My Favorite Album of 2022 / Mi Disco Preferido de 2022

Posted on February 1, 2023 by Tyler

was ‘Cuatro Chavales’ by Carolina Durante. Feel free to listen to it here while reading along.

Spain is going to feature prominently within my first few publications of 2023. I will obviously post an update once it appears, but Riffs, an unconventional journal on music and material culture, has recently accepted an article I wrote about how Madrid’s early-2000’s bootleg CD market turned me into a Suede fan. Like all untidy music writing, it’s complicated, but hopefully you will like it.

Cuatro Chavales, the sophomore full-length from Madrid quartet Carolina Durante, is remarkable for many reasons, but for me, it boils down to two. First, on a personal level, it required me leaving North America and the physical act of “being there” to feel genuinely excited about indie rock again. Second, as much as Spanish culture feels off-center from even the rest of “Europe,” the record just hits the global popular music zeitgeist on the head (and then keeps on smashing). In October, America’s biggest pop-star (who adopted a polymorphous indie aesthetic to reinvent herself in her thirties) declared, “It’s me, Hi, I’m the problem, it’s me.” Eight months earlier, Diego Ibañez sauntered across a bridge over the autovía at sunset, lighting a cigarette and loudly declared the same thing. Did the sheer joy of returning to gigs unmasked last year bring out a collective, subliminal acceptance of responsibility?

2022 was great by transitive property, as any year where I get back to Spain is great. My prior visits to Madrid and Segovia, in 2015, came on an extended weekender flying in from Paris. The following year, Carolina Durante formed in Madrid and began recording quintessentially Spanish rock n’ roll shout-along power-jams. Though I had been obsessively listening to the Estepona power-pop trio Airbag since 2008 and had taken notice of their new label Sonido Muchacho, I still managed to snooze on the emergent movemnet which newer groups like Carolina encapsulated. Or, maybe it never went away; I was just gone for too long.

When you’re cursed to be born in a country that celebrates ignorance, it’s easy to fall out of touch with an entire cultural spark that happens to be sung in another language (even if it happens to be your own homeland’s close-second language). Airbag helped confirm my long-standing suspicion that I had been born in the wrong country – namely, the first time I heard the live recording of their 15th anniversary gig and the beachball-bouncing crowd mouthed the synth solo to “Big Acuarium.” In a truly amazing twist, the pandemic drove Airbag into a phase of their greatest activity since the mid-2010’s. They released a great little EP called Discotecas, which included “Disco Azul” a heart-rendering ditty about falling in love with a coworker that sits high atop my favorite songs they’ve ever recorded.

As soon as it was legally possible for Americans to travel to the EU again, Airbag announced that they would play a special gig at Club Ochoymedia (the 8:30 Club, in other words) in Madrid in mid-May. As I did with Blur’s Hyde Park Reunion in 2009, I bought tickets for the gig and then made the necessary arrangements. My partner and I planned our Iberian journey (her first time overseas) around a pop-punk concert, which feels just as cool to write now as it did to plan a year ago.

Less than two weeks before the gig, Airbag announced that their opener would be someone called Temerario Mario, which means “Reckless Mario” (as everything sounds dumber in English). Possibly influenced by Mario’s detached, lo-fi aesthetic online, I let my excitement to see Airbag drown out any curiosity about who the opener was. My presumption was that it would be some Spanish analogue of Christopher Owens (not great) or Ariel Pink (much worse).

I will proudly say now that I was amazingly wrong.

Like a lot of aging punk fans, my early-’20s dalliance with (indie-)rockism had left me largely apathetic about the prior decade of chaff that labels like Sub Pop and Matador had been spitting out. This prevented me from falling in love with artists like Mac Demarco, the War on Drugs, and other references from 2016. Even in the minutes before Mario del Valle and drummer Juan Pedrayes (who constitute half of Caroline Durante and play in several other bands) walked onstage, I let myself chomp at the bit for Airbag to begin.

