Ash – Islands

Bought it online before I had a turntable (recipe for success, as we’ve seen). Got a limited edition signed silver pressing. Not unhappy to own it, but it’s not going to spend a whole lot of time off the shelf.

I’ve seen Ash four times in concert and loved each one. We went to see them play the entirety of 1977 in London one time (I think this is the show). Great show, but ahead of it, I ended up waiting with a friend in a tube station for our better halves.

At one point, we’re sitting there chatting and she says, “There’s Tim” – Tim Wheeler being the lead singer of Ash. I laughed and kept talking, but then she turned me around and sure enough, there’s the lead singer of a not unpopular British group just hanging out in the tube station. I think he and the bassist hopped on a train to grab something they left behind.

Fun little celeb sighting. I mean, you don’t know who Ash is, sure, but in the UK they’ve released four albums that cracked the top ten. Two of them hit number one.

When the show kicked off, they had stormtroopers walk out on stage followed by a dude dressed as Darth Vader, I think. Ash is really into Star Wars. At that show where I saw them chuck the PlayStation out into the crowd (something I’m referencing like you’ve read it, but that I actually write about below), the most popular song was the one they contributed to the Star Wars: Republic Commando game.

I’m now seeing that Islands made it to number 18 on the UK charts, which means I probably haven’t listened to it enough to appreciate it. Maybe. The British have hit and miss taste in music, which is a compliment. American musical tastes haven’t broadly aligned with mine for decades. 

It’s not like a Tranquility Base Accordion + Pie Plate situation where I actively dislike it. It just never really wormed its way into my ear.

When I saw them in Rochester back in whenever it was, they threw a PlayStation into the audience. I think they’d gotten a new one. The weird part of that was how early into the set it happened. Some dude grabbed it and ended up holding a PlayStation for most of a concert. They were the opening act, too.

This was all back when Charlotte was still in the band. I think she added a lot to that line-up, but she had a thing she wanted to do apart from Ash. Her first album was really solid – Grey Will Fade. Now she’s doing more producing and writing, I believe. 

Islands is the second album Ash released after they took a break from albums. They did this little dance from 2007 – 2015 where they released a bunch of singles online, but no albums. I think they took a pretty strong stance on the side of the traditional album being a thing of the past. That was not the case. 

The results of that break have been compiled into the A-Z Series. It’s like Islands. It’s fine and there are some excellent tunes on there, but it’s not consistently great.

Ash will always be one of my favorite bands. I heard Kung Fu back in the Angus soundtrack days and immediately got 1977. That’s an album that distills being a teenage kid in the summer, for me. Hope I get to see them in concert again.

“Where would I find REM, if you had any?”

“Did you look in the [generic good stuff] section?”

“Yeah.”

“Well, they don’t have a divider, so probably just in Rock – R.”

I get it. REM is new (post-1980) and popular. I like music a lot of other people like and maybe that’s a major flaw. One I’ll be carrying for the rest of my life. Like some sort of Sonically Transmitted Disease. I’ll have to tell my doctor and wear earmuffs everytime I go to a concert. I’m sorry, I just love listening to music with other people and sometimes I don’t protect myself from popular culture.

Record stores drive me fucking bonkers.

It’s not their fault, which is part of the reason I’ve driven. It’s 100% on me. That store with no REM divider shouldn’t have one, because it’s a store for music fans of other, older stuff. If you want to get into the depths of Barclay James Harvest, you are in luck. Dude (Dudes? Are they a group or a person? I honestly have never heard of Barclay James Harvest.) has a divider and shows up in multiple sections of the store.

My challenge is finding the place that fits what I want. I live near a massive city, so I should be able to find the place that has REM and Elbow and the Beastie Boys (the Harvest location did have a Beasties divider, but the section was empty).

In that way, record stores are unlike used book stores. 

Now I’m thinking about that and thinking it’s wrong. Maybe it’s just that what’s popular with vinyl enthusiasts is the pre-80s world, in the same way western classics are popular with American readers. If I was looking for a specific version of the Tao Te Ching, I’d probably experience a similar level of frustration in bookstores.

That’s not because they don’t recognize the popularity of the Tao Te Ching, but they don’t move many of them and don’t really know how to price them. So the shelves are full of Orwell and Chabon, instead.

See, I knew this was going to be my fault. 

