2020 is the year I'm relaxing the rigorous regiment I trapped myself in for the final few years of the 2010s. I had gotten into the habit of trying to consume at least five albums every week, and did my best to keep up with every new and notable album that came out. It was unsustainable, especially with two kids and a weirder-than-usual work schedule. So I slowed down this year.
I have relieved myself of the pressure of having to "get" every new, critically acclaimed album, and often times I'm listening to them once and then just... letting them go. It feels good. On top of that, I'm downloading like three albums a week tops, which is giving me more room to breathe and to experience each album as it comes through. Finally, I'm giving myself more opportunities to discover older music, because that's important too (I'll probably rank some old music at the end of the year, but not here).
My point being that my semi-annual rankings of the year's new music is gonna take a bit of a hit. I'm still checking out a lot of music, but the amount of new music that I'm really digging into is a lot more limited than it has been in years past. I was able to compile a Top Five list of the best music 2020 has had to offer so far, but I had fewer albums to choose from. This is good for me, and this is bad for you. Sorry.
I saw a comment online that said "this album is so Philly grade school that I'm surprised they didn't sing about pretzel money."
3. Silver Landings by Mandy Moore
I originally dismissed, and then I was hooked. Gotta love well-crafted Laurel Canyon folk pop. My love for this album is both separate from and equal to my love for This Is Us.
Bonus: Top Five Albums of 2020 So Far That I Only Listened To Once
I should also add to that introduction above that I have doubled down on a commitment to listening to pretty much every notable album at least once, or at least attempting to listen to each album in full. Some are really fucking bad, and I forget about them. Some are pretty decent, but didn't stand out to me enough to make a commitment (i.e. download it). I listen to it once, I (mostly) enjoy it, I write it down on a list, and then I (mostly) forget about it. This is refreshing! This is how a normal fucking person listens to music! Hear that ma? I'm normal!!!
Anyways, I went through the list of everything I listened to one time this year, and compiled this list for you, with a very brief note for each. Maybe one of these albums will look more appealing to you than they sounded to me.
This was fun, but I've already listened to enough Tame Impala this year.
1. Circles by Mac Miller
Backpack rappers have their own Pink Moon now.
HONORABLE MENTIONS: Skuba Sada 2 by Sada Baby (bottom-right); UNTITLED (black is) by SAULT (top-left); Lost in the Country by Trace Mountains (Neutral Milk Hotel was never gone they just live in the woods now); Earth by EOB (WXPN insists); Coriky by Coriky (I guess I should check out Fugazi eventually...)
I had a Hoegaarden today, split one with Pam from her six-pack of it. We've already written about Hoegaarden though—it's the original witbier, creamy mouthfeel with orange peel and coriander, the beer that Blue Moon takes after, the beer that Pam remembers thinking of as "pretentious" in college but now willingly drinks because she is consciously moving away from Natty Light (boooooooooo).
Since I don't have anything to say about this beer that I haven't already said, I will take this opportunity at the end of Q2 2020 to do what I did at the end of Q1, and that is to look back on the past three months and spotlight some of the beers that deserve a spotlight (for reasons either good or bad). Here is my retrospective for the beers of April, May, and June.
Goose Island is not a brewery I had held in high regard, simply because it's not really local (a Chicago transplant). But as it turns out, they do make some beers exclusively in Philly, and the wonderful St. John Street Pre-Prohibition Lager is one of them. Plus, they are selling crowlers for $6 each when you buy two or more, which is BY FAR the cheapest crowler in town. It's not even close.
You can find cheaper beers on the shelf, but this is a very affordable Oktoberfest, if that's your thing (and apparently pairs really well with the Burger King your eating while sitting in the car).
I spent a lot of
time in the early parts of the summer trying to get a grip on IPAs. I
knew I liked them in general, but too many were getting to me and not
tasting that good at all. I had to figure it out. Turns out the answer
is that hazy IPAs are shitty, and non-hazy IPAs are great. If you're
drinking a bunch of them, a non-hazy session IPA is even better.
That distaste for hazy IPAs hold true even for breweries held high by beer snobs. I hear a lot about the Alchemist, and I paid more than I should've to try one out, only to be sorely disappointed. Hazy IPAs suck.
I am not a proponent of wild sour beers typically, but man, this strong sour paired really well with a strong, creamy bleu cheese. My mouth is watering just typing this.
I thought about picking Sage Against the Machine for this one, but I only dislike that beer because I dislike goses in general. With Triple Bottom's Stoop Fireflies, that excuse doesn't apply. I love hefeweizens, but this was just a poorly made hefeweizen, with way too much lemon for my liking. Bummer.
I can't decide. Heavy Belgian beers and weizenbocks are similar in that they derive so much flavor from the yeast and the malt (i.e. not so much from the hops), but don't have that roasty flavor that bogs down the other heavy beers like porters/stouts. Sweet without being cloying, packing a punch without puckering, a beer that you want to keep in your mouth for as long as possible before swallowing. Remember that scene from Beerfest when all the guys are exaggerating about how much they love the beer they brewed by saying how much they want to have intercourse with it? I have to imagine they created something along the lines of La Trappe or Aventinus. I'd have intercourse with these beers.
Well, we're halfway through the year, and I'm finally starting to feel like I know what I'm doing. I mean, I'm not at the point where I can taste a beer and tell you all the flavors and ingredients and whatnot; I don't know if I'll ever get to that point. But I can at least distinguish between certain styles, and tell you about them, and most importantly, I can drink a beer and appreciate the beer and tell you exactly why I appreciate it.
But there are still six months to go, and still so much to learn.
NOTES
BEER: Hoegaarden Original White Ale
STYLE: Witbier
ABV: 4.9%
BREWED BY: Brouwerij van Hoegaarden
LOCATION: Hoegaarden, Belgium
PURCHASED AT: Foodery NoLibs as part of a six-pack
I made a list of 200 movies I've never seen before—found HERE—and I'm working my way through them in alphabetical order, while writing a little bit about them.
The Basketball Diaries
1995
There was a day in 2001 when 3000 Americans died, and we cried for weeks. In 2020, we get an average of 1000+ preventable deaths per day from a deadly virus, and not too many people even blink. From this, we can come to the very unscientific and unresearched conclusion that we, as Americans, have become numb to death and violence, and grow more so every day.
I bring this up in the context of The Basketball Diaries, which celebrated its 25th anniversary this past April, as I have to imagine that its impact in 2020 is dulled at least a little bit because our sensitivity to such subject matters have become dulled as well. It's gone from "could this very extraordinary horror happen to my child?" to "could this normalize, regular horror happen to my child?" One need not look much farther than the closest underpass to find a handful of Jim Carrolls.
Here's the part where I should drop some numbers on y'all—how do heroin rates for teenagers in 2020 compare to teenagers in 1995 (when the movie was released) and to teenagers in 1965 (when Jim Carrol was sixteen years old)?—but I don't even know if that data exists. I assume no one was tracking heroin usage in teenagers in the '90s (certainly not the '60s), because maybe people assumed that there was no fucking way teenagers were using heroin. Maybe it took movies like The Basketball Diaries to convince people that this shit was happening.
