This definitely sounds like something, something I can't really name. It's eclectic. Perhaps it's the foreign-ness in the accent, though not the language, with the interesting rhythms and light beep boops mixed in. Her vocal delivery being the clear spike. Bjork (I don't know how to make the umlauts without copy pasting so I'm not going to try) has been hanging around as an artist most of my life. Wynona Ryder on SNL? Just seeing that this album came out in early 2001 is something of a mind flip.
Listening to Björk in public is a little like wearing a boa constrictor. Most people just notice and say something like "wait, is that...?" Others comment "oh, Boa, are you wearing that for snake club?" All well and good, most enjoy the snake even if they don't totally get it, or get me. But some get violent, or perhaps, scared, and demand that the Boa be removed immediately. When asked well what other snake or animal would you like me to wear, the answer is a simple anything but Björk.
Which is a shame because I kinda like whatever strange floaty project this is. It's up to me!
There is a rot. It is perverse. An art gallery at a golf course. A data center in a dry lakebed. There have been six great global extinction events in the history of the earth, so says the popscientist. Geological time will destroy you with its scale. What else are we to do? How do you look right at it? How do you resist becoming a guileless expression of emotion? Why do some resist it at all. The size of it makes it impossible to ignore, yet that very ignorance allows life in its shadow. What shadow? What life? The only one you'll ever know, I guess.
I want to like this album, but I don't. Maybe listening to it in a bath with candles, fog, and retrograde amnesia might be a cool experience, but I don't think I'll ever listen to Vespertine again. I would if I was a cloud person who lives in the sky as a collection of dew drops. Or if I turned into a tree root.
But as is? I just cannot get down with Björk's vocals, and this is not my first time trying. I dig the delightfully experimental tracks especially "It's Not Up to You" and the outro on "Undo." Give me those instrumentals. But Björk's voice makes me kind of uneasy. She's undeniably talented and a trailblazer, and I can totally understand and respect why she's so highly regarded as an artist. If she sang in her raspy, punky approach toward the end of "Pagan Poetry" more often on this album, I think I'd be more into it. The album is a classic example of me appreciating something in theory, but then I turn it on and don't actually want to listen. Sorry, Thom Yorke. I know you're a big fan.
I'm supposed to be writing employee evaluations today, but instead I'm evaluating the music of the Icelandic queen of art pop, Björk. I am drawn to the way that Björk doesn't kowtow to the needs of an audience member like me. She gets me to bend my will to hers, not the other way around. I would say that I am not particularly drawn to glitchy electronica like this too often, but Björk makes tiny decisions that get me to reconsider that broad take. The first song on the album, "Hidden World," is well-named, and pays off in the final song, "Unison," which finally pulls me into that hidden world after an album-length stay in limbo, wondering whether I get it or don't get it. "Unison" is probably well-named too, in that regard. I become one with Vespertine when I hear those synths in the background, so goddamn perfectly placed. At the very least, "Unison" gets me to hit repeat pretty quickly, but more generally, it makes me understand at the final moment that Vespertine is good, that it is for me, that it is something I can grasp and make mine through that understanding.
I accidentally give my review to my boss instead of the employee evaluations.
But she's the type of boss who doesn't actually mind. Like, I'm not going to get in trouble for this snafu. She's actually interested, at least for the five minutes that it takes her to finish whatever tofu-kale concoction her husband put together for her for breakfast.
"I just think that we need little breaks like this, you know? I just get so tired of all these outcomes that I have to process and IDS summaries that I have to approve, that sometimes it's good to just enjoy something like early-'00s glitch-pop."
She's got a voice like Fran Drescher, but none of her devilishly handsome looks (which is for the best, I think, given that I need no further distractions at work, at least beyond hobby blogging duties). She's one of the nicest people I've ever met. I am struggling to think of any boss I've ever had in this stinkin' government municipal building that would ever greet an accidental album review with this lack of disdain. I already know that I'm going to pledge fealty to this woman for as long as retirement restrictions keep her here.
"It's like the question I had this morning about the difference between orders of protective custody and dependent petitions. Sometimes I don't feel like I should be a part of this world, a world that I am continually humbled by how much I don't understand. I don't know what this delinquent court order means, I don't know if I'll ever get it through my thick skull. And I've been wondering lately if there is a similar barrier for certain types of music getting through that skull too. Like Björk."
"Ya know, I think it's... I don't think anyone expects anyone to really 'get it' around here. I just work here. I do what I'm told, just like you do, you know? So you see it when you get these workers who are being pushed through the system without any training, it's like, how do you expect anyone to know what's going on? I wouldn't worry about it with the music either. You don't need to know Björk. You're just putting in the work. We had a case a few weeks ago that..."
I'll be honest, sometimes I don't understand my boss either. Like occasionally she's telling me something and the words are going in my ears and being processed through my brain but the ticket that gets printed out through my teeth has in big blocky letters DOES NOT COMPUTE. I think it's half because she likes talking more than not talking, which could be a problem in a chain of command if you let it, and half because I am getting distracted while she's talking, like sometimes my brain gets fuzzy and all I can hear is the high chimes of "Frosti."
But I know she means well, I know she's doing her best with me, someone who has always felt a pull toward anti-authoritarianism and now is struggling with being labeled as an authority, I know that she honestly does have the kids' best interest at heart, which is for real the only fuckin' thing that matters in this place, at the end of the day.
I tell her I don't have any more questions and she's like "Well hold on, we didn't actually talk about your Vespertine review" and I'm recoiling like ah shit, I hope she doesn't know that this is why I don't have any of my employee evaluations completed yet. But then she starts talking about modern abstractionism in folktronica art-pop, how Björk is creating moods here most of the time. I'm like, how do you know any of this, do you listen to music like this? I can't hear her response because my brain gets all fuzzy again.
That's what the music is for. It comes to me in a flash.
Vespertine gives words and sounds to that feeling you have when you're confused and discombobulated and unable to concentrate. Yes, of course, I don't get it—that's the point! Holy fucking shit. I'm sitting in my boss's office now listening to her drone on about timecards and overtime slips and mandatory trainings but I'm so distracted from the answer that just hit me that I can't do it, I can't pretend to be interested. I start backing away toward the door. I'm nodding my head, making little laconic affirmations, need to get back to my keyboard NOW. I say okay and then say "thanks for your help" as I walk out the door and I'm 20 feet away from her doorway when I hear the Drescherian "no, thank you!" and I know she's already distracted by one thousand other tasks and won't remember saying anything about Vespertine by the time she has her morning coffee tomorrow.
