A More Final Frontier

Happy New Year, everybody. I'm delighted to announce that IDFC is back on its bullshit. I'm going to be covering the first seasons of Discovery, Picard, Lower Decks, Prodigy, and Strange New Worlds over the next (sigh) six years. We kicked off yesterday with "The Vulcan Hello": check it out!

No Apologies For The Infinite Radness 1.3.4 - "Walk Idiot Walk" (The Hives)

The joke is that the Hives only ever write one song. They've had some fun with this accusation in the past - Howlin' Pelle Almqvist once told Rolling Stone that the band was like a school of sharks. "Sharks have been the same for billions of years, and they still rule. You have no need for development if you're a shark".

This is both true and funny, but the truth is the original charge never quite stuck in the first place. The Hives certainly have a very simple template, but - as with the various two-tone suits they've sported over the years - there's plenty you can do within simplicity. Sonically they've - well, not matured, obviously, but they've shifted, from snotty garage punk to snotty pop-flecked rock. In terms of their lyrics, meanwhile, it's true that basically every good Hives song is about how they are smart, and someone else is an idiot.

But it matters who the idiot is.

In this case, the Hives set their sights on teachers and politicians, making the case that they're both ultimately the same job - people pretending they want to help, but really just want private fiefdoms where they can talk at people unable to talk back.

I don't know why I decided to be a teacher. I despised much of my time in secondary school, and indeed suffered what could fairly be called a nervous breakdown at age twelve because my maths teacher at the time was so relentlessly unpleasant to me (and everyone else in the class) that I simply couldn't handle it. I've had a lifelong phobia of electronic alarms because I would lie awake every morning, terrified of when the sound would begin and I'd have to get up for school.

Maybe I just wanted to better than her. More likely, I just have a marrow-deep need to break things apart in front of people to show them how they work, and an equally ingrained need to not use my hands. What else was I going to end up doing but teaching a theoretical subject?

"Walk Idiot Walk" came out in the final days of my NQT year (for the uninitiated, this is the year after you finish your training, where you basically find out if you have any chance of being able to do the job long-term). I'd just decided to give the job at least one more year, a few months before the words "at least" got deleted from the plan.

I'm not saying this song influenced that decision, but it was a timely reminder of whose shoulders I was rubbing against. "I'm one of the good ones" isn't just an excuse for remaining a cop. The education system prefers to do its damage over a much longer period, chronic afflictions rather than discrete incidents of assault and murder, but a lot of people still come out the other end at least as injured as they were informed.

And for what? Online lyrics sheets be damned, the line here is "Still you never learn nothing, and nothing is enough". Your school teaches you nothing of value, except by accident. Your teachers are idiots. They're robots, programmed to program you to accept incoherent and petty power moves from gurning bullies at every stage of your life. They tick your name on the register, you tick their name at the ballot box. Just say you're present - nothing else is wanted or required.

Is all that true? No. Not any more than it's true that the Hives have the technological base to declare nuclear war. But here's what it all boils down to: it was fucking true enough.

Within a few months, I'd handed in my resignation. My pupils would have to watch some other idiot chalk up his name on the blackboard.

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People are still Bezzing in the post COVID age. Amazing.

Infinite Diversity, Finite Combinations Volume 1.1

 I done a book.

This Is How I'll Do All Music Reviews From Now On

 (With apologies to Alexei Berrow's apologies to Brian Molko)

It's been seven long years, but hey ‘Lexei Berrow
I’ve finally made my first home-ground show
When I found you in the teenies
All sick riffs and ghost beanies
You’d made meals from each time you ate crow

I turned my friends to converts, I went looking for concerts
But you’d shut shop on cruel ironies
Just those embers left strewn cooled on closed-comments Youtubes
Sharp sadness it hurt just to see

So I respect what you’ve built up with time
Learned structures still stand, planned on land you’ve not self-undermined
That you can just risk feeling fine

And that new JoFo is lit
Tongue further from cheek
Sun on the peaks, lights in the deep
More beauteous than bleak
In King’s Heath

Friday 40K: End Of The Beginning

Forgot to turn the lightbox on for these ones, but hey: grim darkness, innit. Anyway, here's what would once have been a complete Intercessor Squad, representing the long-awaited completion of Conquest Issue #1's miniatures. Totally useless these days, of course, but it's not like I've had any chance to play 10th Edition anyway.

On to the next thing, anyway. If I very hard, I might have the Plague Marines from Issue #2 finished by Christmas, at which point every 40K miniature that was on my painting desk when I moved back up North three years ago will be done. DARE TO DREAM.

