SO/SN/SB/SB — 10/2/23

Something Old

If there's a list of priorities when it comes to listening to music, then "quality of recording" is pretty low on that list for me. This might be a side effect of spending most of my serious-music-listening existence as someone who rips files from the dark depths of the internet. In the world of free-and-yes-technically-illegal, you get what you get. There have very occasionally been situations in which the file is just too poor for even me to handle, but that just means I'm going back online and re-downloading it from somewhere else. No big deal. No need to make fun of me when "Jessie's Girl" comes up on the party playlist and sounds like Rick Springfield is singing at the bottom of a lake.

That's why the hype surrounding the rerelease of the Replacements' Tim landed a little flat for me. I love that fucking album, and I am aware of the infamy of its supposedly poor mixing, but that's never been my reaction. I've always taken the quality or lack thereof at face value. It is what it is. The hooks are still there.

I'm sure the new version sounds great, and I'm really happy for Replacements fans who care about this kind of thing. But ultimately, it feels like a really great slice of pizza on a fancy plate. It's not the plate that makes the pizza taste good, it's the pizza. I'll take a slice on a cheap paper plate, I don't care.

Something New

The idea of "garage rock revival in the early aughts" was one of the paths that directed me toward serious music listening, if I'm being honest. It came before the Rolling Stone thing, and I didn't in seventh know exactly what the genre was "reviving," but still. I liked the White Stripes and the Strokes and the Vines before I even know what the fuck rock 'n' roll was. I'm always gonna keep those bands close, because they've always been there.

One of those bands is the Hives, and they came back this year, after an eleven-year hiatus. More like twenty-year hiatus for me, since it's been longer than eleven years that I've cared about the Hives. Maybe that's the case for a lot of people, I don't know. Like I said, though, the Hives are always going to be "important" to me, just because of their partnership in that whole "scene," even if they may or may not be reluctant to include themselves in that "scene" to begin with. This is fifteen-year-old Joe speaking, and I say: welcome back.

It's interesting to me when a band like this (not quite cult-like, more like mid-tier) comes back after a long time away. There's the expectation that they are going to bring their old sound back to a modern audience, but also maybe an opportunity to try something new? Like, if the Hives were all of a sudden playing crossover thrash or rockabilly, they wouldn't get too much shit for it, especially if they did their new genre well. Extended periods of time have a way of warping expectations. The Hives could've been anything.

That they mostly stuck to their energetic brand of garage rock should be applauded too. Because then the hope is that they don't sound old or tired or any other adjective that might describe musicians who are now comfortably in their 40s. Not too much of that. The Death of Randy Fitzsimmons is exactly what I crave from any rock 'n' roll band these days, and the fact that it is from a band that won my heart literally decades ago means that I'm pretty happy listening to it. That's all I need.

Something Borrowed

I like the idea of full critical runs of an artist's discography. Listening to them all, becoming familiar with each one and what makes them distinct from the others, and then, of course, ranking them from best to worst. Or rather, I should say "least favorite to most favorite," since there is definitely a difference between "best" and "favorite."

Music critic and blogger Josh Terry recently made a commitment to doing a few of these full-discography discussions and rankings, and luckily for me starting with an artist that I too am already intimately familiar with—Vampire Weekend.

Vampire Weekend has always been a band that elicits a lot of, let's say, varying opinions. They've mostly gotten raves throughout their career and are undeniably popular. But for a certain type of music fan, Vampire Weekend is a punchline: Columbia-educated East Coast preppy kids making hyper-literate impressionistic lyrics over breezy Afro-pop-inspired arrangements. Critics, almost always fellow white folks, would call them "too white" and WASP-y, which wasn't technically true. People were always weird about them for some reason, and even their fans felt the urge to hedge a little especially early on. During my first week freshman year of college, I heard this album blaring from an open door on my dorm floor. I popped in and introduced myself. The guy who will go unnamed responded, "Oh yeah, I was just playing this album because I figured it was popular and crowdpleasing enough that it would get people to say hi. I mostly like more challenging music." Like I said: people are weird about this band (I'm normal about them).

