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After several weeks of concocting plans and schedules (and scrapping them the next hour), a new five-year plan and this playlist came together. It’s built mostly around songs from the 2000s-era music-philic teen drama, The O.C. and a couple bands I found through Matador Records compilation that came out in ’97. I doubt that’s the first place I heard this week’s featured artist, but it’s possible.
Yo La Tengo, A Subtly Addicting Band
“In the context of Yo La Tengo, ‘just right’ means the noise ended up being soothing instead of grating, beautiful instead of ugly.”
The author of SPIN’s review of Yo La Tengo’s 2018 release, There’s a Riot Going On, executed a tidy two-fer with that sentence, summing up both the band and the album. He (assuming “Andy” is a he) fleshes that out a little more poetically in the next sentence: “Yo La Tengo have found tenderness and soul in the sound of humming speakers and overloaded amps.”
Hoboken, New Jersey’s Yo La Tengo has out-lasted scores of their contemporaries while never achieving anything approaching mainstream success; their “peak” came when their aptly-named 2009 album, Popular Songs, clawed its way to No. 58 on Billboard’s charts. And yet the band’s two founding members, Ira Kaplan and Georgia Georgia Hubley, persevered through 14 bassists (a detail that always comes up) before bassist James McNew backed into the band and, by general agreement, completed them as an act. McNew’s arrival coincided with the band signing with its long-time label, Matador Records, and creates a very clean B.C./A.D.-style split in its career/catalog. If you’re gazing over Yo La Tengo’s catalog, Painful (1993) is the first album of the band’s long “A.D.” era. Even with Kaplan and Hubley being married almost as long as Yo La Tengo has been around (1984 versus 1987), the band is an entirely collaborative effort. They’ve given “Yo La Tengo” writing credit since 1995’s Electro-Pura and, based on McNew’s description of how they compose, that’s fitting:
“But I had never been in a band where it was like, ‘The next section of the song begins when we decide, when we’re ready.’ It was always, ‘Count to 16 and then change.’ That’s just who Ira and Georgia were, and it’s who I became. It’s a huge part of the way we play music: a real open approach.”
Comments in that SPIN review suggest that same process continued on There’s a Riot Going On, which came from production fun-‘n’-games with “musical odds and ends McNew recorded during jam sessions.”
Yo La Tengo, A Subtly Addicting Band
“In the context of Yo La Tengo, ‘just right’ means the noise ended up being soothing instead of grating, beautiful instead of ugly.”
The author of SPIN’s review of Yo La Tengo’s 2018 release, There’s a Riot Going On, executed a tidy two-fer with that sentence, summing up both the band and the album. He (assuming “Andy” is a he) fleshes that out a little more poetically in the next sentence: “Yo La Tengo have found tenderness and soul in the sound of humming speakers and overloaded amps.”
Hoboken, New Jersey’s Yo La Tengo has out-lasted scores of their contemporaries while never achieving anything approaching mainstream success; their “peak” came when their aptly-named 2009 album, Popular Songs, clawed its way to No. 58 on Billboard’s charts. And yet the band’s two founding members, Ira Kaplan and Georgia Georgia Hubley, persevered through 14 bassists (a detail that always comes up) before bassist James McNew backed into the band and, by general agreement, completed them as an act. McNew’s arrival coincided with the band signing with its long-time label, Matador Records, and creates a very clean B.C./A.D.-style split in its career/catalog. If you’re gazing over Yo La Tengo’s catalog, Painful (1993) is the first album of the band’s long “A.D.” era. Even with Kaplan and Hubley being married almost as long as Yo La Tengo has been around (1984 versus 1987), the band is an entirely collaborative effort. They’ve given “Yo La Tengo” writing credit since 1995’s Electro-Pura and, based on McNew’s description of how they compose, that’s fitting:
“But I had never been in a band where it was like, ‘The next section of the song begins when we decide, when we’re ready.’ It was always, ‘Count to 16 and then change.’ That’s just who Ira and Georgia were, and it’s who I became. It’s a huge part of the way we play music: a real open approach.”
Comments in that SPIN review suggest that same process continued on There’s a Riot Going On, which came from production fun-‘n’-games with “musical odds and ends McNew recorded during jam sessions.”
35 years, 15 studio albums, a handful of film soundtracks (many of them tossed together on 2008’s We Shoot, They Score), and a reputation as the band that covers everything (compiled on Yo La Tengo Is Murdering the Classics), puts dissecting the totality of Yo La Tengo’s several miles out of the question. Moreover, and because (don’t look at me!) I jumped into them blind, I haven’t listened to half of their albums, some pivotal ones among them (e.g., Painful or, checked into the transition between Ride the Tiger (1986 debut) and New Wave Hot Dogs (1987)). On the plus side, that blind jump landed me on one of the most critically-acclaimed albums by a band known as “a critic’s band,” I Can Hear the Heart Beating as One. (The other two I own are And Then Nothing Turned Itself Inside-Out, and Genius + Love = Yo La Tengo.)
