Category Archives: Sonic Sunday

2023 in Short Music Lists

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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.

Hickey. Yeah. Moving on…

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 EXACTLY what 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.

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

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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 #NotbyREM Song Challenge Results

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I had a lot of fun writing this one, and it also influenced me to revisit REM’s early and mid-era catalog on vinyl, which is always enjoyable. I had overlooked the second side of Murmur for so long! Anyway, here are my song choices from this month’s challenge. The matrix, for reference:

NotByREMSongChallenge

  1. Worriers – “End of the World” (song of 2020)
  2. The Aquabats – “Pool Party” (it was a cool party)
  3. Cee-Lo Green – “The Art of Noise”
  4. Pinback – “How We Breathe”
  5. Herbie Hancock – “Chameleon”
  6. Common – “The Corner (feat. The Last Poets)”
  7. Jessie Ware – “Spotlight”
  8. Mrs. Magician – “There is No God”
  9. Def Leppard – “Stand Up (Kick Love Into Motion)”
  10. Frodus – “The Day Buildings Mysteriously Vanished”
  11. Prefab Sprout – “Moving the River”
  12. Dan Deacon – “Wham City”
  13. Andrew W.K. – “I Get Wet”
  14. Travis – “Flowers in the Window”
  15. Goldfinger – “Superman”
  16. Grandaddy – “El Caminos in the West”
  17. The Dead Milkmen – “Watching Scotty Die”
  18. Orange Juice – “Falling and Laughing”
  19. The Ramones – “Howling at the Moon (Sha-La-La)”
  20. Meat Loaf – “Everything Louder than Everything Else”
  21. Snapcase – “Bleeding Orange”
  22. LL Cool J – “I Can’t Live Without My Radio”
  23. Sick of It All – “Clobberin’ Time”
  24. Buzzcocks – “Everybody’s Happy Nowadays”
  25. Deftones – “Be Quiet and Drive (Far Away)”
  26. The Replacement – “A Little Mascara”
  27. Cock Sparrer – “Working”
  28. Sunny Day Real Estate – “In Circles”
  29. Husker Du – “I Apologize”
  30. Ruth – “Polaroid Romain Photo”

Because I can’t stop won’t stop (procrastinating), you’re all getting a challenge for September, too. I am going to try to keep grinding one out for every month the US is in “quarantine” due to COVID, so you can all look forward to another year or so of these!

[cue bitter sobbing]

Anyway, tune in tomorrow at 9AM Eastern for that, and don’t forget to tell a friend or two or however many the Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram algorithms allow to see your posts (probably around 2).

Here’s a Video of a Whole Bunch of Schoolkids Singing “Minor Threat”

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I’m sorry for (actually/no excuses) missing Sonic Sunday this past Sunday. There has been a lot to digest, and lot of information (and counters to misinformation) to spread, and the existential crisis of TWA (Thinking While American) had me a bit overwhelmed.

I’ll have a full-on series of “amplify melanated voices” links for this coming Sunday, and I will also have a special post on some updates for the Ben Irving Postcard Project this week.

In the meantime, here’s a video of a bunch of kids in the Wirtz Elementary School after- school program in Paramount, CA singing “Minor Threat.”

The caption by Rich Jacobs:

Wirtz Elementary School 5th graders go off with their version of MINOR THREAT Tim Kerr, Mike Watt, Mark Waters, Ray Barbee, Alexis Fleisig, Randy Randall, Hagop and a host of other musical champions musically backed up the 5th graders at Wirtz Elementary school in Paramount, California. Last year they did a Sly and the Family Stone song and the year before they did 2 Big Boys songs. They also do a ten minute FREEDOM improv jam where the kids play an instrument they bring to the experience. It is really rad. Here they sing the song: Minor Threat, originally written by the band of the same name. The power and vitality of the youth was palpable, inspiring and intoxicating. Eric Caruso is their teacher. He brought an idea to his principle to have an after-school art project since they did not have an art program. He gives them art assignments based on living artists work and at the end of each year, there is an awards ceremony. The artists give the students a prize. It is a really positive experience, as many of the students are underserved and have never been given the chance to do stuff like that.