Not that The Basketball Diaries gets too "after school special" on its viewers. It's a little on-the-nose, but sometimes movies like this have to be in order to get its point across. The gratuitous violence and drug use committed by teenagers is the point—this is happening, this is a problem, there are millions of teenagers like this everywhere.
If you grew up white and male, you might even reluctantly see a little bit of your own younger self in this characters. I know I did toward the beginning of the film, when the protagonists were simply cocky and brash. Now, I certainly never mugged an old lady or stuck a needle in my arm or threw anyone off a roof to their death, but those actions were presented as one step in a whole series of them, leading to a downfall, a downfall anyone could meet if they continued down that path.
Watching as a thirty-something was scary because it presented a concise and horrifying depiction of a road I didn't travel down, but totally could've if my situation was even slightly different (slightly less attentive parents, slightly more morally-compromised friends, slightly more pressure to be somebody, and so on). It's the horror at realizing a near miss. It's the waking up in the middle of the night because you dreamed you were in a car crash.
Had I watched this film as an actual teenager, though, I don't know if I would've even thought to consider it a cautionary tale. There was another similar film that came out only three months later, and one that I watched a lot closer to my teenage years than I did watching The Basketball Diaries. Yes, we are talking about Kids, the subject of a rare movie blog post during my early 20s. I haven't revisited that post in a long while (probably because I can't bear to think about The Wall's meat grinder any more than I have to). I wrote this thing at the age of 21, which probably seemed pretty far removed from sixteen at the time I wrote it, but from my current vantage point seems equally prepubescent.
And even in that post, the message was the same as it is here—"holy shit, these kids are awful... but was I awful too?" I have no way of knowing whether these movies or similar ones would've had a measurable impact on me as a sixteen-year-old. Probably not—teenagers are by and large headstrong and refuse to believe that they are vulnerable. I would've watched The Basketball Diaries and only seen the differences: "Well, at least I would never do heroin!" as opposed to "Holy shit, I hope circumstances in life never tempt me to do heroin," or "Maybe I should learn from these mistakes and never do heroin." I wouldn't see it as a cautionary tale because I would assume I don't need a goddamn cautionary tale, I'll be fine Mom, jesus christ, get off my back! That I ended up not needing it after all is only coincidental.
Anyways, I'm 31 years old, I have no plans on doing heroin, and my own kids are still a decade-plus away from their teenage years, maybe we should talk about how this functions as a film, ya know, since this column is supposed to be about movies I've never seen as opposed to a self-reflection about how shitty of a teenager I was?!
Here's my take: decent movie. I thought Leonardo DiCaprio gave a really good performance as Jim Carroll, and this is coming from someone who doesn't have many kind words to say about DiCaprio's acting skills in general. He found the right balance between someone who was shown to have a sensitive side that he poured into a marble copy notebook of poetry and someone who built a hard, heroiny exterior to deal with the pain of losing a best friend to cancer. He only overacted when the film called for overacting—mainly in the throes of addiction and withdrawal, and heartbreakingly so when he was outside his mother's door, asking for help and crying and cursing and slobbering and devolving into a puddle, less than human, the mask of good times finally removed to reveal a great rotting maw, snapping at every vein... if there's a time for overacting, its now, and DiCaprio fucking nails it.
Otherwise, I thought that The Basketball Diaries felt a little cartoony at times. Maybe the filmmakers were trying to replicate what it feels like to devolve into a heroin junkie, but to me it just came off as '90s-style corniness, with the fishbowl lenses and the Dutch angles and the overwrought narration (I get that the narration was literally from the autobiography the film was based on, but still). I'm not saying that I disliked The Basketball Diaries because it was hokey, but it definitely didn't hook me as much as a better-made film in the same vein could have.
But maybe that's bullshit. Again, maybe it's just that the subject matter isn't necessarily fresh or original to me. I have dealt with teenagers who couldn't get out of bed because they were too high, while their parents looked on, horrified that outside help was finally needed. There are kids dipping out on SEPTA every day. At this point and time, The Basketball Diaries have been drained of any shock value that it so clearly aspires to present. Or, maybe, like many Americans, I'm just numb to it all.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Who's Involved
I wonder if it was detrimental for me to know Lorraine Bracco first as a mild-mannered therapist in The Sopranos, because every time she pops up as a high-strung New Yawker, it's jarring for me. But that's not a knock against her work, as she was pretty great in this somewhat underutilized role. (Thought she was good in Goodfellas too, for what it's worth.) It doesn't look like we'll see her again in this column, so I guess I'll have to wait until Pam and I watch The Sopranos for the FOURTH time to marvel at her skills as an actress.
Usually, for non-A-list actors and actresses, we have to look 'em up on IMDB to answer the question "Where is that guy from?" In a rare occurrence, we did not have to do that for James Madio, whom Pam recognized immediately from Hook. He, like the other kids in this movie, did a really good job portraying terrible teenagers.
Yes, even Marky Mark did a good job, but that was only because Mark Wahlberg actually was a terrible teenager, and a violent teenager, and a hugely racist teenager. As a fifteen-year-old, Wahlberg threw rocks at black teenagers while yelling the N word. As a seventeen-year-old, Wahlberg assaulted two Vietnamese men in two separate incidents on the same day, yelling racial slurs, and assaulting the one man so badly that he went blind. From a purely cinematic perspective, it's interesting that Wahlberg was approaching the film's lessons from the opposite direction I was—he didn't have to be worried about turning into such a person, because he had already been that type of person. And possibly still was! It took him until 2016(!) to apologize to the dude he blinded, and that was only because he was trying to obtain a pardon for his crimes so he could become an LAPD officer(!!). The pardon was declined, as Wahlberg has "never acknowledged the racial nature of his crimes." I know it's not fair to paint the world as this cut-and-dry, but Mark Wahlberg seems like a piece of shit, or at the very least was absolutely an unrepentant piece of shit during the filming of this movie. (Also, can we acknowledge how differently the whole LAPD aspect of this story reads today? Oh, it's cool that you beat someone blind, Mark, just say sorry to a judge, and then you can perform racially-motivated assaults LEGALLY!! Defund the police, please?!?)
Jesus, now I'm blind. With rage. Where were we? The actors. Yeah. Patrick McGaw rounds out the group of four teen boys in the movie, and he is definitely the actor with the shortest filmography. He hasn't been in anything since a 2008 CSI guest appearance, and before that it was 2000's adaptation of Chicken Soup for the Soul (apparently there was a 2000 adaptation of Chicken Soup for the Soul). Whatever McGaw is doing right now, I hope that he is happy, and that I can rest easy knowing that he is probably not out there beating minorities until they go blind.
