To anybody who went to the gig and found my site because you dug the tunes between the feature and headline set: thank you for visiting! There’s a decade of material scattered across the preceding posts (just keep scrolling), much of it about material you may enjoy if you’re cool enough to appreciate Drug Church. Hopefully you’ll find something you like and find a reason to bookmark the site and keep coming back.
Negative Approach – “Can’t Tell No One”
Carolina Durante – “Cayetano”
Red 40 – “Straight Past Me”
Sincere Engineer – “Fireplace”
Seam – “Something’s Burning”
Throbbing Gristle – “Hot on Heels of Love”
Shudder to Think – “Shake Your Halo Down”
Pohgoh – “Tired Ear”
Sinkhole – “Donut”
Mustard Plug – “Fall Apart”
The Front Bottoms – “Everyone But You”
MORFEM – “Megah Diterima”
Broken Hearts are Blue – “Gettin’ Over My Sassy Self”
Airiel – “In Your Room”
The Wedding Present – “Suck”
Full Playlist here! Start yourself off with some classic NA and enjoy the ride.
BY THE WAY: If you live in Michigan and are seeing this today (Friday, February 2nd) come hang out at the Loggers Luau tonight in Saginaw! I’ll be DJing a special edition of Luau/beach/surfing/chilling Sonic Geography from 6 until 9. No cover, and there will be a food truck!
Artwork ripped from the back cover of ‘Taste the Sand!’ by Beatnik Termites (1995)
A vast majority of my social media posts are fluff. Cotton candy, not to be taken too seriously, mainly as an act of self-preservation to document what I’m listening to and watching (or presenting; though it defeats that purpose since every platform has been systematically compromised to prevent independent events from getting free publicity by some members of the wealthy parasite class).
It’s a rare occasion that I pour my creative heart and soul into anything on social media that I truly believe deserves to be seen by more people than the 10-13, max, that Meta’s algorithms allow. Today’s the fourth anniversary of my favorite post I’ve ever put on Instagram, so to ensure that it’s seen by people who may actually appreciate it, here it is. The prompt for Day 3 of the Springfield Vinyl Challenge was: “Disco Stu doesn’t advertise! Post a disco music favorite or any album you like dancing to.”
This here’s a tale ’bout Ev’green Terrace /
Best Rummage sale; you can’t compare us /
People havin’ fun, but Sales don’t look good /
Cause George and Barbara bush are movin’ to the hood ///
…
Okay, Flanders /
With a PA, panders /
From table to table he meanders /
Mrs. Glick walks by; you wanna low-ball her /
Cause she’s selling her candy dish for ninety dollars ///
…
Shirts say the Ayatollah /
Is an assahole-uh /
Homer steals the PA and goes on a roll-uh /
Skinner bought the merch, but he will come back /
Cause he needs a fancy motor for his new tie rack///
…
Hey Big Spender/
Dig this Blender/
Make the crowd shout “We surrender!”/
Sell the rhinestone jacket to some funky dude/
Who don’t like to advertise?/
Disco Stu.
Reference point one.
Reference Point Two (most likely to get taken down).
American Football (August 2023), fulfilling their 25-year dream of performing for me.
This year, I’ve decided to enter three categories: best song, best album, best reissue, and best song I heard for the first time in 2023. Each category will have a brief spiel before I unveil which three songs/albums/reissues fell into place for me.
BEST SONG
These are not necessarily slated in this order, because I heard them (and got into them) at largely disparate points this year. Until I fact-checked myself and realized that the Afghan Whigs’ How Do You Burn? came out late in 2022, “Domino and Jimmy” was firmly entrenched in my top three favorite musical moments of this year, but that’s just a testimony (heyyyy) to how amazing and wonderful that Marcie Mays cameo was.
Anyway, here are three songs that came out this year that I loved more than any other songs I heard that came out this year:
Olivia Rodrigo – “all-american bitch”
There has certainly been a wealth of trite, garden-variety bullshit packing the “top 40” this year, but to tip my hat to Todd in the Shadows, a lot of that mantle was overloaded with Cul-de-Sac Country, not necessarily pop/rock music. Even hip-hop didn’t exactly have a banner year. It will be interesting to see where the conversation on Olivia Rodrigo sits after she’s able to tour her (mostly great) album GUTS next year (presumably), but we need to face facts that, maybe, just maybe, she became impossible to avoid because she’s very good. The opening track to GUTS demonstrated everything great about Rodrigo’s songwriting/production partnership with Daniel Nigro: a clear reverence for nineties rock tropes (e.g. the Cropper-esque plucked intro, a Ween-esque see-saw of self-flagellation and self-esteem, and not being too perfect to add a dollop of distortion) that makes her the most blatant heir-apparent to Alanis Morrisette not named Deanna Belos (see below). At least three or four of the tracks on Guts could have made an expanded “Songs of 2023” list (and neither of the actual singles “vampire” or “bad idea right?” would be among them), but this song rules, cuts out just before the joke wears thin, and gave me the same vibes I got from my Best Album of 2022‘s album opener. Pure fire mission statement and declaration of insanity.
