Mixtape 001
Put THIS on
Hello and good morning. I’ve continued to be a bit more excited about discovering movies than discovering music lately. I found myself putting together a playlist earlier this week of some soundtrack and sort of movie-adjacent music. (Or maybe it’s just movie-adjacent in my head.) I’ve been really into some of these artifacts from whatever the hell was going on from the end of the eighties through 1992 or so when everyone seemed to think the world was going to end with the millennium and nihilism was kind of “in”. It feels sort of similar to where we’re at now, maybe. Who’s to say, I wasn’t there.
But anyway that’s a long way of saying that this is just some music I’m into at the moment, for whatever reason. Check it out:
Here’s one from that mysterious Boston band again, the Brothers Kendall. Someday maybe I’ll figure out who they are, or were. “When’d you grow up / And get like this / You throw your ideals out the window.” Everything in the lyrics is cynical, but taken as a whole with the music it kind of plays as innocence.
I continue to find these old Saltine recordings to be absolutely perfect, in a barely-held-together sort of way. Oftentimes the best stuff is barely held together.
I embarrassingly have never really listened to Sonic Youth. These first four are all Hartley soundtrack picks; this one’s in Simple Men. I think it’s fantastic. The energy when it gets to the spoken word bit is unbelievable.
Is this a good song? I don’t know. But it makes me happy to listen to. As I’ve written about before at some point, I really love a good musical moment in a movie that isn’t a musical, and this one in Surviving Desire is one of the best I’ve seen.
This is a good song. What a weirdly low register to sing it in. But it kind of makes it. Starts out low and miserable and goes downhill from there!
I’ve been getting into this song again recently. It’s one of Scott Miller’s better ones, with some writing that kills me: the bit with “blowing my hair and tearing my mind” in particular. “Make believe and pretend / I remember when they served the same end”—that’s right.
Not the sort of thing I usually am into but man, that feeling when the synths come in…
Hoooorses!
I am still getting into Felt. I have trouble liking any of the songs individually too much. Sometimes I wonder if they’re better without the singing. But in the right mood…
You could easily persuade me with this song that so-called “indie rock” was as good as it ever got when it technically began, in the 80s. And for a song that sounds scrappy, the musicianship is pretty strong. I’m not sure many bands nowadays could pull off this strumming/rolling snare pocket thing without sounding like a mess. And then it really takes off in that middle eight towards the end.
One of the best sounding recordings you can put on a pair of speakers in my opinion (not so with modern headphones, maybe). Some of the early 00s stuff is like that. I don’t know what it is exactly but put it on in the car or the kitchen and the drum sound is unbelievable.
It’s a hell of a thing to do, stopping the rock band like that to … rap? about sharks and lifeboats. But he’s right, you know—“stay in your lifeboats, people / it’s murder out there” And when the band comes back in? How is he getting away with this?