Oh hey, we recognized Bruno Kirby from When Harry Met Sally. This was a very different role for him than the quirky best friend. I was impressed that Kirby was able to give the role of pedophile a little bit of nuance here. The big scene where he sexually accosts a very high Jim Carroll in the showers could've been played poorly without the right touch (lord forgive me for using that word, I mean ACTING touch), but Kirby plays it with just the right timidity that curdles to anger, it makes the whole thing so creepy and so real. And the first sign of pedophilia—when he asks Jim to accompany him for pizza and deep talks about college—was played so deftly that I thought there was a chance that the coach was being sincere, and that the film was setting it up so that Jim would falsely accuse one of his role models as being a creep, or that maybe it existed simply to show that Jim was not very trusting of his authority figures. Not so, unfortunately for our protagonist—his trust of authority ended up being warranted, when his adult basketball coach tried to sexually assault him. But my main point is that Kirby did a good job with acting a delicate part.
Hey, we also recognize Michael Imperioli. He was Dwight's karate sensei in The Office. (Jokes aside, there was one other Sopranos actor in The Basketball Diaries—Big Pussy, a.k.a. Vincent Pastore. Here's a coincidence: these were also the same three Sopranos actors who were in Goodfellas.)
Pam to the rescue again with Juliette Lewis, who I just fucking knew I recognized from somewhere. Except, for Lewis, Pam tried pulling the bullshit line of "Oh, she's in a lot of stuff," as if that line could ever apply to someone who has watched as few movies as I have. But I definitely recognized her from Christmas Vacation, as a similarly snotty but way less heroin-stuffed teenager. We watch that movie every year. Still... I could've sworn I've seen her in something as an adult. Going through her filmography with a fine-tooth comb gives me nothing that jumps out. Maybe I'm getting her confused with Rachel Griffiths. Anyways, she was pretty decent in The Basketball Diaries. She gets to lay the protagonist real low after he gave her so much shit during her own rock bottom, which must've felt unsatisfying on a personal level, but from an audience's perspective, it felt totally justified.
(This is Never Seen It episode #10 and I still can't decide whether I want the "Who's Involved" section to be about the actors/actresses themselves or about the motivations of the characters they portray, so sometimes the two just kinda blend into each other.)
Ernie Hudson plays the only male adult figure in Jim's life who doesn't try to rape him. His character, Reggie, could possibly be seen as a "magical negro," though maybe not, since race didn't seem to come into the equation throughout this movie. In any case, he was pretty good here, getting to play compassion, as opposed to the other role I know him for (Oz's hardass warden).
There's probably a better time to talk about Leonardo DiCaprio. I dunno. I just don't feel like it today.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Jim Carroll / Music
I don't listen to soundtracks too often, but I do love soundtracks from '90s movies. They all sound the same, with the alternative '90s punk goofiness. This is fucking great. There's a song from Flea! PJ Harvey! The Posies! Soundgarden! And most interestingly, a bunch of songs from the dude who wrote the source material!
Jim Carroll was a Basketball Diaries triple threat. He wrote the book. He acted a cameo part as a drug abuser spouting bullshit (it is apparently required that if the person whose the movie is based on is still alive, they make a cameo, and this movie is no different). And his band did a bunch of songs on the soundtrack. I guess the most well-known song is "People Who Died," which would be incredibly on-the-nose if it wasn't a good fucking song (I think it plays over the scene when the guys skip school and cause some childish mayhem).
The first video that pops up on YouTube when you search "Jim Carroll" is a live version of "People Who Died" featuring Lou Reed. It appears that they were at least acquaintances, if not friends, since Jim Carroll is also on the Velvet Underground live album Live at Max's Kansas City. I've never heard it, but according to Wikipedia, he's the MC at the show, and can be heard inquiring about drugs in between songs.
This got me thinking about the timeline here. Carroll lived The Basketball Diaries in the '60s, but the book didn't come out until 1978. So Carroll was known as a beat poet before this novel came out, which is not what I would've thought. I assumed that The Basketball Diaries made him famous (book or movie, either one), but he was already well known (and dating Patti Smith!) long before that. Okay, fair enough. He apparently got sober in the '70s, for what it's worth, though I don't know if that's before or after the book. Maybe around the same time.
In any case, wondering about all this led me to a pretty good New York Times article published after he died in 2009. This article also quotes an unknown party in describing Carroll's debut album, Catholic Boy, as "the last great punk album," so I guess I'm gonna have to check that one out.
BEST: "Stephen Lang was offered the role of Jim's basketball coach Swifty.
Lang declined, citing the misrepresentation of the book in the script.
The part was subsequently toned down as a result." I'm including this
"trivia" in this section instead of the "Almost Casted" section below because I find it
interesting, and did not respond "who the fuck cares?" Mainly because
Stephen Lang apparently had standards at one point, and then years later
ended up choosing to play the most hackneyed, clichéd movie villain in
cinema history.
WORST: "Mark Wahlberg was widely felt to look too old to play a teenager." YEAH NO SHIT. But also, every movie and TV show (besides Degrassi) does this.
ALMOST CASTED (WHO THE FUCK CARES): "A popular misconception holds that River Phoenix was set to play the lead before tragically dying on the Los Angeles sidewalk. This is not entirely accurate. Phoenix was a big fan of the book, and as the film version entered various stages of readiness, he was always the front runner. However, prior to his death, he had declined the role, due to a combination of feeling he was too old to play a fifteen-year-old, and trying to broaden his range with more adult roles." WHO THE FUCK CARES?
~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Lawsuits, etc.
There's a brief interlude in the middle of the movie where the character Jim has a dream that he is in a black trench coat and has a huge shotgun and is blasting away classmates as they stare on in horror. It's not much of a scene (apparently it wasn't even in the source material), but apparently it was enough that the media started connecting the movie with the rash of school shootings in the late '90s.
We touched on this in our Oldboy discussion—just because a deranged criminal claims that his crime was motivated by a movie, doesn't mean that we should connect those same dots, and I'm not sure there's much more I have to say on the subject. If The Basketball Diaries motivated someone to commit murder, then the fault does not lie with The Basketball Diaries. The movie wasn't advocating for someone to do in real life what the fictionalized version of Jim Carroll did in a further fictionalized dream sequence. The movie was instead presenting a very damaged individual and the sick ways he coped with his issues.
Carroll defended his position similarly when news stations started to reach out to him in 1999 regarding these allegations. Here's an old blog post news story about it. Carroll stated that "artists have nothing to do with the deranged, vaguely connected actions of a few celebrated nut cases," citing Mark David Chapman's copy of Catcher in the Rye as another example.
He concluded: "The ridiculous thing is that, in fact, books like mine and others have made a lot of kids feel less isolated, less alone, relieved to know that someone else out there understood how they feel." Which got me on a whole different thought process, about how—and this is getting off topic / back to an old topic, but I'm rolling with it—how maybe this movie would've been a lot different for me had I been an ex-(or current-)heroin addict, if I could actually relate to this movie instead of just being thankful that I couldn't.
I'm all for pop culture making someone feel empathetic. Like, if there is a 16-year-old drug addict watching this movie, and they feel a kinship with the Jim Carroll character, then that's great. The Basketball Diaries is able to take the lessons that Carroll learned, and underline them with bold black ink, so if you're watching this movie and you have the same issues, then yeah, hopefully it'll make you feel like you're less alone, like there's hope to be found somewhere.
