John Vanderslice - Time Travel is Lonely

John Vanderslice – Time Travel is Lonely

Barsuk, 2001 (2009 Reissue)

Acquired: Love Garden, Used, 2015

Price: $10

Jenny got me $40 in Love Garden gift certificates for my birthday and for me, the gift isn’t the records I get, but getting to spend two blissful, allergy attack laden (the mix of dust and adorable cats brings out the worst of my allergies but so worth it) hours flipping through vinyl. Since leaving Half Price Books, I’ve quit buying records. I was beyond thrilled to go in and buy whatever the hell I wanted and make the most of my $40. First off, I found a few safe picks that I would grab in case Jenny and Rosie got done early with their thrifting. After that, I buried myself in the alt-rock vinyl and when I looked up, I’d snagged a few must haves. One was this reissue of Time Travel is Lonely, a huge album from my high school years. Transitioning from listening to nothing but punk rock to a world that was changed by Neutral Milk Hotel’s In the Aeroplane Over the Sea was the greatest musical time of my life. Everything was new and exciting and I approached it all without prejudice. I’d discovered JV through the Mountain Goats and fell in love with his gorgeously photographed tour diaries. I saw him play at the Bottleneck on the Cellar Door tour. He played for pretty much no one and the young openers, the then relative unknowns Okkervil River, played for an even smaller chunk of the crowd. In addition to Time Travel is Lonely’s title track, I particularly latched onto his sonic interpretation of Robert Lowell’s “The Old Flame” (here “My Old Flame”). The consummate producer and engineer, JV’s albums are fun just to hear the man delight in crafting sonic landscapes.

Gut Feeling: Cymbals Eat Guitars - LOSE

Cymbals Eat Guitars – LOSE

Barsuk, 2014

A few years ago I gave up on trying to be anything but an indie rock kid. It was hard to quit pretending that I really listened to everything when really all I wanted to listen to was people banging out chords on guitars singing simple, heartfelt songs. After leaving KJHK, where I felt it was important to paint myself as someone who loved all types of music, I went into a deep hibernation of 1990s alternative rock. I listened to the Lemonheads and Superchunk incessantly in addition to combing through the darker recesses of Guided by Voices’ back catalog. It was so fundamentally necessary to unwind from almost four years of playing tastemaker. It’s embarrassing that I even think of it like that, but that’s how I approached my job at the station and when it was all over and the mask fell off, I accepted myself for what I was: Someone with boring taste. That’s not to say I don’t appreciate all different types of music, it’s just when I instinctively reach for something to put on in the car or in my headphones I go for the same sort of stuff. Some is punkier, some is poppier, some is folkier, but it’s all a variation of my beloved indie rock and roll.

When I put on the new Cymbals Eat Guitars record I was just looking for something pleasant to have on in the background. I remembered enjoying their first record—Why There Are Mountains—when it came through KJHK, but couldn’t remember anything but a line about Natural American Spirits from the one song (“Wind Phoenix”) I listened to on repeat. They released a follow-up in 2011 that I totally missed. The last I heard from them they were doing an episode of the AV Club’s Undercover series in which they covered Superchunk’s “Detroit Has a Skyline.” Which is ultimately what caused me to take a chance on LOSE, which ended up being one of the most surprising and enjoyable records I’ve heard all year.

All the indie rock elements are there, but the Staten Island quartet arranges them in such a way and bends generic conventions is a refreshing treat. The first three tracks go from emotionally charged slowburner to a reverb drenched 80s alt-rock throwback to a propulsive, harmonica heavy folk-tinged stomper. It’s an excellent place setting that keeps the listener off balance but also keeps them locked into curious route this band is taking. The lyrics come across deeply personal and deeply sad. Certain lines catch my ear and I know I’m going to be poring over this one for the rest of the year (“I learned to scream ‘Bone Machine’/ My windshield spit was glistening” and “Each frequency’s a memory of some show we attended/ Fuck you learner’s permit/ Drive down to Philly with me to see the Wrens in a rec room” are good examples. Actually, there are a couple of Wrens references on LOSE, and the lyrics sheet looks a whole hell of a lot like The Meadowlands. Which is a really good thing). The personal burden unloaded in Joseph D’Agostino’s songs helps to eschew the normal indie rock conventions and offer a document of drugs and friendship and grief. It’s the sort of deep, thoughtful record with a hearty shelf life that makes me salivate.