Your Sonic Sunday: May 31st (Ruby Pearl Diamond and Chris Rusk)

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This week’s Sonic Sunday is brought to you by THE INTERNET. Well, specifically, the Florida Memory portion of the internet. I was looking for more information about the Hotel Floridan in Tampa – I did find this cool 1920 photo of the lobby – and wound up searching left and right for information on a Jewish dowager from Tallahassee named Ruby Pearl Diamond after this photo came up in the results. I don’t know who coded their search algorithm, but that’s where I found it.

I quickly found this article about Ruby, which runs through her (very interesting) life story, which linked the old world, Southern Jewish tradition with the post-War progressive Southern Jewish tradition (there is such a thing).

One point that jumped out to me was a passing mention of how her older brother Sydney, a decorated Tally attorney, “gained a reputation for collecting risqué literature and jazz records.” Well, clutch my pearls! The first question that sprang to mind was where that piece of trivia came from, so I wrote the author, Josh Parshall of the Institute of Southern Jewish Life. I’ll share any revelations as I receive them.

That’s all I got this week, other than the very cool news that Chris Rusk, an old acquaintance of mine from Knoxville (seen here, in full effect) was the guest on this week’s episode of Mike Watt’s looooooong-running podcast The Watt from Pedro Show.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I need to get back to my long-overdue reading of Gloria Jahoda’s The Other Florida and revisit my favorite piece of music ever to emerge from Tallahassee. Long live Little League!*

*They broke up in 2012.

 

Your Sonic Sunday: May 24th (well, 25th)

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Happy Sunday, folks (I forgot to set this to publish yesterday! Oops. Well, it’s still the weekend here in the States, so it still counts as “Sunday.”)

Do you believe we have one week left in May 2020? It’s almost like something happened to slow life down to a crawl and inversely speed up the passage of days. I wonder.

Anyway, here are a couple gems from around the internet that you may like if you like me/this site:

  • I’ve given McMansion Hell credit where (a lot of) credit’s due on this site before, but I decided to check back into her website recently, and found this fantastic article she wrote (and I somehow missed) a couple years ago about the populist (actual populism) preservers and archivists of mundane, built-to-fail architecture.
  • A user who calls himself Snake Oils for Holy Spirits posts a fantastic mix of olde timey music to Soundcloud on a near-weekly basis. Here’s his latest, which includes some Polynesian vocal music, good-time fiddle jams, and plenty of surface noise to hug your soul.
  • Newly minted Dr. Corinne Gressang (University of Kentucky) just issued and publicly filed her dissertation about a topic I had never once thought about, but now I can’t stop thinking about: French nun-hood during the Revolution and Napoleonic era.

I will be back this week with a new entry on the Ben Irving Postcard Project! I will also be writing an insane amount to catch up on some writing which complications at the end of the digital semester delayed.

Enjoy this mashup of Futurama footage with Red City Radio’s song “This Day Has Seen Better Bars,” which you didn’t know you needed. For those interested in learning more about the song, I interviewed RCR in Baltimore once, many years ago.

 

Your Sonic Sunday: May 17th (Punk Scholars, Jangle Pop, and Hardcore)

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Happy Sunday! I have a few music documentaries to recommend (which are streaming, for free, on YouTube as of this posting), but first a couple of announcements about things near and dear to me.

First, per Dr. Matt Grimes, the Punk Scholars Network website is up and updated! For those keeping track, I published an article in the connected journal Punk & Post-Punk a couple years ago ahead of Capitals of Punk, and I’m looking forward to collaborating with this consortium more in the future. For now, take a gander at what they’ve been up to lately, and who makes up their team.

a2570743017_10Second, while working on the Sonic Geography Song Challenge, I’ve inadvertently discovered that Mark Mulcahy put the entire Miracle Legion discography up on Bandcamp (the second-best website on the internet, behind Cinema Treasures). For my fellow 90’s kids who remember the beautiful show The Adventures of Pete & Pete, Polaris were, ostensibly, a massaged iteration of Miracle Legion. Chris Viscardi and Will McRobb have said that Miracle Legion’s 1985 EP The Backyard directly informed the aesthetic of the show, and it makes perfect sense.

