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)
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.
2023 / Bad Time Records. Autographed copy hookup by Vertigo Records.
True to form, I posted this over a week ago to Instagram with a pretty skeletal caption that “we don’t deserve Mustard Plug.” Today, I’m going to add to my (unfortunately paltry) volume of ska-related posts on Sonic Geography by explaining why. The band also posted to their social media yesterday that it was “National Ska Day.” No idea how that one got by me.
When I moved to Michigan, I stumbled upon a local performance by Brian Vander Ark, which motivated me to buy tickets to see Mustard Plug that Fall. Both are artists embedded in Michigan who I’d known since my adolescence due to exposure bumps that both got in the 1990s (inevitably, Mustard Plug covered “The Freshmen” before that decade/century ended). As it happened, a one-off concert by the Verve Pipe at the Michigan Theater in Jackson was the last performance I saw before the COVID lockdown. As soon as it was safe/sane to do so in 2021, Mustard Plug re-emerged with a pair of shows (one in GR, one in Kzoo) packed wall to wall with vaccinated fans. Dave Kirchgessner, never one to back down on what’s right (see DVD extra of him destroying swastika graffiti with a hammer), led the crowd in a massive chant of “sci-ence! sci-ence! sci-ence!” while half of Michigan was still whining about having to wear masks in public.
Considering how no member of Mustard Plug in its three-decade long history has ever earned a steady living solely from the band, their longevity as a touring and recording entity is not merely remarkable – it’s almost ahistorical. Other veterans of ska’s 3rd wave (at the party well before Sublime and No Doubt made everybody famous; still there decades on) have been enjoying considerable post-COVID touring success, but Mustard Plug feel like the only one still operating at a clip they were 25 years ago, well before their marriages, kids, and varying careers in industries like real estate.
Last month, they released Where Did All My Friends Go? on Bad Time Records, and to say I enjoyed it would be putting it mildly. As much as I’m sure I’ll hear something in 4 years that came out this year which buries WDAMFG, it’s oddly reassuring to write that Mustard Plug are my current Album-of-the-Year front-runners.
How did they pull this off? Foremost, the songs are thoughtful, fun, and catchy. Even the minor-key singles like “Vampire,” which I didn’t love the first time I heard the advance release, are awash in hooks that sound better with each listen. Most of the tracks, though, including the title track, “Fall Apart,” “Another Season Spent in Exile,” and “Everyday Wait,” beautifully match the band’s early moments of synergy (e.g. their 1995 single release of encore-fodder “Beer (Song),” a moment that guitarist Colin Clive cites as the moment they found their sound).
“Everyday Wait,” in particular, is one of the most life-affirming songs I’ve heard in years, flying in the face of the inevitable existential crisis that comes with middle age and informs a lot of the record. Hearing the gang-harmonies declare “everyday wait, it’ll get better,” recalls the sensation of first hearing Ginger Alford belt out “just keep moving, you’ll find solid ground” at the end of Good Luck’s Into Lake Griffy. Both are the type of songs and lyrics that people need to hear at a time when it feels like the entire world is conspiring to make you feel powerless and worthless. It’s just socially conscious and responsible songwriting.
Along that line, perhaps middle age has helped the band come to terms with how they don’t owe anybody anything. Where Did All My Friends Go? is the soundtrack to that epiphany. I’m almost inclined to say that it rivals 1999’s Pray for Mojo as their best album, which is a weird juxtaposition. Mojo documented the band at their arguable commercial peak, but it was hard to suss anything like that out at the time when ‘normal’ people were buying ska CD’s. Now, three albums and two decades later, it feels like listening to a band at their artistic and personal peak. They stayed true to their sound and their home state, and as Clive sings on one of the many WDAMFG? highlights…
“with all we’ve had between us, we’ll keep doin’ what we do.”
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.
I’m looking forward to these opportunities coming up, most of which are actually in the daylight. Come and say hi. I’ll make sure to keep this post updated here and over on the DJ page.
