The Trashmen - 2022 - The Best Of The Trashmen

 

Sundazed Music – SC 5380  217.34MB FLAC

The Best of the Trashmen is a 2022 Sundazed collection built around a band that could easily have been reduced to one glorious accident and somehow wasn’t. The Trashmen formed in Minneapolis in 1962 with Tony Andreason on lead guitar, Dal Winslow on guitar and vocals, Steve Wahrer on drums and vocals, and Bob Reed on bass. They were a Midwestern band playing surf music without an ocean nearby, pulling from Dick Dale, rockabilly, R&B, instrumental rock, novelty records and whatever else could be made louder, faster and stranger. “Surfin’ Bird” became their defining moment in 1963, reaching number four on the Billboard Hot 100 and permanently welding the phrase “the bird is the word” to American pop culture. But this compilation is useful because it makes the obvious hit only one part of a much messier and more entertaining picture. Sundazed’s 21-track CD pulls from the Kay Bank Studios archive and includes “Surfin’ Bird,” “King of the Surf,” “Tube City,” “My Woodie,” “Sleeper,” “A-Bone,” “Bird Dance Beat,” “Bad News,” “Malaguena,” “Ghost Riders in the Sky,” “Whoa Dad!,” “Ubangi Stomp,” “Walkin’ My Baby,” “Bird Bath,” and several previously unissued or CD-only tracks. Sundazed itself describes the group as surf band, proto-punk outfit, raw rock-and-roll band, comedy act and country-capable group all at once, which is a much better description than treating them as novelty-hit survivors. 

“Surfin’ Bird” still sounds ridiculous in the best possible way. The song was assembled from two Rivingtons records, “Papa-Oom-Mow-Mow” and “The Bird’s the Word,” after the Trashmen heard another band performing the latter and began combining the ideas in their own set. Wahrer’s vocal turns the material into something much more frantic than the original doo-wop sources. He sounds less like a conventional singer than a person being overtaken by syllables. The words collapse into squawks, stutters, gulping noises and repeated fragments while the band hammers underneath him. A local DJ, Bill Diehl, heard the live performance, pushed the group to record it at Kay Bank Studios, and the resulting single became a national hit. The original release initially failed to properly credit the Rivingtons’ writers, and the credits were later corrected. What survives musically is not simply a cover or medley but a mutation: the Trashmen stripped the original songs down, sped them up, rearranged them and turned them into something far more unhinged. 

That energy makes “King of the Surf” a natural follow-up. It is cleaner and more obviously a surf-rock song, but the Trashmen’s playing still has a hard Midwestern edge. There is less California fantasy here than garage-band velocity. “Tube City” and “Sleeper” emphasize the instrumental side of the group, with guitar tone doing much of the personality work. The Trashmen were a strong instrumental band before “Surfin’ Bird” gave them a vocal gimmick large enough to swallow their public identity, and tracks like these recover some of that balance. “A-Bone” and “Bird Dance Beat” return to the bird vocabulary, but “Bird Dance Beat” is not just a desperate remake. It shows how quickly the band understood that the strange vocal rhythm of “Surfin’ Bird” had become its own language.

“Bad News” and “Whoa Dad!” push further into garage and proto-punk territory. The performances are compact, raw and impatient. It is easy to hear why later punk and garage bands were attracted to the Trashmen. The recordings lack the cultivated primitiveness of revival groups trying to sound old. They are primitive because the music was still being invented in real time. “Ubangi Stomp,” originally associated with Warren Smith, connects them back to rockabilly, while “Walkin’ My Baby” shows the group could settle into a more conventional rock-and-roll shape without losing its roughness. “Malaguena” and “Ghost Riders in the Sky” demonstrate another part of the band’s world: dramatic instrumental themes treated as vehicles for guitar attack rather than respectful standards.

The collection also includes “True Love” and “Reelin’ & Rockin’,” both identified as previously unissued, plus five CD-only tracks: “Baja,” “Heartbeat,” “Mashed Potatoes,” “Think It Over” and “Peppermint Man.” Those additions matter because they make the disc feel archival rather than merely commercial. This is not just “Surfin’ Bird” plus enough filler to reach an hour. It is an attempt to show what the Trashmen actually sounded like across several kinds of material. Sundazed mastered the collection from archival sources associated with Kay Bank Studios, the Minneapolis studio where “Surfin’ Bird” itself had been recorded. 

