It Doesn't Stay the Same

Have you ever noticed yourself losing your taste for something you thought you liked while you are in the middle of experiencing it? Example: I liked the album Harmony No Harmony by Million Dead. What was wrong with it? I like wild guitars and drums going nuts and a guy singing and often yelling what could be wrong with it. When I put it on I felt the warmth of uncritical familiarity. It was energetic enough to affect my mood and it made me want to play a guitar loud. It was something nice to listen to while I drove to my bad workplace or while I swept my splintering hardwood floor. Or at least it used to be.

3 months ago I put that album on in the apartment and my beautiful girlfriend comes in from the other room and says to me, "Who is this? It kind of sucks." And in the moment I inhaled to begin saying, "Shut up no it doesn't, (my beautiful) swine (who I love so much please marry me)," I felt the feeling go. I suddenly began listening to it with ears unveiled from the warm, forgiving blanket of familiarity. Damn, Frank Turner's lyrics aren't great on this. The leg bone is connected to the foot bone? Why are the drums so clean and far back in the mix? They're so separated from the guitars that also aren't particularly blowing my ass off like I thought they just were. I listened on, the flavor of this thing I liked souring in my mouth.

One might say, "you just felt like that cause you got embarrassed," or, "you are a coward, easily swayed," or, "you should just listen to their first album, they broke up after the second one and maybe you can hear why." And to all of that I say: maybe a little yeah; maybe a lot yeah; dude I'm listening to A Song to Ruin right now and it's awesome, and I heard they broke up cause the bassist and guitarist haaated Frank and the drummer like they were all onstage every night seething before they finally ended the whole thing.

This draining-out feeling happened again while I was listening to Bjork (Vespertine, her vocal delivery just started to hit me like hearing a car alarm out on the street at 10pm), Godflesh (A World Lit Only by Fire, it used to get me hype but now it feels the same as reading the news on twitter), and latter-day Black Moth Super Rainbow (Panic Blooms, Thomas Fec, if you're reading this I love you and I will help you choose the 10 good songs out of the 16 you are putting on these albums). All of this stuff I used to like, but something in my taste has changed, and with these albums in particular I have caught it changing in real time.

I don't think there's a particular lesson here beyond time causes things to change, and how many times am I gonna learn that lesson? I look at pictures of my mom when I was a kid and I feel a distant, shrieking ache in my gut. The good news is there are 1 million bands making 1 million music and there is always something else beautiful to discover after losing something you once loved.

Rhodri Davies - Telyn Rawn (2020)
One Welsh guy and one harp, the texture of this album is like looking at sped up footage of prairie land.

The Bee Gees - Main Course (1975)
Me and Maxine and Loren have band practice on Saturdays. Listening to this album in the car together was the musical highlight of last month for me.

Variété - Variété (1993)
A couple years ago I was trying to understand what "coldwave" music was and who was in the canon. I forgot most of what I learned because it was boring but I did find this band from Poland. The album is long and kind of drags on but my god the first few songs kick so much ass. Loren says the bass tone at the start of the first track, "Should be illegal."

I got stuck in traffic a lot on my way home from work recently. I had my little Canon S60 with me and I got curious about making something interesting happen from inside my car:

My technique for shooting in was to hit it without looking while holding the camera on my shoulder pointing out the driver's side window or sticking my arm straight out to take shots out the passenger side. Unsurprisingly, most of the pics are blurry, badly composed, or both. The stuff that sings to me, though, really feels worth taking 75 bad pictures to get to. It also feels good to make something while stuck out on the road in the dark.