Militarie Gun – “Never Fucked Up Once”
To be quite honest, I conflated Militarie Gun (quite poppy) with Conservative Military Image (quite hard) for most of 2023. Once I actually got around to listening to both of them, I felt like an idiot. The former, a bunch of sun-soaked L.A. bros (Ian Shelton moved down from Seattle during COVID after Regional Justice Center fizzled, I suppose, another detail nobody mentioned to me), took hardcore’s indie fringe by storm this year with their debut album Life Under the Gun. “Never Fucked Up Once” is the best song on the album, and a hardcore-enough singalong that even your mom may like.
100 Gecs – “Hollywood Baby”
I didn’t love 10000 Gecs as much as some did, but this was a scorcher that reminded us why we liked 100 Gecs in the first place (after getting over ourselves).
BEST ALBUM
Mustard Plug – ‘Where Did All My Friends Go?’
The more I think about 2023 (and everything we as a species have been through in the past five years), the more Mustard Plug’s new album Where Did All My Friends Go? feels like an epoch-defining record. I already wrote a long spiel about it, even, and going back through everything that hit me the hardest this year, I feel like I want to sing its praises even more.
Sincere Engineer – ‘Cheap Grills’
Not that there isn’t space for Olivia Rodrigo in that conversation (being as how she’s a household name and all), but in a just society, we’d be sick of hearing Deanna Belos’ powerful wail on the radio every 45 minutes by this point. Everybody who wasn’t already a Cubs fan would have adopted them as their second-favorite team, and an Old Style and a black Carhartt pocket tee would become haute couture among people who paid whatever stupid ticket price to attend When We Were Young. That’s how good Sincere Engineer’s Cheap Grills is. Ironically, it’s less poppy than the singles that Belos released during COVID, but that may have to do with her current lineup coalescing. At any rate, I’m not going to be the umpteenth person to also draw the (perhaps more fair) comparison between Belos and Kim Shattuck (RIP), but to quote Lars Fredericksen on Rancid being compared to The Clash, “if you were a baseball player, would you complain about being compared to Willie Mays?”
Never Ending Game – ‘Outcry’
I wanted to get something brutal on this list, and living in Michigan for the rise of NEG has been a lot of fun. At the Tied Down festival in June, they played between Negative Approach and Gorilla Biscuits (two loud-fast-rules hardcore legends) and made themselves and the fanatic crowd right at home with their beatdown chugga-chugga. Hometown heroes hitting a major stride, with a deceptively high number of hooks stuffed in the margins.
Honorable Mentions: Hotline TNT – Cartwheel(Bandcamp) Blur – The Ballad of Darren(because we need to remember that one of the greatest bands of all time put out a new record this summer, and they still got it)
BEST REISSUE
I’m not including simple, cash-grab re-presses here. I’m talking finely curated repackaging and thoughtful remastering that leads to an immense payoff.
SS Decontrol – The Kids Will Have Their Say (1982 orig / Trust reissue)
I have two questions about this one. (1) How could it possibly have taken over four decades to actually re-master and reissue this one, officially? And (2) HOW MUCH ART CAN YOU TAKE? HOW MUCH AAAART, CAN YOU TAAAAKE? HOW MUCH AAAAAART? CAN YOU TAAAAAKE? HOW MUCH AAAAAAAAART? CAN YOU TAAAAAAAAKE? HOW MUCH AAAAART…
Action Patrol – 1993-1996 on Patrol
When this one landed, several friends and I (who had PAID ATTENTION… sort of, to what had happened in Richmond in the years preceding when most of us got into punk) were equally amazed that such a cool band from the ’90s had effectively vanished from their own subculture, considering how we’ve spent most of the 2000’s and 2010’s bathing in the end of history. It’s remarkable that there are still bands like Action Patrol whose discographies have been dwelling in the memory banks and portable hard drives of middle-aged punks, awaiting their comeuppance. This reminds me a bit of when Secretly Canadian made my goddamn decade by introducing me to the Zero Boys in 2008 – sure I would have read about them in the margins of some Midwestern hardcore history book sometime, but boy did Vicious Circle influence me to look at an entire chunk of our country in a different way. 1993-1996 on Patrol made me realize that ’90s Richmond was a magical place for reasons that didn’t (directly) involve Tim Barry. Beautiful job repackaging what should have been considered a seminal dork-rock band. (Note: upon trying to find a good video to embed here, I saw that Action Patrol actually reunited in 2018 for a gig or two, so I really don’t know anything).
