July 2019 MAME Playlist/Post: A Review, and the Last of Its Kind

This has multiple interpretations, but I have only one...

Hola, and welcome to what I think will be the last post of its kind in over-arching MAME project. Due to the simple fact that the way I was posting ate up too much of my time, I’m going back to writing band/artist-specific posts – and this time with the emphasis on the artist. For the record, those will come out as I get them done, and that’s something that depends quite a bit on the artist and my relationship to them.

That’s another thought for another day, and this post is about the old/former model I’ve been using for these posts/playlists. I actually wrote five (5) of them this month (holy shit, I had time?), and they’re all decent. Moreover, they include links to…I think over 150 songs, and by almost as many artists. (I kid, I kid; the people I really like get up to a half-dozen songs, while some others get two, three or four.) I’ll post the 50-song playlist I created from that collection of songs to Spotify – and, if you like the balance of that selection, and have Spotify, my handle is snackyd.

That’s all I have to say for this post. And, for anyone who’s curious, Wild Flag will be the next band I review. For what it’s worth, I bought that one, but don’t think I ever cared for it that much, so it shouldn’t take too long for that post to go up.

That’s all the editorial content. In the event you haven’t read (or listened to) any of the earlier playlists, links to the playlists/posts are down below, identified to the artists/free festivals I reviewed for each week in July 2019. Here goes:

Yo La Tengo, A Subtly Addicting Band (yes, I’m totally cheating, but they’re fucking amazing!)

Yeah Yeah Yeahs, A Thing for B-Sides

Celebrating PDX Pop Now!

Gaytheism, and PDX Pop Now! 2019

X, Punk Rock for the Heartland

That’s it for this piece of Middle Age Music Express’ history. I hope the next phase goes better. And produces more coherent posts. I’m groping toward a useful future. Join me!

Crash-Course, No. 5: Gaytheism & PDX Pop Now! 2019

Fine. Mid-40s probably.

[Ed. - Full disclosure: I don't own any Gaytheist albums, so this kind of violates protocol, but I wanted to look into them, they just played PDX Pop Now! and I wanted to learn about them...I regret nothing.]

It’s sometimes easy to forget that there are more or less purely local bands. Whether it’s a question of what they play or…let’s call it personal aesthetic, some bands will never grow much beyond its immediate market. When you’re a three-piece playing under the name “Gaytheist” and you’re (guessing here) pushing 50, your shot at the big time probably passed a while back.

I assume Gaytheist is pushing 50 based on the names its front-man, Jason Rivera, dropped as the bands he saw growing up in the Pacific Northwest – e.g., ““Nirvana, Mudhoney, Yankee Wuss, Hazel, Tad, The Accused, Whermacht, Hitting Birth, Sissyface, The Need, Sicko.” (Fun story: I’ve knew the latter from their time in Pullman, WA; and I’ve fucked up their guest list at least once by being over-polite.) That said, I suspect it’s what and how they play more than their age that will always keep them at the local level. To borrow the phrasing that lingered on the tip of my tongue as I listened to them last week:

“It's not quite metal, but it is heavy.”

While they have “metal” passages across multiple songs – e.g., “Let’s Get Astrophysical” is solid sludge metal, also see the boiling riffs in the middle of “The Glory of Love, Part 2” – but, regardless of what they do on the guitar sound, their rhythm components sound more punk than metal to my ear. Once you add Rivera’s fairly eclectic, and specific lyrical choices – i.e., what drew me to them in the first place on “Post-Apocalyptic Lawsuit” and “Into the Trap” – you have a band built for a certain audience, and it ain’t a huge one.

Tim Hoff (bass) and Nick Parks (drums) round out Gaytheist, and they’ve had the same lineup since they started. Of all the things I learned about this week, none of them gave a sense of who they are quite like Rivera flat-out stating in a 2013 interview with Performer Mag that he writes with Parks in mind. And, as I’ve found across multiple (scarce) interviews/reviews, Gaytheist is a band built on co-writing (this is Rivera):

Crash-Course, No. 4: Celebrating PDX Pop Now!

Eh, they do pretty well sometimes.

With PDX Pop Now! 2019 happening over the weekend, I threw together this wee tribute to Portland, Oregon’s DIY, highly-affordable (it’s free) outdoor music festival. It’s been going on since 2004, it’s always been all-ages, and some of the bigger local names have given songs to the compilations that fund the festival each year.

I have far from a perfect record of attendance – think I’ve been to just three of ‘em, most recently in 2016 – but it’s usually fun. The current location isn’t the best - the organizers center it under the Hawthorne Bridge, with North and South stages on each side – and, unless they’ve got tarps this year, it’s largely uncovered. The crowds have been sparse during the day every time I’ve gone, which hurts the atmospherics a bit (it has looked downright desolate here and there), but the crowd fills in nicely when the sun goes down; it feels like a solid, regular music festival starting right after dinner.

The first year I went – this would have been 2006(?) – they held it at least partially at an indoor venue (think it was Loveland the year I went) and, if I could have one wish, they’d go back to that, but I get it at the same time.

Anyway, the coolest thing about PDX Pop Now! is the range of artists you can hear. An entire day spent there almost guarantees exposing yourself to something you normally wouldn’t listen to and that’s the festival’s strength. You get that on the compilations too – something that comes through in the 50 songs selected down below (and included on the Spotify playlist I’m posting with this). Last, but definitely not least, here’s information on where to find and, crucially, where to buy the compilations – and that gets you access to all of them. That helps with the funding for what is a goddamn cool event, however you take it in.

Some of your bigger local artists have contributed songs to past compilations and some of them (but not many) show up on the playlist I compiled. One thing I noticed as I was getting them onto the Spotify, a lot of the songs submitted for the compilations aren't the best-known works by many of these artists. In many cases, that happened because I'm pulling from older compilations (as old as 2005), and they've put out more, sometimes better work since that time. Best case, people can use the list and links below as a first step for exploring the local music scene. That's the goal here, and god knows I'll be doing that going forward. Just this post gives you/me about 47-48 bands/artists to work with, so have it.