RC@5: Sorry for the Delay by 340ml

Record Club covered this album five years ago. I gave it another listen this week. Here are some thoughts.

Sorry for the Delay

340ml

Week 83: August 30-September 5, 2020

It's weird to me that, in the past five years, I have not heard about 340ml a single time in the wild. I have not spied their name mentioned in passing in any of the millions of words in music criticism or journalism that I've read in the last half decade. I have not heard a random song of theirs on the radio or in a grocery store or anything like that. I have not seen any of their songs on playlists, and the algorithm has never handed them to me or anyone in my vicinity. They've only been mentioned on the insular PoYB, that's it.

This isn't, like, unbelievable, that something like this would happen. It's actually quite thrilling when someone brings an album to Record Club from an artist that I've never heard of before. I love when that happens. But most of the time, it's under the assumption that it's my fault that I'd never heard of them. Usually, I learn about them through RC, and then continue to hear about them through the Baader–Meinhof phenomenon. But it's reasonable to believe that a blog contributor picks randomly or arbitrarily and it happens to be a band that isn't really all that well known outside of this blog's area of coverage.

What I'm saying now is that I still get a little uncomfortable over this idea, that someone or something could pass through and then be forgotten. I have a constant and unending compulsion to hang onto everything that was ever important to me. 340ml, for one brief week, was important to me, and so I wanna keep 'em around forever.

Perhaps I'm writing about all of this now, for this five-year retrospective specifically, because of what spawned from my Sorry for the Delay review. Instead of doing my usual "1000 words about nothing" thing that I guess I wasn't all that great at in 2020, I forwent the words and bought a picture from a redditor. I paid a chick from Pittsburgh to draw me on the back of a cat [on the way to the studio]. She did it, and I thought it was a nice little bit. But then, a year later, we came up with another bit, and Kailyn—now given a name and blog attributes—was added to the roster of RC characters.

And then, of course, years after that, I went through the rest of her favorite albums of all time. The outro to that mini blog column featured me grappling with the idea that I was going to have to live without answers, that Kailyn was gone, that there was nothing I could do, no amount of blogging, to bring her back into my life, after drawing me on a cat so many years ago.

So now I'm relistening to Sorry for the Delay for the first time in a really long time, and I'm remembering the band, and I'm remembering Kailyn, and I'm remembering other random shit, like Sunny's "340ml of rum" bit, and Stephan apologizing for his late review by texting me "sorry for the delay" and having that joke go completely over my head for a couple days until it struck me. Music is good for remembering. I don't ever want to use it to forget.