Using this feature for a different purpose this week — I want to take a look back at the past year of releasing Devinyl Splits Vol. 2 via Bad Timing Records with my partner, Zack. The Devinyl Splits series is a collection of split 7" installments in which Kevin Devine partners with a different companion for each release.
Following up on Weekly 40-Watt #7, where I wrote about The Allman Brothers Band's At Fillmore East, and by the recommendation of my dear friend Owen, I am listening this week to Duane Betts' 2018 EP, Sketches of American Music.
Duane Betts is the son of original Allman Brothers Band member Dickey Betts, named after the band's legendary guitarist Duane Allman. Being named after one of the greatest guitar players of all time and being the son of the guy who wrote "Jessica" and "Ramblin' Man" makes for some lofty expectations for your own music, whether that's fair or not.
When you're in school, they don't teach you that The Allman Brothers rocked. There's a bunch of rock'n'roll music that you hear on the radio or whatever, and you do inevitably hear "Jessica" and "Ramblin' Man" and "Midnight Rider" at times. These songs do rock, but you don't hear the extensive jamming that appears on the album that actually delivered the group into the mainstream.
While listening to the deluxe edition of At Fillmore East extensively over the past few months, I also began reading up on the tragic history of the band. The group released two records to minimal acclaim, but found through an insane touring schedule that they were much better on stage than in the studio at the time — this is what led to the group recording At Fillmore East live over the course of two nights on March 12 and 13, 1971. The original seven-song, 80-minute version of the album charted highly and brought the group the type of artistic and commercial breakthrough they needed to keep the project going.
Now … this type of primary association is a factor of multiple events that need to happen concurrently. First off, this association wouldn't have existed if I'd heard these songs before to any significant extent. If I already had some type of relationship with that Primus song, for example, its primary association in my head would be attributed elsewhere.
Today's focus is William Tyler, a guitarist who played in the band Lambchop for a long time and who has put out eight of his own releases, most often associated with Merge Records throughout his solo career. The band Lambchop is worth looking into on its own — here is an Essentials playlist from Apple Music for them — and I would especially recommend them for fans of alt-country acts like Limbeck. Easy to see here where a band like Limbeck could have taken plenty of influences from this band.
This week's 40-Watt blog is not strictly about a band that I'm listening to for the first time, like last week's was, but it's a band that I'm visiting for the first time in a long while.
I originally heard The Front Bottoms back in summer 2010, when I reviewed their debut EP, Slow Dance to Soft Rock, for AbsolutePunk.net. They were an unsigned band and I wrote about them like they were an unsigned band. Back then, I called the EP an "eager and honest brand of indie rock/punk" and praised "The Beers" as a highlight. In retrospect, that song is certainly still my favorite song that uses the word "steroids" in a chorus — no doubt.
This is a new blog feature called Weekly 40-Watt. My goal with it is to encourage myself to listen to something new in my ears each week and start writing about music a bit more again. I'll listen to one band or album, new or old, that I've never listened to before and write some stuff about it. Let's see if we can somehow get 50 of these in 2019.
Today's blog is about The Black Crowes. My friend Pat pointed me in their direction when, after playing a zillion hours of Red Dead Redemption 2 and watching A Star Is Born, I found myself searching for something rock-ish / country-ish / blues-ish with guitars. Probably I can blame the Jackson Maine tracks on the ASIB soundtrack for this itch.
The following is an objectively good ranking of classic Disney animated movie soundtracks. The criteria for the soundtracks considered in this list is very simple: I focused on the best soundtracks from what is considered objectively the best run of theatrical animated features from Walt Disney Studios.
The run I'm referring to begins in the fall of 1989 and ends in the fall of 1999. Throughout this one single decade, Disney produced the following animated classics (this is not a comprehensive list of all films released in this decade, mind you): The Little Mermaid, Beauty and the Beast, Aladdin, The Lion King, Pocahontas, The Hunchback of Notre Dame, Hercules, Mulan, and Tarzan. You'll notice that this list excludes some crucial titles -- namely, Toy Story, A Bug's Life, and Toy Story 2 -- which are purposefully left behind as I've always viewed the Pixar x Disney partnership to be separate and have produced a superior product when compared to Disney's in-house animated films.
