Vinyl In Alphabetical

I’ve been putting off writing anything about this record because it’s all of a few months old, and I’ve only really listened to it all the way through like 10 times, and obviously don’t have any life stories or funny anecdotes about this record. So I guess the only option is just burning this post off, and saying this is one of my favorite albums of 2013, and getting up out of here. So that’s what I’m doing. 

1. In the course of one year, I saw The Antlers tour behind Hospice three times, making them maybe the only band I’ve seen that many times in one album cycle. I think it says a lot about my general attitudes about a band touring behind an album full of songs about dying in hospitals that I really liked them every time. 

2. The ranking of the times I saw Antlers.

1. When I saw them open for Low

2. When I saw them on their own tour

3. When I saw them open for the National.

3. I have gotten close to crying to this album (no homo), mostly because this one really hits the feelings of being afraid of not being able to take care of someone when they are dying, which actually happened to me when I had to spend my junior year of college helping my dad take care of my mom, who had thyroid cancer, a series of infections, and heart surgery in a 12 month period. I wonder if the main dude from the Antlers has any idea that he nailed that specific feeling, even if this album is a “concept” album that is maybe more about being in an abusive relationship. He spoke to what it felt like to be bummed out in a bunch of hospitals. For this reason, I will stan for Antlers even when their new stuff sorta sucks (it sorta does).

4. I wrote a sorta okay review of this in 2009, and I compared it to In the Aeroplane Over the Sea. I think I like this record better, overall. I know, I suck.

5. Antlers are responsible—in a way, I guess—for the best piece of band ephemera I own: This poster that was made for their gig at a music festival in Madison in 2009. Everyone who sees this always goes, “Oh man, what a downer.” I love it. It’s one of the top five non-record things I own. 

I saw M83 as part of a music festival I went to in Montreal. Technically, they were a sponsored show of the festival, and the organizers wanted us to be at their showcase instead, because they were directly paying those bands to perform us, and M83 was just kind enough to hold like 40 guest list spots for us to go see him. I went to the show alone, and was intimidated; it was in the kind of club you see in arty movies about people who are prettier than me fucking other people who are prettier than me. Eventually, I ran into two people I recognized as fellow festival-goers, and not the pretty Montrealers who were their to see M83. One of them was a freelancer for Filter Magazine. The other was a promotions person for KCRW. We decided to hang out together, since we all came alone. 

The show starts, and it was fucking incredible. It was as life-affirming in person as M83 records are on wax. It was maybe in the top 5 of best concerts I’ve seen, and I’ve seen Jay-Z and Kanye in a basketball arena. It was so great. It made you feel like everything was great, and everything would be great forever. 

I’ll always remember the high the three of us had walking back to our hotel after the show. We kept saying stuff like, “I’m not sure what to say! That was so good!” and we kept high-fiving. We hugged like three times, and said, “We’ll always have this experience together.” It was so cliche and lame, but it was so in-the-moment. I let myself get swept up in the emotion in a way I wouldn’t have if I was at home (the prodigious amounts of hash I smoked that day might have had something to do with it). 

I have made literally no contact with either of those people since we left each other on the hotel elevator 20 minutes after seeing M83. I don’t even remember their names, to be honest. But every time I listen to Hurry Up, We’re Dreaming I remember them, and that experience we had together, and then I feel embarrassed because real, sappy memories are so lame. 

1. I think like every other suburban MTV-obsessed high schooler, my first exposure to the knotty verses of Del the Funkee Homosapien was through “Clint Eastwood,” by the Gorillaz, one of the last pop songs that felt to me like it could totally change the entire landscape of popular culture. His verses on that song probably turned thousands of kids onto the existence of underground rap. I know that’s what happened with me.

2. There was a jukebox in downtown Madison that had this in the jukebox a few years ago. My friend and I once spent $10 playing the entire thing. This stands as the third funniest thing I’ve done with a jukebox, behind playing a 25 minute version of Zeppelin’s “Moby Dick” five times in a row at a bar in small town Wisconsin when I was 18 and an asshole and the time I almost got punched in the face by this girl’s boyfriend after I kept yelling at her to play a song by The-Dream when I was drunk. 

3. It feels impossible to overstate how forward-thinking and advanced this album is. It’s an album about overbearing corporations, a government that will kill you, and outer space. It’s probably the most perfect concept album in all of hip-hop history. It’s the kind of album you never want to end. It’s the kind of album that makes you pay attention to every single thing Del has ever done, even if nothing else he’s done has gotten close to this. 

Nas has Illmatic. Tupac had All Eyez on Me. Biggie had Ready to Die. Kanye has My Dark Twisted Fantasy and College Dropout. Mos Def has Black on Both Sides.