Now I'm sure of it. I'm convinced that this is the key to understanding the album. All I need to do is stretch my original outline to include it. Yes, the album starts with an invitation into something that you hitherto did not know, and yes, the album ends with a preposterously gorgeous song about finally knowing that world, but in between, all the "Pagan Poetry" and "It's Not Up to You" and "Sun in My Mouth," all of it lying there, making me perplexed on what it does and how, all of that stuff is supposed to be there, and it's supposed to make you feel that way. It's a beauty and a discomfort—the music, yes, but also the confusion. Do you see? Can you see it now? You're not supposed to know! Until you finally do! And then "Unison" confirms it for you! You've taken the journey and now you know!
I type this and then run back to my boss's office, and yell "I've got it! I've got it and I get it!" I'm excited to finally understand. I spend so much of my time trying to understand everything, and it's exhausting. I spent all goddamn week trying to understand Björk and then just typed up a review that amounted to the embarrassing conclusion of "I don't get it" and then made the devastating blunder of sharing that embarrassing conclusion with someone outside my circle, my boss, who maaaaaaybe understands it, "it" in this case being not necessarily my music album review but the work we share, the work as I understand it at least, how there's a way to get through the day by choosing what to care about and what not to care about, sometimes I think she understands it and sometimes I'm not so sure, but she's never called me out for not caring about something I've chosen to not care about, so I'm leaning towards "she understands it," which makes me sleep pretty well at night. But you see how exhausting it is too, to constantly bounce up against people and things and try to understand, even try to understand their level of understanding, you see, you get it, and you're wondering why I'm so excited about this, and I'm saying to you that I understand that Vespertine is supposed to be about the lack of understanding, it's baked into the premise, it's real and it teaches you how to not understand and how that in itself can be the understanding, you see! and that that can be its own kind of beauty, the permission to not understand, and one step removed: understanding that you don't understand, every emotion being incredibly complex and not actually able to be processed by the puny human mind, and so we step back and we just admire, the beauty of it, the emotion and that it is felt, just to feel is wonderful even if you don't actually understand how you feel! and how Björk so ably captures all that, here in this beguiling, bewitching album.
I have it all, I have the answer, I'm running toward my boss's office, but she's not there. She's at lunch. Or maybe she doesn't exist. She does exist, of course, but not in this form, because she can never know about the album reviewing club, because she wouldn't understand.
August 20, 2026. 40.07959, -75.08793. See the updated map here. See all the blog posts here.
lol, that ill-fated cemetery ride the other day, uncle joe's cursed carpool, beyond the old lady red light snafu, there was also myriad construction detours (including the bridge), and so the whole lot of us were snaking our way through the local roads of the smallest town of Rockledge, my hometown, less than a square mile, streets not fit for a hearse at all.
and i remember thinking, wow, this is the only time i'll ever be able to blow a stop sign without worry about bored cops fucking up my day.
so i sped up a little at each intersection, middle finger up but hand below the steering wheel so uncle joe couldn't see.
Wrecking Ball probably came five to ten years too early for me, when it comes to the lyrics. When it comes to the music, it hit at exactly the right time. Let's talk about the difference.
In 2012, when Wrecking Ball dropped, I was transition from a bohemian-via-Vegas lifestyle to half-settling into my regular working life. By the time this late-stage Springsteen masterpiece reached my ears, I was commuting into the city on regional rail, working for a car-sharing company called Zipcar. I recall walking from Market Street to Locust, listening to this album. I wasn't a grown-up yet. I had a girlfriend who would eventually be my wife, I had a paycheck and I was scrimping and saving all that I could to pay for house and a wedding, but I also still lived with my parents, I still was spending weekends hanging out with friends at bars without a care, and I still had no fucking clue what the idea "career" meant, or "mortgage," or "retirement funds" or whatever. It was the in-between years.
I was obviously familiar with Bruce Springsteen at this point in my life. Had you asked me at the time (and maybe you could, since I have an eighteen-year-old blog), I might have described Springsteen as "music fit for the summer." This was a primitive understanding, but that's okay. I will never say that I "know music," but I'm always trying to learn more. Time would reveal that Springsteen's music is fit for all seasons. It was pretty easy to assign "Thunder Road" et al. that description though, you gotta admit! But we already went through all that.
What I'm saying here is that Wrecking Ball was my very first look past the days of innocence vis-à-vis Bruce Springsteen's discography. This wasn't music that was made before I was born and thus felt from a different era (of music history; of my life). This was music being made now. It was current, and it was vital. That was a new sensation to me then. I'm really proud to fill in so many of the gaps that I skipped over back then through this blog project, but let's acknowledge that most people's understanding of any given artist is not formed by a deep dive chronologically. I went from Born to Run to Wrecking Ball, and the reaction mainly was: holy shit, Bruce still has the juice.
This is Bruce's "recession album," which means it falls in line with many of his other 21st century albums, where you can assign an easy descriptor to it based on what was happening in the country at that time. The Rising was his "9/11 album," Devils & Dust was his "Iraqi War album," Working on a Dream was his "Obama's election" album. You don't have to assign these descriptors, and if you don't, then there are certainly plenty of options on each tracklist for you to pick and choose from and not think about these political issues. The difference between those other three albums and Wrecking Ball is that the topic Bruce has landed on for this one seems unfortunately evergreen.
It's not just about Occupy Wall Street, just like Occupy Wall Street wasn't just about Wall Street. More generally, it's about class warfare, and it's about the broader picture of the haves versus the have-nots. Billionaires are the enemy, and Bruce Springsteen is attempting to rally those whom he has always had a connection with—the working man, people like me and you—in the battle against those who are trying to crush us. This isn't the first collection of Springsteen songs to operate under that pretense, but it's the first that seems to be working in the present tense. There's a difference between the protest songs of We Shall Overcome (in which Springsteen is taking old songs from the past and applying them to the here and now) and the songs from Wrecking Ball (in which Springsteen is tell you what is happening right this very second, and trying to convince us that it's not too late). September 11th was almost 25 years ago; Wall Street has its boots on your neck right fucking now.