Mario began his set with a few solo songs – just him, his acoustic-electric, and (what appeared to be) everyone in the audience below the age of 35 screaming along to everything. “Oh, this dude’s a phenomenon here,” I told my partner, “Of course he is.” Within a couple songs of Pedrayes joining him on drums, I found myself yelling at her, “I kind of love this kid!” unable to wipe the smile off my face. He and Pedrayes covered “The KKK Took My Baby Away” during their set (a potent reminder of just how important the Ramones have always been), and they spent almost all of Airbag’s thrashing through the crowd, climbing onstage, and embracing in tandem stagedives. I had never seen anything like it before, particularly as such a flagrant fuck-you to Spanish laddish machismo (even more so considering how “chaval” closely translates to “lad”).

Carolina Durante: Juan Pedrayes, Diego Ibañez, Mario del Valle, Martín Vallhonrat (via Sonido Muchacho)

All four members of Carolina Durante present different visions of sexual ambiguity, too, which, coupled with their unconventionally photogenic looks, make them the perfect rock n’ roll band for the 2020’s. Even their respective ages are difficult to guess, since they’re tight as hell musicians who still carry themselves as if they looked and sounded like shit (recalling musical urbanitas like The Strokes in their rawest moments). Diego Ibañez delivers a glorious mix of David Yow’s madman energy and David Gedge’s purposefully unsophisticated vocals, beneath a unibrow-scowl that brings to mind a brash young Liam Gallagher. If they’d formed ten years earlier in the UK, they may have supplanted the Arctic Monkeys as “the century’s saviours of Rock music,” but they formed in 2017 in Madrid, so they’ve had to settle for being one of the most exciting rock bands on Earth, largely unknown to the 7.35 billion people who don’t speak Spanish. Their Iberian contemporaries who chose to sing in English such as Hinds and Mourn have earned a following in that world, but they haven’t exactly taken it over. Either way, cultural traits like “la retranca” (ambiguity of personality/intent) are impossible to translate lyrically, no matter what language. The more I understand what Ibañez is singing, the more confused and intrigued I get about where he stands. And that’s fine.

I’ve grown increasingly skeptical and/or distasteful of outsider, English-language analyses of Spain – as enjoyable as Gerald Brenan and that ilk can be to read – but if I could insert my two cents as an English-speaking outsider who’s developed my own complicated relationship with the country: visiting Spain as an American feels like you’re sitting in a stranger’s living room with your feet up on their coffee table. It finally hit me just how off-center Spain is from “Europe” in 2015, and this time last year, it felt even more like a peripheral bubble with its own universe of art, food, and quality bullshit (even their interpretations of stuff created in the English-speaking world) that anybody from anywhere could enjoy or appreciate, but never understand.

This is all strange to write, since Carolina Durante has myriad points of reference in English-speaking indie music. It reveals their Spain to be an (infinitely better) alternate universe in which Doolittle made the Pixies – perhaps Carolina Durante’s most obvious Anglophone influence – superstars in their prime. The whole first half of Cuatro goes straight for the throat in that loud-quiet-loud way, and if “Tu Nuevo Grupo Favorito” doesn’t come true by its first chorus, well you’re about to start yelling along whether you want to or not. By the fifth track, “Urbanitas” (perhaps my favorite track on this thing) the scream-along choruses pound into your skull and played at the right volume, feel like they could peel your wallpaper. Cuatro Chavales feels calculated to be the record that should make Carolina Durante the biggest band in the world, even if that “world” is the self-contained one south of the Pyrenees.

So, let me return to that first point about what makes Cuatro Chavales such a landmark album to me. Ageing American music writers (cough) love to offer opinions about why rock music has “declined so much in cultural prominence” without even thinking what a tiny slice of the world we are. It’s that imperialist mentality that’s so easy to fall into without seeing how and why things don’t have to be that way.

Venues wouldn’t be so stringent and overpriced if our government weren’t too chickenshit to dissolve Ticketmaster and Livenation. People would pursue their creative dreams and be happier if they weren’t tied to soul-crushing employment for health insurance, and more people would come out and stagedive if ambulance rides didn’t cost $1000. Most importantly, it would be easier for us to admit that, sometimes, we are the problem, if we lived in a country that didn’t make a vast majority of us feel that way from birth. I make no pretenses that Spain is bereft of its own problems, but for me, hearing Carolina Durante shines a bright light on just how much more fun we could all be having.

