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.

Sunny Day Real Estate "how it feels to be something on"

Music is the only thing that makes me contemplate spirituality in the face of my staunch atheism. It's not that a CD makes me ponder the existence of a god, they don't... but music does make me suspect there is a deeper level to the human condition. Music is not an essential element of survival. In fact, I could argue it has no real purpose in our existence, but that's precisely why it perplexes me. It is important to me; my life would be shallow without it. This disc by #sunnydayrealestate  is a pastoral influence on me and has worked it's way into my double-helixes. This disc was released while I was dealing with financial and identity crises in my mid-twenties. I was ripe to be absconded by a cult, and in a way music did just that: gave me attractive responses to big questions. This CD is as charismatic as any guru. It's honey-warm production and it's ascendant complicated musicianship coupled with Jeremy Enigk's nasal angelic croon sounded like a road map out of misery. It made the doldrums of my life suddenly seem like mystic conundrums. It also really made me think about the spirituality of music. I believe up until this point I had thought that gospel music cornered that niche, slowly i began to understand that all these abstract patterns of sound couldn't be appealing to me in a cognant rational way, there was some other elusive explanation. I've still never really come to any conclusion to this that nestles comfortably with my pragmatic atheism. I have, however, become more comfortable with the transcendent feeling music invokes. Giving myself up to how these songs can influence and guide my emotions and thoughts. I decided to just drink the kool-aid.

Suicidal Tendencies "join the army"

My sophomore year in high school I decided to take up skateboarding. My very first skateboard was a plastic blue "banana" board and I would do circles in my garage and driveway. Around and around clockwise and then counterclockwise until i felt ready to try the street. Having asked the guys at the pizzeria where i worked what kind if skateboard i should get they gifted me some giant no-name deck and invited me to tag along with them around town. I had seen photos of Metallica and Anthrax with boards and my newfound interest in crossover thrash was deeply steeped in skate culture so in hindsight skateboarding seemed inevitable. This #suicidaltendencies album came out that year and I had seen it's advertisements in both metal magazines I would shoplift and the Thrasher magazines the dudes would show up to work with. I was really excited about ST's aesthetic before I heard a note: the pentagram adorned skateboards and the bandanas worn low over their eyes. It was exotic and cool. I reappropriated some white dress shirts which were stashed in my dresser and drew skulls and goats on the backs of them with permanant marker emulating the photos in the ads I had seen. I took one of my baseball caps and painted "suicidal" under the brim. It totally freaked my mom out and I totally loved it. I played the crap out of this album and would sing "possessed to skate" to myself as I frantically pushed to keep up with my buddies. While I never got good at skateboarding. I was serviceable and could keep up and participate but never really excelled. My friends were awesome and didn't make fun of me, it was our culture not a competitive sport. I would make marker covered dress shirts for them as a token of my appreciation of acceptance. Though geography and time have seperated us we are all still friends today. Shared experiences and shared music are some pretty powerful bonds.

Drive Like Jehu "s/t"

Home of the Hits closing is one of the biggest losses in my life. That statement may sound absurd to anyone who is not a passionate, obsessive music fan. That record store was my church, it was my cultural hub. It was where the magical mysteries of music touched the earth. I miss it's smell, I miss the creaky floor, I miss the rows of incredibly provocative band t-shirts on the walls, I miss the layers of flyers on the bulletin board next to the door and I miss the pastors who worked there. To name them "pastors" is no stretch, they sold me salvation, they offered me guidance and mentoring and I felt really weird running into them in public away from the holy building. As I ebbed and flowed through my musical taste the guys working there paid attention to my purchases and often made suggestions to guide me to new CDs. Sometimes this guidance was fruitless and sometimes they were magical seers of binary sound. I can vividly remember holding this disc and Parasites "punch lines" and musing aloud that I could only afford one. The record store dude walked up and snatched the Parasites CD out of my hand and walked it back to the "P" section and muttered "you're welcome". So I went home with this #drivelikejehu  disc. It's a true watershed moment in music for me. Chaotic, percussive, melodic and interesting. It's a fantastic fucking album and one I believe is essential to anyone who has ventured into music beyond passive radio. My clergy had come through for me and had shown me the light. Fuck, I miss that place so much. Oh and I went back and bought that Parasites disc as soon as I had the money