The Stereogum Springsteen ranking I've been following along with while writing these columns was compiled a short while after Wrecking Ball was released (which means that we won't be using it again until we get to some of the archival compilations). In it, Ryan Leas wrote that Wrecking Ball felt too "black-and-white" when it came to the issues it was tackling, as opposed to the more "nuanced" take on, say, Devils & Dust re: war. The decade-plus since has revealed that Leas was premature in his assessment. Yes, it's black-and-white. It always has been, and that's the truth that Springsteen needs to address. Working on a Dream, for all its flaws, grappled with the idea that the Obama years felt like an improvement, and yet there was still so long to go. The Rising was stuck between wanting to support a country that needed support and caution against falling into straight-up jingoism. There's no need for caution within the world of Wrecking Ball. There's no "both sides" to class warfare. Billionaires are a pox on society, and they need to be eliminated (to the illiterate FBI agents reading this post right now: I'm talking figuratively, relax!)
This is what I meant at the top when I said that I was a little too young still to understand what Wrecking Ball actually means. I didn't care about politics, I didn't know what Occupy Wall Street was, I still was operating under the naive notion that some billionaires could effect positive change in this world. I was earning pennies on the dollar from some large corporation that would soon (thank god) spit me out without a care in the world. I just liked the music. It meant something to me, but it didn't mean this. It would eventually. There's only so much we can take before it becomes impossible to ignore. Electing a billionaire pedophile to the presidency (twice) was terrible for our country in so many ways, but at the very least it opened my eyes to how this nation really operated, and I was radicalized, and I, ya know, also came to appreciate certain albums of music as a consequence of all that. There is where Wrecking Ball sits for me, at this crossroad.
I guess we should say that it is unfortunate that Wrecking Ball has aged so well. If only Bezos got the noose and we all lived in peace and harmony in a society that focused on making sure everyone's basic needs were met, then maybe this album would feel outdated. But that's not where we are, so Wrecking Ball has aged well, because it's still relevant today. Perhaps more so. I'm talking about theme, of course, not the music itself. But to my ears, the music has aged well too. That's why it's important to talk about my own experiences with this album, though. It could just be the cloud of nostalgia hanging over the music for me, which always improves an album's standing within the mind of that nostalgic person.
I think we can all agree on a couple of things, though, even if you're just hearing Wrecking Ball for the first time in 2026. We can certainly agree about the two classic cuts from this album, "Land of Hope and Dreams" and the title track, adequately capturing the full might of Bruce Springsteen's talent for epic drama. The former has basically Clarence Clemons' final sax solo, and the latter has another amazing "1, 2, a 1 2 3 4!" If you're burned about Bruce Springsteen getting older and not being able to replicate "Born to Run" on every track, then you'll find comfort here. You can possibly add "We Take Care of Our Own" here too, in terms of "epic songs." I think the guitar chords at the beginning of the song (and album) are designed for us to think that way. I also think that it's a direct callback to the sardonic nature of "Born in the U.S.A.," in that it sounds patriotic but is very clearly the opposite of that, all of which elevate the stature of "We Take Care of Our Own" in my mind.
We can probably all agree, I think, on the trio of stompers that make up the stellar deep cuts on Wrecking Ball—"Easy Money," "Shackled and Drawn," and "Death to My Hometown." All of them have a similar feel of "boots on the ground" in the way they move. All three are addressing similar plights. All three are incredibly passionate about what is happening now, and why that's fucked up. I might be reaching, but it's hard to see how you could dislike these three songs. Maybe you want more Max Weinberg drum fills? Wrecking Ball is not in E Street Band mode, and it's better for it.
If we're talking about "aging well," then we need to discuss "Rocky Ground." From where I'm standing, this thing has aged the best out of any song on the tracklist, if only because it was far and away the most critically derided at the time of the album's release. I remember this clearly, people having an issue with there being a rap verse on a Bruce Springsteen song. I probably fell into this mindset as well, at the time (if there was proof on this blog either way, I'd show it, but there's not, as far as I could find). I was young, and I didn't have the capacity to take a stand on something like this.
But I have that ability now, and I will say that, from where I'm standing, "Rocky Ground" is a triumph of inclusion. I keep saying "class warfare," and that's on purpose. If there is an us-vs.-them, it's not in terms of race (as the rock-vs.-rap division very often implies), it's in terms of class, the people who have everything vs. the people that they are stealing from. And we need everyone, even those who want to hear hip hop in their music, to come together. Ah shit, I don't know how to word it without sounding hokey and patronizing, I'm sorry. I do believe this, though, that Springsteen was trying to knock down divisions, and I do think that including Michelle Moore's verse was a purposeful way to do that.
Not only that, but Wrecking Ball came out right before the onset of the streaming era. Soon after, streaming would provide every regular listener with the entire collection of music history, and throughout this period, genre walls would start getting knocked down, and people would stop caring so much about what is "supposed" to be in a rock song. It all gets blended. With mixed results, sure! I'm not necessarily interested in young hip hop artists using emo music to create cloud rap, for example. I'm not interested in listening to it, I should say. But I am interested in it in theory. I'm interested in "Rocky Ground" in the same way, how Springsteen foresees the genre-less future and gets a jump on it, critics be damned. I also like "Rocky Ground" as a song, and think it's catchy, so there's that. I'm just saying that critics were way too quick to pile on this song. It's aged beautifully.
I am not quite there yet on my journey, but I'm far enough to be able to confidently claim at this point that Wrecking Ball is the best Bruce Springsteen release of the 21st century. The music is there as it usually is, and the lyrics get truer as we take another step each year toward self-destruction. It makes me think back to the apocrypha regarding the inspiration for The Rising, how the towers fell and some guy rolled down his window yelled at Springsteen that "we need you more than ever." That might have felt true at the time, but we didn't actually need Bruce Springsteen to address a single terrorist attack. In Wrecking Ball, though, Springsteen finally meets the moment when we need him. If his legacy is that he is a musician speaking to the heart of the working man, then this is the moment—2012 and also now—when the working class is being systematically eradicated, and we need him to sing to that. He does so on Wrecking Ball.