Anorak Girl – Plastic Fantastic
It’s obviously a Reggie and the Full Effect-style alias for Helen Love, whose records are criminally inaccessible outside of the UK. It’s the two singles released by said side project, compiled into one EP, of which they pressed 300 copies. I nabbed one almost by fate in Chicago earlier this year, and I’m very happy I did.
Honorable Mentions: The Knapsack LPs – yes! I forgot this, but just added it.
Everyone Asked About You – Paper Airplanes, Paper Hearts (Bandcamp). It’s true! Everyone DID ask about them! And we finally got their discography from the Numero Group, illuminating us as to what the drummer from THE BODY was doing in his early 20’s.
De La Soul – De La Soul is Dead (1991). De La finally got to reissue a bunch of their records this year, and this was my favorite, mostly because “Bitties in the BK Lounge” remains the purest distillation of the type of fun that made us all fall in love with DLS in the first place.
Best Songs from Other Years that I Heard for the First Time in 2023
Let this portion where I basically embarrass myself be a lesson that there are ways to find new music that aren’t just fed to you by some algorithm or Anthony Fantano (himself fed at you by algorithms). Read zines and leave your stupid house.
The Ecstacy of Saint Teresa – “Whats” (1991)
The guy who does Possessed*, one of the most bitter and funny zines I’ve ever read, mentioned that this invariably bitter and funny Czechoslovakian (1991 – two whole years before the velvet divorce was finalized!) shoegaze gem was one of his favorite songs, so I bit. It slaughters.
Seam – “Something’s Burning” (1993)
One of the greatest mysteries of 2023 was how it took me until 2023 to actively listen to Seam. From what I can tell, only that first album they did in Chapel Hill (with Mac Superchunk on drums) before relocating to Chicago got a proper reissue, via Numero Group. Maybe they fell a little too neatly into that box established by Pavement (clean-cut fellas with nondescript names playing clean-cut music) that I just passed them over for years and years. Anyway, I’m a fool, and I highly suggest you drum up some Seam on whatever your preferred streaming platform is, or go out to a great shop with a lot of used indie CD’s like Vertigo Music in Grand Rapids, Michigan, and pick up The Problem with Me. This is EXACTLYwhat Gen-Xers are talking about when they talk wistfully about the ’90s.
Throbbing Gristle – “Hot On Heels of Love” (1979)
Yeah, 20 Jazz Funk Greats sat in the same “band for critics” bin I’d put This Heat and other in over the years as I decided to listen to catchier songs by less elusive artists. And, to be honest, Throbbing Gristle still sits there, for me. It’s also impossible for me to separate how contrarian and difficult Genesis P-Orridge was from the music they innovated. But, one of the guest DJs at the Gluestick Zine Fest spun this, and I was mesmerized.
*Thanks to Possessed Zine as well for the passing mention of Hiroshi Yoshimura, who may be one of my favorite dead artists I’ve discovered this year. This work is too good for this world, but he made it anyway before passing away in 2004.
A couple years ago, I wrote a spiel about my favorite album of 1985, The Replacements’ Tim. Recently, Ed Stasium (and the surviving members of the band) blew up the age 35-65 internet with a truly revelatory remix of the whole record. Have a listen here.
I’ve already articulated my thoughts on the original 1985 release extensively and expansively, but sitting here and listening to these songs liberated from their Tommy Ramone-sanctioned aural flocking is just HITTING ME repeatedly with feelings I couldn’t quite describe. Thankfully, Joe Gross, author of the 33 1/3 book on Fugazi’s In On the Kill Taker, shared a column where the right person to articulate those feelings stepped in. That person’s name is Keith Harris, he’s from Minnesota, and I’m going to link his article here, hit “Publish” and head to class.
For those without time to read the link, I’m going to blockquote the penultimate paragraph, because it brought me to the verge of tears and if you know me that well, it may have the same effect on you.
Yes, we project so much of our own baggage on the Replacements, and that includes our feelings of and about regret. No one makes it to 40 without a litany of what we have done and what we have failed to do haunting us. And the Replacements are our Ghost of Modern Rock Past, a reminder of missteps as ephemeral as a kiss left unkissed and as quotidian as that ill-timed second mortgage. It’s almost enough to imagine the Stasium mix of Tim duking it out with Bryan Adams or Dire Straits for the top of the Billboard charts, without realizing what a sad victory that would have been.
Issue 5 of Postcards from Irving is now out! Check out my virtual lecture LIVE tomorrow night with Friends of the Cabildo at 6pm CT! More on those soon, but first…
Well we jumped all night on your trampoline, and when you kissed the sky, it made your sister scream. You ate our chips and you drank our Coke, and then you showed me Mars through your telescope…
“Grace”
One of my favorite Supergrass moments occurred halfway through the band’s headline set at the 9:30 Club on February 12, 2006. Gaz Coombes sat down at a keyboard (normally the province of his big brother Rob, whose full-time membership in the band was half a decade along at that point, yet I still refused to accept as such) and diddled out the opening measures of “Funniest Thing.” It only took one measure, though, for the audience to erupt. “What great songwriting,” I thought, amazed at how one measure of one hook was enough for the crowd to recognize a deep-cut.