Tyler’s Favorite Records (1996): Ash – ‘1977’

Posted on January 3, 2022 by Tyler

The first time I saw Ash, I was in middle school. The band were a trio on a bizarrely packaged tour promoting their (arguably*) second and (inarguably) best record, 1977.

The second time I saw Ash, they were a quartet, and I was wandering around Irving Plaza under the directive to promote a tour-only EP they put out to help boost attention for their album Free All Angels. I was interning for their label at the time, and I was downright indignant that none of their singles had gotten any real attention in the US, especially “Burn Baby Burn,” a scorcher that had all the ingredients of pop chart success (including a couple of high-profile UK awards) but barely even scratched the United States.

Six years later, while record shopping in London, I found an original vinyl copy of 1977, lamenting to the clerks that Ash were one of my favorite bands, but no matter what they did, they could barely even get arrested in America. The clerk replied that they couldn’t get arrested there anymore, either, citing how they hadn’t really put out any great records in a while. In the interim, they had released Meltdown (2004) and Twilight of the Innocents (2007), neither of which, despite the gaudy cover art of the former and the title of the latter’s opening track, really caught fire.

I don’t remember if the band announced it before or after that London record shop conversation, but Ash had floated the idea of stopping making albums altogether to focus on singles. It seemed like a bizarre move at the time, though history has certainly not proven it misguided. Ash were within their right to do whatever the hell they wanted, but looking back now as an American fan of 25 years, I can sympathize with their frustration at the time.

I’ll never forget bumping into an old college radio friend (who ran WERW-AM from 2001-2002) at that Irving Plaza gig, watching his face light up when the band broke into their early single “Jack Names the Planets.” He repeatedly commented that he hadn’t heard, or even really thought about, that song in forever. Ash had spent their first decade (and four records) as a band being touted as “the next big thing,” and by 2003, even most music nerds in the states barely had any idea who the hell they were.

I think the importance of 1977 is self-evident in how the band have centrally the band have incorporated the year 1977 into their brand. I would argue that no record had a greater impact in simply helping remind Americans – who were, despite Weezer’s golden era and the ‘punk revival’ led by Green Day and Rancid, deluged with grunge’s watered-down cousin Modern Rock – that bands were still playing power-pop and garage-laden punk across the pond in 1996.

I’m going to assume I was watching MTV (or possibly M2 during a “free sample” weekend on my local cable provider) relatively late one night that year when the video for “Goldfinger” came on. I remember being intrigued. There weren’t a whole lot of other bands who sounded like that: sugary tenor vocals, grungy guitar that didn’t feel very “grunge” to me, and willing to take that commercial suicide-risk of resting their instruments almost completely several times per verse.

It took a sequence of life-changing events to arrive there, though. I had already seen the video for “Goldfinger” once, and likely heard it on the radio a couple of times, when I ran into a record shop in town adjacent to mine to see if they had a single for Stabbing Westward’s hit single “Shame” (an infectious bit of industrial-pop-metal with a music video so stupid I could write a separate essay on why). The clerk had no idea what I was talking about, but some dude in a leather jacket turned to me from down the counter and asked “Are you coming to the show tonight?” I had never had anybody ask me about coming to a show, much less a guy who looked like he could have been in a band as bad-ass (to 13 year old me, anyway) as Stabbing Westward. Stunned, I replied that I didn’t know. The labret-pierced Alt-Rock dude told me they had a bunch of copies of the single at Toad’s Place.

Intrigued, I convinced my Dad to take me to New Haven for the gig that night, a supportive gesture that has no doubt changed the path of my entire life. Stabbing Westward happened to be touring with Ash and I Mother Earth. Even at the time, that lineup seemed strange to me. If I ever meet Tim Wheeler, my first question would be how the hell that happened. I would assume some record company glad-handing, since a teenage Irish power-pop trio did not pair well with a brooding industrial quintet from Los Angeles (that weren’t even on the same label), but it may have just worked out that they played some festival together and Stabbing Westward invited them on board. If there weren’t just enough digital evidence to prove that the two bands played together in the Midwest that Fall, I would probably doubt my own memory. Brian Phelps’ new book about Toad’s place lists Stabbing Westward and I Mother Earth in their official band index, but not Ash. I don’t have any ticket stubs, photographs, or concrete third-party documentation that this show ever happened. I don’t have a copy of the “Shame” single, either, which makes me think labret-piercing dude was lying to me.