I guess what I’m saying is I haven’t found my place yet. I do a lot of shopping (okay, some shopping) on Discogs, which is like the AbeBooks of vinyl, but I thought it would be fun to flip through records and stumble across something neat or rare or that I’d just forgotten about.

In reality, flipping vinyl is a huge pain in my ass. Books all line up nicely, allowing the shopper to move through rows and rows without having to pull anything out. Vinyl sits in a horizontal stack, waiting for you to come along and flip each one forward. 

I’m new to all this, so I’m also constantly worried that I’m doing it wrong and that my flipping is going to fuck up a cover or something. I have visions of some irate customer selling me out to management as as bad browser. Then they’d kick me out and I’d read online later that it’s just the kind of place to buy REM and to not buy Barclay James Harvest. 

Anxiety. What a thing.

Flipping vinyl really is a pain. There are two other record stores near me. Neither of them are particularly well-curated. The bigger one looks less like a store and more like a hoarder’s basement, though they do keep a nice stash of the good stuff all in one place. 

What I want is a system. Even in good used bookstores, there’s the lack of a system fucking everything up for everyone. Oh that’s not in fiction, it’s in classics. Yeah, see, Le Carre is really more thriller than mystery and yes, we have sections for both.

In this place, it was rock as distinct from indie/new wave/alt/punk/Slash-based bands or whatever. Well where the hell would you put TMBG, if you ever accidentally purchased one of their albums? I’m sure they’ve worked with Slash before.

Did you know, by the by, that there’s a Bad Religion album called Into the Unknown? Published in 1983, it’s all synth and weird beats, and the band basically killed it after release. They’ve referenced it a handful of times, but it’s almost like it never existed. Vinyl copies run around $200. The songs are fine-ish. A few winners, more losers. You can find playlists on YouTube. Crazy.

The sum total of all this is that I need to go to more shops and figure out what the hell you’re supposed to do. Do I talk to people? Having a hobby is usually a communal thing, but that’s my least favorite part of hobbies. I don’t wanna talk about my setup or my collection or what I thought of the new Gizzard Lizard and Wizards album (real name King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard, a band vinyl people seem inordinately attracted to).

New goal. Visit a new vinyl store each month until I find the one that suits me. Or until I die in despair.  

Arctic Monkeys – Whatever People Say I Am, That’s What I’m Not

In contrast to Tranquility, this is an album I could listen to forever. Top ten for me? Probably not, but not far off.

Okay, let’s run it off. Criteria to include – things I like all but maybe a single song on, things that are fun to listen to (not just good for me), no repeat bands.

In no particular order but using numbers so I don’t have to keep counting what I’ve written down.

1. Elbow – (I stumbled right out of the fucking gate. I have no idea which album is my favorite, but one of the them goes here. Seldom Seen Kid. Eh, maybe Cast of Thousands?)
2. Jason Isbell – Something More Than Free
3. Nirvana – In Utero (another one that might not be true but I’m bad at picking)
4. Bad Religion – Stranger Than Fiction
5. REM – Automatic for the People (a new entry)
6. Smashing Pumpkins – Mellon Collie (I think people argue that this could be a single disc, but I think it’s one of maybe three double albums I can listen to all of)
7. Ash – 1977
8. Beastie Boys – Ill Communication
9. fun. – Some Nights
10. My Chemical Romance – Three Cheers for Sweet Revenge
11. Pain – Midgets With Guns
12. Self – Breakfast With Girls?
13. Vampire Weekend – Contra, but maybe the newest one.
14. Weezer – Pinkerton (this is like favorite Wes Anderson movie, in that it changes all the time)

This whole process is intellectually bankrupt. Damnit. So Whatever isn’t necessarily on the top ten.

Buddy Holly now playing on the café speakers. I take back the Pinkerton pick, but I retain the right to reissue the Pinkerton pick when Pink Triangle comes on.

The point is, Whatever is a great album and learning all the lyrics is both challenging and rewarding. If you can get a good grasp on them, you’ll also have a solid grasp on the drinking culture of British kids aged 16 – 30. Lots of feeling stupid, drinking too much, trying to impress girls and doing it all while wearing a jumper.

It’s also a neat album because it’s got a little history to it. The Arctic Monkeys hadn’t done anything before this except release a bunch of demos to fans at their shows. They got a bunch of views on a YouTube site their fans made and grew in popularity across Northern England, which means they had upwards of 78 fans. That’s supposed to be a joke about how thin the population of Northern England is.

Here we go.