To claim instead that the movie might inspire someone to kill their classmates is an affront to anyone who is able to watch a movie and comprehend what the movie is trying to say. The Basketball Diaries isn't trying to say that. C'mon. Intent matters here.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Final Words
I guess it's kind of interesting that the crux of my argument above is "we are numb to this," when a more general argument I usually make is "good art makes you feel something," and yet I would not call this "bad art" by any means. I guess when I say "numb," I am speaking specifically about content—drug use, violence—and not about style or character. DiCaprio's performance in the climactic outside-the-apartment-door scene hit me hard for reasons that had little to do with heroin's pervasiveness in our culture. I can fault the movie for other hokey bullshit, but I find it hard to fault over the fact that I couldn't relate to the characters in the final 3/4ths of the runtime. There are kids who can relate to it, so at the end of the day, we must consider it important.
GRADE: 3 pukes out of 5
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
NEXT TIME: We check out A Beautiful Mind featuring Russell Crowe, whose Oscar-winning performance is literally the only thing I know about A Beautiful Mind, so I cannot even slyly allude to any preconceived notions in this section like I usually do.
I've seen a lot of comparisons between Women in Music Pt. III and Vampire Weekend's Father of the Bride. I agree regarding substance, as WiMPIII covers a wide range of musical styles and sometimes feels held together by scotch tape (meant as a compliment) (also, the comparison seems a little too easy, since Danielle Haim was all over that album). But in spirit, I'd argue it's more like VW's third LP, Modern Vampires of the City. Haim showed that they can create something new, and then create that something again, but can they level up and create something new, again? They do, and it's pretty darn good.
I typed out "great" but then hit backspace five times because I guess I'm not quite there yet. Haim's first two albums had a few standout tracks that were instantly memorable, and I haven't found as many on here yet. They are there; I get that these things take time (took me months to understand that "Little of Your Love" was the best song on Something to Tell You, and years to understand that it was one of the best songs of the decade). But for now, it's been a bit of background listening for me. Really catchy background music, but still background music. I am patiently waiting for it to pop.
Honestly, the first three times I listened through, I didn't have those "I gotta see what the title of this particular song is because it's popping for me" moments at all until I got to "Now I'm in It," and apparently that and the other two tracks that end the album are self-described "bonus tracks." The three songs (this and "Hallelujah" and "Summer Girl") were all released as loosies in the past year or so. They are included here but kept at arm's length, part of WiMPIII but not really part of WiMPIII. That they are mostly the best songs on the album is to the album's detriment.
Still, like I said, I'm giving it time. I'm content with having Women in Music Pt. III soundtracking the BBQs (that can't happen) until it starts to get colored in a little bit. (For what it's worth, "The Steps" seems like a strong contender, but we'll see.) For now, it just feels good to have Haim back. Haim-as-a-grower is still fucking Haim, and I love it. Happy summer, everyone.
The most interesting thing to me about Natural Light's fruit beer Naturdays is that it instinctively grossed Pam out. She said she bought it as a joke because she hates Natty Light, and so she assumed that Naturdays was going to be gross too. On a purely flavor level, this was an incorrect assumption—Naturdays tasted like a light shandy, with notes of lemonade and strawberries, more cocktail than beer. But I can see where the assumption comes from.
Natural Light—henceforth referred to by its sobriquet, "Natty"—is a beer that fuels high school and college parties, and exists for the sole purpose of getting kids fucked up for cheap. A Natty Light would have no place in the This Is My Blood series because there's nothing to taste. Taste isn't the point. It's basically skunked, carbonated water.
That description is as snobby as I will allow myself to get, because the real truth is that I love Natty Light, I have always loved Natty Light, and I will always love Natty Light. Natty Light was the elixir that made those college nights so legendary. Every great evening during my first two years of college began with a trip to Wister Beer with an empty backpack and a $15 30-bird of Natty Light to fill it. I am eternally grateful.
But Pam is right—we weren't doing this because Natty Light tasted good. It didn't. Natty Light was to be endured, not enjoyed. We drank it because it was a path to a party, full stop. Flavor was never the point.
So then, isn't that the point of Naturdays, though? There are millions of college kids that want to get drunk and don't have a lot of money, but are not afraid to stand up and say ENOUGH, that they no longer have to stand by and drink shitty beer, that they deserve to pay pennies for something that actually tastes nice on their delicate palates. Anheuser-Busch is just catering to that crowd.
When I was real young, before I had ever gotten drunk on beer, my friends and I would pay a dude to buy us sixers of Smirnoff Ice—ya know, the flavored ones, green apple and the like. This was because we didn't like the taste of beer, but still wanted to get drunk. But eventually, we switched to beer, drinking something we didn't like until finally we liked it. That was what you did. It wasn't a question.
But I acknowledge now that maybe there were some people who, if given the option, would not have chosen to switch to beer. Maybe Naturdays is for those people. Maybe there are seventeen-year-olds out there who are drinking Naturdays right now, because there is zero pressure to drink beer, since now there are options. Good for them.
I guess my whole point is that it would be silly to assume that Naturdays is going to taste anything like Natty Light, because Naturdays exists as an admission that Natty Light doesn't taste very good. Naturdays is going to have flavors as far away from Natty Light as is financially possible.
It succeeds in that regard. Even Pam liked it.
NOTES
BEER: Naturdays
STYLE: Fruit and Field Beer
ABV: 4.2%
BREWED BY: Anheuser-Busch
LOCATION: Saint Louis, Missouri
PURCHASED AT: Pam bought this as part of the Father's Day six-pack from IGA, but I figured this would be a good beer to save for a later date
As noted in the message I sent to everyone this morning, I will be donating $20 to Black Lives Matter Philly for every review I receive before 7 AM on Friday morning. It's an easy way to contribute to a good cause! Write a review, abuse my wallet, let's do this shit!
I will accept almost any type of review. Write about the album. Write about your love of Diana Ross. Write about your life and tack on a sentence about diana at the end. Record an audio track of you stream-of-consciously talking about music, and send me the mp3. Write a review about a Record Club album that you haven't reviewed yet (find the archives HERE). Rank the best songs from the Record Club playlist found HERE, and describe where the songs from diana fit into that ranking. Do whatever you want to do. Just send it to me before 7 AM on Friday.
(Sidenote: anyone named Diana who writes a review and makes me publish a review titled "diana, Diana" will earn an additional $20 toward BLM Philly.)
Thanks for being part of Record Club, and thanks for doing your part to make this country better than before. Enjoy listening, talk to you soon, and defund the police.
WEEK 74 — June 28-July 4, 2020
What we're listening to this week:
ALBUM: diana ARTIST: Diana Ross
RELEASED: May 22, 1980
WHAT GENRE IS THIS: Disco and pop and soul
WHY JOE PICKED IT: I really dropped the ball during my opportunity to talk about how great Diana Ross is during the Mahogany interview.
READING SOME SHIT: I knew the opening track, but I didn't really appreciate it until I read about it in The Number Ones. That column entry is about "Upside Down," but gives a pretty good sense of the context of diana in general.
