I have seen a few references to a song called “Choosin’ Texas” by an artist named Ella Langley beating out Mariah Carey for the longest-running No. 1 song of all time on the Billboard Hot 100. The surprise in all this is I’ve never heard of Ella Langley or the song that broke the record. I haven’t been into popular music since I was a kid and married to the radio, but I had an awareness of what people were listening to.
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Will You Dance?
The latest casualty of the streaming wars is The Bird and the Bee’s 2015 album Recreational Love, which unceremoniously disappeared from Qobuz sometime recently. The album still shows up, but lists all the tracks as “unavailable.” Usually this is a sign that the service has loaded a newer version of the album to select. Not so in this case.
Music by The Bird and the Bee can sometimes be hard to find. The band followed up their first volume of Interpreting the Masters, an album of Hall & Oates covers, with a volume of Van Halen covers. The first is readily available, the second, almost impossible to hear on any format other than used vinyl.1 All the album’s listed on the merch site that the band links to are sold out. When there are so many music services out there, it seems careless not to make your albums available somewhere digitally.
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These Dreams
Heart was the band that broke the glass ceiling and bought women-fronted hard rock to the masses. By 1985, they had expanded beyond just pummeling riffage and Renaissance Fair folk that betrayed their love for Led Zeppelin. They didn’t completely eschew the hard stuff, but they had synths and they were going to use them.
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I Set My Face to the Hillside
Tortoise – I Set My Face To The Hillside (YouTube)
Last year, I bought TNT by Tortoise on CD from a Discogs seller.1 I should tell you, this sort of activity is as sure a sign of my devotion to a particular album as any. After all, I’ve got access to high-quality digital copies of albums like this through streaming. I don’t need to seek them out on an online marketplace, where, let’s face it, you don’t always know the quality of the merchandise.2
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A Room You Can’t See
Terry Godier might be something of a genius, as evidenced by his masterfully crafted RSS reader, Current, and the ideas behind it. So when I saw he had created a short documentary about musical formats, one of my favorite subjects, I had high expectations.
Godier hits upon a lot of the problems intrinsic to streaming media in the video. When he discusses the limitations of physical media, he’s able to make them sound like desirable features.
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Forgotten Favorite
Some good news came this week in the form of more Velocity Girl remastering. This time it’s a compilation of non-album tracks from various places being released by Slumberland Records. The collection is called 1989-1992 and the contents are precisely what it says on the tin.
The first available track from the release is my favorite song by the band, “Forgotten Favorite.” Even after the remaster, it’s still a bit muddy, but I’m not sure if there is anything more the band could do apart from rerecord the track completely. It’s still a stellar song through, with a shoegaze-worthy crush of guitars that’s as propulsive as anything put out by UK pedal hoppers. Despite some muck still on the recording, the vocals are pristine, and Sarah Shannon sounds heavenly.
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We Might As Well Be Strangers
The last few days have brought with them some serious nineties nostalgia. So it’s fitting that Weezer released a video for their new single, “We Might As Well Be Strangers.” The song represents a return to the form for the prolific but not always consistent band.
Perhaps the best part of the song and the video is the inclusion of guest Karly Hartzman of Wednesday. Hartzman brings her punk rock sneer and pout to the breakup song. As Grace Robins-Somerville notes for Paste Magazine, Hartzman perhaps outshines Weezer’s frontman.
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Chemicals Make You Small
When I read that Hammock had collaborated with The Flaming Lips on their song “Chemicals Make You Small,” I was a bit shocked. Wayne Coyne and The Lips are brash, experimentally noisy, irreverent, sometimes goofy and often oversaturated. They seem to have almost the opposite of Hammock’s ethereal, slow, quiet and completive approach.
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Jim Carol New Year
With Life in Small Spaces, the upcoming album from Black Marble, the project’s creator, Chris Stewart, taps into one of my semi-obsessions. The album’s description on its Bandcamp page has further details on the clue we are given with the album title.
It is an invitation to accept and consciously agree to a more minimal lifestyle for the sake of creative expression and freedom, and to never need to compromise your values for the tempting illusion of success.