I dove into my first listen of Spanish Love Songs' Schmaltz with a suspicion that I was predisposed to enjoy it. The going comparisons for the album were to The Menzingers, Hot Water Music, and other bands of that gruff pop-punk ilk. Right up my alley, in terms of music I've enjoyed for the last decade-ish.
But many bands putting out music that has been up my historical alley have failed with more regularity lately, in terms of my own enjoyment. Rarely does a pop-punk record come around that really impresses me, or has significant lasting value, let alone a debut. To boot, what was I going to gain from a band trying to reboot Chamberlain Waits when I've been latched onto The Menzingers' After the Party for the past year? It's not that I've moved on from double-time punk songs, but that as I'm getting older, I'm keeping up with the bands who grow with me.
In this post, I take an embarrassingly long look at what I sure hope is a complete list of B-sides released by the band The Wonder Years ahead of their new album, Sister Cities.
It is now February 15, and despite that being the date, I still have not put a 2017 year-end list on my blog. I will note that no one asked me for this list, so it must not be all that important, and my lateness to the party must not have been noticed. Primarily, I am putting this online so I can refer to it in the future. I've enjoyed having lists from past years to look back on, so that's why I'm bothering with it at all.
This year I mainly listened to The Menzingers, but managed to squeeze in time to listen to other bands as well.
Each of the previous three years has come with a certain disclaimer -- that I'm listening to less music than I pretty much ever have in the past. Not the case this year! My music listening has picked up quite a bit this year, though it stills tends to come in waves. I'm spending more time listening to music on the train than I used to, and while my commute time is still mostly devoted to a book, a comic book or a podcast, this alone has increased the amount of new albums gracing my ears. Additionally, I'm spending more time in the gym this year than in years past, which is proving to be the main source of my music listening so far in 2017.
The Menzingers occupy this specific space in rock music. They aren't the only band that live in this space, but they're one of the best at doing this thing within it. There's no hard definition for this space, no concrete rules or regulations that determine its residents; it's not marked by a specific sub-genre or even a certain execution of a familiar sound. The space they fill is more recognizable by the way a Menzingers song can make you feel.
This feeling was all around me when I listened to "Lookers" for the first time. Released in August last year, the track was the first single dropped from their upcoming album After the Party. Friend of the program Dan Ozzi wrote, in Noisey's premiere of the song, about The Menzingers' affinity for nostalgia within their songwriting. This affinity is of paramount importance to The Menzingers' membership in this space, and that space is where the term déjá nostalgia will apply most directly. He called on the band's past records, On the Impossible Past and Rented World, for their nostalgic vibes and commented that "Lookers" feels like an instant Menzingers classic, which I very much agree with.
Nostalgia is a prominent feeling when listening to this band, especially to OTIP, due to the imagery in which The Menzingers often deal. The scenes from that album are well known by now: American muscle cars, American diners, American waitresses, a non-zero amount of American drunkenness, driving without aim, getting nowhere (the plot does not develop / it ends where it begins), etc. The Menzingers are amongst the few bands that pull this off without being corny, which is the highest risk run by bands who operate in this area, lyrically. And the nostalgia factor comes into play because diners, muscle cars and other settings or objects like those don't feel particularly of this era, though all of them still exist; there's a wistfulness, a vignette tinge, a haze and romanticism to it all. On the Impossible Past feels simultaneously new and old, even on first listen.
A personal characteristic that bothers me regularly is my inability to listen to normal music while I'm doing any type of work that requires reading comprehension or writing. This didn't always used to be the case, but at some point in the last three years, it became impossible for me to have most music on via headphones while I was writing anything, and more recently, I don't like having music on when I'm reading, either.
Some quick tasks are exceptions to this rule, and I can definitely have music on when I'm doing more "drone-ish" work, like updating spreadsheets or the more technical parts of my job. But the general rule is that I'm not listening to any music with vocals while I'm working. This obviously rules out most of the music I like, and it also rules out listening to podcasts while I'm working.
This was my impetus behind getting more into instrumental post-metal recently (I'll probably have another blog about that at some point). But my recommendation for today is the Narcos original series soundtrack, which I will credit my friend Andy (who tweets once a year, about football) with turning me onto indirectly. If you haven't seen Narcos yet, it's a Netflix show about Pablo Escobar and his drug empire in Colombia. The first season was awesome, highlighted for me by the acting performances, and I'm planning on starting the second season soon.