Wednesday, June 21 | Midland Farmer’s Market 10AM – 1PM Friday, July 14 | Loggers Brewing Company (Saginaw) 6PM – 9PM Saturday, July 22 | Mt. Pleasant Farmer’s Market 10AM – 1PM Saturday, August 12 | Mt. Pleasant Farmer’s Market 10AM – 1PM Sunday, August 13 | Loggers Brewing Company (Saginaw) 2PM – 5PM Saturday, August 19 | For Art’s Sake Market for the Arts (Mt. Pleasant) 11AM – 2PM Saturday, September 9 | Mt. Pleasant Farmer’s Market 10AM – 1PM Saturday, October 14 | Mt. Pleasant Farmer’s Market 10AM – 1PM
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.
I’ll be bringing back one of my favorite lectures from my curriculum on the Geography of American Popular Culture. From the poster/site description:
Pop Culture in the United States, like American History at large, must address uncomfortable realities about its past (and present) to embrace what has made it remarkable. Early forms of American music, theater, and eventually film, radio, and television are inextricable from the minstrel show – generally speaking, mockery of African-Americans by white performers and audiences. However, as with anything in popular culture, the realities, appeals, and most influential performers exist within gray areas. As this lecture argues, much of the most persevering and influential American art – all the way from The Marx Brothers’ Duck Soup (1933) to Childish Gambino’s “This is America” (2018) – has happened as a reaction to minstrelsy rather than embrace of it.
See you next Thursday, October 20th, at 6pm in DOW Science Complex Room 102 (not Pearce 127, the original location as posted on the Honors site).
I don’t know why it took me two+ years to land on this one, but in honor of Joe Strummer’s upcoming 70th birthday, the time felt right. So I present the:
NOT-BY-THE-CLASH CHALLENGE!
Feel free to share on whatever platform(s) you would like, tell your friends, and don’t forget #NotBytheClash. And above all, KNOW YOUR RIGHTS.
“[Greg] Dulli’s a Catholic boy blessed with a filmmaker’s sense of story, a robust, overly industrious voice that can’t quite stay on key, sexual hang-ups for days, and the seeming conviction that he may, in fact, be black.” – Joe Gross on the Afghan Whigs in The New Rolling Stone Album Guide (4th Ed), 2004.
Columbia Records Promotional still from 1965 era (photo by Marina Chavez)
For a substantial portion of my twenties, I lived with venerated guitarist and session musician J. Tom Hnatow. We met because I needed a room when I moved to DC, he had a room to let, and we both loved Tom Waits. He spent a lot of time on the road, but whenever he was home, we would, predictably enough, bullshit about music. To this day, whenever I listen to the Afghan Whigs, I occasionally remember the first thing Tom said when I brought them up: “It must have been no fun at all being in that band.” I trusted Tom then, and I still trust him now, given his pedigree from years of hard-scrabble touring and babysitting various collaborators with various addictions.
Though the Afghan Whigs emerged from Cincinnati at the height of the hair metal/scuzz-rock era, which their long-lost debut album reflects, there was always something different about their scuzz. Their first album on Sub Pop, Up In It was just as problematic as it came out in 1990 as if it had dropped last year (despite the term not having dissipated into popular discourse from the academic bubble yet). However, Greg Dulli’s blatant love and admiration for Miles Davis and Billie Holiday made listeners wonder how serious he was about the band’s whole “track-marks and rage” persona. Bob Gendron did a good job demystifying Dulli’s story in his 33 1/3 book about Gentlemen, the Afghan Whigs’ 1993 major-label debut which frequently centerpieces any listicle about “bands who actually got better when they sold out (imagine that)”.
First of all, I think that ideology is flawed, considering how my favorite record of 1998, the Afghan Whigs’ swan song 1965, is sandwiched in between two other records by underground artists who generated their finest work using major-label machinery*. Of course, there was no rhyme or reason to how or why certain music of the Nineties has aged better than most. It feels like a lot of the most timeless shit from the 80’s went against aural and production trends (fucking saxophones…), but the timeless shit from the 90’s were about purposefully bucking whatever was popular and giving LOTS of love to your pop forebears. 1965 isn’t even the only “apart-from-indie-and-punk” album named after the authors’ birth year to top one of my favorite-albums lists this decade**. Maybe it was the sudden floodgates of cultural-text access which the internet had opened, but both Greg Dulli and Tim Wheeler both seemed like they would have had a hell of a time being able to experience their birth years as adults. I often waver on this about my own year of birth.
