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.

B side