As the year beings to speed past in a hazy kind of blur it appears we are already in the month of June. As I gaze at my annual to-do list and wonder where it all went wrong (usually around the second week of January) the album releases continue to amaze and delight in equal measures. This week saw the release of a new album from San Francisco band Papercuts. An album that will soundtrack late nights laid out in the garden watching the sun come down and quite possibly a few hungover mornings.
A record that’s pleasing on the ears without asking too much of the listener. Lovely stuff indeed.
Also during the week I found out that three very important releases have been added to Spotify. All three are the work of the same band, Modest Mouse. They are their first two albums, This Is A Long Drive For Someone With Nothing To Think About (one of the best album titles there is), The Lonesome Crowded West and also the 2000 compilation of early singles entitled Building Nothing Out Of Something (another great title).
I will add that along with Pavement, Modest Mouse are my favourite band, so the following is quite probably heavily biased, but eh, what can you do.
All of these albums mean a great deal to me on a personal level.
I have never heard any lyricist that captures small-town isolation, feelings of emptiness and desolation as well as Isaac Brock. Now admittedly, I maybe stretching it a tad to compare the seaside town of Southend where I’ve lived all my life to various small desert towns in the US, but, when that nagging creeping feeling hits you, that maybe this will be the town that you were born and may die in, there is no better soundtrack to the desperation and daydreams of small-town life.
But it doesn’t end there, the guitars at times screech and howl, perfectly in tune with Brock’s sometimes screaming vocals. And then at the core, we have the bass of Eric Judy which along with the drums of Jeremiah Green provide a solid groove which runs through the heart of the songs.
The band have released three further studio albums since these releases, one more as a three piece and the other two with an expanding lineup. Any of these are worthy of your time.
But, it’s the early releases that show a band at their absolute peak, the sometimes lo-fi quality of the recordings only enhances the qualities of a band on three releases that are absolutely essential.
On a final note, on the 1997 album The Lonesome Crowded West they cry out against their disappearing landscape being swallowed up by shopping malls and the like, and as I walk around, seeing virtually every empty shop and other parts of the town becoming a Sainsburys, a Tesco or a Morrisons, I know that 17 years later, the words of Brock are still ringing very very true.
1. The Flaming Lips – Feeling Yourself Disintegrate (The Soft Bulletin – 1999)
2. The Sea And Cake – Up On The North Shore (The Moonlight Butterfly – 2011)
3. Papercuts – New Body (Life Among The Savages – 2014)
4. Cherry Ghost – Fragile Reign (Herd Runners – 2014)
5. Modest Mouse – Whenever You Breathe Out, I Breathe In (Building Nothing Out Of Something – 2000)
6. Queens Of The Stone Age – The Sky Is Fallin’ (Songs For The Deaf – 2002)
7. Baths – Ocean Death (Ocean Death EP – 2014)
8. Joy Division – Isolation (Closer – 1980)
9. Mimas – Treehouse (The Worries – 2008)
10. Sun Ra – Neo-project #2 (Cosmos – 1976)
11. The Decemberists – Here I Dreamt I Was An Architect (Castaways And Cutouts – 2002)
12. Sufjan Stevens – Casimir Pulaski Day (Illinois – 2005)
13. Papercuts – Staring At The Bright Lights (Life Among The Savages – 2014)
14. Kuedo – Mtzpn (Hyperdub 10.1 – 2014)
15. Nick Cave And The Bad Seeds – Mermaids (Push The Sky Away – 2013)
16. Modest Mouse – Polar Opposites (The Lonesome Crowded West – 1997)
17. Grouper – Vapor Trails (A I A : Alien Observer – 2007)
18. M. Ward – Right In The Head (Post-War – 2006)
See you next week! You can listen to this show and many others on the 33RPM Mixcloud page :
https://www.mixcloud.com/33rpmphoenix/