Under the “Hey! Free Viewings!” category: Lance Bangs made this appropriately slow-burn documentary about Slint’s 1991 masterpiece Spiderland, and it’s available to watch here. He does a good job pulling from his own super-fandom of the mystery that surrounded albums like this before the internet, as well as the fascinating little world of Louisville, Kentucky.

maxresdefaultDrew Stone has been breaking his back for a long time to not only keep the spirit of New York Hardcore (or as it’s properly pronounce “N’Yuk Hahdcowa”) alive through shows he organizes in Brooklyn, but hosting numerous live-streams with NYHC figures. I caught this one with Lou Koller, the singer of one of my favorite bands Sick of It All, and as I may have said on twitter, it felt like a warm embrace. Stone’s “The NYHC Chronicles” documentary (stream-able here) digs deep into that universe, and I recommend it. Also, somehow, Walter Schriefels does. not. age.

the-jane-projectSpeaking of hardcore (just a bit further North), every time I have the privilege of introducing someone to Converge’s 2001 masterpiece Jane Doe, I get excited about the record all over again. While traversing the algorithm for those previously mentioned videos, I found this video of Kurt Ballou talking about the album to a class at the Berklee College of Music in the band’s native Boston. As an academic who thinks Jane Doe deserves every bit as much respect as any other piece of critically-coveted “art music” of the past two decades, it’s always gratifying to see Converge getting that kind of institutional validation (not that they need it). Over the past couple of years, I’ve had an epiphany: Converge may be the greatest band in Boston history. Sit on that one, and tell whether you agree that there may be weight to that argument.

Sonic Sunday Announcement: ‘Capitals of Punk’ is Available in Paperback!

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Well, I finally missed a Sunday post! I can only hope that it didn’t ruin any of your April 26th experiences, not letting me direct you to any random corners of the internet while (most of) you are still (mostly) stuck in your homes. The Sonic Sunday series (which will continue, don’t get me wrong) began as a form of New Years’ Resolution for 2020 in an effort to put a better foot forward digitally as far as my research and publication interests. Obviously, New Years’ Resolutions are made to be broken, and I’m not just saying that because my only other resolutions included “cool it with the parentheses” and “don’t get caught in a global pandemic.” Eggs on my face!

To make up for my irresponsibility, I’ve got a couple pieces of news to share here. I’m so happy to report that my 2019 book Capitals of Punk (Palgrave) is now available in paperback! I always pay tribute to the hard work of my editor and good friend, Joshua Pitt, but in this case, a lower price ($30, £30, €30, or something in that ballpark depending on where you are on Earth) was a priority we had been talking about since last summer.

Also, while we’re on the subject of the semi-lockdown many of us are still living under, anyone who orders a copy of the book from Palgrave’s website will immediately receive the digital version (a 20-dollar/pound/Euro/etc. value) for free with their order. Did I mention that the digital version price had also lowered, precipitously? Because it has! I’m grateful for this elevation of the accessibility of my book.

To anyone who’s checked out my Australia Megamix a couple weeks back (a tribute to Joshua and all of my friends Down Under) or enjoyed my France Vinyl Mix this past week (equal parts a tribute to my friends/collaborators in France as it is an audio experience of Capitals of Punk… save for my inability to find anything by Prohibition on vinyl), I’ve got an extra special mix going up this Wednesday. I won’t give away what it will be, but if you know me, it’s the kind of vinyl mix you’d make fun of me by saying I would make.

Your Sonic Sunday 04.19.20

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Happy Sunday! I’m sorry not to get this posted until the later side, but I’ve been occupied with pet projects and haven’t been spending as much of my time on the internet (unless your understanding of “the internet” includes FaceTime-ing platforms). I’m grateful to report that my friends and family are generally doing well, and as I notified my students this past week, we’re over a month into lock down, and this next month is going to be slightly easier.

I don’t have too many highly relevant, thoughtful links this week, but I will gladly point you to the new Todd in the Shadows video essay on the (now-unfortunately named) Corona’s mid-90’s Italo-Dance jam “Rhythm of the Night.” I’ll also direct you to a profile that Billboard published on Todd Nathanson back in January which I completely missed, somehow.

Even further outside the subject of academia, prior to mid-March, I became involved on the tech side of a local theater production of “James and the Giant Peach.” Of all the things to look forward to on the opposite end of what this pandemic is putting us through, this is at the top of my list. For those of you anywhere near Central Michigan, I’ll keep you posted.

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