Because this project is all about 1) (finally) learning something about the artists I’ve loved down the years, and 2) listening to more of their music, I made a brave attempt to look past those three albums. And that was…somewhat successful, in that “Big Sky” made it onto the playlist (from Ride the Tiger), as did “Here to Fall” (pretty famous tune) and “Periodically Double or Triple” (from Popular Songs). Long-time favorite “Let’s Save Tony Orlando’s House” shows up to rep for And Then Nothing, but you’ll see I Can Hear’s gravitational pull made manifest with four entries on the playlist: “Moby Octopad,” “Little Honda,” “One PM Again,” and, the song that doubles as my personal associative memory for Yo La Tengo, “Autumn Sweater.”
Expect to see Yo La Tengo songs on future playlists for a while. Circling back to I Can Hear, especially, reconnected me to something I didn’t realize I’d missed. Yo La Tengo is a band that can literally play anything, but one that chooses to play something very specific and, to echo McNew’s comment quoted above, musically omnivorous in a way few bands can match. I tend toward their more up-tempo stuff – and Murdering the Classics is just fun (and they’ve got a wonderful “Blitzkrieg Bop”) – but the one word that always springs to mind when I try to describe them is “restraint.” Songs like “Big Sky” and “Periodically Double or Triple” shows they know how to write a hook, but they’ve produced 30+ years of achingly-careful music, a lot of it built around texture and atmospherics. I don’t love everything they do – i.e., I won’t pretend There’s a Riot Going On didn’t break my attention span – but the critics are right to rave. Yo La Tengo is a genuinely special band (especially for one with a nonsense name).
Before moving on to the rest (who will be more brief), I want to share some resources for assailing the edifice of Yo La Tengo’s ouevre. Vice’s UK office put out a guide for getting into their catalog, while The Guardian (who does great work with music) served up a selection of “greatest hits that no one else is listening to.” (And they top that article with a great headline/punchline from a 2002 Onion piece: “37 Record Store Clerks Feared Dead in Yo La Tengo concert disaster.”) Last but not least, thanks to my fixation with hearing these artists talk, I can pass on a brief, strange interview with Ira Kaplan. It covers a lot of ground, while also hinting at a major truth about Yo La Tengo: they’re happy that people like their music, but they’re mostly in it to entertain themselves.
Moving on, now, to the rest of the bands I rescued from that Matador compilation. And this is by no means exhaustive (e.g., I left Liz Phair, Cat Power and Pavement for future editions).
The Ballad of Railroad Jerk
Wikipedia’s choice of “punk blues” describes Railroad Jerk fairly well and, to offer a translation of my own, I place them in the same musical family as Jon Spencer Blues Explosion. Two New Jersey transplants started the project – one from Minnesota (Marcellus Hall, vocals/guitar), the other from North Carolina (Tony Lee/bass) – and they rode the early-90s Manhattan scene to whatever success they had. They lasted around seven years total – 1989 to “the late 90s” (their fourth and final album, The Third Rail, dropped in 1996) - but it’s hard to fit the other members into a clean time-line. They started with Jez Aspinell on drums (later replaced by Dave Varenka) and Chris Mueller as a second guitarist (later replaced by Alec Stephen), but their best days featured the latter at loosely determinant point.
Because they pre-date the Internet, Hall’s thoughts and reminiscences about his time in an indie rock outfit dominate the discussion. He’s still going too: after forming White Hassle with Varenka (broke up in 2006), Hall continued to play (as of 2018) with Marcellus Hall & The Hostages, but it sounds like he puts food on the table through a series of illustration gigs (kids’ books, but a graphic novel that looks interesting). He dished some well-phrased insights on his genre/era in a 2011 interview with Magnet Magazine:
“We got a publishing deal. We crisscrossed America in battered vans, ate nutritionless food at diners and snuck four people into malodorous motel rooms after paying for two. We went to Japan once and to Europe several times. We enjoyed a brief and inexplicable stardom in Holland for a time.”
Because this project is all about 1) (finally) learning something about the artists I’ve loved down the years, and 2) listening to more of their music, I made a brave attempt to look past those three albums. And that was…somewhat successful, in that “Big Sky” made it onto the playlist (from Ride the Tiger), as did “Here to Fall” (pretty famous tune) and “Periodically Double or Triple” (from Popular Songs). Long-time favorite “Let’s Save Tony Orlando’s House” shows up to rep for And Then Nothing, but you’ll see I Can Hear’s gravitational pull made manifest with four entries on the playlist: “Moby Octopad,” “Little Honda,” “One PM Again,” and, the song that doubles as my personal associative memory for Yo La Tengo, “Autumn Sweater.”