I’m certain that 1977 wasn’t the first album I evangelized to anyone who would listen, but boy did everybody I know get an earful about Ash around the time. I remember showing the CD insert to my friend Alison (no idea why I had it with me), who gave me a blank cassette to copy their music onto just because they looked like a cool band. My 8th grade art teacher, who played us Echo and the Bunnymen tapes while we drew, allowed me to put 1977 on in class. All I remember was my friend Jeff joking that the intro to “Kung Fu,” which sampled a fight scene from a Sammo Hung film, sounded like his house when he pissed of his parents. I even scanned the album cover (my first time I can ever remember using a scanner) for a class project explaining how Compact Disc technology worked.

I can’t quite compare 1977 to anything else I remember hearing as an adolescent. The naivete and strings on “Oh Yeah” and “Let It Flow” both felt equally sincere. “Girl from Mars” featured moments of the nastiest guitar distortion imaginable for a pop group, but was still somehow the most sugary punch on the album. Though it wasn’t my priority as a listener at the time, Rick McMurray’s drumming is incredible on this record (and, without combing through dozens of retrospective reviews, I’m unsure whether he got enough credit for such). The band tacked several minutes of drunken vomiting as a “hidden” track onto the fireworks-laden finale of “Darkside Lightside” – a bit of buffoonery that they probably laugh off/regret now, but still the edgiest shit in my whole music collection at the time (provided I hadn’t bought that One Fierce Beer Coaster cassette yet). It seemed punk as fuck, although the band’s connection to punk was about as specious as their connection to Britpop.

1977 would be a first-ballot record in the Power-Pop hall of fame no matter what year it had been released, but releasing it in 1996 doomed the band in several ways. A decade later, after the Libertines had revived the British garage movement, the Arctic Monkeys kicked up a (well deserved, now that we know about the staying power of Alex Turner and Company) shit-storm of hype on the heels of their first record – a storm that Ash may have gotten a solid chunk of had they been born a decade later.

Or not. It’s pretty clear that American music fans are fickle about which British artists to which they’ll lend a moment of their time. Considering how ginger and toothless so much British crossover success has been, it’s hard to imagine a moment in the post-punk era where Ash would have gotten as big as they seemed on the heels of even their best work. Even Two Door Cinema Club, whose Millennial fans nearly trampled me to death at Coachella in 2013, didn’t seem to lead a new crop of indie-dance-pop fans down that Irish rabbit hole.

I kept up with the band for the remainder of that decade, though I’m ashamed to admit I hadn’t paid too much attention to their new singles-oriented output. Not that I had necessarily written them off (unlike another Irish band of note, they had put out some good material since 2000), but I couldn’t stop returning to 1977 whenever I did revisit Ash.

This changed, though, when I took my first trans-Pacific flight in 2019. On the way to Sydney from Los Angeles, somewhere over Oceania, I got restless and started browsing the airline’s music catalog to sample through the tinny, shitty proprietary headphones they passed out in their pre-COVID way. This was how I found out that Ash had, despite their promise not to^, released a new LP called Islands. I clicked play on the first track “True Story,” and enjoyed it quite a bit, but it didn’t strike me as a “return to form” where their teenage bursts of energy were concerned.

Then, “Annabel” started.

NOW THE PATH AHEAD IS GONE
NOW THE FIGHT IS REALLY ON

What a catchy opening! I felt my heart rate going up.

I CAN SEE REAL TROUBLE IF WE WAIT
DON’T HESITATE

My eyes were nearly welled up with tears even before the chorus hit. What a fucking amazing song.

ANNABEL
HAVE NO FEAR
YOU CAN BE
MY GUINEVERE

Oh god yes! Tim Wheeler is still a master popsmith. I wanted to fight somebody over this.

IN THE STORM I WILL
DRAW YOU CLOSE
IN THE TEMPEST
IN THE SNOW

I hit “repeat” and listened to “Annabel” at least 10 times before moving onto the third track, the admittedly corny yet memorable “Buzzkill.” I felt like such an idiot for falling off with this band, especially since I’d been a fan since I was thirteen. Tim Wheeler hadn’t lost his ability to write an amazing song, and Ash hadn’t lost an ounce of relevance. I put “Annabel” firmly within my list of 10 favorite songs of the decade, and it felt great being able to do that nearly 25 years after Ash became one of my first favorite bands.