Considering how instantly memorable so many of their 2000’s-era songs are, it’s amazing what a disappointment all of the band’s 2000’s albums were when they arrived. I should qualify that, though, by clarifying that disappointing for Supergrass would be tantamount to an under-40 goal season for Alex Ovechkin. Life on Other Planets is still great. It’s just that, for “everyone’s second favorite band,” something HAD to give after the millennium turned and everything started to suck. Those of us who’d plied ourselves on those double-disc bonus editions of the In It for the Money CD knew that the band wasn’t going to keep up their golden streak forever, and like a LOT of bands who blew up in the ’90s and survived the Great Music Industry Cave-In, the new decade wasn’t going to make things easy. Though I didn’t realize it back then (since it took me quite a while to appreciate their 1999 self-titled album), the band spent five years debuting and amazing us with as good a trio of First-3 albums as any band in rock history. Gaz and Danny being in bands together since age 14 did give them a good handicap going into 1995, but I digress.
Revisiting this album, on vinyl for the first time (because I wasn’t rich, living in a major city, or a country with UK vinyl distribution in 2003) has been a true pleasure. True to form, reissues are all about money enabling people to appreciate the album in its purest form as if they’d be able to when it first escaped into the world. I wrote about this a lot in my Master’s Thesis, which I am sincerely mortified to ever go back and read.
Also, far be it from me to tell a great band who had the good sense to quit when they needed to quit (and whose inevitable reunion tour was cut short by an ahistorical pandemic) that they can’t squeeze a little fund-age out of willing fans. Yes, those somewhat redundant Record Store Day single reissues irk me, but that’s also because I already have OG pressings of most of them (being a nerd who had some expendable income and lived for some time in a major city WITH killer record shops that made it their mission to provide distribution for UK vinyl in the early ’10s).
Anyways, Life on Other Planets wasn’t so much that Supergrass were trying to pry a new “mature” iteration of themselves (like Blink-182 were successfully selling of themselves at the time), but a bit of a come-down was needed both in ferocity as well as in outlook/quality. It didn’t feel like the same Supergrass, largely because it wasn’t. I won’t lie; I still feel ambivalent about Rob Coombes’ stature as the fourth member, owing to the same pretenses that have kept Jason White out of Green Day and kept Pat Smear out of Nirvana (i.e. pointless rockist delusion). The ‘grass were cursed to be immortalized as a trio, despite how one of their best 90’s hits, “Sun Hits the Sky,” prominently featured Rob tickling the keys in his stoic way.
Revisiting with album with the gift of context that I didn’t have in 2002 has verified a lot of things I felt back then. The band didn’t try to fire all their weapons in a different direction like they did in 1997 then again in 1999 with those first three records. They just set their phasers to stun and gave us, as Rob Tangari commented, a thoughtful tour through fifty-plus years of British pop music traditions. On a few occasions, this resulted in genuinely amazing hit singles like a late-comer track inspired by their engineer’s charity-collecting daughter:
In other occasions, it was a bit drab. In some, it was fun but barely hiding the Bowie worship in ways they had previously owned their Bowie worship. No matter how erratic it was, it was a necessary window into the band’s mortality. The singles collection that came between this and Road to Rouen (another flawed album that still somehow does everything well, just in that subdued, Warning, “check out our acoustic guitars!” way) was an even split between cashing in relevance and justifiably marking a decade of being a singular band. For me, the 10th anniversary singles collection was redundant, but I caved and bought it in Bologna when I found a copy that had the accompanying video collection/documentary DVD. I managed to find a computer that would read Europe-region discs (oops) and made it about halfway through the documentary before turning it off, because it was fucking boring.
Somehow, though, this constituted another one of my favorite Supergrass moments: realizing that bands didn’t need to have insane, rubberneck-inducing stories to make great or interesting music. Gaz and Danny were always marketed as rock n’ roll brats during their ’90s heyday, but realizing that maybe that was pretense/bullshit made those Great-First-Three even greater. The early 2000’s served as a good moment of reckoning for (surviving) bands slapped with the Britpop label. Blur cleared the haze, splintered and put out their best record (in my opinion). Pulp released an LP that was fine and then broke up. Suede put out a couple of quite good clunkers before going on hiatus. Oasis had been burnt out for nearly a half-decade by 2002. Supergrass, in spite of everything, proved their mettle by remaining beautifully Supergrass for another half-decade on their own terms.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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!
Sonic Geography 