Expect to see Yo La Tengo songs on future playlists for a while. Circling back to I Can Hear, especially, reconnected me to something I didn’t realize I’d missed. Yo La Tengo is a band that can literally play anything, but one that chooses to play something very specific and, to echo McNew’s comment quoted above, musically omnivorous in a way few bands can match. I tend toward their more up-tempo stuff – and Murdering the Classics is just fun (and they’ve got a wonderful “Blitzkrieg Bop”) – but the one word that always springs to mind when I try to describe them is “restraint.” Songs like “Big Sky” and “Periodically Double or Triple” shows they know how to write a hook, but they’ve produced 30+ years of achingly-careful music, a lot of it built around texture and atmospherics. I don’t love everything they do – i.e., I won’t pretend There’s a Riot Going On didn’t break my attention span – but the critics are right to rave. Yo La Tengo is a genuinely special band (especially for one with a nonsense name).
Before moving on to the rest (who will be more brief), I want to share some resources for assailing the edifice of Yo La Tengo’s ouevre. Vice’s UK office put out a guide for getting into their catalog, while The Guardian (who does great work with music) served up a selection of “greatest hits that no one else is listening to.” (And they top that article with a great headline/punchline from a 2002 Onion piece: “37 Record Store Clerks Feared Dead in Yo La Tengo concert disaster.”) Last but not least, thanks to my fixation with hearing these artists talk, I can pass on a brief, strange interview with Ira Kaplan. It covers a lot of ground, while also hinting at a major truth about Yo La Tengo: they’re happy that people like their music, but they’re mostly in it to entertain themselves.
Moving on, now, to the rest of the bands I rescued from that Matador compilation. And this is by no means exhaustive (e.g., I left Liz Phair, Cat Power and Pavement for future editions).
The Ballad of Railroad Jerk
Wikipedia’s choice of “punk blues” describes Railroad Jerk fairly well and, to offer a translation of my own, I place them in the same musical family as Jon Spencer Blues Explosion. Two New Jersey transplants started the project – one from Minnesota (Marcellus Hall, vocals/guitar), the other from North Carolina (Tony Lee/bass) – and they rode the early-90s Manhattan scene to whatever success they had. They lasted around seven years total – 1989 to “the late 90s” (their fourth and final album, The Third Rail, dropped in 1996) - but it’s hard to fit the other members into a clean time-line. They started with Jez Aspinell on drums (later replaced by Dave Varenka) and Chris Mueller as a second guitarist (later replaced by Alec Stephen), but their best days featured the latter at loosely determinant point.
Because they pre-date the Internet, Hall’s thoughts and reminiscences about his time in an indie rock outfit dominate the discussion. He’s still going too: after forming White Hassle with Varenka (broke up in 2006), Hall continued to play (as of 2018) with Marcellus Hall & The Hostages, but it sounds like he puts food on the table through a series of illustration gigs (kids’ books, but a graphic novel that looks interesting). He dished some well-phrased insights on his genre/era in a 2011 interview with Magnet Magazine:
“We got a publishing deal. We crisscrossed America in battered vans, ate nutritionless food at diners and snuck four people into malodorous motel rooms after paying for two. We went to Japan once and to Europe several times. We enjoyed a brief and inexplicable stardom in Holland for a time.”
He’s also duly humble about what Matador did for them (“There were a lot of great bands on Matador, and we benefited from this.”). Apart from the songs that made the playlist – “Another Night at the Bar,” “Natalie,” and two of their most famous songs, “Rollerkoaster” (which featured on Beavis & Butthead) and my long-time musical North Star, “Bang the Drum” - the most compelling thing I can pass on about Railroad Jerk is the existence of a fifth album with the almost magical name, Masterpiecemeal. It was never released but their Wikipedia entry (which reads like a fan’s mash-note) claims that unreleased material came during “the band’s most productive period.” The four songs above give a fair impression of the rest of what you hear on One Track Mind (1995) and The Third Rail. While the comparison to Jon Spencer gets you in the ballpark, Railroad Jerk’s sound tracks with the reason Hall chose the name for the band - “he liked the clack and clang of the two words together” – i.e., it’s just as raw, but fit together in a way that feels forever on the verge of falling apart.
Silkworm, Posterity In Memoriam
Silkworm wrote “Couldn’t You Wait?”, yet another “all-time favorite” from a list of them engorged to the point of being meaningless and yet it still took a streaming service for me to get off my ass and listen to them. That’s doubly-pathetic given that they moved to Seattle from their hometown of Missoula, Montana the same year I did for entirely prosaic reasons (1990/college). Silkworm operated as a three-piece most of the time – first with Tim Midyett, Joel RL Phelps and Andy Cohen, later with Midyett, Cohen and Michael Dahlquist – but they also played for a time as a four-piece with all the same members. Phelps departure in 1994 knocked them back down to a three-piece of Cohen (guitar), Midyett (bass) and Dahlquist (drums), and that coincided with the band’s glory years. That said, Phelps was involved in the 2013 re-release of 1994’s Libertine (he’s interviewed here) - one of the band’s pre-Matador Records albums – but their active years as a band ended in 2005 when a suicidal driver killed Dahlquist and a couple others in Skokie, Illinois (one hell of a story itself).