"Jackson" 

"Warning"


"Chambers"

Death Cab for Cutie - Transatlanticism

Death Cab for Cutie – Transatlanticism

Barsuk, 2003 (2013 Reissue)

Acquired: Half Price Books, Used, 2014

Price: $7.50

The only thing you need to know about my relationship is that, in the late summer of 2005, I listened to this at top volume in my new bedroom at my first apartment while hammering together a shitty particle board dresser at midnight. All while singing along and getting very emotional. It was an emotional time, the first time I’d dealt with relationship-y relationship drama since high school. Because there is no line that fits your complicated relationship drama like “I NEED YOU SO MUCH CLOSER.” I also drew a comic comparing my relationships with Death Cab for Cutie songs that was never finished because it kept evolving and by the time I met Jenny it was the most embarrassing thing I’d ever created. Most of the songs were culled from Transatlanticism, because of course they were. No album in recent memory really captures all of the embarrassing sadness of suburban white kids falling in love.

And as a suburban white kid, I have a special place in my heart for Death Cab for Cutie’s best, most complete album (but only if you discount The Postal Service’s Give Up, which is the best Death Cab album Death Cab didn’t make). This thing oozes with sentimentality, and my sentimental attachment to it makes it hard to analyze it with any sense of objectivity. Transatlanticism has some cringe-worthy moments. The lyric sheet for “Title & Registration” and the unbearably awful earworm of “The Sound of Settling” are rough. It also has some big, dramatic grand gestures like the build and break in “Expo ‘86” and one of the album’s truest, most affecting tracks “We Looked Like Giants,” which cuts through all the sad sack shit with lines like “We looked like giants in the back of my gray subcompact/ Fumbling to make contact as the others slept inside.” The spare closer “A Lack of Color” delivers twenty times more emotional impact than the title track that feels structured to make your heartstrings bend and break. It caps an album that, while not traditionally Emo, might as well be because goddamn, so many emotions.

Though sentimentality reigns, it’s not really a bad thing. Or I can’t really recognize it as a bad thing. Like I said, I sang along to “Transatlanticism” while hammering tiny nails into the back of a dresser. That shit was deeply felt. But my favorite tracks on the album were the ones like “We Looked Like Giants” and “Tiny Vessels.” Those tracks captured the ugliness of young love in a way that contrasts so nicely with lines like “When you feel embarrassed, then I’ll be your pride/ When you need directions, then I’ll be the guide for all time.” There’s nothing sexy or sweet about a line like “You touch her skin and then you think/ That she is beautiful but she don’t mean a thing to me.” But it’s that ugly truth that makes Transatlanticism live and breathe. It’s a messy document about the inherently messy nature of love between the ages of 15 and 25. It’s inherently built for the nascent emotions of high school kids, but like a good young adult novel there’s enough truth in it for anyone to enjoy. I put all this emotional stuff behind me when Jenny and I started dating, but I still love this album, and I love looking back at all the heartbreak, all the awkward first dates, and all the uncoordinated emotionally fraught fooling around that occasionally dotted my late teens and early twenties. It was ugly, but it deserves respect because its through all that awkward and depressing stuff that you mature and make yourself ready to be an actual partner to someone instead of putting them on a pedestal or being a total dick.

Sometimes I think I’d like to reach through time and tell my angsty 17 year old self “Hey, it’s gonna be OK” because when I was 17 all I wanted was for my grown-up self to reach back in time and say, “Hey, it’s gonna be OK. You’re gonna marry your soulmate and you’re gonna have the most beautiful little baby, but you’ve gotta get through all this stupid, childish romance stuff before you can learn what love really is.” When I was at my worst, that’s what I wanted most: some sort of verification that things would work out and that I could worry a little less when waiting around for so and so to call. It’s why I want to be a young adult novelist and why everything I write automatically heads in the direction of hyper-emotional 18 year olds. I just want to say “Hey, it’s gonna be OK.” It's pretty much impossible for me to separate this album from the last ten years, and a lot of people feel the same way. It's not dated, per se, but it draws up the big fat feelings of younger, more vulnerable years.

"Transatlanticism"

"Tiny Vessels"

"A Lack of Color"