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.

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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.

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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 Usually this is a sign that the service has loaded a newer version of the album to select.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.

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Heart was the band that broke the glass ceiling and brought women-fronted hard rock to the masses. By 1985, they had expanded beyond just pummeling riffage and Renaissance Fair folk that betrayed their love for Led Zeppelin. They didn’t completely eschew the hard stuff, but they had synths and they were going to use them. “These Dreams” was the hit from Heart’s self-titled LP, which proved to be a sort-of comeback for the band.

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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.

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Memoryhouse consists of Canadians Evan Abeele and Denise Nouvion. The band had a minor hit with their piano-driven live cover of My Bloody Valentine’s “When You Sleep” for Yours Truly in 2011. They capitalized on their success with that cover and the well-regarded EP, The Years, by signing to indie heavyweight Sub Pop Records. When their follow-up full length, Slideshow Effect didn’t garner as much attention, the band unceremoniously parted ways with their label and went out on their own.

The next LP was a labor of love called Soft Hate which brought some more uptempo songs to what had previously been a mostly slowcore catalogue. Despite having some of their most accessible songs, Soft Hate didn’t generate the kind of buzz the band had experienced at their outset.

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Tortoise - I Set My Face to the Hillside (YouTube)

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Last year, I bought TNT by Tortoise on CD from a Discogs seller.¹ I should tell you, this sort of activity is as sure a sign of my devotion to a particular album as any. After all, I’ve got access to high-quality digital copies of albums like this through streaming. I don’t need to seek them out on an online marketplace, where, let’s face it, you don’t always know the quality of the merchandise.²

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The last few days have brought with them some serious nineties nostalgia. So it’s fitting that Weezer released a video for their new single, “We Might As Well Be Strangers.” The song represents a return to the form for the prolific but not always consistent band. Perhaps the best part of the song and the video is the inclusion of guest Karly Hartzman of Wednesday. Hartzman brings her punk rock sneer and pout to the breakup song.

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With Life in Small Spaces, the upcoming album from Black Marble, the project’s creator, Chris Stewart, taps into one of my semi-obsessions. The album’s description on its Bandcamp page has further details on the clue we are given with the album title.

It is an invitation to accept and consciously agree to a more minimal lifestyle for the sake of creative expression and freedom, and to never need to compromise your values for the tempting illusion of success.

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I’ve been on a post-punk x new wave kind of kick the last several days, after I learned Black Marble (who I blogged about last year) are going to be playing nearby in September. The algorithm overlords recommended Castlebeat to me after the end of a listening sesh of “Bigger Than Life.” I hadn’t listened to Castlebeat in a few years, but remembered them from this fan video using footage from the best movie ever to take place in a Target big box store — Career Opportunities.

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