For a relatively-obscure band, they left a footprint big enough to inspire a full-length documentary named for their most famous song, and some of the biggest names in 1990s indie-rock (e.g., your Albinis, your Malkmuses) gave interviews for it (Albini’s connection is particularly special). The aspect of Silkworm’s music that I most admire – their lyrics (which “Couldn’t You Wait?” brings front and center) – comes up in every article/interview I’ve read on them, whether a Worship Guitars interview that came out around the same time as Blueblood (1998; the notes on “Beyond Repair” get at how they approached lyrics), or an interview with Seth Pomeroy, the Nashville resident who made Couldn’t You Wait? For what it’s worth, that interview piqued my interest in the documentary enough that I’m going to buy/watch it shortly. Pomeroy set out to preserve the memory of something he loved, raising fandom to praiseworthy levels, but he created a record of a very specific era in American music at the same time, one that really could have slipped down the memory hole without him.
The outlet for the latter interview, The Big Takeover, sums up Silkworm’s sensibility neatly enough that I’ll borrow it here: the music they wrote “featured strong examples of its acerbic lyricism and willfully cockeyed mutations of punk, pop and classic rock.” I like “pungent” to describe the few lyrics I know and, when I picked through Blueblood, Lifestyle (2000), and Italian Platinum (2002), it was the short, sharp lyrical hooks that snared me – e.g., (and in the order in which the albums are listed) “Eff,” “Treat the New Guy Right,” and, on the sharpest edge, “I Hope U Don’t’ Survive.”
That’s enough time in the 1990s. Onto the next decade!
I did a feature post under the previously operative five-year plan about the Australian indie rock outfit Youth Group. Knowing they recorded their cover of Alphaville’s “Forever Young” for The O.C., I attempted what might have been my first “concept post.” The O.C. provides plenty of material (seriously, you could kill a couple months listening to every artist), because the show’s creator, Josh Schwarz, “always intended that music be a character on the show.” He tapped Alexandra Patsavas to make it happen, and she responded by creating a magnet for both established and aspiring indie-rock artists of that time. By the show’s second season, they wrote a music venue called The Bait Shop into the story-lines to serve as a setting for bands/artists that Patsavas liked and wanted to promote to come onto the show and perform (e.g., Modest Mouse, The Killers, and The Walkmen). The exposure did wonders for a band like Youth Group and getting a single song on The O.C. could “fetch” $20,000-$30,000 for an artist.
When I made this month’s playlist, I pulled music from one of the several sites that promote “the songs from The O.C.” I decided to stick exclusively with artists I didn’t know – which ruled out, say, Beck (who was offered an entire episode to promote Guero). I also confined the selection to Season 2 to contain the inputs. If that’s up your alley, The O.C. is a gift that keeps giving musically. Here are quick intros to several artists I found – starting with the most obvious one.
Phantom Planet, The Jason Schwartzman Origin Story
Phantom Planet is probably most famous for The O.C.’s theme, “California” and for giving once-drummer/now-actor Jason Schwartzmann his first turn in the spotlight (and if you've ever wanted to see him go all rock-star, that video has you). Alex Greenwald addressed both of those…realities in a 2004 interview with Entertainment Weekly, where he sounds more anxious about the song (they don’t want to be “the other Rembrandts”) than Schwarzmann’s departure. He left at Phantom Planet’s peak, i.e., right after they recorded “California,” but the split occasioned no hard feelings – as Greenwald acknowledges, Schwartzman wanted to act, while he wanted to make music – but Schwartzman did write a song to commemorate the band’s decision to go on hiatus in 2008.
Jeff Conrad replaced Schwartzman on drums (as noted in 2004, he’s not better, just more focused), and Darren Robinson (lead guitar) and Sam Farrar (bass) round up the current line-up. (They had another member named Jacques Brautbar for 2004’s Phantom Planet.) Phantom Planet changed its sound and producer(s) shortly after Schwartzman left, going from Tchad Blake (call it the “California”-era) to a rougher, garage-toned sound. The idea of “evolving” came up in just about everything I read about Phantom Planet and they cite restlessly creative acts like The Beatles and Elvis Costello as inspirations. Greenwald turned a couple nice phrases on this (“We want to have fun with the music. People can hear when you're not having fun. They discover you're bored and you're boring.”), but Farrar, offered a more natural answer on process in a 2008 video interview with Billboard:
“It’s never intentional. You’re just…it’s a summary of what’s around you. What you’re listening to, who you’re hanging out with, what you’re reading. This is what we’ve been…I mean, this record is summarizing our age and what we’ve been listening to.”
Phantom Planet doesn’t have a massive catalog – in terms of studio albums, there’s only Phantom Planet Is Missing (1998), Phantom Planet Was Here (2002, home to “California”), Phantom Planet (2004), and Raise the Dead – so call your own shot on how much and how well they evolved. Personally, I agreed to the point where I zoned out the rest for Raise the Dead. The rougher, garage-toned production gives them a heavier, thicker kick, all the way down to Greenwald’s vocals (i.e., he toned down the whiny). That’s why this month’s playlist includes, “Do the Panic” (the single for Raise the Dead), the surprisingly catchy droner, “Quarantine,” and the anthemic, slurring “Strokes-esque,” “Leader.” They’ve made noises about reuniting since the beginning of 2019, and they’ve got an album in the works. They’ve already released a new single, “Balisong,” which suggests they’re listening to different music, hanging out with different people, reading different books, etc.