This sort of thing reminds me of certain reactions to Wes Anderson, a great director whose aesthetic is so distinct and recognizable it's become a (mostly misunderstood) meme. Like Anderson's work, Vampire Weekend's songs have such an unmistakable sensibility it's easy to dismiss outright. I warmed up to "A-Punk" the more I heard it: through that self-released EP, its appearance in Step Brothers, and especially hearing it in the context of the band's debut 2008 LP Vampire Weekend. As the band continued their career, especially in their third album 2013's Modern Vampires of the City, the entire catalog clicked. By their latest, 2019's Father of the Bride, they hit all-timer status for me.

Read the whole thing HERE. Lots of good stuff even in his introduction, which is what I quoted above. Ultimately, he ranks his favorites in this order: 4) Contra, 3) Vampire Weekend, 2) Modern Vampires of the City, and 1) Father of the Bride. And, for the record, my favorites in order would go: 4) Contra, 3) Father of the Bride, 2) Modern Vampires of the City, 1) Vampire Weekend (with the same exact caveat—all four of these albums are fucking incredible).

That's what's great about naming "favorites"—it's incredibly subjective, and more fun to talk about. If we were talking about "best," then maybe the answer would change (and my list would look more like Terry's "favorites" list does, honestly). But, despite the immense growth in songwriting over subsequent albums, the nostalgic pull of the self-titled album is just too strong for me, and will forever be my favorite VW album (as well as one of my favorite albums, full stop).

Not that I've never done a full-discography run myself, but I'd like to do more of them on the blog. Seems like fun.

Something Blue

We've watched The Conjuring and The Conjuring 2 recently. This isn't an anti-recommendation for either of those movies. I actually quite liked them. Good directing, jump scares employed smartly, and an interesting premise in that we are following both the haunted family and the ghost hunters at the same time in parallel stories. If you're like me and not fully invested in the horror genre, then you could do so, so much worse than The Conjuring.

But we're in "Something Blue" because I was thinking about something during the viewing of the sequel that kind of took me out of the moment a little bit. It's a logical nitpick that I've started to notice in a lot of horror movies, especially the ones whose plots involve a supernatural creature of some sort who desire to banish the victim family from their (the ghost's) residence or place of existence. In both Conjurings, we've seen a family move into a haunted home, and the ghosts of the people who were murdered there (more or less) trying to get that family out, through increasingly violent means.

The plot-related bugaboo is related to that adverb—"increasingly." It always starts that the family has reason to believe that they are just "making it up" or misunderstanding their own senses. A floorboard creaks, but it's just a sibling using the bathroom. Then they hear a disembodied voice, but maybe it's just a sibling sleepwalking. Then the ghost grabs at their ankle and pulls them out of bed, but it could've been just a dream. Then the ghost moves a chair or dresser, and no one believes the kid who saw it. Then the mom gets bruised by the ghost, and on and on and on, gradually ramping it up until the ghost appears for all to see and attempts to murder the family who is living there.

This is how the film is structured because it makes for better viewing. We know, since we are watching The Conjuring 2, that there really is a ghost in the house, that it's not just make believe or a misunderstanding but an actual ghost. The gradual increase of horrors keeps the audience invested. I get it.

But what I'm saying now is that if there actually was a ghost in a home that wanted a family to leave, and that ghost has the capability to do whatever they want, then there would be absolutely no logical reason that the ghost itself would want to "gradually increase the violence." If a family moves into a house and the ghost has a desire to remove that family as soon as possible, then there is no logical reason why the ghost wouldn't just immediately murder the entire family. Right? That would be the quickest way, no? I don't think there's an actual reason why the ghost has to, like, hint at their existence before gradually revealing themselves. They does nothing to achieve their stated purpose.

I'm not a moron. I know why it ain't like that in horror movies (because then there'd be no movie at all). I'm just saying that it's a illogical plot function that happens again and again in horror films that Pam has us watch, and it's bothering me for reasons that I might not even have a full grasp on yet. Maybe I'm just scared and am using logical as a defense mechanism, I don't know.