I made a shitty list of beer styles HERE and I'm working my way through 'em this summer, for better or worse. I'm going to catch up on a couple of beer styles that I've had in the past few days but that I didn't write about on those days due to creative conflict. I will include today's actual beer last.
So, about that list I made. A bunch of those styles taken from Tasting Beer are listed as a "historical style" in the book. I'm worried that this means that I will have a really tough time finding them at a six-pack store or brewery. However, that label is also affixed to Gose, of which I've had a few in my time, and definitely have seen at numerous breweries. Attic Brewing Co. had one when we went there this past Friday.
Gose (pronounced "GOES-uh") was apparently pretty popular in northern Germany, especially in the town of Goslar (hence the name). It's a pretty normal beer in many regards—white beer, top-fermenting ale, very pale, very light—but one ingredient makes it completely abnormal. Salt. This fucking thing is salty. It's weird, you guys.
Weird enough that I will commit to the opinion now that I do not like goses. I can't be alone in this opinion (Pam loves 'em, though—says it tastes like a soft pretzel—so what the fuck do I know). It's probable that up until the 2017 publication date of this book, the majority of America had either never heard of a gose or thought it was definitely too weird to enjoy, and that's why it's still listed as "historical." It's not historical anymore. Local breweries are brewing it, and they are even giving them rap rock fusion pun names.
Allegedly, if you went to Goslar and requested a gose, you could indicate your preferred level of salt. I think that would probably be the only reason I purposefully order a gose: "very light on the salt, please."
Fans of Reinheitsgebot (the medieval European law that stated you can only have water, malt, hops, and yeast in your beer) stay away. Fruit beers do not abide by your shitty laws. We already talked yesterday about how these aren't "chick beers," and we also already talked about how fruit beers mostly literally add fruit juice to the beer (whereas beers with fruity aromas might just get them from the hops).
I don't think there's that much more to say, other than this is a very broad category of beers that could encompass any number of other styles. Bell's Brewing apparently makes a cherry stout (which sounds fucking amazing), which is technically a fruit beer, even though it's a stout too. We already had a Berliner Weisse that had fruit juice in it. Goses can have fruit in them as well. The overarching point, I suppose, is that maybe "fruit beer" is a specific style of beer but also not really. Count me as a reluctant fan (I like 'em, but too many give me a toothache).
Eisbock (#40) Exemplified by Aventinus Eisbock
This is a beer legend that has been passed around since our teenage years: "ice beer" earns the nomenclature because the beer is frozen, and the ice is taken out, leaving less water, and thus more alcohol by volume. When this was explained to us by the older kids, they were mainly referring to beers such as Keystone Ice. But as it turns out, the process is can also be found in the creation of a "fancy" beer. That beer is an eisbock.
As you can note from the name of this particular beer, "Aventinus," this is the same beer that I had on Thursday—a weizenbock, rich caramel flavor, all that good stuff—except that the ice was removed, and a much denser, darker version of that beer remained.
Considering how much I liked Aventinus Classic, I was expecting to really like the eisbock version as well. I didn't hate it, but I wasn't head-over-heels for it either. For one, the feel of it was thicker and more syrupy. It was closer to a liqueur than a beer. Also, the taste was a little more roasty than I expected, which overpowered any of the rich caramel flavor that I love so much. Finally, I guess I should've expected the alcohol-burn with an ABV of 12%, but it still caught me off guard a little bit. This shit is heavy!
There's a picture of this beer on the Wikipedia page for ice beer, so there I don't think I'm gonna find anything different about any other eisbock. But I didn't hate it, and I definitely grew to like it more as I got comfortable with it (it also paired really well with some BBQ chicken). But it's the type of beer that you just gotta know what you're getting into from the get-go.
NOTES
BEER: Aventinus Eisbock
STYLE: German Eisbock
ABV: 12.0%
BREWED BY: Weisses Bräuhaus G. Schneider & Sohn GmbH
If you want to hear more songs from more weeks, click this link HERE.
"PYNK"
Janelle Monáe
from Dirty Computer
2018
Whether it should be or not, it's safe to say that the color pink is culturally tied to the idea of femininity, perhaps irrevocably. No one is quite sure how this came to be (though Mental Floss has some ideas), but it's true. Pink is a color for girls. So I say: why not celebrate the color of pink today? If women can use the color to empower themselves and the world, then I back it.
A song and a beer were consumed today, both coincidentally named "PYNK" (both misspelled and capitalized in the same annoying way, but the less I obsess over spelling and grammar, then better off we'll all be). Janelle Monáe has a great 2018 song called "PYNK," and Yards has a pretty decent fruit beer in their lineup called PYNK. You might not think I'd be able to connect these two disparate fragments of my life, but this is Saturday on the blog—it is a lawless place, and no one reads it on Saturdays anyway.
"PYNK" is a wonderful ditty by Monáe, with help from everyone's favorite cyborg, Grimes. It features a video of Monáe dancing with her real-life girlfriend Tessa Thompson (also Lady and the Tramp costars, shout out to all the 2019 Lady and the Tramp fans, i.e. just Willow!!!!) while wearing a beautifully campy set of vagina pants. Monáe has said, in her explanations of the song, that the color pink "unites all of humanity" because it is the color "found in the deepest and darkest nooks and crannies of humans everywhere." This is the best description of pussy power that I've ever heard, and I'm fucking HERE for it.
It's always great to hear from strong female artists about the power that women wield when they are united, because then I.....................
..................have to turn around and hear disparaging comments about a nice beer
style being a "chick beer," as if that's a bad thing. It's not. Fruit
beers are for everyone, and if this particular beer is going to be more
associated with women simply due to pink's association with femininity
in society, then all the more power to it.
PYNK, for
what it's worth, is a very refreshing. It's just a little bit tart—any
more would be too much sour—with a cherry flavor that's very forward.
This is a summer beer, even though it also reminds me of the Shirley Temples that we used to drink on Thanksgiving.
On top of this, PYNK, like "PYNK," uses its power
to unite humanity. Every sale of PYNK apparently sends a portion of the
money collected to local charities.
This is why we
should celebrate women more often—each celebration brings the world
together in a positive way. Whether it's a song about the strength of
women or a beer that eschews negative sexist connotations to help those
less fortunate, we celebrate PYNK.
NOTES
BEER: PYNK
STYLE: Fruit Beer
ABV: 5.5%
BREWED BY: Yards Brewing Co.
LOCATION: 5th and Spring Garden
PURCHASED AT: Foodery NoLibs
PAIRED WITH: Nothing. I usually don't eat until around 11 AM, and I'm drinking this beer at 6:16 AM
You know, I listened to this album a few times through while working this week, and reader, I retained very little of it. "Ultrasound" grabbed my attention the most, and "Emerald" would be on the Garden State soundtrack if that movie was made today. NOT SURE IF THAT'S A COMPLIMENT! It's a fine album, listenable, I just wish there was a little more to sink my teeth into.
