It’s strange that in just 10 short years, an ostensibly modern era can feel so seperate. There’s a generation of people who can now say they’ve grown up with the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, the anointed New York early-2000s indie-rock scene had a defiant, exciting sense of nowness…
Daft Punk’s Random Access Memories is so indebted to the past that you don’t even have to listen to the album to listen to the album. It’s fun to play music taxonomy with bands, but so rarely has a record come along and culled from everything from ’80s yacht rock to musical theatre…
Ian Gilliam of Deep Purple once wrote a little note that explains why Y.N.RichKids are so remarkable right now. The note is printed on the back cover of an album by an obscure ’70s Brit-metal band called Jerusalem, a record produced by Gilliam. It reads:
This message from Cold Cave’s singer and creative force, Wesley Eisold, intrigued me in part because of its content, but also its candor that appeared to be the result of his sobriety. I wasn’t aware of Eisold speaking in such confessional terms to the general public without being provoked. His interviews were always honest but usually characterized by his answers dealing directly with the questions and offering little more. However, with a message about change and personal growth, atypical behavior seems precisely the point.
I find it hard to listen to the Exploding Hearts without hearing some haunting melody from the past. It’s a fleeting, ghostly hum that must have crystallized during the Portland power-pop band’s final moments. At least that’s how I imagine it. I imagine the sound of eternal youth and wasted promise embodied by the Hearts’ lovelorn songs from a decade ago suddenly spilled across an innocuous stretch of Oregon’s Interstate 5 on a Sunday morning. Or perhaps what I’m hearing is just an echo from the long, sickening silence that trembles in oblivion’s wake.
The black and white parental advisory sticker that Tipper Gore worked so hard to place on jewel cases in the mid ’80s is becoming another cultural artifact fit for a listicle about the way we used to do stuff. If you want to download Tyler, the Creator’s new album Wolf from iTunes, you just do it, and there it hides in your cloud or MP3 player, the young rapper and his suspect morals. Parents are none the wiser. Kill people, burn shit, fuck school in total secrecy.
Welcome to another installment of Stress Position, where we test a writer’s patience and insanity by forcing them to listen to an album they hate for 12 hours straight.
Let the carnage begin.
Welcome to the second installment of Aux.Out. Book Club, where a group of us tackle a new or renowned book of the music canon and lay down some of our thoughts. For our first book, we chose Michael Azerrad’s Our Band Could Be Your Life, and now we arrive at the 2012 R. Kelly diary/autobiography/memoir/Yearbook Soulacoaster: The Diary of Me Please read along with us in the future (our next book is at the bottom).
The Continuing Tales Of… is a new bi-monthly feature where we pay tribute to an album’s anniversary by asking writers to compose a short story inspired by each one of the songs. This installment is Led Zeppelin’s Houses of the Holy.
A sentence not really out of context from Gerard Way’s eulogy for My Chemical Romance reads, “Fiction. Friction. Creation. Destruction. Opposition. Aggression. Ambition. Heart. Hate. Courage. Spite. Beauty. Desperation. LOVE. Fear. Glamour. Weakness. Hope.” Well, Gerard, if you’re trying to buck the fact that you were what’s commonly referred to around here as an “emo band” you’re not doing a great job. But it’s not entirely your fault – and no matter what you do, there will always be the undue stigmatic qualifier “emo” around yours and many other band’s music but maybe for us kids who grew up with you squeezing our hearts and lungs empty there’s a fine reason to still enjoy it without immediately falling into some reflexive nostalgia. I took a trip to see an old partner of emo – one who struck a Fuastian bargain with the genre changed how people view it ever since.
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