It was hard to compartmentalize in 1996, especially considering how young I was, but Ash were truly singular within the international pop-rock landscape. They were never meant to be clumped in with Britpop; they just happened to be British citizens putting out great pop music in the mid-Nineties. I misguidedly considered them punk because I didn’t have a much better frame of reference (having no idea who Teenage Fanclub were back then). Now that we’re not so shackled or silo-ed by calcified ideas of genre, it’s great to be able to enjoy the brilliant 1977 without scraping to figure out exactly where it fits. Ash still don’t, and one thing is for certain: they were always, and remain to this day, simply ASH. I’m so grateful they decided to be a band.

LINER NOTES
*I refer to 1977 as Ash’s second album, even though it was technically their first album recorded and released as a full-length LP. Their “first” album Trailer, which came out before 1977, was a compilation of singles, b-sides, and EP tracks to get fans excited for the band’s next LP, hence the title. For reasons of congruity, I’ll refer to 1977 as their second album, mainly because it’s always felt that way to me.
^ I was so out of touch with the band in 2015 that I had completely missed out on their return to the LP format, Kablammo! that year. I’m not proud of this.

Tyler’s Favorite Albums (1984): Minutemen – ‘Double Nickels on the Dime’

Posted on October 19, 2021 by Tyler

I once devoted an entire episode of my first radio show to playing this record in its entirety, and I would do it again. Despite it’s prodigious length for a punk record, it still takes infinitely less time to listen to than Ulysses takes to read.

Not to be too hyperbolic, but this is the best album of the 1980s by the best band of the 1980s, and deserves to be considered one of the great works of Western Civilization. If you haven’t listened to Double Nickels on the Dime, just do so now and begin the next chapter of your life.

Tyler’s Favorite Albums (1980): U2’s ‘Boy’

Posted on July 26, 2021 by Tyler

Inspired by similar lists I saw some musically-preoccupied friends doing on social media, I decided to challenge myself to list my 10-20 favorite albums of every year for the past four decades. My lists inspired others to reply with their own lists, which turned the project into even more fun than the pandemic could have mustered. To help buttress my summer writing goals, I’ve decided to revisit my favorite albums of the past four decades, providing some rationale and geographical context for each one.

1980
U2 – ‘Boy’ (Island Records)

In seventh grade, my Reading/Literature teacher assigned us to read William Golding’s classic novel Lord of the Flies. We dedicated the first 15 minutes of each class to write short entries in each others’ composition notebooks about our responses to each chapter of the main characters’ regression. Though the novel’s central theme passed me by at the time (likely the result of my own lack of interest in literary analysis more than my teacher’s lack of trying), but now I catch myself thinking about it all the time, especially every time U2’s debut album (and still their best) Boy reaches it’s closing track, “Shadows and Tall Trees.” Lord of the Flies had a clear impact on them, too, especially given the novel’s takedown of British polite society. Demystifying the book, Golding wrote that the book’s theme was “an attempt to trace the defects of society back to the defects of human nature.” Still, there was something timeless about proper British schoolboys reverting to bloody savagery when left to their own devices.

Bono always claimed that U2 attempted to write the quintessential album about youth and adolescence on their debut LP, and the prodigious amount of press that U2 got, even while they were still teenagers (and 5 years before their performance of “Bad” at Live Aid, which I’ll put a pin in here) backs up those claims and aims. There’s no doubt that, by 1980, U2 were prepared to be the biggest band in the world. When they played at the Bayou in Washington, DC on December 7, 1980, Xyra wrote as much in her review in that month’s issue of the Capitol Crisis zine:

“The only cubby-hole one can fit U-2 into is the one marked ‘magical.’…. As with all of U-2’s songs, there is an urgency about it, as if the whole world depended upon singing and playing the song just the right way….As I left the concert I felt a sense of attachment to U-2 unlike any I’d felt before. It was a mixture of pride at being one of the few people in on their secret, and sorrow at realizing that they can’t stay unknown forever. For that would be a tragedy. U-2 are destined to be one of the classic bands of all time, and believe me they will.”