Empty Country is a difficult album to dislike, in my opinion. It’s an exercise in nostalgia at some points as it blends a '90s rock sound with a quintessential indie rock sound, and throws a dream-sequence song in there to catch you off guard ("Chance"). There’s even that song about the lady selling bad eclipse glasses knowing her customers will go blind... that one reminded me of "Maxwell’s Silver Hammer." A catchy romp about blinding/killing people. Each song is distinct from the others, in sound and story, and each one makes you want to listen. I was originally looking at Soccer Mommy’s color theory for this week, but avoided it because it sounded like it was going to be real depressing to listen to. Welp, Empty Country has some real downers on here too, but I guess pain is always a driving force for good art.
I don't often comment on the album art, but this one hooked me. A graveyard with a huge Chestnut in middle frame, taking up half the photo, with our muse set afront. But B/B/B [book club] crossreaders know that it can't be an American chestnut. Those are more dead than all the people in the photo; disease hollowed them out and they fell apart.
SWIM would say that the album gets to cruising speed at "Diamond." SWIM would say this is a different-formulation Shins from/for the 2020s. Off-brand (said with endearment)—still tasty, but different. There's enough rocking ("Ultrasound") to mix it up, but it's not terribly memorable. SWIM would say the locus of the album is in "Diamond," "Emerald", "Becca", and "Swim." Slower beats, strummed and bowed strings, laid atop his wistful voice drifting between crisp and muddled. It fits the core themes—the heart of the album has been carved out and it looks like it hasn't been replaced with anything. But it has—it's been replaced by a deliberate sense of emptiness, hollowness. The emptiness in the glint of an uncut diamond smile, the emptiness of self-disassociation, the emptiness of sudden, unexpected blindness.
SWIM would stretch out the already weak comparison to the Shins by seeing this as a Jersey album. What state could you both see 9/11 and walk on the Walt Whitman? That feeling of being stuck in Jersey, wanting to leave Jersey, but only know Jersey. Jersey is empty in a way too, seen from the outside as veins connecting NYC to PHL. What would the Natalie Portman character be listening to in the '20s Garden State remake?
Anyway, I'm probably just misidentifying the tree. It's likely something else. But maybe it's a Chinese/American hybrid Chestnut! A headstone for the trees near the headstones for the people. Those people are gone, now stone representations. They're no longer themselves, but how often are we really ourselves?
I close my eyes and feel the dusty wind blow through my hair as we speed down some dirt highway somewhere in the midwest, nothing but desert around us, music blasting out of the speakers, hands up, free.
It's kind of weird that this album became my quarantine album, released just as the stay-at-home restrictions came down hard and heavy. I was forced to plug in my headphones while holding a slippery eel of a child, blocking out the tinny background sounds of a Zoom happy hour, dancing around to "Diamond," pretending that I wasn't in the stuffy living room but instead on the open highway, me and Martha like Duke and Gonzo.
It's kind of weird that this album became my quarantine album, but kind of not weird at all. Joseph D'Agostino yells at one point: "You know your home is wherever I am!" Just because we were stuck at home doesn't mean I couldn't find a home right here in Empty Country.
To the loyal PoYB readership, finding a home in Empty Country shouldn't be a surprise. Joseph D'Agostino previously fronted Cymbals Eat Guitars, the band with the best song of the 2010s. This shit is catnip to me.
There's a big gaping hole in the middle of this album—gotta be fair in my assessment, even if this record is already really important to me. There's value to be mined from tracks 4, 5, and 6, but as a whole, those tracks bring the album to a screeching halt. Luckily, "Becca" brings us back with some key whistling, and the rest of the album finishes strong.
Tough to fault the album too much for its missteps. I hit play, and I'm not worrying about the bad songs. Instead, I'm hearing the great ones, and I'm feeling something visceral. Let's get the fuck out of here.
It was just yesterday that I was preaching the joys of weizenbock, with its crystal caramel malts and "fruit bowl" aromas and its low hop / high flavor balance, and so I could help but get a Dark Sommer Weizenbock as soon as we got in the door. Amber-brown in color, cold, a little less flavorful than the Aventinus, but that might have to do with the weizenbock/weizen doppelbock difference. Didn't matter. After a long day with the kids, it was so nice to sit back and...
Well-Timed Puns
We had to drive around the horn to get to Wayne Junction tonight, meaning we went south on 95, west on 676, and then west on 76. This also means that we drove past the section of 676 where police gassed peaceful protesters as they were trapped on the now-trampled hill along the side of the road, shooting rubber bullets indiscriminately, pulling back face masks so that they could get a better shot as gassing directly into faces, pretty horrifying dystopian shit. Rage Against the Machine was right all along—some of those who work forces are the same who burn crosses. Sage Against the Machine was a pretty mediocre beer—I'm not the biggest fan of goses—but it seemed like the appropriate beer to be drinking on a night like this, during a year like this. In this essay, I will...
New Beer Style
I had to google "what is table beer," because there is no mention of this style in any of my primary sources that I've been using this year. I did a little light research, and it seems to be... any light beer, or, alternatively, nothing at all. It's basically just a beer-tasting beer, probably a pilsner or light ale, low ABV. "Table beer" has that ironic anti-fancy ring to it that appeals to many hip drinkers. Who needs a goddamn "weizenbock WTF is that?!" when you could just have a regular fucking beer, and a lot of them. Brewers have an excuse to give you a Miller Lite now. Jolly good. Still, it was a decent beer to have with BBQ; there's something about...
A Food Review
Deke's, a Manayunk(?) institution, opened up a new location right next to Attic Brewing (the whole building is apparently an old pencil factory). We had heard good things, and it seemed like a great night for BBQ, so here ya go. I told Pam to get me whatever. Knowing me well, she ordered a brisket cheesesteak. I had high expectations, but Deke's unfortunately didn't deliver. The meat was too sparse, the bread wasn't fresh enough, the cheese was kind of...
IPA Bummer Again
The original plan was for Pam and I to each get a hazy IPA and then switch halfway through. I've already established that I'm not the biggest fan of hazy IPAs, but it still intrigued me that any brewery could have FOUR different hazy IPAs. Why? What was the difference? Did it just come down to what hops you used? You can't possibly be selling that many hazy IPAs that you would need four different ones to satisfy customers? Whatever. Not worth it. Why buy a beer you know you're going to dislike? So I instead for the one (one!) West Coast IPA that they had. Awful name—fuck cats—and awful taste. Maybe the gose blew out my taste buds or something, but I got absolutely nothing from...
The Return
I checked out Attic Brewing in January, when it was brand fucking new. I thought at the time that this was the start of a year full of weird outings to beer spots around the city. An invisible crown-shaped virus put a stop to those dreams, and since my last trip to Attic I've been laying low so I don't murder my grandparents. No worries! We're in yellow phase now, so that means that we can drink outdoors with friends. Attic Brewing survived the red phase. It was still standing. It still had some great beers. We had a great night with friends we hadn't seen in forever. Pam even thought about moving to Germantown for a hot minute, looking at houses for sale online, before...
NOTES (Beer #1)
BEER: Dark Sommer
STYLE: German Weizenbock
ABV: 6.8%
BREWED BY: Attic Brewing Co.