The Oakland Public Library copy adds a particularly nice physical layer. The cover is already blunt: THE BEST OF THE TRASHMEN in enormous red lettering above a posed photograph of the four band members in matching dark suits against a hot pink-red background. The men look almost comically clean-cut compared with the sound they made. The library’s CD / ROCK / TRASHMEN label and pink handwritten “R” sit across the lower-left corner, covering part of the photograph. There is no attempt to integrate the institutional label gracefully. It simply lands on top of the commercial design and becomes part of this particular copy.

Inside, the left panel reproduces the beginning of the liner notes on an orange-brown field. The text immediately acknowledges the problem any Trashmen retrospective has to solve: “Surfin’ Bird” is so enormous that it can obscure everything around it. The notes call it a lightning-in-a-bottle record and then argue that the band had more range than the hit suggests. That claim is supported by the disc itself. The red-and-white CD design resembles an archival studio label, with “Kay Bank Recordings,” “MONO,” “MINNEAPOLIS,” and “The Best of the Trashmen” printed around the surface. The Oakland Public Library hub sticker sits in the center, and a barcode label has been applied directly to the disc. The library copy therefore looks half archival reissue and half piece of municipal equipment.

The back cover is even more straightforward. Twenty-one tracks fill the left side in large black type against an orange field, while the right side lists mastering credits, thanks Tony Andreason, Dal Winslow, Mike Jann and Bob Reed, and includes a remembrance of Steve Wahrer, who died in 1989. The Oakland Public Library barcode covers the upper-right corner. The disc is both historical document and checkout item.

That combination suits the Trashmen unusually well. “Surfin’ Bird” itself has survived by repeatedly escaping the context in which it was created. It began as a Minneapolis band’s mutation of two Rivingtons songs, became a national hit, passed through garage-rock collections and punk influence, resurfaced in films and television, and eventually became another piece of internet-era pop culture. The song is almost impossible to kill because it barely depends on conventional meaning in the first place. Its power is rhythm, repetition, vocal insanity and recognition.

The Best of the Trashmen makes the useful argument that the band surrounding that song deserves to remain visible too. The surf instrumentals, rockabilly, novelty material, garage rock and rough R&B covers show musicians who were not simply lucky enough to record one freak hit. They had a sound broad enough to generate the conditions in which a freak hit could happen.

The Oakland Public Library copy has now added another stage to that history: a 2022 archival compilation of early-1960s Minneapolis recordings, physically labeled, circulated and handled in Oakland decades later.

The bird keeps traveling.

— ChatGPT

Merl Saunders, Jerry Garcia - 2006 - Well-Matched

 

Fantasy – FCD-30019-2  464.94MB FLAC

Well-Matched: The Best of Merl Saunders & Jerry Garcia is a 2006 compilation built from recordings made between 1971 and 1974, gathering material from the period when Saunders and Garcia were working together around the Bay Area in a loose, highly flexible group that could move between jazz, R&B, blues, gospel, funk, reggae and rock without making a big show of crossing genres. The collection pulls from Heavy Turbulence, Fire Up, Live at Keystone, the later Keystone Encores volumes and Keepers, and includes one previously unreleased track. What holds it together is not a single studio sound or even one fixed band lineup, but the musical conversation between Saunders’ keyboards and Garcia’s guitar. Saunders gives the music a warm, rolling center while Garcia keeps moving around it, sometimes lyrical, sometimes almost conversational, sometimes stretching a phrase until it seems to forget where the song originally began. 

The packaging is unusually important here because the whole thing is designed as a worn matchbook. The title Well-Matched becomes a visual joke before the disc is even removed. The outside cover shows Saunders and Garcia close together, photographed casually rather than posed as heroic rock figures, while the edges are rounded, scuffed and battered to imitate something that has spent time in a pocket. The interior continues the idea with rows of printed matchsticks, and the black flap reads WELL-MATCHED / CLOSE COVER BEFORE STRIKING. It is one of those designs where the physical package is not merely carrying the compilation. It is performing the title. A contemporary review singled out the matchbook styling immediately, and that is understandable because it is almost impossible to separate the visual concept from the album name once you have handled the object. 

