Week 41

Filistine – Dirty Bomb

Music seems to link to memories more than other arts. I seem to link music with the person or place I first encountered it pretty heavily.  Case in point, Filistine’s album Dirty Bomb links to a classmate / roommate I had when I was doing my master’s. What’s particularly funny is the sort of antagonistic relationship I had with this guy. I don’t think he was a bad guy, but we didn’t see eye to eye on most anything. Some five years after I graduated, he actually reached out to see how I was doing.

He was seemingly obsessed with just two songs from this album, and would play them almost ritualistically before going out on weekend nights. Those tracks buried themselves pretty deep in my brain, to the extent that I still hear them play every now and again, particularly when I am gearing up for a night out. But the curiosity as to what the hell the rest of the album sounded like kind of remained in my head.

So i gave it a whirl. I found a lot of things to like about it, actually. I will always give props to any musician willing to give a  multi-language approach to music the shot it deserves. I found it pretty damn awesome to go from tracks in (what I am assuming is) Arabic, to then go to Spanish a little bit later. I always felt like this is having multiple flavors on your plate. And oddly enough, both seem to work well with what the music is trying to do. That alone was worth the price of this.

Yea, I was half-way expecting this to be a one hit wonder, and I was pretty grateful to find that it wasn’t.

Week 42

The Knife – Deep Cuts

I already did an album by ‘The Knife’ this year. I should really have kicked this down the line to next year. But dammit if 2020 wasn’t a particularly hard year.  By the time I got to October I need something easy to do, just to take the edge of life off.

The previously album I listened to was good, but somehow disappointing. It was just one of those weird things where I knew they had more really good songs, and the album was otherwise muted. I liked the songs on here, but I just kind of wanted more.

So I looked up which album people thought was best and came up with this. It actually felt like something of an arbitrary choice. The Knife is one of those groups that is fanatically loved by their fan base, and no one has a consensus as to why. Everyone seems to like a different album for a different reason.

And yea, the tone of this album was very different from the tone of the previous one I listnened to. This one was… surprisingly upbeat in some places. Not what I expected. Bust still good.

And there actually isn’t much to say about this album. I like it. I am not sure what else goes here. It’s the kind of weirdo music I like.

Week 43

Billie Eilish – When we Sleep, where do we go?

There is a certain amount of ‘keeping up with the kids’ that I am for some dogged reason determined to do. A large part of it might just be not trying to turn into the style of older person my father is – the kind who thinks that the world stopped turning when he turned in his youth. I am desperately trying to keep this at bay as much as possible.

So a year or so ago when a decade younger than me roommate mentioned Billie Eilish I at pretend that I had heard the name before. I also made a note of it so that I could look it up later.

I heard that little miss Eilish scored a bunch of awards at some point. I was too lazy to see if it was with this album. If it was, I am not sure I see the big deal. It’s fine as far as albums go. Hell, it’s even catchy in some places. I may even keep a song or two from it. But I don’t think it was all that revolutionary for me. Maybe I am once again just being old. But I don’t think that is the case.

And I will definitely concede the Billie has talent. You can really hear it from the album. It just wasn’t really my bag.

There was a nice ‘pay off’ moment in the song ‘wish you were gay’. It resonated with me mostly in that this is an utterance I have actually heard before. It came from a girl (about my age) who after months of my ignoring her advances finally took the hint that I just wasn’t interested. One drunken night she flat out told me that she ‘wished I were gay’ – wishing that my lack of interest wasn’t something that she would ultimately blame on herself.

That was hard on both of us. But I can imagine that if my father heard this he would kick someone’s teeth in, and I think such a statement has a generational divide. Thus, I can convince (delude) myself that I am still kind of young.

This album paid off in more than one way. The day after I finished listening to this, the song ‘bad guy’ came up in the weekly zoom based pub quiz I attend. I usually tank the damn pub quiz, so every little point counts.

Week 44

Rage against the Machine – Rage Against the Machine

This turned into a rant that I posted last week. It can be found here.