LOCATION: Wayne Junction
PURCHASED AT: the brewery
PAIRED WITH: Trulia listings
GRADE: 4 pukes out of 5
NOTES (Beer #2)
BEER: Prolonged Forms
STYLE: Table Beer
ABV: 4.7% (table beers are usually way less, apparently)
BREWED BY: Attic Brewing Co.
LOCATION: 137 Berkley Street
PURCHASED AT: the bar(!!!)
PAIRED WITH: subpar BBQ
GRADE: 3 pukes out of 5
NOTES (Beer #3)
BEER: Sage Against the Machine
STYLE: Gose
ABV: 4.1%
BREWED BY: Attic Brewing Co.
LOCATION: Right near La Salle
PURCHASED AT: the right side (takeout orders to the left!)
PAIRED WITH: catching up with old friends
GRADE: 2 pukes out of 5
NOTES (Beer #4)
BEER: Cat Boss Approved
STYLE: West Coast IPA
ABV: 7.0%
BREWED BY: Attic Brewing Co.
LOCATION: my favorite city on earth
PURCHASED AT: a wonderful brewery
PAIRED WITH: texts to the babysitters that we're gonna be a little late
Joe runs through every album on his iPod, mostly in alphabetical
order, and offers some brief thoughts. Check out previous columns HERE. This is the final day of a non-alphabetically-ordered album. Thanks for putting up with me as I try to find ways to lessen the self-imposed burden of twice-a-day blogging (spoiler: this was not a good way to lessen it).
Turn to Gold
Diarrhea Planet
2016
I haven't outright stated it over the past three days, but it's at least been alluded to—a band's legacy is important. When a band doesn't have one at all, it feels sad. When a band has a great one, then we must question what it about them makes them so well-remembered. When a band doesn't have a necessarily great legacy, we must wonder if they really deserve the negativity. What I love about Diarrhea Planet though (besides their name) is that they chose to control their own legacy. They were at the highest peak (relatively speaking), and they decided to walk away. There was no backslide, no stagnation, and no souring. Diarrhea Planet will live forever.
Of course, this is rock and roll in the 21st century, so when I say things like "highest peak," there are naturally some caveats that come with such statements. Rock has never been this culturally insignificant. Your grandma has never heard of Diarrhea Planet. What I mean is that, within our tight little circle of friends and strangers who appreciate "good music" in a mostly-indie rock sense, Diarrhea Planet was one of the good ones, and their star seemed to still be on the rise (as much as a band called "Diarrhea Planet" could be, anyway) when they called it quits. They went out on "top," the quotation marks surrounding the word "top" being everyone else's fault, not ours.
I guess we're supposed to be talking about an album here—Turn to Gold is the penultimate part of this band's story. It's a great fucking album. It's also their last. It's pure unadulterated guitar rock when it doesn't feel like anything is guitar rock anymore. They have four guitarists! Most bands are lucky to have one, and they have four! This is some good shit.
Two years after Turn to Gold hit the proverbial shelves, Diarrhea Planet broke up with a series of farewell concerts in their hometown of Nashville, TN. This blog post is supposed to be about an album, but it's really about a band, and the manner in which they broke up, as covered in this Stereogum cover story. Maybe I would've assumed they simply "couldn't hack it" as a band if I hadn't read that interview.
But it made me consider the toll that being in a rock band can take on a person, and it made me consider that maybe I take this beautiful art for granted sometimes. The sometimes-frontman of DP, Jordan Smith, is quoted in saying "I love doing this, but I miss waking up and being happy." I want to listen to music that makes me happy, and Turn to Gold has made me happy more often than not, but I can't live with knowing that it's at the expense of someone else's happiness.
So by breaking up, Diarrhea Planet has added an extra layer of meaning to their best and final album. These are the happy sounds of an extremely sad group of individuals, who thought that making music would make them happy, but all it did was bring them stress and the immense weight of higher expectations. Before their breakup, Turn to Gold was the sound of some kids kicking and screaming against the idea of adulthood. After their breakup, Turn to Gold is the sound of some kids kicking and screaming against the idea of adulthood, and losing.
All bands are fated to eventually die. I get that. But there's something powerful in committing to going out in style. Turn to Gold does that, and more.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
If this album sounds interesting, try this song: "Life Pass"
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Stray Observations
Didn't want to mention it in the article proper, but the Stereogum piece
makes sure to mention the fact that all these guys are entering the
workforce after DP wraps up. One of them is in nursing school, the other
is getting a degree in electrical engineering, etc. Something about
this makes me so incredibly sad, but I didn't mention it above because I
already wrote something like this for Tapes 'n Tapes and for The Bad News Bears, just in the last week and a half alone. Maybe it's because I too have given up on any dreams of
being important in this world, and have settled into a nice quiet home
life, but I appreciate when other people do make it, when they are able
to live out their wild dreams. When they can't, when members of a crazy
six-piece certifiable fucking rock band have to quit because they
couldn't make it work, and have to live as a fucking electrical
engineer, it just fucking bums me out, man.
I didn't want to misrepresent myself by talking about DP's live shows, because I never attended one. By all accounts, they were legendary. For someone like myself who doesn't attend many shows, I will have to just imagine what they were like, and allow them to pass into myth, like any other band I never got the chance to see in their prime.
ALBUM COVER: Gold lettering on a black background, with the name Diarrhea Planet in small cursive letters. Pretty simple stuff. The music can speak for itself.
ALBUM TITLE: The Stereogum piece made the case that it's really tough out there for rock bands to be financially secure, so maybe this was DP trying their best to will financial stability into their lives.
We didn't talk about the name of the band. We don't really have to. If you aren't listening to a band because you are uncomfortable with the idea of fecal discharge, then that's your loss.
NEXT TIME: Better Oblivion Community Center by Better Oblivion Community Center (yeah, we're back to the alphabetical order, as this week was just an anomaly, a showcase for PoYB's least beloved column—sorry about that)
To the dismay of all those poor souls (pour souls?) still reading, I am working my way through the beer styles list I compiled HERE, and it continues below.
Weizenbock / Weizen Doppelbock (#51) Exemplified by Aventinus
This beer style is the opposite of yesterday's Baltic porter. The Baltic was the same or similar flavors as its ale brethren, but it was a lager. Weizenbocks are the same as bocks/doppelbocks, which are lagers, except that a weizenbock is an ale. The porter is made with all barley, but the weizenbock is made with about 60% wheat, creating a smoother texture. There's also the small matter of the Baltic porter being mediocre, and the weizenbock confirming that the whole bock family is my favorite beer style ever (or, at least, the beer style I fell in love with most during this year).
This particular weizenbock seems to be the original, or one of them at least. Schneider is so fundamental of a brand that it gets a shoutout in Tasting Beer's section on weizenbocks. Aventinus is also listed at #1 for weizenbocks on Beer Advocate. This is no forgotten local brew.
Like other bocks, weizenbock is notable for its deep and complex caramel flavor. It's not as sweet as eating actual caramel, but the caramel flavors blend effortlessly with the slight fruitiness, slight maltiness, and high carbonation (the foam head was ridiculous). Far from a dessert beer but an absolute treat all the same. Get on this shit, gang.