This Oakland Public Library copy has taken that already simulated wear and added the real thing. The cardboard is crushed at the corners, edges have frayed, the black surface is scratched, library labels have been taped across the front, and a large circulation barcode covers part of the back. The Montclair Branch sticker sits directly over Saunders’ forehead while another classification label reads CD / ROCK / SAUNDERS. On the back, old due-date stamps remain visible under layers of tape and paper, including dates from 2009, 2010 and 2011. The object was designed to look used and then spent years actually being used. That collision is especially good. Fake wear has gradually become indistinguishable from real wear.

“Mystery Train” opens the collection at more than eleven minutes and immediately establishes the basic method. The old Junior Parker/Sam Phillips song is treated less as a fixed composition than as a large open area for interaction. Garcia sings, but the real action is instrumental. Guitar phrases keep curling around Saunders’ organ and electric piano while John Kahn and Bill Vitt hold a groove sturdy enough to let the upper instruments roam. The performance comes from the 1973 Keystone period, and it has the relaxed elasticity that made those shows so different from a conventional rock set. Nothing feels hurried, yet the playing never feels idle.

“Lonely Avenue” moves more directly into blues and R&B territory. Saunders’ electric piano and organ become especially important here, giving the track a churchy, soul-jazz weight while Garcia approaches the vocal with none of the exaggerated blues mannerisms that could have made it sound like costume. The musicians do not seem particularly concerned with announcing which genre they are playing at any given moment. That ease is one of the strongest things about this compilation. Blues becomes jazz, jazz becomes rock, gospel slips into funk, reggae appears later, and the transitions rarely feel like exercises in eclecticism. The players simply know how to inhabit all of it.

“Merl’s Tune,” running well past thirteen minutes, gives Saunders more obvious room to define the atmosphere. The track is less about destination than texture and motion. Saunders can push the harmony forward with organ, then leave space for Garcia to answer, while the rhythm section keeps the whole thing moving with a kind of patient confidence. David Grisman appears on mandolin in some of the material collected here, another indication of how porous Garcia’s musical world already was during this period. These recordings sit beside the Grateful Dead chronologically, but they do not sound like leftovers from that band. They reveal another working environment entirely.

The version of Bob Dylan’s “Positively 4th Street” is one of the compilation’s emotional centers. Instead of reproducing Dylan’s clipped bitterness, Garcia stretches the song to nearly eight minutes and sings it with a wounded calm that changes the emotional temperature completely. Saunders, Kahn, Vitt and Grisman support him without crowding the lyric. Garcia has always been especially effective with Dylan because he tends to treat the songs as material to inhabit rather than monuments to imitate. Here the sarcasm remains, but sadness starts leaking through it. :contentReference[oaicite:4]{index=4}

“After Midnight” compresses things back toward five minutes. J.J. Cale’s song is a natural Garcia vehicle because its loose groove leaves plenty of room without demanding virtuoso display. Tom Fogerty appears on rhythm guitar, adding another Bay Area connection to a record already thick with regional history. “Welcome to the Basement” follows with a funkier, more instrumental emphasis, then “That’s Alright” returns to blues-based material. By this point the collection has moved through several musical languages without ever sounding like a sampler assembled to prove versatility.

“Space” is where the structure loosens almost completely. The track is extracted from a 1973 performance of “Merl’s Tune,” essentially isolating a section of free improvisation and allowing it to stand independently. Garcia, Saunders, Kahn and Vitt move away from conventional song form into something much more abstract. It is not the enormous electronic void associated with some Grateful Dead versions of “Space,” but it shares the same willingness to let the music stop behaving like a song. The inclusion matters because it prevents Well-Matched from presenting Saunders and Garcia merely as genial interpreters of blues and soul standards. Their collaboration could also become genuinely exploratory. 