 

Held Steady

So, back in 2022, The Hold Steady - one of my all-time favourite bands - announced they and their people were putting a book together, and were looking for submissions from fans. Stories about what the band means to you, the effect they've had on your life, that sort of thing.

I submitted a piece, and never heard back. Looking through the book itself, I can see why it didn't get through - there's a broadly similar but much more narratively satisfying tale there, so fair enough.

Still, now that the hypothetical event in the piece has actually come to pass, and I no longer need to worry about my then-girlfriend, now-fiancée reading it and learning of Forbidden Knowledge, I thought it might be nice to get it out into the world.

I fell for a girl and The Hold Steady at essentially the same time. I’d bought Boys And Girls in America blind, and span it up driving home after one of our first dates. Everything clicked. Sure, this boy and girl happened to live in North-East England, but that’s the thing about the whole Hold Steady deal. The details are crucial, but they’re not a barrier to entry.

The first time we danced, it was to “Sequestered in Memphis”. We still barely knew each other’s rhythms, each other’s bodies. It didn’t matter. Hell, maybe it helped. We were awkward, and we were incandescent. Stumbling but still in it, by mutual consent. Later, I told her what the song was about, but that didn’t matter either. For all that I’d at least rent out my soul to write like Craig Finn, the moment transcended anything so restrictive as the story he happened to be spinning.

But that’s the point, isn’t it? The Unified Scene operates according to very simple rules. Yes, the lyrics tend to the tragic, just as the tracks lean to the loud. But what they deliver is joy. And more than joy: connection. The actual specifics are incidental. Not because they matter; they very clearly do. It’s just that something else matters much more. The details are crucial, but not a barrier. The policy is open door.

The girl and I are still together, 622 weekends and four Weekenders later. Every year, we head for London (or the internet), and wait for the band to break into a certain song. When they do, we light up, and we dance together again.

One day soon, I’m going to make more one connection. I’m going to propose. The first question, obviously, will be “Will you marry me?”. The next will be “Can ‘Sequestered In Memphis’ be our second first dance?”.

I’m pretty sure she’ll say “yes” to both. Maybe I’m counting my chickens. But hey. I gotta stay positive.

No Apologies For The Infinite Radness 1.3.3 - "Trouble Breathing" (Alkaline Trio)

Get used to these guys.

I started with A3's third album, and worked my way backwards. The original Trio trio, as it were. I picked up their debut album from a cramped record shop off of Waverley Steps, on what I think was my first visit to Edinburgh.

Edinburgh is my favourite city, but still: this proved the best part of the trip.

We've got plenty of time to talk about what makes the Trio special, but we might as well start with a summary: they're where the self-aware morbidity of the Cure crashes against the gleeful refusal to be serious that characterises the SoCal punk scene. The result is a mission statement that's staggering in its simple accuracy: depression, addiction and mortality are, above everything else, just astonishingly fucking ridiculous.

Like every hedgehog band, Trio would later struggle to figure out how to write the second line of their manifesto. That's some way ahead of us, though. "Trouble Breathing" isn't just the best song from their debut, it's the best signpost. A miserable guy meets someone much more miserable than he is, and is equal parts fascinated, concerned, and just plain amused at what weapon's-grade Goth bleakness can look like. I wrote out my version of their guiding principle above, but they give it to us themselves here, perfect right out of the gate. "It's one or another/between the rope and the bottle". Self-medication is still medication, given the definition includes the things that stop you from being dead. They then immediately follow that up with a jet-black pun, though: "I can tell you're having trouble breathing". You have to laugh, or else you'll cry, and the alcohol abuse hasn't left you all that much moisture to work with. 

(There's also the amazing couplet "Look at all those stars/look at how goddamn ugly the stars are", a lyric I adored so much I stole it for a story I was writing, only for that to be the pull quote our uni fanzine used when they published it. AWKWARD.)

The fact all this talk of strangulation and breathlessness is accompanied by Matt Skiba pulling at his guitar strings like he's fixing to employ one as a garrote is just the poisoned icing on the incinerated cake. A lot of Trio songs are quite simple in structure, but when the mood takes him Skiba can put together some pretty sweet guitar parts for his sour stories. This is one of those times; a sweeping array of shifting ideas your average just-starting-out punk band might struggle to match over half an album.

It's miserable punk-pop perfection, in other words; a triumphant take on the ways it all can fail.

Good mourning, lads. We'll see you again real soon.

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