Joy Zipper, Stopping Mid-Sentence
“…we've had so many set backs on the business side of things that if we didn't have a firm self belief we probably would have stopped doing it. actually, we never would have stopped, just maybe did it for only ourselves.”
That quote comes out of a (reading between the lines) 2004 interview with the UK’s i really love music and, seeing as their last (and my favorite) album, The Heartlight Set, dropped all the way back in 2005, it’s possible they’ve been doing it for themselves since then. Centered around the duo/married couple Tabitha Tindale and Vincent Cafiso, Joy Zipper hail(ed) from Long Island and, despite having the connections to get called on for tribute cover albums (for The Pixies and The Cure), they’ve had better luck getting exposure for their 60s/70s lightly-psychedelic, harmony-larded sound in the UK. The Independent had a nice description for what they do - “part heat-haze New York and part sunstruck Cali-pop, its bright-eyed, boy-girl harmonies glide over a wash of woozy guitars to hypnotic effect” – but call-backs to The Beach Boys and/or Brian Wilson don’t seem to sell States-side (see Drowned in Sound’s review of American Whip).
To stick up for American aesthetics a little, The Heartlight Set was the only Joy Zipper album that really connected with me, but you also can modify the verb “connected” with “and how” because I spent a lot of time on that album…or at least the first half of it. While I held onto “Out of the Sun” from American Whip (2002), too much of that album and the band’s eponymous 2000 debut went past “dreamy” to where you find yourself just nodding off (e.g., “Baby You Should Know,” the song they got onto The O.C.). “Go Tell the World” (also on the playlist) announces the band’s comfort with heavier guitar sounds on The Heartlight Set, and they follow it up with “You’re So Good.” Even when they nakedly borrow a 60s-becoming-70s sound on “Anything You Sent,” they build it on a firmer foundation than anything I heard on American Whip.
Joy Zipper was a fun little band, and a well-liked one; I mean, how else to you get, like a lot of The National to go on tour with you otherwise? That carries over to the fact that they literally named the band after Tindale’s mom (i.e., Joy married a guy named Jay Zipper). They never figured out the logistics of touring as a two-piece (while ruefully acknowledging it is possible (“the white stripes were smart”)) – and that no doubt put one more obstacle in the way of making a career in music.
Martina Topley-Bird, (SIGH) “Tricky’s Muse”
Even after releasing three albums (arguably on two albums’ worth of material) and spending her later years collaborating with Massive Attack, you’ll still see Martina Topley-Bird translated through her relationship to Tricky, aka, Adrien Thaws. True, he “discovered” her when someone else (i.e., not him) heard her singing somewhere around his house, and they combined to make Tricky’s (clearly) important Maxinquaye (1995, and I don’t know it…yet), as well as a daughter named Mina Mazy (who very tragically passed just this year), but I found great, unique songs across those three albums, and I’ve enjoyed them as much as anything I’ve heard this past month. (For what it’s worth, the best background I’ve seen so far on Tricky came in a 2017 profile in The New Statesman.)
The only article I read that put Topley-Bird in the spotlight was a 2010 interview with The Guardian from around the time the stripped-down re-issue of her earlier work, Some Simple Place, came out. That album grew from the stage-set she worked up in collaboration with Ninja, the percussionist for their live shows. The two albums she drew from – 2003’s Quixotic and 2008’s Blue God – come from different times in her life: she worked with Tricky to produce Quixotic, but worked completely on her own (with an assist from Dangermouse) on Blue God. Most of my Topley-Bird favorites came off Quixotic – the smooth funk of “Soul Food,” the addled scratch-guitar on “I Wanna Be There,” and the big soaring sound of “Need One” – but Blue God feels like the more complete and coherent album. And, as she once noted, she felt more ownership with Blue God, which counted as a big step out of Tricky’s shadow.
Premature death plays an unnerving role in the lives of both Tricky and Topley-Bird – in addition to Mina Mazy’s tragic death, his mother, Maxin Quaye, committed suicide when he was four, while Topley-Bird’s father died before she was born. Neither of them “enjoyed” fame, so much as they managed it as an occupational hazard, but (because I only know her material) she clearly has the talent to continue to collaborate with “indie-major” acts like The Gorillaz and, often as they come around, Massive Attack. Topley-Bird claims Billie Holliday and Ella Fitzgerald as influences, along with Tom Waits and Serge Gainsbourg; according to Wikipedia, she also “cite[s] Bollywood and Asian cinema” as well. That’s a tough fit in pop culture, but here’s to hoping there will always be space for it.