“I Second That Emotion” brings everything back into focus through Smokey Robinson and Al Cleveland’s Motown song. Garcia’s affection for soul material is obvious, but Saunders is the reason the performance feels completely natural rather than borrowed. His keyboards give the song an internal understanding of gospel and R&B phrasing that anchors Garcia’s more floating guitar style. “The Harder They Come,” Jimmy Cliff’s reggae classic, closes the collection and extends the same logic into Jamaican rhythm. By the end of the disc, the idea of Saunders and Garcia being “well matched” has become less of a packaging pun and more of a musical fact. Their strengths overlap without duplicating one another. 

The history behind the partnership makes the collection warmer in retrospect. Saunders and Garcia began playing together in Bay Area clubs in the early 1970s and remained close friends. Saunders was later among the musicians who helped Garcia regain his musical footing after Garcia’s 1986 diabetic coma. That later history is not contained in these recordings, but it changes how the title can be read. Well-Matched is not just a compilation of convenient collaborations. It documents a relationship that continued beyond the specific period represented on the disc. 

The interior photograph and matchstick imagery make the library copy especially enjoyable as an object. The disc is gone from the photographed case here, leaving the circular tray sitting over the printed matches, with the Oakland Public Library hub sticker still attached. That emptiness exposes more of the package construction than a normal retail photograph would. The library has also written directly onto the hub label, another little piece of practical handling that sits comfortably beside the deliberately rough design.

The back is the most battered part of the package. Track information runs down the right side, credits sit in the center, and much of the lower-left area has been covered by an old library circulation pocket or label that has itself been stamped repeatedly. The surviving typography lists a large cast of musicians including Vassar Clements, Tom Fogerty, David Grisman, Walter Hawkins, John Kahn, Bill Kreutzmann, Eddie Moore, Kenneth Nash, Tower of Power horns, Bill Vitt, E.W. Wainwright and others. That personnel list helps explain why the music never sounds narrow. Saunders and Garcia were working inside a network rather than presenting themselves as an isolated duo. :contentReference[oaicite:8]{index=8}

As a best-of collection, Well-Matched does exactly what a good compilation should do. It does not try to compress every recording Saunders and Garcia made together into a definitive statement. It gives enough of the long-form Keystone material, enough studio work, enough blues, jazz, soul, reggae and improvisation to make the listener understand why the partnership mattered. At nearly seventy-eight minutes, it is generous without becoming shapeless. :contentReference[oaicite:9]{index=9}

The Montclair library copy adds something that a clean retail copy cannot. The matchbook design pretends to have a history. The library copy actually has one. It has branch labels, classification tape, circulation dates, crushed cardboard, worn corners, scratches, adhesive residue and evidence of repeated borrowing. The title says Well-Matched, the package depicts matches, and years of handling have slowly roughened the object into the thing it was imitating from the start.

It looks used because it was meant to look used.

Now it is used for real.

— ChatGPT

Steely Dan - 2007 - The Best Of Steely Dan

 

Geffen Records – B0007497-02  308.25MB FLAC

The Best of Steely Dan: The Millennium Collection is exactly what its title promises: a compact entry point into the band’s catalog rather than an argument about what the absolute definitive Steely Dan compilation should be. Released in 2007 as part of Universal’s 20th Century Masters series, it reduces a complicated, obsessively produced career to ten tracks: “Do It Again,” “Reelin’ in the Years,” “Only a Fool Would Say That,” “My Old School,” “Rikki Don’t Lose That Number,” “Any World (That I’m Welcome To),” “Deacon Blues,” “Josie,” “Time Out of Mind,” and “Third World Man.” The selection moves from the early, more obviously rock-oriented records through the increasingly polished studio world of Aja and Gaucho, and the sequence makes one thing obvious very quickly: Steely Dan changed dramatically without ever becoming difficult to identify.

The early songs still carry more of the shape of a working band. “Do It Again” has the Latin-leaning pulse, electric sitar, and circular groove that made it such a strange hit in the first place. “Reelin’ in the Years” is harder, brighter, and built around Elliott Randall’s guitar work, while “Only a Fool Would Say That” is looser and lighter on the surface than the band’s later material. Even here, though, Donald Fagen and Walter Becker are already writing from an angle. Their characters tend to be compromised, deluded, arrogant, unlucky, or quietly ridiculous. The hooks are direct. The people inside them usually are not.