NOTES
BEER: Aventinus
STYLE: German Weizen Doppelbock
ABV: 8.2%
BREWED BY: Weisses Bräuhaus G. Schneider & Sohn GmbH
LOCATION: Kelheim, Germany
PURCHASED AT: Iron Abbey in Horsham (somewhat drunkenly and randomly)
PAIRED WITH: cheddar cheese and crackers and a beautiful afternoon on the back deck
Joe runs through every album on his iPod, mostly in alphabetical order, and offers some brief thoughts. Check out previous columns HERE. I'm not doing the alphabetical thing this week. Instead, I'm boring your socks off by writing about four random albums. Let's burn this shit to the ground.
The Loon
Tapes 'n Tapes
2005
Tapes 'n Tapes exist now as a footnote, and that kind of pisses me off.
You see, there was this made up genre back in the mid-'00s called "blog rock." This was around the time that internet websites first started to write about music and becoming the taste-makers of the up-and-coming generation, and the first group of bands that were widely pushed by these blogs because forever associated with the movement.
So now, during a time when music exists everywhere and can be curated by anyone, you can sometimes find people reminiscing about this strange couple of years when blogs held all the power, and how weird that all was. And all these bands are going to be grouped together, even though a lot of them don't sound anything alike, and a lot of them are fucking great and deserve to be remembered for more than being just part of a fictional genre.
Tapes 'n Tapes is one of those bands, and their immortal debut album, The Loon, absolutely deserves recognition. As it stands now, there aren't a whole lot of people reminiscing about those months when The Loon was all the rage, and that's a fucking shame. This band deserves to be fondly remembered as more than a goddamn footnote in some shitty nostalgia piece about whatever the music nerds were pushing at the time.
The Loon is a truly unique album, which makes it weird to me that some blogs take swipes at their supposed lack of originality. I guess you could say they kind of sound like the Pixies? But Tapes 'n Tapes' sound is way tighter than that band's, and, dare I say it, a little quirkier. They do absolutely have that mid-aughts sound of DIY indie mixed with mid-tier venue sell-out aspirations, both with a shakiness that sounds like it was recorded in one room on one recording device, and also loud enough and with enough passion that it's gonna reach the cheap seats.
"Insistor" was the "big hit" back in the day, and rightly so, as it showcases Tapes 'n Tapes at their best. This is balls-to-the-wall indie rock, with a snare drum that won't quit, and a vocal performance that just drips with sweat. I do not blame any blog in 2005 for thinking that this band was destined for greatness based on this song alone, but the rest of The Loon fucking brings it. "Manitoba" plays coy for three minutes before hopping in the driver's seat and pressing the gas. "Crazy Eights" sounds like the boys trying to emulate "Louie Louie" in spirit, if not necessarily in style. "Cowbell" has the most crooked chorus I've ever heard, and it still works.
I could go on, but you get the point. Why should this band be relegated to a context that immediately dismisses them? It just doesn't seem right—this album is just too fucking good.
But that's what blogs do, I suppose. We try to provide a context for the music, even if it's not fair to do so, even if the music is good enough to stand on its own. Tapes 'n Tapes was only known to anyone because some websites decided to hype them up, and then they ceased to exist because those same websites declined to continue carrying the torch. Tapes 'n Tapes lived and died by the blogosphere. I suppose it's important to mention all this in telling their story. I just think they deserve more, is all.
Maybe it's easier for me to say that because I was slightly late to the whole "blog rock" thing. I was blooming as a musiophile around the same year that this album came out, more into the Beatles at that time, because that's who you start with, right? But I was absolutely dipping my toe into the indie rock waters by 2005. I know that I definitely was a fan of blog rock royalty Clap Your Hands Say Yeah by the end of the year—their self-titled debut (one of my favorite albums of all time, for what it's worth) came out about three months prior to The Loon.
I didn't get The Loon until Christmas 2008, so I was very late to the party. My experiencing this album for the first time came with absolutely zero baggage. But in a reverse Spiderman, with no responsibility comes no power; I could not defend The Loon against all naysayers, because they had already left the building.
But here we are, almost fifteen years after the album was released, and I'm still listening to it, still loving it. Call it blog rock if you must, I'd just rather you not use the term in a negative way. This is a blog, after all.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~
If this album sounds interesting, try this song: "Just Drums"
~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Stray Observations
All this being said, I never got around to checking out either of the other Tapes 'n Tapes albums. As great as The Loon is, it absolutely sounds like a band striking gold once. Walk It Off and Outside got bad reviews in general, which didn't help, but I guess there is a chance that the critical reception was just blowback for the blog-rock fad being over. This sounds like a job for Record Club.
Shoutout to the drummer, Jeremy Hanson, for being busy and on-point during every song. I was going to say that he was "underrated," but can a band's drummer be underrated when they have a song called "Just Drums"?
ALBUM COVER: Couldn't find much about it. There are four neon-colored trees. The same color scheme would show up on their subsequent release, Walk It Off.
ALBUM TITLE: A loon is a "silly or foolish person." The word is repeated a few times on "Crazy Eights." That's it. No one accused this album of being deep or anything.
That's gotta be a Herbie Hancock "Watermelon Man" homage on "The Iliad," right?
According to Wikipedia, each band member has a stage name that is a word from the band name, like, frontman Josh Grier is "Tapes 1," and so on. This is so dumb that it has to have been an inside joke that made it to the Wikipedia page accidentally. It doesn't even make sense—there are three words, and four band members!
Speaking of the band name, as a member of the Apostrophe Protection Society, I've always been offended that there's only one apostrophe around the n, where there should be two. It's like "rock 'n' roll," the apostrophes take the place of the a and the d.
Even though the idea of blog rock annoys me, here is a blog rock playlist that I found that just features too many jams not to mention. Menomena! Midlake! I'm from Barcelona! Art Brut! Los Campesinos!!
If you're looking for a real-time look at blog rock as it was developing, this review of The Loon was a pretty good representation of it.
I thought about including this in the main article above, but I thought it might become too maudlin. But I looked up what Tapes 'n Tapes are up to these days. I mean, I knew they weren't a band anymore, but I figured it might've been like a Pepper's Ghost situation, where the guys are in other bands, pecking away at making it in the industry. Not so. After the band's hype died down and their third album was met with a collective sigh, the members pretty much just went back to their data entry jobs in the real world. That bums me out to no end.
However! Wildly, Tapes 'n Tapes had a reunion show very recently. Last fall, they all got together in Minneapolis to play the old tunes at a brewery. This was also to celebrate the release of that brewery's "TNT Brut IPA." I would've loved to talk about this band in the This Is My Blood column.
My point being that it's gotta be fucking surreal to have this band that nibbled on some fame at a point in time, to be in a position where people are telling you that you are going to be big, and then fifteen short years later you're playing a brewery gig to promote a beer, and almost no one notices. Tapes 'n Tapes deserves better than this. I am trying to do my part to keep the legacy alive.