Song for the "Tramps like Us" mixtape: "Death to My Hometown"
Sure you could and yet many bloggers do everything in their power to insulate themselves from the common man, from where they live, from where they trade, from 500 movies they've never seen before, from where they fight and love and converse and... and... So naturally their work suffers and regresses into empty formalism and... well, I'm spouting off again, but to put it in your language, the theatre becomes as phony as a three-dollar bill.
Barton Fink
1991
The Coen Brothers
Our resident 30-something-years-old sometimes-blogger Sam has chosen this Coen brothers flick for his "already seen it" FC choice this go-around. Sam participated in the Blood Simple Zoom a few months ago, so we both knew that it would be fun to slip back into that Coen brothers mindset. Their films more often than not have a similar feel to them. I'm not saying they are all "the same," not in any sense of the word. I just feel like they all sort of lean on the surreal lightheartedness mixed in with serious drama, good character acting that features bizarre quirks, that sort of thing. Barton Fink was like that too, and I appreciated it. I also think that there is more here than some of the Coen brothers movies that I've seen, so let's dig into it. Sam, what say you about this film?
"What are the limitations for a film that is writing about writing? The movie also grapples with the common man. At some point writers are not the common man, and writing about writing is honest to their lived in experience. How do you make that compelling?"
Not sure if that final question is supposed to imply that Barton Fink was not compelling in this specific way, because it is. I would answer that question in this way: do what Barton Fink does.
Would I consider myself a "writer"? It depends on how I'm feeling that day. I usually view "writers" as those who consider writing "what they do," like their main purpose in this life. I considering writing "something I do," which is far enough away a definition for me to balk at the idea of me being a "writer." But I'm literally writing these words right now, so what the fuck do I know?
Hmmm, how do I make this compelling? To write about writers writing about writing? I could do what this movie does, and sort of be self-deprecating about it. I liked how we're initially meant to think of Barton as a good writer, but the movie never actually confirms that. Note how everyone who reads the script he writes during his eureka moment is quick to say it sucks. That could be because a cop and a film producer are fucking philistines, but it could also be because the movie doesn't want you to land too firmly on the idea that Barton Fink is anything special.
I also liked how Barton was, at times, not very humble. I think he is unsure of his work and as his status as a writer, but I also think that he believes in his high ideals when it comes to writing, and that that confidence plays as him being full of himself sometimes. I'm talking mainly about the scenes when Barton is explaining to Charlie about the common man, and how Charlie keeps trying to be a common man to Barton, but Barton continuously cuts him off. Barton believes that what he's saying is smart, and he believes that it is right, but at no point does he actually attempt to do what he's claiming he's all about. He's unable to connect to the common man. Eventually, he does connect with Charlie, but even then, it's revealed that Charlie is, uh, not actually a "common man" either.
I think I've always viewed humility and self-deprecation as true values as a writer, and as an artist. If you think that something you've done is the best thing you've ever done, then that self-image devalues the art. If you are hard on yourself and think that even your best work is not up to snuff, then it becomes special when other people disagree with you and actually like your work. If someone asked me (a person who is, again, not a writer) what the best thing I ever wrote is, I would have a tough time saying. Because it's all shit. Am I saying that I believe not a single person has ever appreciated anything that I've ever written in my life? No, I'll acknowledge that there have been some people, no doubt unmedicated, who have expressed interest in reading something I've written. But if I believed that, then it would suck the artistry out of it, I think.
Maybe that's what we're looking for when it comes to "limitations of writing about writing." Had Barton Fink been more grounded, more understated in his writing pursuits, less quirky and cringey, then that would have been boring, right? So you make him a movie character who is a writer but you never say whether he is actually a good writer, you make him have all these high ideals about the art of writing but immediately undercut them, you make him incredibly flawed in other ways, you put him in surreal situations that you're not even sure are real (e.g. the hotel burning). You have him grapple, internally, with his art. Is that a bird dying at the end? Is this symbolism for his hopes and dreams about his career as a writer? Does the fact that I'm even asking the question this way prove that the Coen brothers made this shit compelling?
I definitely agree with the fact that writing is easiest when you're writing from lived experience. I know that about myself, that I find it so much easier to write something if I'm basing it on my own life. I've also always viewed that as a flaw, as an "easy way out," but maybe Barton Fink presents a different way of looking at it. The Coen brothers apparently wrote this script right in the middle of writing the script for Miller's Crossing (which I've never seen, please no spoilers), because Miller's Crossing was giving them headaches (apparently it is a complex plot, again please no spoilers), and they needed to just let loose and write. Which tells me that writing about writing is way easier than writing about [whatever Miller's Crossing is about].
And I guess you're right, Sam, in that "writing" is not something for the common man. I've tried to get all kinds of nurses and lawyers and office drones to regularly write for this blog, with very little success, and the constant refrain is "I'm not a writer." I believe that everyone is a writer, but in order for someone to write, they have to believe it for themselves too, which doesn't often happen. I wonder if Charlie Meadows a.k.a. Karl "Madman" Mundt would ever consider himself to be a writer, if he gave it a try. He did say that he "had some stories." Isn't that compelling, what those stories ended up being? I mean, I guess it depends on what you consider a compelling story, either within the movie of the movie itself as a story...
But now I'm getting off-track here. Let's try to narrow it down to this. What is a writer? A writer is someone who sees a story and does their damnedest to tell that story. Could a non-writer write this movie? Probably (a non-wrestler was attempting to write a wrestling movie, after all). But could a non-writer be compelled by the end of this movie, and what it means? If you don't give a shit about stories, then you might be nonplussed as what happens with the fire and the beach and the woman. If you care, then you're going to appreciate what Barton Fink was trying to say, even if the answers are not quite there. Because if you care, that means you're a writer, and you see stories, and you think about stories, enough that you might want to write one of your own one day.
I apologize if I didn't answer the questions in the right way. I can revise my thoughts in the comments if need be. I have a deadline.
GRADE: 4 pukes out of 5
Sam went above and beyond and sent me a write-up as well! So here's what he had to say:
~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Sam
I love the way the Coens can wind me up. The set-up here involves premise catnip for me: writers, elegant period piece, long ornate hallways, actors I know and love, and a little murder. But possibly like a Barton Fink screenplay, it's a little fruity without actually saying anything.
Is this movie just a send-up of pompous writers? Hollywood producers? Intellectuals writ large? Or is it a handful of high-minded ideas slapped together in a fairly incoherent, magical realism plot?