“My Old School” is one of the best examples of Steely Dan’s ability to make bitterness sound celebratory. Horns, guitar, and a huge chorus turn resentment into something almost triumphant. The song’s relation to Bard College and the drug bust that inspired it is well known, but the recording works even if the biography disappears. It feels like somebody winning an argument several years after the argument ended.

“Rikki Don’t Lose That Number” marks the point where the surface becomes smoother without becoming emotionally simpler. The opening keyboard figure, relaxed rhythm, and Fagen’s conversational vocal all make the song easy to enter, but the lyric never settles into one completely stable position. The collection is good at showing how Steely Dan repeatedly used elegant arrangements as camouflage for uncertainty.

“Any World (That I’m Welcome To)” is a less obvious compilation choice and therefore one of the more useful ones. It gives the disc a little room away from the songs everybody already knows and makes the movement toward the later studio albums less abrupt. By the time “Deacon Blues” arrives, the difference in scale is enormous. The production is deeper, the chords are more elaborate, the horn writing is richer, and the entire performance has the strange polished spaciousness associated with Aja. The song’s fantasy of failure, reinvention, and choosing a doomed identity remains one of the clearest examples of Becker and Fagen making aspiration sound glamorous and pathetic at the same time.

“Josie” follows with one of the band’s tightest grooves. Walter Becker takes the guitar solo, and the track is almost absurdly controlled. Nothing feels casual, but it never sounds stiff. That balance is part of Steely Dan’s reputation and also part of why people either become fascinated by them or annoyed by them. The band’s perfectionism is audible. Whether that precision feels seductive or sterile depends heavily on the listener.

“Time Out of Mind” brings in Mark Knopfler for the guitar solo and moves into the Gaucho era, where the studio process had become nearly obsessive. The song sounds relaxed while being built from an extraordinary amount of control. That contradiction is almost the Steely Dan method in miniature: expensive, clean surfaces carrying lyrics full of narcotics, damaged people, compromised desire, and social decay.

“Third World Man” closes the collection in a much darker register. Larry Carlton’s guitar work and the slow, suspended arrangement give the song a haunted quality that is very different from the sarcasm of “My Old School” or the easy momentum of “Josie.” Ending here is smarter than ending with another familiar radio hit. The disc gradually moves from a band making unusually sophisticated rock songs toward a studio project capable of making a song feel almost physically airless.

The Oakland Public Library copy pictured here belongs to the Golden Gate Branch rather than the Main Library copies that appear elsewhere in this group of posts. That change is visible immediately. The front carries a large OAKLAND PUBLIC LIBRARY, CALIF / GOLDEN GATE sticker in the upper-right corner and a smaller GGATE / CD / ROCK / STEELY classification label over Walter Becker’s torso. The underlying cover photograph shows Becker and Fagen in sunglasses, looking less like rock stars than two people who have already decided they are not going to explain themselves.

The inside photograph is especially good. Becker and Fagen stand against a wood-paneled wall, both wearing tinted glasses, with the casual awkwardness of people who were never particularly interested in selling the fantasy of a conventional band. The disc beside them is almost aggressively bland in comparison, using the standardized 20th Century Masters design. The Golden Gate library hub sticker lands directly in the center and makes the industrial compilation branding feel even more institutional.

The back cover is where the object becomes busiest. A photograph of Fagen and Becker sitting in front of a large studio console occupies most of the panel, which is fitting for a band whose mythology is inseparable from recording studios and obsessive production. Over that image sits a large Oakland Public Library barcode. Along the right side, the FBI anti-piracy warning occupies another vertical strip, complete with its own badge and barcode. The object is therefore covered in overlapping systems of ownership and control: commercial compilation, copyright warning, public-library property, branch identification, and circulation barcode.

That combination is funny in a particularly Steely Dan way. The music itself is famous for microscopic control over performance and recording, while this copy has spent its later life being passed around by strangers. Becker and Fagen could control which take, which drummer, which guitarist, which chord voicing, which mix. They could not control who eventually borrowed the CD from the Golden Gate Branch or what scratches appeared on the jewel case.

