The whole “desert island” game where you pick the three books or three albums or three movies that you wouldn’t mind having to watch over and over and over again is always a fun one, if only because of the disconnect between your desert island choices and what you happen to have in your backpack/car/DVD player right now.
Yeah, yeah. The complete works of Shakespeare. And that’s why you’re busy burning through the complete works of King in your spare time.
Then again, there is the point of “hey, if all you had to do was read, you’d probably read different stuff than if all you have to do is your job, and deal with your family, and feed the cats and then clean the cat boxes, and go to Costco, Petsmart, and Safeway, and update your blog… if your life is very busy, your free time is probably best spent enjoying a thriller here or there.” Sure, okay, fine. I *DO* wonder if the person who does not read Shakespeare for pleasure really would want to read him for leisure.
That’s not where the blood is spilled, though. The blood is spilled on the topic of albums. I can’t give you a best three or whatever right off the top of my head at this minute… but I can say that My Bloody Valentine’s Loveless
It’s hazy. I don’t know how to best describe it… I’ll try. Back when I was in my early 20’s, I had a couple of weeks at the restaurant where I worked 100 hour weeks. I would go home at one, sleep, wake up at 6 and go back to work. I lived on Coca-cola and Camels (if you stop eating for fourish days, you stop having to go to the bathroom as often, I found out). Sometimes I was sent home between 3PM and 6PM so I could catch a nap here or there. During the second week of this schedule, while laying on my back, I could sometimes hear voices… as if they were behind a curtain. When I’d push myself toward the curtain, I was better able to hear the tone of the voices but I was never able to make out the words…
This album is like that.
So that’s my recommendation for you this week.
If I were stuck on a deserted island the three books I would want would all deal with how to survie on a desert island. Like most people, the music I listen to most is the music that was popular when I came of age, but I have a low threshold for boredom and do not want to listen to any album one to many times. So, what I would like to have is a guitar with several sets of strings and a tuning fork.
Yeah, that’s why I’m not a fan of the deserted island trope. It doesn’t get you to exactly what you’re necessarily digging for.
Maybe “you’re stuck in a car with your best friend and his/her lover and your lover and you’ve got 3 days to get from Denver to Tampa and you can only bring 3 CDs… which ones?
But then you’re asking about the best driving music that doesn’t make you want to kill someone…
What I listen to changes from week to week. The top three cds in my truck right now are “Flower Petals” by the Subdudes, “Poi Dog Pondering” by Poi Dog Pondering and a cd of cajun and zydeco music that my wife burned for me. In all probability, next week the list will be different. Most of the time I listen to NPR or the local high school station that usually plays old blues.
Loveless is a solid album. I might lean towards some Slowdive or Swervedriver as my prefered shoegaze fix, but I can’t really argue too much with My Bloody Valentine.
I got there via Hum’s “You’d Prefer An Astronaut” and Low’s “Things We Lost In The Fire”. I mentioned these albums to a friend and he told me to pick up Loveless.
After a moment where I immediately ejected the cd out of the habit of ejecting tapes that sounded like that when I put them in, I dove in and still find myself wondering at the album. I *STILL* hear something never every time I listen. My favorite tracks migrate across the disc…
I remember Slowdive fondly… I will investigate this “Swervedriver”.
For Swervedriver try the album “Raise” tracks “Son of Mustang Ford”, “Rave Down” and “Feel So Real”.
I would also nominate Ride’s “Leave Them All Behind” EP as one of the best shoegaze albums ever.
When Maribou is done recovering from her root canal, we will go Amazoning.
Why wait until she is recovered? If they gave her good painkillers, I’d argue she’s in the right mindest *now* :-). Ride had some good songs, but I maintain that Nowhere (their supposed classic) has terrible production, thin and metallic and monotonous. The only one of theirs I listened to regularly was Going Blank Again. On Swervedriver I prefer Mezcal Head myself, but yeah, solid band – one of the only so-called ‘shoegaze’ bands that integrated more American rock influences like the Stooges, their best stuff SOUNDS like muscle cars. The 2nd Slowdive album Souvlaki is my fav of theirs, a distant second to Loveless IMO. And Loveless, well, what else can be said there? So damn near perfect it pretty much killed the scene, nobody even bothered trying anything more in that vein for a while ‘cos it just couldn’t be topped. It’s one of those records (like those of the Cocteaus, an ancestor, or sometimes those of followers Lush) that makes you forget that actual people with actual instruments in an actual room somewhere made it, rather than say, angels or something (the first Stone Roses record is like this for me too. ) Lots of great bands on the edges of the scene too, like Galaxie 500 and Spacemen 3/Spiritualized (different approaches but linked for me by The Drone. ) Heck, I’d argue Radiohead came out of it too, listen to the back half of their 1st record and try to argue. If you are looking for their descendents today, Deerhunter and No Age sometimes approach, and the 1st BRMC record was great.