One of my favorite bands in the early 90s was Nothing Painted Blue, an indie rocker’s indie rock band. Fronted by the hyperliterate Franklin Bruno, Nothing Painted Blue had a clear advantage in the lyrics department. Bruno could be clever, erudite, and wry. Lyrics like, “you say you’ll pray for my soul, you’re more like Senator Dole,” from the song “Vengeful as Hell,” sung in Bruno’s matter-of-fact voice, still makes me chuckle.
As someone born in the mid-seventies, I almost entered this world with a predisposition to like Sylvie, the project of Ben Schwab (Golden Daze, Drugdealer). The band was inspired by finding tape reels recorded by Schwab’s father John and his band Mad Anthony in a barn in 1975.
My absolute favorite record for the transition from late summer to early fall is Yo La Tengo’s I Can Hear The Heart Beating As One. The affinity has to do with more than just the fact that there is an (excellent) song called “Autumn Sweater” on the album, but that surely doesn’t hurt. The guitars crackle like stepping on dead fallen leaves. There’s a whole section of this 2xLP where it sounds just like the cooling down on a hot summer night (complete with crickets chirping). You can almost see the lightning bugs flickering on and off.
I’ve written about my struggles with collecting vinyl. My basic problem has been with surface noise, enough of which can spoil the music listening experience. It has been a bit of an obsession at times to try and minimize that and get to the analog goodness that the format can offer.
Isaac Greene points out what Dolly Parton and Mr. Rogers had in common.
Though her life was certainly more glamorous than Mr. Rogers’s, Dolly Parton demonstrated the same ability to pay attention to those around here. There are so many stories of her kindness to studio crews, cameramen, and particularly musicians. She always had time to speak with everyone and see them where they were. Like Mr. Rogers, she always remembered her helpers. When Porter Wagner fell on hard times later in life, Dolly purchased the rights to his back catalogue and gave them to him as a gift. He had taken advantage of her in a vulnerable moment in her early career, but she chose to remember that he had gotten her started in show business and taught her to succeed.
Are you ready for… Death Cab For Cutie’s 5th best album? Rather than the typical response that their new record — I Built You A Tower — was their best or best since (insert highly praised past release), when DCFC’s Ben Gibbard was asked to rank their albums, he put their latest in 5th place. Of course, this surprised, and I’m sure greatly displeased, their publicist.
The latest casualty of the streaming wars is The Bird and the Bee’s 2015 album Recreational Love, which unceremoniously disappeared from Qobuz sometime recently. The album still shows up, but lists all the tracks as “unavailable.” Usually this is a sign that the service has loaded a newer version of the album to select. Not so in this case.
Music by The Bird and the Bee can sometimes be hard to find. The band followed up their first volume of Interpreting the Masters, an album of Hall & Oates covers, with a volume of Van Halen covers. The first is readily available, the second, almost impossible to hear on any format other than used vinyl. All the album’s listed on the merch site that the band links to are sold out. When there are so many music services out there, it seems careless not to make your albums available somewhere digitally.
Designer Jon Hicks’ obsession with music apps left him with a problem — he couldn’t find any that met all his needs. So, like many others in the age of LLMs, he built his own.
Hicks calls his app Jacket, and it’s easy to understand why when you see all the references to physical media. Giant artwork, extensive liner notes integration and perhaps most surprising and impressive, spines.
The spines harken back to Apple’s long-lost Coverflow view in iTunes.
Reviews of Dinosaur Jr.’s Green Mind don’t always focus on what a shift it was for the band. For the first time, it was J. Mascis’ unadulterated vision, updated to fit perfectly with the alternative scene that was strengthening in the early nineties. However, nothing about it presaged the success of Nirvana’s Nevermind, bringing sludge rock to the mainstream. It was at once denser than anything the band had done, but also more pastoral. On the lead single, “The Wagon,” The meandering guitar lines on the verses hint at straying through open fields on some rural route somewhere. It was no doubt this turn that helped Mascis get the role of soundtracking and appearing in 1992’s coming of age drama Gas Food Lodging.