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.

B side

D CDs #470: And Could He Give Us More?

I know what you're thinking. Finally an ill-informed white boy dares to discuss a hip-hop revolution.

Wikipedia tells me LL Cool J's Radio represents the vanguard of the shift in dominance from old school hip-hop to new school, a fact I relate both to introduce what I want to talk about, and by way of warning the reader I know so little about hip-hop that I'm reduced to reading Wikipedia.

With my ignorance fully admitted, then, the thesis statement: Radio was the sound of the future. 

Even in so banal a position, I run into problems. Yes, it was astonishing, having listened to this, to learn it was released as early as 1985. But what does that actually mean? What I want to be true is that this represents how forward-thinking Radio is, that it encapsulated the sound of the early nineties almost a decade ahead of time. What I fear is true is that all I've picked up on is time-lag; the inevitable dissemination delay between block parties in Brooklyn, and the mix tapes of suburban North East England. 

When we get down to brass tacks and golden tracks, though, that's just noodling on how much Cool J (along with DJ Cut Creator and Rick Rubin) had one eye on the future, while the other focussed on the charts and communiques he used to conquer hip-hop. What matters is the victory.

There's perhaps some irony in the fact Cool J became the genre's emperor through democratising music. By showing you anyone could do it, he ensured everyone would do it, and some of them better than he did (I'll toss out here an entirely unsourced and uninformed opinion that this is why Charlie Juliet never hit so hard with an LP again). Radio is so minimalist it feels weird describing it with so long a word as "minimalist". It's just a dude with a microphone, a drum machine, and the occasional sample, clipped so short and tight they land like lightning strikes amid the storm of percussion. The pressure is fully on Cool J to be enough almost on his own, which he embraces in a statement of intent far more powerful then any number of balls-out braggadocio broadside ever could. Maybe that's why he gets the inevitable boast-track out of the way immediately, so he can move on to better things.

And those better things are genuinely great. It's absolutely the case that you just need to hand this guy a microphone and a tight beat and he can bring it. It's really hard to make something look this easy. Especially when you also make it funny. "You Can't Dance" (dips into ableist language aside) and "That's A Lie" in particular are notable for brilliantly tearing chunks out their targets, and doing so without ever reaching for a word you couldn't say in a Saturday morning cartoon. "Dear Yvette" is almost as fun, the admittedly uncomfortable sexual politics of its slut-shaming slightly sweetened by Cool J's own tales of heterosexual entanglement being oddly sweet in their hopeless romanticism.

If there's a problem here, it's in the timing. Assembling a meal with the smallest number of ingredients doesn't just force you to get everything you're adding absolutely right, it means no matter how well you prepare the food, people won't want to each all that much of it. Just about every track here starts brilliantly, and just about every track ends a verse after you want it to.  Sure, it's genuinely amazing that this formula works so repeatedly ten times in a row (we'll ignore "El Shabaz" here, for all that making a mid-disc palette cleanser the filthiest dish on offer is pretty fun). But I don't care how sick your rhymes are, sooner or later I'm going to stop caring how much you hate a guy whose dancing you dislike.

But then what am I recommending instead? Messing with an almost perfect formula? Adding more tracks for which, if they existed at all, there was presumably a good reason why they got left off originally? About the only advice I could offer, which stopped being timely forty years ago and never started being useful, was that these are two of the best EPs ever written, which maybe didn't need combining into a format where their genius is slightly blunted.

Still, even if I'm right (and ifs don't get much bigger), that wouldn't necessarily translate into Radio scoring a bigger win. And really, how much more total did its triumph need to be?

Eight tentacles.

Wee Jock

Wee Jock was a dog that could whistle 

And track legs like a heat-seeking missile 

So a ref he became 

Until he ruined a game 

Pissing on strikers while at Partick Thistle

Friday Dreadfleet: Bonesheads

Did me a Bone Hydra.