I Listened To These Albums So You Don’t Have To

Hey everyone,

I wanted to drop a little check-in to the Patreon for the new year. l don’t use any other social medias right now, so this is my only form of sharing about my life right now. I don’t mean this to say you are all part of a very special exclusive club, but also that I’m out of practice with the performance of posting. I am then taking on a mode familiar to many, the 30+ y/o earnest poster. A despicable bunch honestly, but in classic-me style I am working to revive the genre.

I spent NYE in the desert of Joshua Tree National Park. There I visited some friends with goats and a permaculture project. While being showed around the property, it was kind of going over my head how anything actually worked. There were trenches dug to direct water and I didn’t really understand how the 2-4 inches of rain could make it anywhere. We got a light rain the next day that flooded every single road in town, and then it made sense. There is a lot about being from New England that made it so hard to understand the desert, like that water doesn’t actually absorb into the ground. While messing around with a little bit of lysergic diethylamide, I saw a funny picture in the bathroom of a restaurant next to a tiny airport that I wrote a whole essay about in my head. I’ll post that in the next week or so. It’s about airplanes and technology and military and living forever.

My home life lately looks like cleaning my house, listening to music, and going to the gym with my mom. All tame sounding things until I try to describe them to people and they laugh at me. I just got roasted because I told Lanna “I’ve been trying to make my hands less soft” while trying to describe improving my grip strength (a thing to come in the living forever essay). After a couple year hiatus, I’ve been marathon listening to albums all the way through. Some albums I have listened to before, but most are things I had come across and thought “that sounds interesting.” The list is like, thousands long. I’m about 120 or so in since mid-november, and let me tell you I’ve listened to some really great stuff but I’ve also listened so some stuff that was incredibly difficult to get through. I’ll talk about some of them below.

I’ll start with the one I’m listening to as I write this.

Mr. Bungle’s California: This is a fever dream of a record. There are some people who I really respect in music who love Mr. Bungle, which is why I listened to this. There is an incredible amount of talent on this record, sent into all the strangest places. And that it’s from the 90s there is just this Nickelodeon-esque type sense of “What the fuck inspired this?” There are some songs I enjoy, but everything else is forcing my brain to shut down because I have no anchor to hang on.

Saosin’s self-titled: Okay we can reminisce for sure. Anyone that was around when this came out might have a hard time having anything but fond feelings about it. But in trying to sing along, I find myself feeling kind of foolish and cringe. What do any of those lines mean? It is very AIM-away-message-core. I went back and listened to Translating The Name and that actually still holds up quite well. Spotify doesn’t have the original version of Mookie’s Last Christmas though and it’s annoying. It even had remixes??? I could write and essay on this band alone and being young when this album came out, but it would involve me having to listen to the later records and I don’t really want to have to do that.

Macula Dog’s Orange 2/Cabo Boing’s Real Gems For Little Jewels/Slugbug’s 0xBAADF00D: This is a trio of records I listened to from a particular scene of bands making music right now, stemming off the label HOARD. It is interestingly dissonant in a way that is basically DEVOcore, but you really are being asked to slog through some of these records. Cabo Boing I actually particularly enjoy, but every time I show it to someone they hate it and tell me to turn it off and reconsider my life. As an aside, I also listened to Jack Stauber’s Micropop which is actually seemingly in the same lineage as these albums but is less abrasive to the average listener.

Storm & Stress’s self-titled: This band comes between Don Caballero (a band I have just begun listening to) and Battles (a band I have listened to quite a bit) and I had no idea the 3 were connected until right now. Storm & Stress is a band I believe is actually fairly important, but GOD. This record is so hard to get through. It’s 90s skronk (jazz punk) improvising and while I knew the first track of the record, I didn’t know the whole record was like that. It seems like they made a more digestible second record which I’m more familiar with.

There are a couple of other records that I didn’t enjoy that I would, most actually came out this year. It’s interesting how records can be well regarded in the year they come out and then drift off completely. I listened to a bit of the records that people had held up high and was let down by some where the production highly outshines the song writing. Apologize that I am ending this with such an earnest posting trope of missing the good ol’ days!