When the album kicks off, it’s like the top of a rollercoaster. The drums just roll over and then the song builds up and then they drop it back and Alex’s vocals come over the top of a pulled back guitar and drums and you just roll along for the rest of the album.

Favourite Worst Nightmare, their second album, is similar in feel. Jump into this moving car and ride along at 95 mph until we get to the end of the road. Then, chances are, you hop right back in a do it all again – speed and volume are wicked addictive. Not the drug speed. It might be addictive. I don’t know.

I started buying records before I bought a turntable. I wasn’t sure if I was going to get a turntable, to be honest. Maybe vinyl would just be a way to own something that meant something, even if I wasn’t listening to it. Hell, I own more books than I’ll ever hope to read, but having them there means something to me. 

They also say something about me. Hopefully, they give some insight as to who I am. The longer I’ve been collecting vinyl, the more I’ve been thinking about it as a way to explain myself to my son. 

Music has been one of the biggest creative influences in my life, but if I kicked it next week, my kid wouldn’t have anything to know what I was really interested in or why. We’ve shoved all the old CDs in binders upstairs, and they give you something, but most of them were purchased before 2010. 

“I guess dad was really into KMFDM for his entire life,” my son would think. Which is true, to an extent, but not completely. Vinyl lets me refocus on the things that are going to be meaningful in explaining myself. Or that might just be an excuse for buying things, but here we are.

It’s also a chance for me to buy things in support of the bands I currently enjoy. I’ll buy that Elbow or Tennis or Tennis Elbow album when it comes out, not knowing if it’s going to be my favorite or just one that sits on the shelf. That’s okay though.

Most of my daily music is pumped into my brain through a Spotify branded tube. The bands I like get about $0.00004 each time I listen to their songs, so buying some vinyl seems like a nice way to help reward the singers and musicians I love.

That said, last year I clocked about 76,000 minutes on Spotify (three-and-a-half hours a day, give or take), so maybe I’m helping pay someone’s bills.

I can’t remember what we were talking about.

Owning albums. My buying albums should, therefore, be a little more focused. I don’t want to just recreate that folder of CDs, I want to tailor something. I’ve got a watchlist of LPs on Discogs that represents my wishlist. A single album from a favorite band here and there, but not an entire discography.

With the exception of Elbow – I’d be not uninterested in owning a version of every piece of vinyl Elbow ever produced. That’s a poorly constructed sentence.

So the list is tight, which makes shopping in record stores fun. There are going to be occasional impulse purchases (REM’s Tongue single), but I’d rather pass over the stuff that doesn’t really excite me. That means seeing a whole bunch of excellent music and just getting to leave it all behind.

There aren’t rules for buying or owning albums. I’ve got some guidelines, but they’re rough at best. Here goes.

• Is a previously released album I can’t imagine not listening to (Something More Than Free, Whatever People Say I Am, That’s What I’m Not, etc.).
• Is, preferably, a limited release, remastered version or first pressing. I come from a book collecting background, so I like a little bit of rarity.
• Is new and from a band I love (Islands, Sound & Fury, etc.).
• Has a cool b-side. I don’t own any of these yet. I’ve got a handful of singles, but they currently tick other boxes.
• Is from Elbow.

There it is. The rough outline of why I would buy an album. Exceptions will be made, but only to prove the rule. Or because it looks like a cool thing to have on the shelf. Or because I briefly think owning Sports would be fun, even though I’m not really going to listen to that, am I?

Maybe I’ll go to Record Store Day (a thing I don’t fully understand) and wind up with two dozen new albums. Maybe I’ll get distracted by an interesting bug in the yard and not buy another album for a year. 

If I do buy, I’ve got a plan.

This wasn’t a manifesto, I don’t think. At least, not interesting ways. I mean, we covered the goal (get good stuff) and how I’m trying to do it (buying things), so maybe it does count. 

Arctic Monkeys – Tranquility Base Hotel + Casino

I preordered this album back in April of 2018. I was well over a year away from even owning a turntable at that point.

Aside. Girlfriend in a Coma is playing in Vigilante. As a kid, my main experiences of the Smiths were twofold. One, a girl I had a crush on was into them. I don’t know that I ever actually listen to them, but I knew they had an album called Meat is Murder and I knew I wasn’t interesting enough to really get it. Two, the record store in town had a poster hung up, featuring a picture of Morrissey with “Morrissey is a Twat” emblazoned on it.

