve always held the opinion
that Doug Compton and First Management could all go fuck themselves. I
fantasized about doing a mini comic about the whole experience and leaving it
in the plastic Apartment Finder stalls located around downtown Lawrence. But
the whole thing is easier to fit into an album review. Honestly, it’s ones of
the best experiences I’ve ever had. You get it if you’ve ever seen the inside
of one of those $900 a month apartments.
After
that I worked at CD Tradepost in Olathe for a handful of months (a job I did
actually write a mini comic about) until I parlayed that experience into a job
at Half Price Books. And I’m content enough. It’s not a dream job but I’m
hungry and I like the work and I like the people and I like that I’m not
working for a CEO who owns a private jet and a giraffe and buys up all the cheap
property in a town and sells it back to the people at exorbitant prices. Those
people can all get bent.
Kurt
Vile’s latest album is a bit long in the tooth, but it’s a piece of
motherfucking honest work. You get an impression of this guy when you listen to
his album. There’s not posing. No artifice. No goddamn dicking around. Just a
dude from Philly speaking his mind and often doing it at length. “Wakin on a
Pretty Day” is over nine minutes long and it’s got maybe the prettiest little
riff I’ve heard all year. A laid-back riff that puts the mind at ease. To this
day Childish Prodigy is my
quintessential fall record. Every autumn, it finds its way back into my CD
player. Something about the finger picking on “Blackberries” and pretty much
every song. There’s a tone that bathes that whole album in dimming golden light
and it is so insanely beautiful it’s almost impossible to express. Wakin on a Pretty Daze abandons the
distant tone for directness. You can hear it best on the absolutely gleeful
“Shame Chamber,” the sassy-as-fuck “KV Crimes,” and the chord changes in “Pure
Pain.”
Don’t
be fooled into thinking Kurt Vile is some sort of prodigy. The feast he offers
up is mostly sick guitar work and drugged-out-sounding vocals and cryptic
lyrics, but the level of refinement he has achieved is brand new. I loved Childish Prodigy for its rawness, and I
love Wakin on a Pretty Daze for its
confidence. Kurt Vile is probably the sort of guy who wants nothing more than
to be reviled in his own time and only appreciated years after his death. Too
bad for him so many people are catching on.
Price: $4
I was never very good at being a punk. There was a solid year in high school
where I really cared about being legit, but that all fell apart when I admitted
to liking Radiohead. But there was a year where I was listening to nothing but
Dead Kennedys, Black Flag, Minor Threat, Descendents and every band signed to
Fat Wreck Chords (I always had a soft spot for pop). Against Me! Were a part of
that too, but I never had the nerve to ever consider being an anarchist. Sure I
wore an American flag patch upside down on my patch-covered hoodie but who was
I kidding? I hated America, but 9/11 had just happened so I couldn’t really hate America. I was sixteen, and
if I remember anything about sixteen it’s that all of my beliefs and opinions
about God and Country were so fresh off the boat that they were quaint at best.
Just groundwork for a more adult understanding of the Issues. But holy shit I
loved Against Me! So much. They were making punk rock in a way I’d never heard
before. The folk elements and the scream-a-long atmosphere like it was all one
big party drew me in on the surface but it was Tom Gabel’s lyrics that really
made me fall in love. There is just so much honesty in these songs. A sort of
honesty that was kind of absent from NOFX (with the exception of The Decline) or Bad Religion or any
other band trying to topple the system or making fun of George W Bush. Part of
it was the way Gabel sounds like he’s about to lose his voice at any second,
part of it was that he was just singing about his friends and himself. Personal
politics are way more interesting than world politics. I still can’t tell if
he’s serious when he’s singing “Baby, I’m an Anarchist!” but it doesn’t matter
because the point gets across. The point gets across because it’s funny. Not like fart-joke funny but like
legitimately, at its core, beautifully hilarious. I find it hard to believe
that Gabel was being entirely sincere on that track considering Against Me!’s
eventual signing to Sire Records and making a slick sort of folk-punk that was
apparently better suited to the masses. I saw them play at one of 96.5 the
Buzz’s summer concerts at City Market and I was just baffled that they looked like they were trying to be rock stars. I know it’s
silly to call anyone a sellout, because as an adult and not a sixteen year old
punker I understand that if you can justify compromising your ideals so you can
provide for your family then you probably do it so long as it’s not too sleazy, but it wasn’t the band I
fell in love with. The band that helped me stay politically aware and
suspicious in a time when blind patriotism could have very easily taken over my
young brain. You really can’t expect your punk rock idols to stay young and
hungry forever, I suppose.
For all the haterade the 80s get dumped on them, were they
really any worse than now? Are the 2010s the new 80s? The fashion is stupid,
the popular music is brainless garbage, and the cool music all sounds like the
same electronic bullshit that is going to sound incredibly dated by 2020. But
that’s just the haterade talking. The haterade that courses through my veins
and abates when I find a band that feels honest and genuine. I am reminded that
they still exist, and get to avoid the fact that I’m living in the decline.
This ties into Sparks because I feel like they were just weird and didn’t give
a fuck and had fun. It’s incredibly dated to the era of early 80s synth-pop and
new wave, but it’s cool. “Angst in My
Pants” came into my life circa 2008 when it popped up on a mix CD a friend gave
me. I was told the track was from the Valley
Girl soundtrack. And then it never quite left my rotation. It would
occasionally come up on shuffle and I’d be like “Oh yeah, this song is weird
and catchy and great!” And I found the album a few years after that and that
was that. When I finally watched Valley
Girl a couple years ago I was dismayed that “Angst in My Pants” was not
featured in the film proper. Instead the film uses “Eaten By The Monster of Love”
and I cannot for the life of me understand why the soundtrack used a different
Sparks song from the same album on
the soundtrack instead of the one that was in the actual goddamn movie. Ok ok I
figured it out. The point I was trying to make was this: Why does every cool
band have to give off the appearance that they are too cool to have fun? Everyone
is so fucking SERIOUS about their craft and/or image these days it’s impossible
to enjoy anything. Angst in My Pants is
enjoyable, dumb, and brilliant and I wish more bands were willing to be brash
and more willing to make fools of themselves.