This was not my first rodeo with this film, and my memory was one of disappointment. That emptiness maintained on rewatch. Individual scenes were a lot of fun—Steve Buscemi signing Tuturro in, Tony Shalhoub chewing a lot of scenery, and most of the John Goodman ones. But the individual moments were to stretch us along whatever journey Barton is supposed to endure. But I never cared for him—if he failed as a screenwriter or was fingered for a murder he didn't commit—none of it mattered to me. Ultimately, I rooted more for the alleged serial killer played by Goodman. Maybe that's intentional, or maybe that's a failing on my part.
Either way, the parts exceeded the sum of the total. Totally fine but disappointing nonetheless.
~~~~~~~~~~~~
NEXT TIME: We're getting together on Tuesday night to discuss Pink Flamingos! Be there!
August 18, 2026. 40.02248, -75.15979. See the updated map here. See all the blog posts here.
Sometimes I see huge buildings every day and have no idea what they are and never stop to think about it and wonder if anyone even steps foot in it and wonder what would happen if we lived in a perfect world what the building would be used for. This is storage, I think? For what? For people's bullshit junk that they couldn't fit in their house? Or stuff that needed to sit and rot while someone tries to pull themselves up by those bootstraps and find somewhere to live to begin with? I don't know. I don't know.
Joe is working through a list of albums that he considers "blind spots," i.e. albums that he's never heard but feels like he should.
1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die:
It is all too easy to forget quite how barren the musical landscape in the UK was in 1994. Britpop was yet to fully blossom, and grunge had died with Kurt Cobain. It took five of the most ordinary, working-class lads to reignite the scene, and redefine the musical landscape.
Oasis never really had an infancy. Spewed from the streets of Manchester, they seemed already fully formed. Definitely Maybe remains their most coherent, exciting, and fresh album to date. The album cover betrayed their influences—from George Best, to Burt Bacharach, to carafes of red wine (actually blackcurrant juice). Football, music, and booze. A band of the people.
And the people loved them back. There was no pretension in their often thinly veiled reworkings of Beatles tunes. "Rock 'n' Roll Star" sets the agenda from the off, a hedonistic anthem par excellence; the exhilarating "Cigarettes and Alcohol," which references T-Rex's "Get It On," provides another. "Shakermaker," itself a New Seekers rip-off, is all the more vivid for such brazen borrowing. "Live Forever" is as classic-sounding a single as ever flowed from the pen of chief songwriter Noel Gallagher. That all five members of Oasis would actually go on to become (briefly) Nineties personifications of the true rock 'n' roll spirit makes listening to the album today much more satisfying. Even the acoustic simplicity of the closer, which famously determined the supposed audience's music as "Sheeee-ite," had a bite they rarely revisited.
Oasis are like a Sherman tank in the music industry. Reliable, often devastating, and something you most definitely do not want to argue with.
Joe:
It's a well known fact—I'm joking, this is all just in my head, but still—that I am, at best, agnostic on the Britpop music of the '90s. The only other example in this column over the past six years (by design, because I don't really consider Britpop to be a Blind Spot I desire to make less blind), the Verve's Urban Hymns, had the big hit, and then a bunch of filler. Oasis is obviously the prime example in this genre, though. I checked out (What's the Story) Morning Glory? before "blind spots" were a thing, but I've always been ambivalent on that one too. I don't get the hype.
Look, the three big songs are good. But I'm reaching the point in my old age that I get sincerely worn out from these sort of generation tentpoles being overplayed in the general populace. I'm not saying that "Champagne Supernova" couldn't hit hard in the proper context, but 99 times out of 100, I'm rolling my eyes. It's actually a pretty similar situation to the music of the Notorious B.I.G., now that I think about it. Music made for one audience, and the co-opted by a younger audience as a sort of artless aesthetic ritual. Think seventeen-year-old white women singing along to it at a party after they heard it on six or seven TikToks over the past few months. Not to throw that demographic under the bus or anything. The same shit happened with mid-'00s indie rock, how it started out as something cool and eventually became closely associated with Urban Outfitters.
So if I'm listening to an album with that song and "Don't Look Back in Anger" and, most prominently, "Wonderwall," then those songs are going to weigh the album down instead of lift them up. I'm tired, I'm so fucking tired of songs that have hit a global wavelength like that. All this to say that Definitely Maybe is my fucking shit! This is really good! And you know why? I didn't recognize any of the songs. Thank fucking god.
It's just really refreshing to hear Oasis as the way they've always been described: young hooligans casually changing the course of British rock 'n' roll. They can't be like that after their second album, the fame becomes too much of an albatross (much like the Jersey Shore cast after Season 1, Oasis could only be themselves before the point when they started playing characters based on themselves). On this first album, everything is so pure. Just a couple ugly British idiots making fun rock songs.
I never understood the Beatles comparison until I listened to this album either. Obviously there are still key differences even here, but this was the first time I understood even a hint of connection, beyond the accents. Like, I can see how you get from Beatles to Oasis, this debut album was just a crucial missing link for my understanding in that. I do find it interesting how 1001 Albums frames the comparisons to other bands, basically accusing Oasis of stealing from all their sources? I can't say that I literally recognize and Beatles melodies or anything here, but I feel a Beatles-esque energy that Oasis manages to shake free by the time you get to Morning Glory.
One thought I had, just based on my experience with Oasis fans and what they say about this band versus my own limited experiences with them, is that maybe a lot of what I hear is based on what is happening in Definitely Maybe? How they are cool and how they were so fucking casual. Nothing about the album after this is casual, but this one certainly feels that way. Definitely Maybe feels loose and fun. Don't wanna overstate the Beatles thing—this definitely rocks harder than anything McCartney or Lennon could put together. But even when there's a hard edge, it feels like it's done in a winking way. Does the band regain this ability post-Morning Glory? I don't know if I have the stamina to get there. Maybe we'll table this question until RC deigns to answer it for us with an Oasis pick.
I also think it's extremely funny to read the 1001 Albums blurb 20 years after it was published, because a lot has happened with Oasis since then. Well, there was the absence of Oasis for a long time, because the Gallagher brothers were fighting. Then there was a much-publicized reunion tour, which feels like a pretty explicit attempt at making more money (they have been clear there'll be no new music, for example). This is partially my Britpop agnosticism talking, but, haha, very funny to see Oasis described as "reliable," when in my mind they are clearly anything but.