As a partially functioning adult, I think those things are probably both true – I’m not going to be a Smiths person and Morrissey is probably a twat. That said, I could listen to their greatest hits album for years. Morrissey is this weird little proto-Jarvis Cocker.

I just looked at the line-up on The Sound of the Smiths and I take it all back. You can’t generate that many magnificent songs without something going right. It’s still true about me and Morrissey, but maybe proto-Cocker wasn’t fair.

Love Pulp though.

End digression. I bought Tranquility on the basis of Whatever People Say I Am, Favourite Worst Nightmare, AM and the other two, though to a lesser extent. AM, in particular, has been in my heavy rotation for a few years.

Then Tranquility came out and I hated it. I still hate it. I own it and I hate it, and it might be the only record I currently have that I’d ditch in a heartbeat. Eighty percent of the songs sound like Alex just took a side gig writing lawnmower maintenance manuals, then decided to read them while being recorded.

I’ll absolutely buy their next album. I love the Arctic Monkeys and they’re music makes me supremely happy, most of the time. They, like Morrisey, are often way up their own asses, but god bless ‘em. Try not to move when Brainstorm kicks off. It’s like trying to mop the ocean.

Tranquility – not so much. There are a few (two?) songs that I genuinely enjoy, but most of it is a slog.

The time before the turntable was full of these near misses. I have, historically, purchased albums that didn’t really line up with what I loved. I bought Ignition instead of Smash, Unplugged instead of Nevermind and Against the Grain instead of, well, almost any other Bad Religion album.

The pre-turntable days have a lot of these scattered throughout. I got a Bad Religion album that’s fine but not great. A Tyler Childers live album that’s also fine. An Ash record that’s good, but it’s not that good.

I’m not to be trusted, I guess. On the other hand, I bought all these things because I love the bands behind them. I’ve tried (and partially succeeded) to have a plan when buying vinyl.

I don’t want to just recreate my old CD collection. I don’t want to own every cool 70s rock record that came out just to say, “Yeah, the version you hear on Spotify is fine, but listen to this.” I want a tight little collection of previously released stuff that has a lot of meaning and I want to support bands I like when they release new things.

That means striking out sometimes. Like ordering the new beer from your favorite brewery, only to discover that the brewer fell in love with rose hips or cardamom and just blew it out of the tank.

Now the coffee shop is playing Op Ivy. They (or Epitaph) just repressed their album. It ticks a lot of my boxes. Cool old album, limited release, probably sounds good on vinyl. I didn’t buy it, though. I’m really trying not to stray too far.

I might buy it.

While I’m trying not to be the guy who tells you the Guinness you’re drinking sucks because it’s so much better in Ireland and can you believe they even import this stuff (now made in Baltimore, whatup), I do like when things sound nice on vinyl.

I grabbed the Rushmore soundtrack the other day when it was on sale at Barnes & Noble, and it’s just boring. It’s thin and compressed, because it’s just the songs slapped onto wax to sell them in a new way. On the other hand, I got a copy of Cursive’s Ugly Organ, and it’s clear someone put a ton of love and time into this thing.

Bad records will happen. Or just records that are good but that I don’t love. I’ll own those – that’s fine. As of the beginning of 2020, I have about 30 albums. I imagine I’ll finish the year out closer to 50, but I wouldn’t want to overshoot that by much.

Predictions. Not my forte.

Funeral by Arcade Fire

I don’t think I ever would have picked this album up on my own (for reasons detailed below), but I’m glad I got it. My brother- and sister-in-law got it for me for Christmas 2019. Christmas was a lucrative vinyl season. I guess people heard about the turntable and went all in. All the results were winners, though, so no complaints.

I don’t have strong feelings about Arcade Fire. Or maybe I didn’t have strong feelings about Arcade Fire? They were a band that rose to popularity during a weird little musical break for me. In 2004, I had moved to Philadelphia. I didn’t know anyone who lived there and Napster wasn’t a thing anymore.

For my college years, a combination of friends and the Wild West of content sharing had given me all sorts of new bands to enjoy. I went to a Phish concert in Ohio and watched as people chucked glow-in-the-dark bracelets around a stadium while a pudgy man played music with a vacuum. 

I went up to Montreal and saw Suicide Machines play a little club with ceiling fans that whirred along inches about the heads of crowdsurfing Canadian kids. In Plattsburg, I listened to a Pink Floyd cover band while a girl who was off her gourd on whatever drug she’d picked up tried to take a nap on my friend’s lap.