Whether or not U2 ever agreed they were a punk band, they certainly emerged from the post-punk era with a hell of a set of songs and a supernatural set of tricks; Xyra would have been honest had that not been the case. Of course, we all know how history proved her closing statement correct, but unfortunately, U2 have spent half of their career as a band making mediocre music. Which is why I still contend that Boy captured that early fire they had, between their choices in artwork, Steve Lillywhite’s production, and the way it keeps on revealing its secrets to the world with every listen. It also helps map out just what went wrong with the band, and how tied it was to geography.

On paper, the line “Someday I’ll die, the choice will not be mine” (which Bono sings in “Out of Control”) could be mediocre teenage poetry, but coming out of Bono’s mouth with the band’s on-point backing it does sound wise beyond its years. Bono also posed another question of mortality in “A Day Without Me,” a ballsy choice for Boy‘s lead single. One of Bono’s cross-Sea contemporaries who would choose death in May 1980, Ian Curtis, lent the song a whole new din as the year progressed.

Like all great albums, Boy reveals new secrets with every listen – perhaps the most profound of which was an epiphany I had when playing the tape for my partner after she and I had been basking in Joy Division’s music for a few days. Thought I’d been listening to both bands for at least twenty years, it never occurred to me just how Joy Division’s influence is slathered all over early U2. I haven’t read enough interviews to verify it or not, but the blueprint of Unknown Pleasures (released one year prior to Boy) still echoes in a lot of the latter, as much as U2 were not content to slow down their tempo. The key exception here is “An Cat Dubh,” a rare appearance of Gaelic in U2’s catalog that stands on the shoulders of the finest early goth that they were mustering over in the UK (e.g. “Bela Lugosi’s Dead,” “Day of the Lords”).

As has been documented and dramatized, Ian Curtis took his own life right before his band was to embark on their first tour of North America. New Order’s eventual world-conquering notwithstanding, for U2, their Boy-ish dreams were impossible to contain within Ireland’s borders. By 1985, U2 were the biggest band in the world and led off their following (great, yet overrated) album with a song called “Where the Streets Have No Name,” a declaration that their sights were set on the whole world, not just their small North-Atlantic island country. Unfortunately, the more Bono has tried to save the world, the less enticing his music has become. From a geographical standpoint, that’s no disaster, since he’s done more to help those in need around the globe than almost any living celebrity.

But I digress. This isn’t about what U2 would eventually accomplish as artists and celebrities, it’s about their first album and why it’s my favorite record of 1980. Relatively few people heard Boy first among U2’s discography (mine was Rattle & Hum, which is a whole separate conversation), yet nothing sounds immature or half-cooked about the album when juxtaposed with their later works. It’s alternately amazing and upsetting that U2 didn’t seem to improve as musicians or songwriters over the course of becoming the world’s biggest band. I mean, it wasn’t their final great album by any means, as some of their musical ideas did go a bit more left-field (some more successful than others) into the nineties. For me, Boy still constitutes the closest thing U2 had to a definitive Irish moment, when “the streets that had no name” were only images they had read about in books and in nature programs on RTE. Despite these ostensible limitations, U2 arrived on the scene as the world’s greatest rock band, and their debut album remains proof.

For anyone interested, these are my #2 – #10 favorite records of 1980:

Young Marble Giants – Colossal Youth
Dire Straits – Making Movies
Prince – Dirty Mind
The English Beat – I Just Can’t Stop It
Dead Kennedys – Fresh Fruit for Rotting Vegetables
The Soft Boys – Underwater Moonlight
Tom Waits – Heartattack and Vine
DEVO – Freedom of Choice
Gary Numan – Telekon

The ‘NOT-A-SHOWTUNE’ Song Challenge for November!

Posted on November 1, 2020 by Tyler

I’ve gone on the record, more than once, that I’m not a big fan of musicals. I especially dislike those “Oh, but you’ll like THIS musical, Tyler” musicals. The only musical I genuinely love is Hedwig and the Angry Inch. Otherwise, there are a handful I will tolerate because people close to me love them, but even then I will still periodically wince when the belting begins. God, I hate when singers belt, especially with those assembly line vocal styles that the Andrew Lloyd Webbers of the world have forced us to agree are “good.”