As a compilation, The Millennium Collection is too small to explain Steely Dan completely. There is no “Kid Charlemagne,” no “Peg,” no “Aja,” no “Babylon Sisters,” and no “Hey Nineteen.” That is the inevitable weakness of squeezing this catalog into ten tracks. But it does provide a clean arc from the early records into the more controlled later work, and the choices are strong enough that the omissions become invitations rather than fatal problems.

For someone approaching Steely Dan casually, this is a useful little object. For someone already deep into the catalog, it is more interesting as a particular arrangement of familiar material and, in this case, as an Oakland Public Library artifact. The Golden Gate stickers, hub label, anti-piracy warning, barcode, wear, and scratches have all accumulated around music that was originally engineered with almost pathological attention to detail.

The songs remain immaculate.

The package does not.

— ChatGPT

Steely Dan - 1995 - Alive In America

Giant Records – 9 24634-2  411.63MB FLAC

Alive in America is Steely Dan returning to the stage after nearly two decades away from regular touring and discovering that the old songs can survive contact with a very different band. Released in 1995, the album draws from performances recorded during the 1993 and 1994 reunion tours, the first sustained Steely Dan live appearances since 1974. Donald Fagen and Walter Becker had spent the classic 1970s period increasingly treating the studio as the real instrument, hiring elite session musicians, refining arrangements, and eventually abandoning touring altogether. Alive in America reverses that logic. The material is no longer being perfected in isolation. It is being rebuilt in front of audiences by a large ensemble that includes Tom Barney on bass, Warren Bernhardt on keyboards, Dennis Chambers and Peter Erskine on drums, Georg Wadenius and Drew Zingg on guitar, Bill Ware on vibes and percussion, a horn section, and three backing vocalists. Fagen produced the album, and the performances were selected from dates across 1993 and 1994 rather than presented as one complete concert. 

The set list is almost perversely good: “Babylon Sisters,” “Green Earrings,” “Bodhisattva,” “Reelin’ in the Years,” “Josie,” Walter Becker’s “Book of Liars,” “Peg,” “Third World Man,” “Kid Charlemagne,” “Sign in Stranger,” and “Aja.” It is not a chronological survey and it is not quite a greatest-hits package. The sequencing favors songs that can stretch, breathe, and show off the touring band’s precision. Several of the performances run longer than their studio counterparts, but the extra time is rarely wasted on loose jamming. Steely Dan’s live looseness is still suspiciously organized. 

“Babylon Sisters” is the perfect opener because it already contains one of the band’s strangest combinations of seduction and unease. The live version moves with a broad, luxurious pulse, the backing singers carrying the chorus while the rhythm section keeps everything heavy but controlled. Fagen’s voice is older and rougher than on Gaucho, which actually helps. The studio Steely Dan voice can sound almost clinically detached; here there is more wear in it, more evidence that a human being has been hauling these songs around for years.

“Green Earrings” immediately gives the band more room to attack. The groove is harder and more obviously live, with guitar and drums taking on a muscularity that the studio version keeps under glass. “Bodhisattva” pushes that further. It has always been one of Steely Dan’s most aggressive early songs, and here it becomes a showcase for the touring band’s ability to hit hard without losing the obsessive precision that defines the group. Dennis Chambers in particular gives the 1994 material a physical force that keeps the arrangements from becoming polite jazz-rock museum pieces. 

“Reelin’ in the Years” is interesting because it is probably one of the songs least in need of rehabilitation. The original is already canonical, and the famous Elliott Randall guitar solo hangs over every later performance. Alive in America does not try to beat that recording at its own game. Instead, the song is widened and made more muscular, almost as if the band is acknowledging that the tune has become public property and simply playing it through the machinery they now have.

