Recently it became time to start listening to the Pixies again.1For the record, I categorically reject this revisionist notion that we must always say just “Pixies” without the “the.”Today I pulled this off the shelf:
This is the only piece of Pixies vinyl I own. (Back in the day, I thriftily got both Surfer Rosa and Doolittle on cassette from other people. Then I started buying CDs.) It came out three years before a certain other band put a picture of a baby boy with his willie hanging out on their album cover. Curious, that.
This was a period of transition, after Surfer Rosa made them indie darlings and before Doolittle, their major-label debut. The label for this one was the goth-adjacent 4AD, on which the Pixies sort of fit and sort of didn’t.
This week, as previously mentioned, I’ve been listening to Brian Eno’s Another Green World. This is generally considered one of Eno’s “song” records, though it’s halfway to being an ambient album. In truth it’s a mutant that’s not quite like anything else he or anyone has ever done.
Geeta Dayal’s 33 1/3 book was a good read but at barely 100 pages only scratched the surface. One thing she never talked about was the title, which is an absolutely perfect three-word distillation of the album’s contents. It’s an alien planet to be sure, but a lush and verdant one, so you feel safe there.
You could say the same thing about Discreet Music, which was recorded around the same time. And here I’m talking specifically about the title track, a piece of “automatic music” where Eno set up a couple of slightly-out-of-sync tape loops and let them run. Shortly after starting, he says, “people started knocking on the door, and I was answering the phone and adjusting all this stuff as it ran. I almost made that without listening to it.”
Today I decided that it’s time for me to finally listen to Lulu, the album Lou Reed made with Metallica back in 2011. At the time the buzz on it was so uniformly brutal that I gave it a pass — that being the pre-streaming era, at least for me, I would have had to secure the actual CD, which seemed risky.
In the intervening years I’ve heard some people say it’s not that bad, and a few even claim it’s a lost masterpiece. But I’ve never had the guts to actually tackle it. Then I heard Laurie Anderson’s recent live album, which includes a version of one of the songs using isolated tracks of Lou’s vocal, so now I am Curious.
As with my valiant but doomed tilt at Metal Machine Music, I figure the only way is to write my way through it. The 10 tracks clock in at an intimidating 87 minutes, but it’s a rainy afternoon in Humboldt, so what the hell. As I click the Play button it’s 2:12 PM PDT.
Out of the gate, it’s briskly strummed acoustic guitars. Nothing too scary. And here’s Lou talking about Boris Karloff and… boom! Here comes the noise. It’s getting a bit hairy, but this first song is only a little over 4 minutes, how bad can it be? Sheets of noise now, pounding drums, and someone singing the phrase “smalltown girl” over and over.
We’re fresh off a week in New Orleans, including four days of Jazz Fest, so it seems like a good time to update this thing.
The rara avis here is the Meters, who have been on my target list for decades. It does come with an asterisk, as with the passing of Art Neville, I still haven’t seen and never will see the four original Meters. In this configuration he was replaced by his son Ivan and brother Cyril, and it was billed as the Meters, so I’m going to count it.
Looking over this I realize that many of these shows are very foggy in my mind, and some are complete blanks. But I’m not going to start paring the list; it’s all in there somewhere.
This week I’ve been listening, for the first time really, to Pink Floyd’s The Final Cut.2Though credited to the Floyd, it’s really a Roger Waters solo album — with guest appearances by Gilmour and Mason, but not Wright, who had been sacked during The Wall — in all but name.It’s not a good album — most of it sounds like what it is: Leftovers from The Wall, which was not itself without filler.
For about half an hour it just drifts along, with Waters’ whining occasionally broken up by atmospheric passages that remind you who you’re listening to. Then, out of nowhere, it suddenly comes to life for four and a half minutes:
Gilmour sounds engaged for the first time on the album, Waters’ snarl finally finds a purpose, and for a little while it’s the glory days again. In fact, I’m hard-pressed to think of another Floyd song that crunches this hard; “Interstellar Overdrive” maybe?
Why couldn’t we have had a whole album of this? Why couldn’t Roger and Dave get along, instead of splitting off into increasingly futile solo careers that served as constant reminders of how much they needed each other? I know, I know; musicians and their egos. It’s the oldest story in the book.
Then The Final Cut, and Pink Floyd, end not with a bang but with a whimper — the resignedly apocalyptic “Two Suns in the Sunset.” Well, shit; nothing lasts forever.
I’ve never had an Aperol spritz as far as I remember, but I’ve been semi-obsessed with this song since I first heard it last week on a playlist of stuff chosen by the New York Times. (That’s right, as 57-year-old man, I sometimes get tips on what’s new and hip on the music scene from a newspaper. Don’t hate.)
This is the next step in a logical sequence from That Chick Angel’s “Margarita Song,” which was song of the year in 2023. Whereas Angel at least demanded multiple margaritas before getting into the heavy stuff, all this girl asks for is one Aperol Spritz and it’s off to the races:
On the one hand, she sounds like she’s having fun, and who am I to judge?
And then my inner dad voice pipes up and says, “Young lady, that’s no way to live your life.”
On the third hand, that kind of boldness is certainly sexy. Then again it all seems very unsanitary. So I’m confused.
The tiebreaker, I guess, is the music, which I find almost maddeningly catchy. It’s sleek and relentless and just grating enough to be really memorable.
On further research I see that the group — the aptly named “deBasement” — is made up of two women, and that makes it OK, right? It’s empowering when they debase themselves, isn’t that what we say? I can’t quite make up my mind… let me hear it again.