What’s the classic Jay-Z album? For every person who swears by Reasonable Doubt, there are an equal number of people who stand by Blueprint or The Black Album, or even, now, stupidly, Blueprint III. But all of them have flaws, and all of them have their rightful detractors.

And here’s the thing with Jay-Z: There is no easy answer, because he’s probably the best rapper of all time without one true classic album. He’s the best singles artist in the history of rap, and that’s not even remotely debatable: Jay-Z’s greatest hits album is the best greatest hits comp maybe ever.

But what does it mean that he doesn’t have a singularly “classic” album? Nothing really. He’s won. He’s the richest rapper, he’s got the best life, and I suspect he doesn’t give a fuck that none of his albums is THE defined classic. Because none of his albums is the accepted classic, it’s probably helped extend his career; he’s not constantly being evaluated against one specific album. That’s probably one of the smallest good things about being Jay-Z.    

1. This record got a lot of hate when it came out in December, mostly because critics read all the indie rocker appearances—Little Dragon, Wavves, Phantogram—as Big Boi reaching to try to get indie rock kids to listen to his records. They read it as a pander fest, and shat all over the song with Wavves, shat all over the idea that Big Boi needs Phantogram or Little Dragon, and shat all over Big Boi not just making Sir Lucious Left Foot 2 like he should have.  

But that knee-jerk reaction overlooked some facts:

- Indie rock kids were a not insignificant part of the audience for Sir Lucious to begin with; it’s not like there was a huge radio hit off that record. If anything, Big Boi was just cementing the indie rock audience he had, not reaching for people who were waiting for him to hook up with Phantogram before they’d be interested. 

- The song with Wavves is actually the best song on the album, and when you can admit that to yourself, you’ll find that you find the rest of the album’s charms—specifically “In the A”—measure up pretty favorably overall to Sir Lucious. The new album isn’t nearly as good, but it’s not horrible; it’s a solid 7.5 album.

So, I guess I’m saying that I like this album, and don’t really understand the hatred directed towards it. I sort of think that the built up frustration of knowing that Big and Andre aren’t going to do another album together was enough to make critics flip on this, and flip hard.

2. One of the main reasons I like this album is for “Gossip,” a song featuring UGK (including the dead Pimp C, RIP) and Big K.R.I.T., which ISN’T EVEN ON THIS VINYL EDITION BECAUSE OF SOME REASON. Has anyone been able to amply describe why, when stretching an album out to double vinyl—as they have done here—they don’t bother adding the bonus stuff from the deluxe CD edition? I mean, I am paying more than CD price for this, and I don’t get the bonus CD stuff? That shit is so weak. Why wouldn’t the vinyl and the deluxe CD editions be the same? Someone’s got some mansplaining to do. 

But it’s probably something to do with licensing or whatever. I just don’t get how that can happen, especially when this one has like three songs a side. 

3. Seriously though, the Wavves song is the best one on here. And that is hard to admit, especially since fucking B.o.B has a verse on it. 

Things I didn’t know about Hounds of Love until I bought it this weekend for $6:

1. How good it is. Seriously. This is like 9.5/10 good.

2. That the cover was basically the best cover.

3. That this thing is like 7 singles deep, which I didn’t know because I had only heard the really, really great title track 

4. How good it is. Seriously. Again.

5. How much of this is cribbed by every female synth band basically since 1985. It’s not likely, say, the Yeah Yeah Yeahs or the Knife (circa their first album) were listening to Kate Bush that much, but her influence is so deep. She proved you could be pretty weird and also have airtight pop chops.

6. This album is so good. I am a dummy for not getting into this earlier. This has been the only thing I’ve listened to in the last 48 hours.

7.  Big Boi was right. Kate Bush fucking rules. 

I know London Calling is considered the “classic” and their self-titled album is considered the punk gold standard, but if I had to pick one Clash album to keep forever, I’d pick Combat Rock. It has two of the band’s best singles (“Should I Stay Or Should I Go” and “Rock the Casbah”) and it has one of their best deep cuts (“Straight to Hell,” which was flipped into M.I.A.’s “Paper Planes”). It doesn’t get as much love today, 31 years after it was released, because it was by a wide margin, the Clash’s best selling album, and its most ubiquitous (this one is the most prevalent in used record store bins). Saying this is your favorite Clash album is like saying Sgt. Pepper’s is your favorite Beatles album. 

So I guess I don’t have an excuse for why I didn’t buy this until yesterday. But I did, and there are few pleasures as great as hearing “Rock the Casbah” on vinyl.