Rancid "let's go"

In 1994 I caught  #rancid perform at Mr.Goodbar on Elmwood avenue near Buffalo State College. The bar didn't host many shows but I remember the band playing on the floor upstairs and it was a wild show. Thing is, every time I hear this album I think of that show at that venue but it conjures a memory of that bar from a different night. In '94 I was twenty-two years old and still green at legal drinking. I don't remember why we used to haunt Goodbar, it definitely wasn't my favorite place. Sure, it was a scummy dive but it felt like a college scummy dive (I preferred dives that had an alcoholic in residency and less grunge girls). I had been drinking with the guys in my punk band one night at this bar and we had gotten pretty hammered so we spilled outside to the dollar-a-slice pizza place next door. After grabbing the food we were suprised to see a couch on the curb. While obviously set out for trash it made for a perfect pizza-scarfing people watching spot. One of us walked up to the We Never Close store (not me) a block away and bought a six-pack and we all got a second slice and lounged on our trash throne laughing and generally misbehaving. It was at this point some douchebag rolls up in a red convertible sports car with a dolled up woman riding shotgun. They parked in front of our discarded sofa. The two of them sneered and as they exited their vehicle remarked condescendingly that they could see it was "trash night". A little stunned we watched them stroll up the street to the jock-bar on that strip. The moment the door to that bar closed behind them we all simultaneously threw our pizza and poured our beer into the car. We roared with laughter and sat around for a while waiting for the couple to return to their soggy vehicle, but as I remember it we were pretty drunk and got bored and stumbled off talking about the Rancid show we saw there previously.

King Crimson "red"

The third compact disc that has really stuck with me is "red" by #kingcrimson . It's no secret I am a huge Rush fan, but now that their catalog is finite I have started wondering if there was music in that vein that would appeal to me in the same way. I've tried mining prog "essential records" lists and while I have always liked Yes and Pink Floyd those lists sent me down dead ends of minstrel sounding fluff. I even purchased king crimson's widely lauded debut. Didn't do a thing for me. So I resigned myself to my narrow progressive rock scope. Sometimes seeing a band live will alter the sound of their releases for me. I can gain new angles of reference and perspective on the music. Sometimes this happens when a song is in a movie soundtrack. The material's placement to augment a mood can in turn really change how I hear that song. The awesome psychedelic revenge/horror movie "Mandy" opens with the song "starless" from this album. The creepy artistic vibe of the scene/movie created a very cool music-video for the song. Had I heard the song before seeing the movie I'm not sure I would've picked up on the whole weird/menacing vibe of the whole album. I've been playing this disc daily on the morning drive to take my youngest son to school (until he had had enough and started demanding the "nightmare before christmas" soundtrack) and I started contemplating if I was imprinting a disposition favorable to complicated time signatures in music. When my interest in this cd starts to wane I will try to revisit the other prog discs I have amassed, maybe this release will shed new perspective on those. 

American Football "3"

I listen to alot of music. I listen to alot of kinds of music. My guilt is that I buy tons of music that I will never be intimately invested in (there isn't mathematically enough time for me to hear them all). CDs can be kind of like a drug. You are always hunting for the next fix that changes the landscape for you. It had been a couple of years since I bought music that I couldn't stop listening to; a CD that made me neglect all the other plastic treasures on my wall. In the past few weeks I have found three. It feels like a huge relief to have found some pivotal soundtracks to this time of my life. Typing that I guess it sounds kind of self-absorbed, and it makes me realize that my cd collection is me attempting to score the soundtrack of my life. And make it sound cool like a Wes Anderson movie. I've always liked #americanfootball  . Their first album is a midwestern emo benchmark but I hadnt really thought of them in years. I bought this disc after reading a review online and at first listen I was taken aback by the unassailable production of the album. Everything is in the sonic pocket it needs to be in. Then the songs started pulling me in and I became infatuated. I sat in my car in front of the tattoo shop with the lyric book open revisiting the songs. It is a perfect storm of content that appeals to me. I thought the relief I felt at finding a personally special album was remarkable. A hole was filled I didn't know was there. It's that sort of satiation that strings me along on my music collecting. The relief in finding an album I can live in for a while that stems the search. Thank you American Football!

Pedro the Lion "phoenix"

The second album that has really resonated with me is #pedrothelion  new disc "phoenix". I have been an avid fan of the band for twenty years and when I heard David Bazan was putting the band back together after a 15 year hiatus I was skeptical. I havent really loved his prolific solo output but I took a chance on the moniker and it's another cd that strikes a real chord with me. It's still sad stuff, but now it's steeped in the kind of nostalgic melancholy that someone in their late forties can really sink into. Every once in a while if I'm in the areas I grew up in I will drive past old homes and haunts from when i was a kid. Most of those neighborhoods have drastically changed but I still see ghosts of my life there: I helped plant a pine tree that now towers above the two story duplex we lived in, my childhood school bus stop looks it was cryogenically preserved (I got off my motorcycle and i swear the texture of the rust on the stop sign was the same, like ancient braille). I am amazed at the distances I traveled on my bmx bike. At the time I never thought of the journeys, only the destinations. I wish i could calculate the amount of miles i peddled. The yard line markers we spray painted on our street for touch football games are long paved over but I could still see the tree that landmarked the southern endzone.i remember when an errant pass or kick would touch a draped power line we would all pause before touching the ball because we were afraid of being electrocuted by the now charged pigskin. That these songs can conjure these memories are a true testament to the writing and the universal consensus that childhood is all too brief. Damn fine cd.