Either way, the Afghan Whigs’ completing their transition to noirish R&B made 1965 a perfect title. The cover featured Ed White walking in space outside of the Gemini 4 less than one month after Dulli was born. Though it take a few glances to notice it on the cover, he was attached to the spacecraft via an umbilical cord – entirely to symbolize Dulli’s own introspection about his birth following extensive treatment for clinical depression. Granted, what the hell do I know? I’ve only met Greg Dulli once – briefly – in 2007 at a Dinosaur Jr gig in New Orleans. He told me that he and Mark Lanegan were bringing their Gutter Twins project to DC that March, welcomed me to New Orleans, then went outside to smoke. Maybe he isn’t as complicated as we imagine he is, or at least no more complicated than anybody who’s made a career out of writing songs about fucking and fucking up.
To wit: 1965– perhaps the album that I’ve listened to more times than any record ever made. I’m unsure why that is, outside of the fact that I love it, the CD has always found its way into my car(s over the years), and it puts me where I need to be when I’m in a place I want to avoid. I did first hear it at that pivotal point in my adolescence, when “Something Hot” made it onto the radio while sounding nothing like anything else on the radio. I also took a major coming-of-age trip to New Orleans in 1998 and was still reeling from that six months later when the album came out. I remember buying my used copy of the CD, opening the booklet and seeing that they had recorded part of it in NOLA. The album definitely feels like the pulse of the Northernmost Caribbean City, dribbling in Creole voice samples and steel-pan drums over “Citi Soleil” and nodding to “some old boy who lives Uptown” in “Crazy.” There’s a moment in “Neglekted,” just short of the 3-minute mark, when a key change drops and releases the song into a gorgeous lounge, full of smoky background vocals and a suddenly ebullient protagonist, floating through it all.
Like many bands who became my favorites in high school, the Afghan Whigs split up around that time, too. Given the demons that seemed to permeate the band’s aesthetic, it wasn’t a big surprise. Within a year and change, Dulli had returned as the Twilight Singers, which at first felt like the unfinished business of a guy who had scrubbed his old garage-punk band of all grunge influence. Within a few years, Greg’s buddy Ted Demme died, he scrapped his solo album, and he poured his noirish melancholia into what would become my favorite album of 2003. After spending a decade channeling his middle-aged angst into the Twilight Signers project, he reunited the Afghan Whigs and, in the past decade, has released two very good new albums (with a third on the way). Imagine that.
*Ween in 1997 and The Dismemberment Plan in 1999; the latter had been dropped before the album came out, but they used that Interscope money-fountain to record it.
**Ash’s 1977 also earns that esteem from me for 1996.
I tell ya – this modern society a select few have built has got me jerkin’ back and forth between thinking “Maaaan, what a beautiful world” and “we’re all deep into de-evolution, everything is controlled by morons.” Well, once again, I’m back in the crate of the Not-By 30-Day Music Challenge monster I created toward the beginning of the COVID era, and yet again it is my birthday month. So, prepare yourselves to get sloppy while fighting that uncontrollable urge with the…
NOT-BY-DEVO CHALLENGE!
I had another idea that I may unveil this coming summer provided the usual suspects I know are still engaged with these song-a-day challenges then. But for now, go ahead and download this, share it with your friends, and hashtag it #NotByDEVO to guarantee good times.
If you’re curious, someone on the internet there’s a photo of me dressed up as Mark Mothersbaugh (or Bob, or Gerry, or Alan, technically) for Halloween in 2010. I even made my own energy dome. My best friend dressed up as Thor (bear in mind this was a year before the first Marvel movie for that character came out), and that January we put on a variety show called ‘Ragnarok’ where I hosted one segment in character as Mothersbaugh. Five years later, my friend hit me up, practically freaking out when they announced that the music for Thor! Ragnarok (2017) would be done by Mark Mothersbaugh. Life imitates art imitates full circles, sometimes.
Sonic Geography 