But, I digress. This is why, among other reasons, that this month is a collaboration! My great friend Courtney, who lives in the DC area with her husband, small son, and slightly smaller dog, happens to be a Broadway fanatic. In fact, the last time we collaborated on anything, it was in the DC theatre scene, notably the 2008 Hexagon show (for which she did plenty of the heavy vocal lifting, and I hid in the chorus with my mic turned down).

Anyway, ye grande lockdown(e) of 2020 gave us an excuse to collaborate once again. Her sister Marissa (also a DC friend, with whom I bonded over Sunny Day Real Estate and the Dismemberment Plan) started a Facebook group in which these song-a-day challenges have assumed a whole new life. It only made sense that Courtney draw from her musical theatre past and create a 30-day-challenge. Also, it was her birthday this past Thursday, so…

Download this, share it with your friends, make sure to hashtag #NotAShowtune, and wish Courtney a Happy Belated Birthday! Her Instagram handle is next to mine under the title.

The only rule is… just as obvious in the past few months. And yes, musicals that became more famous as movies count, too. You theatre nerds should know!

My #NotByBillyJoel Song Challenge Results

Posted on July 30, 2020 by Tyler

At the outset, this one got even more traction than the Sonic Geography Song Challenge did when I released it via social media. I’m not sure what they says about the world of Sonic Geography, but I’m willing to accept the reality that Billy Joel’s music has more mass appeal than my research. Crazy, I know (I may be, too).

Anyway, here are the results from my own take on the challenge. In all honesty, I hadn’t queued up so many results in my head as I was writing it as I did with the other one in May.

For Reference:

Pixies – “Tony’s Theme”
The Spinto Band – “Brown Boxes”
The Dismemberment Plan – “Girl O’Clock”
The Afghan Whigs – “Uptown Again”
The Housemartins – “Build”
Descendents – “Weinerschnitzel”
Bill Evans – “Lucky to be Me”
F.Y.P. – “Die Young”
Bob Dylan – “The Hurricane”
Minor Threat – “Cashing In”
The Clash – “Jimmy Jazz”
Lifetime – “Airport Monday Morning”
Minutemen – “History Lesson Part II”
Jawbreaker – “Bad Scene, Everyone’s Fault”
The Ergs – “Books About Miles Davis”
Hunx & his Punx – “You Don’t Like Rock n’ Roll”
Julia Jacklin – “Pressure to Party”
The Jesus & Mary Chain – “Nine Million Rainy Days”
Sick of it All – “My Life”
Sunny Day Real Estate – “Pillars”
The Bloodhound Gang – “Fire Water Burn”
Replacements – “Love Lines”
Misfits – “Bullitt”
Minutemen – “Viet Nam”
Pulp – “Sorted for E’s and Wizz”
Throwing Muses – “Walking in the Dark”
Chumbawamba – “Hanging on the Old Barbed Wire”
Zwan – “Honestly”
The Brian Jonestown Massacre
De La Soul – “A Roller Skating Jam Named ‘Saturdays'”

Thanks for reading and/or playing. Tune back in tomorrow morning at 9am EST for the August Challenge!

Charter to Offer Free Broadband Access (60 Days)

Posted on March 18, 2020 by Tyler

I was going to wait until my next Sonic Sunday post to put this out there, but our world hasn’t exactly slowed down to crawl as may be advisable. My department chair has sent this link, which I will be sharing with my students, and here, in case anybody needs to see it.

Charter To Offer Free Access to Spectrum Broadband and Wifi for 60 Days for New K12 and College Student HouseHolds, Etc.

This is not an endorsement of Charter (as we are discovering these days, internet access should not be privatized), but this may be a valuable service to many, so I wanted to pass it along.

Enjoy this whimsical commercial from 1999.

“13” Turns Twenty

Posted on March 15, 2019 by Tyler

Happy Friday, everyone. I recently noticed that Blur’s everything-falls-apart masterpiece “13” came out twenty years ago today (March 30 in the States, to split hairs). I’d be remiss if I let that landmark slip by without mention here, because I completely missed the anniversary of their self-titled album (my entry point as a fan) two years ago.