Though I'm not here to judge the scope of Oasis' career, I'm simply here to chat about their first album. And from the skeptical position I'm sitting in, I'd say that Oasis nailed it the first time, and never did anything better than this.
August 17, 2026. 40.08409, -75.1744. See the updated map here. See all the blog posts here.
"I don't want to be awkward."
"Honestly, the whole thing is awkward."
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But sometimes there is a great release that comes from that awkwardness. Everyone is so stressed and then something bad happens on a bad day and all anyone can do about it is laugh, which feels good, the laughter sprouting up like the first green plant bloomed in the charred debris months after a forest burns down.
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When you are in a line of cars for a funeral, you don't stop. That's the point of the bright orange stickers and flags. Like, say you're a little old lady driving alone in the middle of a long line of cars, please don't stop at a red light, just keep going, and if you're worried, slow down maybe a little and honk that horn as long as you can and keep going, or else, if ya stop, ya know, ya might lose the hearse, lose your way for yourself and all the dozens of cars behind you, everyone knowing generally where we're going but making wrong turns and making large pointless loops around endless plots of graves.
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And when we arrive, the jokes shatter the tension that each one of us felt. Someone chuckles about Uncle Joe looking down from heaven and enjoying the mass confusion, and even for those of us who don't believe in an afterlife, it's an immense relief to grieve in this way, to laugh.
You get a dozen songs every month, in playlist form, that act as official PoYB music recommendations, since none of the other music columns are necessarily recommending anything, just exploring. These are your recs. Fuck the algorithm.
A lot of the music I listen to, and a lot of the music I write about, is based around Record Club these days. Not all, but a lot of the albums are follow-up albums for RC artists that I've loved because of or predating Record Club. Which means that this monthly playlist is starting to feel like slight overkill, or like I'm repeating myself or something. I just have to tell myself that no one is reading the Saturday RCAA posts, and so this music is probably all fresh and new. To all zero of you who read the blog on Saturdays AND Mondays, my apologies for the same music popping up twice.
August 2026
1. "Candlebox" by the Mountain Goats — More to say about this album at the end of the week (both good and bad, mostly good though), but here's a standout that I thought was pretty fun. Especially because I read something recently that, because of this song, Mountain Goats actually scheduled an opening slot at a Candlebox show? I'm not familiar with Candlebox at all, but that seems pretty cool.
2. "Follow" by Finn Wolfhard — I originally had this song in the #1 slot for this playlist, but I felt weird having Finn Wolfhard's face as the still image representing the playlist in the blog post. I just feel weird in general that the goofy looking kid from the worst television show of all time is out here making legitimate, and legitimately fun, rock music. Fire from the Hip is great! The kids aren't always wrong, it seems!
3. "Yeah" by Charli XCX — I purposefully did not put "Wink Wink" in this slot, because the video would've distracted me and derailed the whole goddamn blog post.
4. "Acid Tongue" by Swamp Dogg — Swamp Dogg's new album has been featured on this blog already a couple times, and I don't want to overstate my affection for it (it's pretty good, maybe even close to great!). So here's the Jenny Lewis cover that he does. Swamp Dogg, as always, nails the balance between silly and profound.
5. "Raising the Grain" by Jack White — He had a "comeback" with last year's No Name, and he continues apace with Frozen Charlotte. One might claim that he doesn't do anything new with this newest album, but for me, it just makes me think of that BoJack scene: "It gets easier. You gotta do it every day, that's the hard part. But it does get easier." Jack White doesn't have to invent the wheel. He's just gotta make a good-to-great garage rock album every year, and every year, it'll get easier to appreciate this artist for who he is. I think about that BoJack scene basically once an hour every hour I am conscious, though, so this blurb might be a stretch.
6. "The Fastest Way Back Home" by Frank Turner — Okay, so the appeal is that this guy is relatively unknown, is that what we're going with? Would I like Frank Turner less if he was a household name? Does the "secret" aspect of his art draw me to it, or is it truly, honestly a matter of quality? Does any of this matter? I can answer the last question: no, it doesn't matter.
7. "Pink Slime" by La Luz — I said a couple weeks ago that La Luz were a cool band, and I'm sticking by that through every song, but I'll admit here that I think they are at their coolest when they are juicing the tempo like this. I like the dreamy surf pop, I love the hard-edged surf rock.
8. "Picking Dragons’ Pockets" by Modest Mouse — Alright, what am I missing? So many people in my life separately claimed to me that this newest Modest Mouse album was their best one in a while. But I was sort of unimpressed. Someone please help! In the meantime, here is the radio single, placed here both because it's a good one and because it's an excuse to ask for help.
9. "Divine Intervention" by the Rolling Stones — All the YouTube visualizers for the songs on the new Stones album are comprised of long shots of half-naked young adults dancing in slow motion. I know there is at least one in which you see a woman's nipples. But I'm not choosing songs for this playlist based on horniness (see above: my Charli choice for the playlist)! I'm choosing it based on hooks! The chorus on this one fucking moves! No (female) nipples needed!
10. "Coding These to Lukens" by Modern Baseball — Relistening to Sports for RC was a good excuse to relisten to the entire MoBo discography (only three albums). I did so, constantly, over the course of two weeks. This is the song that grew the most in stature during that long-form relistening period. The last 20 seconds in particular is the moment that is gonna stick with me for a long time.
11. "Sharp Knife" by Margaret Glaspy — I am utterly fascinated by this new Glapsy outing. It's all over the place, and it fucking nails the target an overwhelming majority of the time. This one feels like something Tori Amos would do or something. I am usually putting the uptempo cuts in this playlist, but this one is slow and creepy and I feel really drawn to it for some reason, so here's your chance to feel what I feel.
12. "Everything I Ever Saw" by the Menzingers — To address what I said at the top of this blog post: I don't think there's necessarily anything wrong with quickly revisiting albums that I've already written about. This whole music thing isn't a one-and-done game. We are adding this music to our lives FOREVER. I actually hate the idea that any of this shit is disposable, and I hate that the pace that I listen to music makes some of it feel that way anyway. Will this new Menzingers album go down in history as one of the greats? Almost assuredly not. But I'm relistening now, and I'm still liking it more and more. Worth checking out, again.
