retro listening #61-70

[fennel]

All the albums I owned in high school, relistened-to in roughly the order I got them. We pick up in the middle of my freshman year.
61. They Might Be Giants - Flood

Comments

[mrwaggish]

I had the TrouserPress record guide pretty early on, which steered me away from Anything. I seem to recall it being incredibly damning (ha ha), something like, "It's hard to imagine who could find this album pleasurable." Aaaand...I was pretty close! "Despite the Damned's proven ability to alternately rock gothic and play nice, there's no audible point to the music; it's hard to imagine who would find this LP pleasurable."

The Husker Du thing is interesting. It was the umlauts more than anything that made me think they might be macho heavy metal cock rock (something anathema to me then and now). But I got Workbook first and that seemed to clear him of charges. Warehouse was the first Husker album I got and I was immediately turned off by the thinness of the sound. I liked Mould's songs less than those on Workbook and Black Sheets of Rain, while my favorites were all Hart's: She Floated Away, Tell You Why Tomorrow, Actual Condition. Mould sounded to me far the more aggre]ssive and masculine, though even with him there was something (maybe just the emo-laden lyrics) that distanced him from Roger Plant and Bono. They certainly didn't *look* macho in the pictures, at least. I got Intolerance and Nova Mob's first albums and liked those too. I got Copper Blue and thought, "Yay, thick production!" On the other hand, I think Black Sheets of Rain, the track itself, is one of his finest moments. So I'm pretty odd on these things, it seems. Oh, and one of my favorite Mould vocals is on Throwing Muses' Dio, where he verges on self-parody, but it really works for the song. Red Heaven is still a fantastic album.

I shied away from Manscape for a long time. Lights/Craftsman is an amazing track, I think (and Gotobed agrees with me!), but the rest defies memory. Something strange happens in Lights/Craftsman where I think Newman tries to sing like Lewis and vice versa. Or maybe they actually are blended together digitally, but I don't think so.

Somehow I knew what were the bonus tracks for Life's Too Good. I don't think they were marked as such, but two tracks were marked as remixes and the "(Icelandic)" tracks also screamed "bonus" to me. I liked Einar's vocals too....I think Traitor is my favorite track on the album, because Bjork's vocals work best as a background layer.

Autumn Sea is my favorite track on Queen Elvis. I'm a sucker for those Beatle arpeggios, I guess, and I really do like the monologue in the middle of it.

[fennel]

If you haven't tried listening to the UK tracklist/sequence for Manscape (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manscape), it's definitely worth doing it once. Not starting with two tracks of filler makes the whole thing less demoralizing.

(Though now that there are other full-fledged Wire studio albums I think aren't exciting, it's less uncomfortable to have mixed feelings about Manscape and The First Letter.)

I love Robyn's monologues, but I think they tend to make the songs they're attached to feel flimsy. (See also the "Clint" intro to "One Long Pair of Eyes".)