Blur’s mid-90’s rivalry with Oasis (manufactured as it was to sell copies of NME), formulates one of my favorite lectures I include in my European Geography (GEOG 371) course. Popular culture reinforces geographic assumptions, especially the sense of place that permeates any discussion of “the North” and “the South” in England. Not since The Beatles vs. The Kinks had there been such a raw encapsulation of that dichotomy. For the record, I do prefer The Kinks, too (and not because of any predilection for Southern England; I just enjoy their music more than most bands in the first place).

Anyway, in 1997, Blur were shedding their Britpop skin and embracing Graham Coxon’s love of American indie rock, perhaps best manifested as the wonderful “You’re So Great.” As I said, Blur was my entry point as a fan, so I didn’t fall in love with the band’s foppish (in a self-aware way) era. Like many of my friends who were listening in this era, I remember being less enthused at 13 when it landed in 1999. “Coffee & TV” felt like the only marginally accessible song on the album, which didn’t matter much to critics, but to a teenage American, it felt like a bit of an affront. I recall putting the CD on at some friends’ house in Syracuse while we sat around as a party dwindled; by the time “1992” got to it’s third-level of noise, walked over to the boombox and turned to me and said “I’m, uh, gonna change it.” If you want to get a decent impression, feast your brain on this:

Knowing what we know now, though, makes the accomplishments of 13 all that more remarkable. Namely, the band had long since shed any sonic accouterments of what had ostensibly made them huge, defied every music writer in the UK, and more or less entered into the worst collective period of their lives. Again, I was too young and under-educated in life to recognize half of this album as a heady mix of cries for help and the other half as gleeful conflagration of their rental castle-mansions. I’ll never forget reading a story on Blur in SPIN in the wake of the trans-Atlantic success of “Song 2” that really harped on how much the members hated one another. It seemed pretty sensationalized (because it was), but I can only imagine how much resolve it took the four of them to remain a band. In 1997, Graham Coxon sang that “DT’s [delirium tremens] and coffee helps to start the day,” and in 1999 he sang “sociability is hard enough for me” to chronicle a years-long battle to overcome alcoholism. “Coffee & TV” sounded convincing enough, and one of the all-time great videos to dramatize his ‘coming home’ certainly helped this case. Stateside, it remains in contention against “Girls and Boys” for the vaunted title of ‘Blur’s most successful single that doesn’t go “WOO-HOO.”‘

Anyway, since it’s 2019, there are a multitude of ways to hear 13 in its entirety if you’re interested in doing that today. Twenty years ago, Blur played most of the album live at the Hippodrome Theater in London, and a fan named Claire Welles taped the gig off the radio. A little over a year ago, she digitized it on YouTube. Considering the teeming oceans of Blur material on the site, it’s only accrued 556 views so far. I’ll embed it here if you’d like to add to that count.

One dynamic that I can’t get out of my head while listening to this was how so many of those cheering fans, like so much of Britain on BBC1, were hearing songs like “Trailerpark” and “Battle” for the first time ever. I believe that Napster, Limewire, and Kazaa were all active by this point, which had fundamentally changed the lifespan of anticipated music’s release. Gone were the days of that hot new single arriving at the BBC on a CD encased in some briefcase with a combination lock.

Damon Albarn, right on brand, didn’t sound too enthused to be performing these songs, but again, the fact that the band still existed in 1999 was remarkable. Considering the worldwide success Albarn had waiting in the rafters with James Hewlett at this point, it’s even more understandable that it feels like he’s punching the clock here. Still, you can’t help but imagine he begrudgingly knew how insane and special this new album was. And no matter what your feelings are on Albarn, he headlined Glastonbury two years back-to-back (2009-2010) with two different bands.

Alright, I’ve said enough. Happy 20th anniversary to 13, hope you all have a great weekend, and if you’re anywhere near Oak Ridge tomorrow night (Saturday 3.16) come see me and Nina Fefferman (UTK Evolutionary Biology) talking science with comedians Shane Mauss and Dave Waite at the Grove Theater. It’s close to selling out, but there may be tickets for sale at the door! More info in my previous entry or at Shane Mauss’ site here.

Sonic Geography

The Gradually Accumulating Work of Cultural Geographer Tyler Sonnichsen

Category Archives: RIYL