August 16, 2026. 40.07913, -75.08318. See the updated map here. See all the blog posts here.
I'll never be able to take this exact picture again.
Of course, that could be true for all of these photos. The way the wind blows the branches of a tree a certain way, the exact micrometer where a car is parked will never be repeated. For some photos, it's more true than others.
Like say they are closing a bridge that you drive across every day. Redoing the whole thing, I assume.
It'll still be a bridge when it opens two Christmases from now, but it won't look like this. It'll look like something else.
I don't have a particular affinity for the bridge, either. It's just one piece of my drive home from this-place-and-that. It's an inconvenience to have to take the three-block detour, but nothing life-altering. Unlike many of the banal places documented in this photo blog project, I don't have any life memories from this bridge, big or small.
(We almost bought the house just to the left of this frame, but that's in another corner of the multiverse, where Joe-9543 is freaking out about the construction noise that is going to be the bane of his existence over the next fifteen months.)
It's just some bridge. But it was captured here, and so it remains trapped it amber, on some shitty blog, in some pixelated photo, forever, or at least until the heat death of the universe. A bridge that once was, and will never be again.
This is our third-to-last week of Record Club's Summer Homework project. I think we've more or less done what we set out to do at the onset of this season-long project, in that we've added some fresh voices to the stable of loyal RC members. Even if it was on a temporary basis, it was cool seeing old friends pop up and add to the chorus of music criticism. Now let's see how many folks are down to listen to this well-known artist and write about her.
CATEGORY OF VOTING: "Obscure Shit" — The category title is obviously intended to be ironic. I went through the list of the greatest albums in history (according to RateYourMusic), and chose the top five highest ranked album on the list that were eligible for Record Club still. Vespertine is listed at #18. Of the seventeen album ranked above it we have: seven albums ineligible because we already covered that artist in RC (or, in the case of Radiohead, at least one album that itself was covered in RC); four albums that were covered in A Year of Blind Spots; one album that had at least three of its songs chosen for Song Challenge; two Beatles albums, which aren't eligible until RC Week 500; three albums that were also on this poll, and defeated by Björk.
LOSING ALBUMS:Heaven or Las Vegas by Cocteau Twins (#27 on the list); In the Court of the Crimson King by King Crimson (#5 on the list); The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars by David Bowie (#13 on the list); Wish You Were Here by Pink Floyd (#4 on the list).
ABOUT: Björk Guðmundsdóttir (known mononymously as Björk) was born on November 21, 1965, in Reykjavík, Iceland. She started performing professionally at age eleven, and was the frontwoman of the Sugarcubes in her early 20s. She went solo after that band broke up. She's known for genre-hopping throughout her career, and she's one of the best selling alternative artists of all time. Outside of music, she has acted, and has advocated for environmental causes. She has sixteen Grammy nominations (but has yet to win). A stalker tried to kill her with a letter bomb in 1996. She has two children, is a grandmother, and identifies as bisexual (as of two months ago, she is in a relationship with Icelandic musician Yara Polana). In 2015, Time named her as one of the most influential people in the world.
DISCOGRAPHY: This is Björk's fourth solo album out of ten total. Her 1993 debut was fittingly called Debut. The most recent album is 2022's Fossora. I feel like I hear about 1997's Homogenic the most.
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ADDITIONAL INFO
READING SOME SHIT: interview in Interview magazine, I assume a few days before 9/11
WATCHING SOME SHIT: I think she does every song from the album live in this video, but the songs are not in the same order
RECORD CLUB CONNECTIONS: This is our third artist from Iceland, after Of Monsters and Men, and Sigur Rós. The latter also requires Alt keystrokes to type the name on an English keyboard, along with Dina Ögon and Janelle Monáe. (Not including any artists with é, which I've typed enough times to have Alt+0233 memorized.)
Danny Brown (of the 54th-best album of all time) is listed on Wikipedia as someone who specifically named Björk as an influence. So has Beyoncé, Perfume Genius, SZA, Japanese Breakfast, Missy Elliott, Mitski, Maggie Rogers, Paramore, and WILLOW. This album was up for Best Alternative Music Album at the 2002 Grammys, but lost to Coldplay. Tori Amos and Radiohead also lost the category that year.
MENTIONS ON THE BLOG: A Year of Blind Spots has covered Homogenic, as well as Life's Too Good by her band the Sugarcubes (I actually had Vespertine on the Blind Spots list for this year, but removed it when it won the RC poll, and replaced it with The Dreaming). "It's Oh So Quiet" from Post was chosen twice for Song Challenge—SSC Day 47 by Fisher, and YSC Day 148 by Sunny. Finally, Brian chose a song featuring Björk on by far the most infamous MMMixtape.
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RECORD CLUB ALUMNI ASSOCIATION
This week's discography dive album: American Trappist by American Trappist
This week's follow-up album:Människobarn by Dina Ögon and petal rock black by WILLOW (both RC alumni mentioned in this post already!)
This week's keeping up album (probably):Days by the Mountain Goats
Listen with us! Keep your favorite Record Club artists in the rotation!
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COUNTDOWN:
69 Weeks Until Week 420
driving to iceland
We are tracking and counting down every week from here on out till Record Club Week 420. We started this countdown 69 weeks out. During Record Club Week 420, we will be covering Donny Most by the esteemed Happy Days virgin Donny Most. The goal for Week 420 of Record Club is that it will feature 69 reviews from 69 different people.
THIS WEEK: We are 26 weeks away from Week 420. Six months away, holy shit!!!!
August 15, 2026. 40.0885, -75.09271. See the updated map here. See all the blog posts here.
I could not have possibly imagined I'd be taking a picture in this building for a photo project in 2026. It was about a year ago that all Iron Hill Breweries closed immediately. And now here I am. I've always been pretty ambivalent about the place, especially now that I can't drink and the only draws are mediocre over-priced food and the high chance of running into my aunt and having to make small talk for five minutes while my stomach grumbles. What is, like, the logical explanation for this? A place of business wasn't making enough money to stay open, so they closed, and now they are open again, for... reasons? Not only that, but the place seems to be a little worse than it used to be? The pizza was medium-tier bar food and they don't use coasters anymore? Not that I came here for the coasters, it was just something I noticed. I don't understand how the restaurant industry works.