I just dug out more details about that Suicide Machines show. It was at a place called Rainbow in Montreal in 2000. If you want to understand the vibe a bit more, you can watch a video of Earth Crisis from around the same time. 

I went up with this guy from my freshman dorm. His handle online was Yukigem, which was the kind of ping pong paddle rubber he prefered smashed together with the name of a girl he had a crush on (Meg) backwards.

Anyways, we drove up in the March cold to Montreal and probably ate some dive food. I imagine we went to a bar because he wasn’t 21, but you can drink at 18 in Canada. So every time I went across the border, we ended up in a bar for a while. 

Then we walked up a flight of stairs in the middle of seeming nowhere to this crazy, packed, overheated venue. There were kids everywhere. I remember thinking it must have been an all ages show. As soon as the opening band kicked up, everyone went bananas. We were bigger than all these kids and we got just surged right up front.

So we’re pressed up near the stage, watching this incredible punk band while 15 year olds kick their legs over our heads and within inches (probably feet) of the fans. The fans which do fuck all to cool the place down because how could they? It’s teeming with dirty punk kids all going a million miles a minute.

Late-90s punk bands had this weird energy on stage. They all looked like they’d never not been moving, all sinew and muscle and buzzed heads and body fat percentages well below 3%. At the same time, those guys had all the coordination of a drunk iguana. Go back and watch. Lead singers jump up at weird times and their limbs just flail around. It’s mesmerizing.

Four years after that show, we’d moved to Philly (Bryn Mawr, really), and I stopped discovering new music, with two exceptions. My coworker at Williams-Sonoma would listen to just about anything with a new wave ancestor, and he pushed them all my way. The Crimea, The Bravery, Louis XIV, Moving Units, Interpol, and on and on. I liked a lot of those. 

In London, I ended up listening to a lot of Moving Units and Bloc Party, which I lump together for no good reason. Like Christian Bale and Rudyard Kipling. They’re glued together in my brain for some reason, but Lord knows why.

The other music injection I got came from Nate, my coworker from the campaign I was working on. Nate was a local boy and he loved some emo. I’d been to a few emo concerts in college, but mainly to see opening bands. I saw OK Go open for somebody. Ash opened for some other band. I’d usually leave after the band I liked played.

Saves the Day and Plain White T’s. That’s who Ash played with when I saw them in Buffalo in 2002. I now wish I’d stuck around for Plain White T’s. Ah well.

Nate mainly got me into Brand New, which was a long time favorite and which will feature in a future entry, as I own at least one of their albums on vinyl. He also got me into Dashboard Confessional, which I really just like the one album from. But I really like that album.

All of this musical intrigue meant that I missed out on Arcade Fire. I think friends back in Tallahassee got into them, but it never trickled down to me. As a result, I couldn’t have recognized any of their songs until about a year ago.

Spotify has made music much more accessible and explorable. The indie playlists and ‘radio’ stations are constantly tucking Arcade Fire songs into the mix. I’ve become well acquainted with Wake Up and Neighborhood #1 (Tunnels). Both lovely songs. 

My lingering hesitation with Arcade Fire is the lead singer’s earnestness. Win Butler is a very open dude in his songwriting and singing, which is probably great, but it’s not for me. I know that’s not a fair assessment of the music and I know it flies in the face of lots of other very earnest music that I listen to.

My point, with the earlier nonsense, was to highlight that I wasn’t listening to Funeral when it was supposed to be listened to. If you go back and read reviews from the time, you’ll see that they all talk about the relevance of album for 2004. A rebirth of indie rock, a sadness from being in middle America, a generation of lost kids trying to find their way and having nothing to support them but old Calvin and Hobbes comic strips, all tucked into a plastic bag. Maybe not that last bit.

It’s like reading Catcher in the Rye for the first time when you’re 37. Holden Caulfield is a whiney jackass. When you’re 17, he’s still a jackass, but he’s also a lot like you in the ways that you wish you could explain. When you’re employed and a homeowner, you’re less impressed by his approach to life.

Since I didn’t connect with it back then, I’m not sure I can now. That said, I really enjoy the record. It sounds nice on vinyl and it’s well-divided, with Neighborhoods #1 – #4 on side A and the rest of the tracks on B. Also, Neighborhood #3 (Power Out) is a pretty banging tune.