Well, all right, that’s everyone I wanted to cover for this post. Future posts will be shorter – and I say that with high confidence, not least because the playlists will be both shorter, more frequent, and built around just one featured artist, plus three new artists. I’m going to close out this one by listing and linking to the rest of the songs I included in this month’s 50-song playlist. As always, I hope people find something to love when I put this stuff out there. There’s so much good music in the world…
…speaking of, here are the rest of the songs on the June 2019, listed by band/artist/performer.
Chavez, “Unreal Is Here”
Gene Austin, “My Melancholy Baby” and “St. James Infirmary” (big fan of the latter, because I know the back-story on that timely genre).
Goldlink, ft. Haile, “Yard”
Har Mar Superstar, “I Hope” and “Everywhere I’m Local” (awesome guy, profiled him earlier)
Jawbox, “Boxcar” (which I landed on thanks to an incursion into late 90s emo)
Mark Ronson, ft. Alicia Keys & The Last Artful, Dodgr, “Truth”
Mexico City Blondes, “Out to Dry” and “Addio”
Stars, “Your Ex-Lover Is Dead” (easily among the most compelling on this month’s playlist)
Stef Chura, “Sweet Sweet Midnight” (ditto, ibid, see above with bells on)
(Portland, Oregon’s own) Summer Cannibals, “Say My Name” and “Full of It”
Talking Heads, “The Big Country” (which I resisted for as long as I could, damn you, Spotify!)
The Macarons Project, “Tonight You Belong To Me” (among my favorite all-time love songs)
The Promise Ring, “Happiness Is All the Rage” and (better) “Is This Thing On?” (another emo detour)
The Shackletons (direct answer to Brian Wilson), “Minnesota Girls”
Wool, “Wait” and “Medication” (only knew and saw them in the 90s, but they’re still (reasonably) active.
Youth Group, “Baby Body” (one of their best for me)
Zero 7, their famous “In the Waiting Line” and (the positively Air-esque) “Give It Away”
And, holy shit, that’s everyone and everything. Till next weekend!
Silkworm wrote “Couldn’t You Wait?”, yet another “all-time favorite” from a list of them engorged to the point of being meaningless and yet it still took a streaming service for me to get off my ass and listen to them. That’s doubly-pathetic given that they moved to Seattle from their hometown of Missoula, Montana the same year I did for entirely prosaic reasons (1990/college). Silkworm operated as a three-piece most of the time – first with Tim Midyett, Joel RL Phelps and Andy Cohen, later with Midyett, Cohen and Michael Dahlquist – but they also played for a time as a four-piece with all the same members. Phelps departure in 1994 knocked them back down to a three-piece of Cohen (guitar), Midyett (bass) and Dahlquist (drums), and that coincided with the band’s glory years. That said, Phelps was involved in the 2013 re-release of 1994’s Libertine (he’s interviewed here) - one of the band’s pre-Matador Records albums – but their active years as a band ended in 2005 when a suicidal driver killed Dahlquist and a couple others in Skokie, Illinois (one hell of a story itself).
For a relatively-obscure band, they left a footprint big enough to inspire a full-length documentary named for their most famous song, and some of the biggest names in 1990s indie-rock (e.g., your Albinis, your Malkmuses) gave interviews for it (Albini’s connection is particularly special). The aspect of Silkworm’s music that I most admire – their lyrics (which “Couldn’t You Wait?” brings front and center) – comes up in every article/interview I’ve read on them, whether a Worship Guitars interview that came out around the same time as Blueblood (1998; the notes on “Beyond Repair” get at how they approached lyrics), or an interview with Seth Pomeroy, the Nashville resident who made Couldn’t You Wait? For what it’s worth, that interview piqued my interest in the documentary enough that I’m going to buy/watch it shortly. Pomeroy set out to preserve the memory of something he loved, raising fandom to praiseworthy levels, but he created a record of a very specific era in American music at the same time, one that really could have slipped down the memory hole without him.
The outlet for the latter interview, The Big Takeover, sums up Silkworm’s sensibility neatly enough that I’ll borrow it here: the music they wrote “featured strong examples of its acerbic lyricism and willfully cockeyed mutations of punk, pop and classic rock.” I like “pungent” to describe the few lyrics I know and, when I picked through Blueblood, Lifestyle (2000), and Italian Platinum (2002), it was the short, sharp lyrical hooks that snared me – e.g., (and in the order in which the albums are listed) “Eff,” “Treat the New Guy Right,” and, on the sharpest edge, “I Hope U Don’t’ Survive.”
That’s enough time in the 1990s. Onto the next decade!
I did a feature post under the previously operative five-year plan about the Australian indie rock outfit Youth Group. Knowing they recorded their cover of Alphaville’s “Forever Young” for The O.C., I attempted what might have been my first “concept post.” The O.C. provides plenty of material (seriously, you could kill a couple months listening to every artist), because the show’s creator, Josh Schwarz, “always intended that music be a character on the show.” He tapped Alexandra Patsavas to make it happen, and she responded by creating a magnet for both established and aspiring indie-rock artists of that time. By the show’s second season, they wrote a music venue called The Bait Shop into the story-lines to serve as a setting for bands/artists that Patsavas liked and wanted to promote to come onto the show and perform (e.g., Modest Mouse, The Killers, and The Walkmen). The exposure did wonders for a band like Youth Group and getting a single song on The O.C. could “fetch” $20,000-$30,000 for an artist.
