added to my library yesterday:
Julie Feeney - Pages
Valerie Francis - Slow Dynamo
Rancid - Let The Dominoes Fall
basically three new CDs I bought last week. the first two are Irish female singer-songwriters, of a sort, a genre which in its more woolly-jumpered and male kind was nearly the death of Irish music in the early 00’s (the film Once with Glen Hansard as the sting in the tail of that particular chapter). However, some really interesting and more experimental music by solo artists has emerged since then. Julie Feeney uses a small orchestra and scores, conducts and then sings over it. The album by Valerie Francis (from whence the ‘Punches’ video comes) I mainly bought because it was produced by the same guy who did Si Schroeder’s Coping Mechanisms, a personal favourite of mine. I think there are some definite similarites in feel, but the album is interesting enough in itself, very textured and quiet.
the last is of course the current album by the Epitaph, and latterly Hellcat, stalwarts. I’m not quite sure what to make of it - on one level it seems a big drop from the immediate impact of Indestructible, which showed that an aging band could still land some solid punches (a la the Ramones Too Tough To Die, which it explicitly referenced), but on another it is very comfortable in itself, content to mellow out a good deal. interestingly, it contains a lot of keyboards by Vic Ruggiero of the Slackers. I think some adaptation of Geek Down’s ‘easycore’ concept needs to be involved… perhaps “goodeasycore”, if it doesn’t seem too Newspeak.
and to make space, I removed:
Nirvana - Nevermind
now, I grew up on Nevermind as much as anybody who went to school in the 90s, and I still think it’s a great album, but I don’t feel like listening to it particularly often. not so much because it’s overplayed, but because the sound doesn’t quite gel with me - on the one hand, too nostalgic, and on the other, too divergent from the other routes of alternative music/post-hardcore that I’ve explored since. in fact, on the strength of the music and the performance, my favourite Nirvana disc has been for some time their Unplugged CD.
but what proved catalytic was the grunge-y meanderings of Dinosaur Jr.’s latest, and a possible way to describe the band - specifically, Beyond - to a neophyte: “the thinking man’s Nirvana”. instantly, I think that’s unfair, as I’m not anti-Nirvana to any great degree, and I think they produced some really important and honest music, while I can’t guarantee that Dino Jr. produce many great cogitations in me either. however, their sound is more layered, more subtle, and most significantly, hasn’t been so blatantly twisted into 15 years of shallow alt-rock as have Nirvana. what’s more, I find the band broadly agree with me, as in this A.V. Club interview from 2005 where Lou Barlow specifically deconstructs Nevermind in comparison to Bug and You’re Living All Over Me (right about down at the end).
