Hot Water Music - ‘Alright for Now’ from Caution (2002)
This is always been my least favourite HWM album, but I’ve just been realising what I’ve always known, that it has a lot of really good songs on it. I’d post the opener ‘Remedy’, but the drum sound really annoys me (it suffers a lot from ‘plastic bucket syndrome’ - as does the whole recording to a degree, but mainly this song) - though equally I was almost going to do it just for the line “I strip the gauze for rational self-analysis”. See, Caution is an especially psychological album; as are all their records, but I think it’s at this stage that that element is most accentuated.
My taxonomy of Hot Water Music albums (after the first, Finding the Rhythms, which is self-explanatory) goes as follows:
- Fuel For The Hate Game - foundational
- Forever and Counting - metaphysical
- No Division - communal
- A Flight and A Crash - experimental
- Caution - psychological
- The New What Next - romantic
and incidentally, that’s not following the titles, which shows they are quite good at naming their records in line with apparent lyrical and music themes.
“How was your weekend?” That is the actual line, I had to check the lyrics to make sure. I’m not in the mood to dissect it any further, to be honest I’m not sure they would even benefit from such an action, but that plaintive, existential response “I’m alright for now” sums up everything that needs to be summed up.