When I made this month’s playlist, I pulled music from one of the several sites that promote “the songs from The O.C.” I decided to stick exclusively with artists I didn’t know – which ruled out, say, Beck (who was offered an entire episode to promote Guero). I also confined the selection to Season 2 to contain the inputs. If that’s up your alley, The O.C. is a gift that keeps giving musically. Here are quick intros to several artists I found – starting with the most obvious one.
Phantom Planet, The Jason Schwartzman Origin Story
Phantom Planet is probably most famous for The O.C.’s theme, “California” and for giving once-drummer/now-actor Jason Schwartzmann his first turn in the spotlight (and if you've ever wanted to see him go all rock-star, that video has you). Alex Greenwald addressed both of those…realities in a 2004 interview with Entertainment Weekly, where he sounds more anxious about the song (they don’t want to be “the other Rembrandts”) than Schwarzmann’s departure. He left at Phantom Planet’s peak, i.e., right after they recorded “California,” but the split occasioned no hard feelings – as Greenwald acknowledges, Schwartzman wanted to act, while he wanted to make music – but Schwartzman did write a song to commemorate the band’s decision to go on hiatus in 2008.
Jeff Conrad replaced Schwartzman on drums (as noted in 2004, he’s not better, just more focused), and Darren Robinson (lead guitar) and Sam Farrar (bass) round up the current line-up. (They had another member named Jacques Brautbar for 2004’s Phantom Planet.) Phantom Planet changed its sound and producer(s) shortly after Schwartzman left, going from Tchad Blake (call it the “California”-era) to a rougher, garage-toned sound. The idea of “evolving” came up in just about everything I read about Phantom Planet and they cite restlessly creative acts like The Beatles and Elvis Costello as inspirations. Greenwald turned a couple nice phrases on this (“We want to have fun with the music. People can hear when you're not having fun. They discover you're bored and you're boring.”), but Farrar, offered a more natural answer on process in a 2008 video interview with Billboard:
“It’s never intentional. You’re just…it’s a summary of what’s around you. What you’re listening to, who you’re hanging out with, what you’re reading. This is what we’ve been…I mean, this record is summarizing our age and what we’ve been listening to.”
Phantom Planet doesn’t have a massive catalog – in terms of studio albums, there’s only Phantom Planet Is Missing (1998), Phantom Planet Was Here (2002, home to “California”), Phantom Planet (2004), and Raise the Dead – so call your own shot on how much and how well they evolved. Personally, I agreed to the point where I zoned out the rest for Raise the Dead. The rougher, garage-toned production gives them a heavier, thicker kick, all the way down to Greenwald’s vocals (i.e., he toned down the whiny). That’s why this month’s playlist includes, “Do the Panic” (the single for Raise the Dead), the surprisingly catchy droner, “Quarantine,” and the anthemic, slurring “Strokes-esque,” “Leader.” They’ve made noises about reuniting since the beginning of 2019, and they’ve got an album in the works. They’ve already released a new single, “Balisong,” which suggests they’re listening to different music, hanging out with different people, reading different books, etc.
Joy Zipper, Stopping Mid-Sentence
“…we've had so many set backs on the business side of things that if we didn't have a firm self belief we probably would have stopped doing it. actually, we never would have stopped, just maybe did it for only ourselves.”
That quote comes out of a (reading between the lines) 2004 interview with the UK’s i really love music and, seeing as their last (and my favorite) album, The Heartlight Set, dropped all the way back in 2005, it’s possible they’ve been doing it for themselves since then. Centered around the duo/married couple Tabitha Tindale and Vincent Cafiso, Joy Zipper hail(ed) from Long Island and, despite having the connections to get called on for tribute cover albums (for The Pixies and The Cure), they’ve had better luck getting exposure for their 60s/70s lightly-psychedelic, harmony-larded sound in the UK. The Independent had a nice description for what they do - “part heat-haze New York and part sunstruck Cali-pop, its bright-eyed, boy-girl harmonies glide over a wash of woozy guitars to hypnotic effect” – but call-backs to The Beach Boys and/or Brian Wilson don’t seem to sell States-side (see Drowned in Sound’s review of American Whip).
To stick up for American aesthetics a little, The Heartlight Set was the only Joy Zipper album that really connected with me, but you also can modify the verb “connected” with “and how” because I spent a lot of time on that album…or at least the first half of it. While I held onto “Out of the Sun” from American Whip (2002), too much of that album and the band’s eponymous 2000 debut went past “dreamy” to where you find yourself just nodding off (e.g., “Baby You Should Know,” the song they got onto The O.C.). “Go Tell the World” (also on the playlist) announces the band’s comfort with heavier guitar sounds on The Heartlight Set, and they follow it up with “You’re So Good.” Even when they nakedly borrow a 60s-becoming-70s sound on “Anything You Sent,” they build it on a firmer foundation than anything I heard on American Whip.