Love Ire & Song — RC Week 284 — 4.5 pukes out of 5
Poetry of the Deed
September 7, 2009
Frank Turner, from what I know about him, seems to be the type of musician who inspires a small but rabid fanbase. "What I know" is that his music is passionate and heartfelt, and it's easy to see (for those of us who are susceptible to such a thing, anyway) why this is an artist that you're either not into or REALLY into. It's that folk rock thing. The themes and aesthetics are supposed to be inspiring. Frank Turner comes from the lineage of Pete Seeger and Woody Guthrie. I was greatly moved by Turner's RC album, and here we are again. There is no timeline here, it all exists at the same time, this album and other albums, both the body of work of this artist and the great folk songbook. I was moved again by these songs about living a full life, about the wide expanse of the universe, about the wonder of it all and the joy to be found in the mystery. The only reason I'm not deep in the pocket for this guy yet is that I value the breadth of musical knowledge too much. If I were instead the type of person to value depth and obsession, Frank Turner would be a candidate. If you're the type, consider this your recommendation.
GRADE: 4.5 pukes out of 5
(Follow-up)
Mika
Life in Cartoon Motion — RC Week 142 — 3 pukes out of 5
Hyperlove
January 23, 2026
There's a difference between making good music and making memorable music, sometimes. I think good always has to be memorable, but memorable doesn't always have to be good. Mika proved that with Life in Cartoon Motion, an album that I thought was so corny I was tempted to harvest it in autumn, but which still remained in my head for a long time. He had a distinct theater-kid energy that typically draws me in. This was the music that you could practically hear blasting out of those late-night set-painting sessions on the local high school's theater stage. With Hyperlove—which, fair, comes much later—Mika forgets about all that, and asks you to listen to some very generic dance music. Go from "Spinning Out" all the way to "Immortal Love," and you'll understand where the true loyalties lie here. It just doesn't feel right for this guy! "Science Fiction" and "Bells" are "for the fans" in that they get closest to attempting to recapture that original energy. "Dreams," on the other hand, feels so parodic that I kept think that was Dennis Reynolds in the visualizer on YouTube. And don't get me started on those interludes, holy shit. I can't say I was ever a fan of Mika, but I was glad he existed. Now, he has deigned to release an album in 2026 that by 2027 I will have completely forgotten. Bummer!
The Bandcamp description for this one is the key to understanding. First, Ritter struck up a temporary partnership with a jazz guitarist, and wanted to get some jazz licks down on tape while his (Bill Frisell's) label let him. So that's why you have the normally folky-country sound of Josh Ritter bending like 15% of the way toward jazz music on this one. Second, it's one of those albums that is "released quickly" with "minimal overdubs" for "the dedicated fans." This is all, in my mind, a really nice way of saying that this shit is inessential for everyone besides the kooks who are devoted to this man. As someone who likes Josh Ritter but is decidedly undevoted, I do in fact believe that this under-the-radar 2024 album is inessential. For one, there's whiplash for me, having listened to The Animal Years so recently, and grappling with the non-country nature of it, and then moving on to this one and hearing a lot of dusty country echoes on it. For another, the tempo is just sooooo fucking slow. You know how I feel about that. I get that Ritter is kowtowing to Friselli's skillset, but that doesn't mean I have to like it. It was okay.
GRADE: 2.5 pukes out of 5
I Believe in You, My Honeydew
September 12, 2025
This had some more oomph to it than Heaven, but maybe I'm just saying that because I am reviewing them back-to-back. That last one at least sounded like an artist trying something new. Doing a low-key folk/jazz/country album is slightly outside this guy's wheelhouse. This folk/pop/rock/country is firmly within Josh Ritter's wheelhouse, however. If there's one thing that he's doing different here, it's that he's adding in, like, gospel elements I guess? Or maybe I'm just saying that because of the Jesus references on "Kudzu Vines" and the backup vocals on "Wild Ways." In any case, the religious vibes don't work. Bandcamp once again holds a key: this is Ritter's partnership with his "muse." It's not all that clear, but I get the sense that he's talking figuratively here, and if we're taking that route, well, then it's just a hop, skip, and jump away from considering god your muse, right? I don't know, man. Gun to my head, I'm choosing upbeat Ritter over downcast Ritter, but some of this rubbed me the wrong way.
I'm definitely not your go-to long odds guy. That would be PoYB staff member Nate Dogg, who indicates to me that he has not listened to the dry land yet, but that he imagines it cannot possibly live up to the standard that he saw in fine thread. I wasn't there with him, emotionally speaking, so you can take what I say about the dry land with a grain of salt. I think that the dry land is a little better. It doesn't sound that much different, but it does clarify a few things more me in a way that feels more efficient than what fine thread was doing. (This is in juxtaposition to its patented lo-fi sound, which remains as grainy as ever.) The main thing that it clarified was that long odds is a direct descendent of the Velvet Underground. This thought snapped into place listening to "dead friends," and it stayed with me for the rest of my time with this album. The thought makes everything make a lot more sense. This is punk in loosest form possible. Viewed in this light, there's a lot more to grab ahold of. I continue to like what they are doing.
Echo the Diamond — RC f/u #21 — 3.5 pukes out of 5
I Am Both
August 7, 2026
Oh shit, I did not expect Margaret Glaspy to take the plunge into Americana that so many of her peers have. Granted, I Am Both is waaaaaaay on the folky end of the spectrum, but still, her still-a-banger debut album Emotions and Math had absolutely zero to do with Americana, or folk for that matter. See, this is why you slot people like Glaspy into the "Singer-Songwriter" category—because no matter what genres she's working with, her lyricism and musical know-how remain sharp. (Kinda crazy that RC coincidentally picked her only misstep so far!) She's packing so many ideas into these songs that she doesn't have any left for the track-by-track breakdown (haha holy shit I fucking hate Consequence of Sound, fucking garbage website). Feels like her voice is getting better too (the growling vocals on "That Rose," for example). Honestly, we can probably chalk all this up to Margaret Glaspy getting older, wiser, more mature. She is no longer the quirky indie violinist, she's the motherfucking second coming of Loretta Lynn!
GRADE: 4 pukes out of 5
(Random RCAA News)
A brand new Paramore album is dropped! Or rather, an album of lullabies that sound like Paramore songs.
