Posts from March 2019

31
Mar 19

Omargeddon #8: Umbrella Mistress

• FT • Post a comment • 206 views

Back in the day, I had a very fixed idea of what an Omar Rodriguez-Lopez album should sound like. I was still in recovery from the rockism that had clouded and limited my horizons since I was a teenager, and often struggled to identify what it was I actually liked. Did I like or dislike something because of my perceptions of its genre, or did I like or dislike it because I felt I should or shouldn’t based on other people’s opinions? I really did waste a lot of fucking brainspace worrying about this kind of thing.

But I empirically knew what I liked from ORL, and what I liked was what I wanted and therefore expected – nay, demanded – to hear: lots of very loud, very crunchy guitar steeped in trippy effects. If there were vocals, they should be at least mildly distorted and preferably sung in Spanish, even more preferably sung by Cedric Bixler-Zavala. When I didn’t get what I wanted/expected/demanded, I didn’t like it as much, as when I bought Omar Rodriguez Lopez & John Frusciante all prepped to have my ears blown off and was rather let down when it turned out not to be the dueling guitars freak-out that I had assumed it would be.

Although you can never tell which genre of ORL record you’re going to get based on the cover artwork (particularly Sonny Kay’s busily detailed digital collages), it’s fun to try and cobble a message out of them. When I look at the Umbrella Mistress cover, it seems to suggest a hushed shh, don’t tell anyone Omar done a pop record! Because this is hella pop, and I wonder what my reaction to it would have been a decade ago. Would I have liked it with qualifiers, justifying it by defining it as indie/psychedelic/folk/country/power pop, not pop pop? Or would I have rolled my eyes and waited a couple months for something else? I’ll never know, and besides, the past is a foreign country populated by idiots. Even if I had initially dismissed it, this project would have changed that, because Umbrella Mistress is pure perfection.

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19
Mar 19

Album-A-Day #7: To The Finland Station

• New York London Paris Munich • • 1 comment • 513 views

This is a document of my album-a-day listening project. Each entry originally comes out as a tinyletter and subscribers to that get framing content and non-music miscellanea as well as the LP reviews. When a new letter goes out, the previous letter goes up here.

This instalment’s LPs:

#42 Ruusut – Ruusut (2018)
#43 Bbymutha – The Bastard Tape, Vol 1 (2018)
#44 Hama – Houmeissa (2019)
#45 Hauschka – A Different Forest (2019)
#46 Onyx Collective – Lower East Suite Parts 1-3 (2017-8)
#47 Silk Road Assassins – State Of Ruin (2019)
#48 Queen Latifah – All Hail The Queen (1989)

I listen to quite a lot of Finnish music. Why did I start doing this? I couldn’t tell you. I like Finland, certainly, its temperature, its mordancy, its taciturn people, neither overly friendly nor hostile. Perhaps it’s just a Moomin thing. I have come to very much enjoy how the Finnish language – famously knotty to learn – sounds, with all its soft vowels and sibilants. But since I don’t understand any, that might just be habit.

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5
Mar 19

Album-A-Day #6: Twilight Of The Dads

• New York London Paris Munich • • 2 comments • 481 views

This is a document of my album-a-day listening project. Each entry originally comes out as a tinyletter and subscribers to that get framing content and non-music miscellanea as well as the LP reviews. When a new letter goes out, the previous letter goes up here.

This instalment’s LPs:

#35 Sylvester – Step II (1979)
#36 Yusef Lateef – Psychicemotus (1966)
#37 James Ingram – It’s Your Night (1983)
#38 Julie London – Julie Is Her Name (1955)
#39 Isao Tomita – Kosmos (1978)
#40 Various Artists – A Day In The Life: Impressions Of Pepper (2018)
#41 Zadig The Jasp – In The Reflect Of The Sky (2018)

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