Joy Zipper was a fun little band, and a well-liked one; I mean, how else to you get, like a lot of The National to go on tour with you otherwise? That carries over to the fact that they literally named the band after Tindale’s mom (i.e., Joy married a guy named Jay Zipper). They never figured out the logistics of touring as a two-piece (while ruefully acknowledging it is possible (“the white stripes were smart”)) – and that no doubt put one more obstacle in the way of making a career in music.
Martina Topley-Bird, (SIGH) “Tricky’s Muse”
Even after releasing three albums (arguably on two albums’ worth of material) and spending her later years collaborating with Massive Attack, you’ll still see Martina Topley-Bird translated through her relationship to Tricky, aka, Adrien Thaws. True, he “discovered” her when someone else (i.e., not him) heard her singing somewhere around his house, and they combined to make Tricky’s (clearly) important Maxinquaye (1995, and I don’t know it…yet), as well as a daughter named Mina Mazy (who very tragically passed just this year), but I found great, unique songs across those three albums, and I’ve enjoyed them as much as anything I’ve heard this past month. (For what it’s worth, the best background I’ve seen so far on Tricky came in a 2017 profile in The New Statesman.)
The only article I read that put Topley-Bird in the spotlight was a 2010 interview with The Guardian from around the time the stripped-down re-issue of her earlier work, Some Simple Place, came out. That album grew from the stage-set she worked up in collaboration with Ninja, the percussionist for their live shows. The two albums she drew from – 2003’s Quixotic and 2008’s Blue God – come from different times in her life: she worked with Tricky to produce Quixotic, but worked completely on her own (with an assist from Dangermouse) on Blue God. Most of my Topley-Bird favorites came off Quixotic – the smooth funk of “Soul Food,” the addled scratch-guitar on “I Wanna Be There,” and the big soaring sound of “Need One” – but Blue God feels like the more complete and coherent album. And, as she once noted, she felt more ownership with Blue God, which counted as a big step out of Tricky’s shadow.
Premature death plays an unnerving role in the lives of both Tricky and Topley-Bird – in addition to Mina Mazy’s tragic death, his mother, Maxin Quaye, committed suicide when he was four, while Topley-Bird’s father died before she was born. Neither of them “enjoyed” fame, so much as they managed it as an occupational hazard, but (because I only know her material) she clearly has the talent to continue to collaborate with “indie-major” acts like The Gorillaz and, often as they come around, Massive Attack. Topley-Bird claims Billie Holliday and Ella Fitzgerald as influences, along with Tom Waits and Serge Gainsbourg; according to Wikipedia, she also “cite[s] Bollywood and Asian cinema” as well. That’s a tough fit in pop culture, but here’s to hoping there will always be space for it.
Well, all right, that’s everyone I wanted to cover for this post. Future posts will be shorter – and I say that with high confidence, not least because the playlists will be both shorter, more frequent, and built around just one featured artist, plus three new artists. I’m going to close out this one by listing and linking to the rest of the songs I included in this month’s 50-song playlist. As always, I hope people find something to love when I put this stuff out there. There’s so much good music in the world…
…speaking of, here are the rest of the songs on the June 2019, listed by band/artist/performer.
Chavez, “Unreal Is Here”
Gene Austin, “My Melancholy Baby” and “St. James Infirmary” (big fan of the latter, because I know the back-story on that timely genre).
Goldlink, ft. Haile, “Yard”
Har Mar Superstar, “I Hope” and “Everywhere I’m Local” (awesome guy, profiled him earlier)
Jawbox, “Boxcar” (which I landed on thanks to an incursion into late 90s emo)
Mark Ronson, ft. Alicia Keys & The Last Artful, Dodgr, “Truth”
Mexico City Blondes, “Out to Dry” and “Addio”
Stars, “Your Ex-Lover Is Dead” (easily among the most compelling on this month’s playlist)
Stef Chura, “Sweet Sweet Midnight” (ditto, ibid, see above with bells on)
(Portland, Oregon’s own) Summer Cannibals, “Say My Name” and “Full of It”
Talking Heads, “The Big Country” (which I resisted for as long as I could, damn you, Spotify!)
The Macarons Project, “Tonight You Belong To Me” (among my favorite all-time love songs)
The Promise Ring, “Happiness Is All the Rage” and (better) “Is This Thing On?” (another emo detour)
The Shackletons (direct answer to Brian Wilson), “Minnesota Girls”
Wool, “Wait” and “Medication” (only knew and saw them in the 90s, but they’re still (reasonably) active.
Youth Group, “Baby Body” (one of their best for me)
Zero 7, their famous “In the Waiting Line” and (the positively Air-esque) “Give It Away”
And, holy shit, that’s everyone and everything. Till next weekend!
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