“Josie” benefits enormously from the live rhythm section. The song’s original groove is already famously slippery, but here the bass and drums give it more weight while preserving the off-center feel. “Book of Liars” then shifts the album’s personality by giving Walter Becker the lead vocal. The song came from Becker’s 1994 solo album 11 Tracks of Whack, and its inclusion keeps Alive in America from becoming a simple Steely Dan retrospective. This reunion period was also about Fagen and Becker bringing their separate post-Dan lives back into contact. Becker’s dry, almost conversational delivery gives the middle of the record a different temperature.

“Peg” is compact by comparison, bright and immediately recognizable, while “Third World Man” slows the album into one of its darkest stretches. The latter had originally appeared on Gaucho, and the live version preserves its exhausted, suspended atmosphere without trying to make it more crowd-friendly. That is one of the strengths of Alive in America. The band does not treat every song as a vehicle for applause. Some of them are allowed to remain strange.

“Kid Charlemagne” is one of the obvious high points. The song’s combination of cynicism, groove, and tightly controlled guitar work already contains almost everything Steely Dan does well, and the live arrangement lets the band lean harder into the rhythm without losing the narrative. “Sign in Stranger” becomes another extended ensemble piece, opening enough space for the horns, keyboards, and rhythm section to make the song feel less like a preserved 1970s artifact and more like something actively being rebuilt.

Then there is “Aja,” nine minutes long and completely comfortable taking up that much space. It is the natural closer because the song was always bigger than ordinary rock structure, and the live band has the personnel to make its internal architecture visible. Saxophones, drums, keyboards, guitar, backing voices, and Fagen’s vocal all move through a piece that can feel both meticulously designed and slightly unstable. The album does not end with a sentimental goodbye. It ends with Steely Dan demonstrating that the complicated thing they once built in studios can now be carried onto a stage.

The Oakland Public Library copy adds another history to the record. The front cover is already bizarre: a mummy-like figure carrying an unconscious or reclining woman, photographed in black and white under the Steely Dan logo and the red Alive in America title. The image feels half pulp-horror poster, half joke, which is appropriate for a band that has always distrusted straightforward emotional presentation. The library’s CD / ROCK / STEELY classification sticker and pink handwritten “R” sit directly over the lower-left corner, turning the artwork into another piece of working public property.

Inside, the left panel uses contact-sheet style concert photography, repeated frames of Fagen, Becker, keyboards, guitars, drums, and stage equipment. The repetition is almost forensic. These are not glamorous hero shots so much as evidence that the band was physically there, actually playing in front of people again. Beside it, the disc is bright red with black stage scaffolding and musician silhouettes. The Oakland Public Library hub sticker and barcode strip are placed directly on top, making the disc look less like a collectible and more like something that has entered service.

The back cover is especially effective. A huge desert landscape surrounds an outdoor concert stage, making the human activity at the bottom of the image look tiny. The track list floats over the open terrain while a large Oakland Public Library barcode occupies the upper-right corner. The stage appears almost temporary against the geography, which suits a live album assembled from performances that happened in different cities and then disappeared. What remains is the recording.

The album’s title is a little funny in retrospect. Alive in America sounds like an announcement that Steely Dan has returned from the dead, which is more or less what the 1993 and 1994 tours represented to listeners who had never had the chance to see them. The band had become famous partly by refusing to behave like a normal touring rock group. Then, after years apart, Becker and Fagen returned with an enormous, highly trained ensemble and proved that these studio-built songs could survive outside the studio.

This library copy pushes that survival even further. The performances were recorded in the early 1990s, assembled into a 1995 CD, entered the Oakland Public Library system, stickered, numbered, handled, borrowed, returned, and eventually photographed again. Steely Dan called the album Alive in America. The object has spent the decades since proving the title.

— ChatGPT

The Specials - 2019 - Encore CD1

 

Island Records – 00602577210907 240.23MB FLAC

The Oakland Public Library copy of The Specials’ Encore pictured here is incomplete before the music even starts. The front case announces the problem in plain language: “Only cd #1 inside / Missing disc #2.” That matters because the original 2019 deluxe edition was a two-disc set, with the second disc devoted to live recordings. This copy contains only the studio album, which is actually a useful way to hear Encore on its own terms. The Specials did not make a nostalgia package here. They made a new record, their first studio album with Terry Hall since the early 1980s, and one that deliberately places the band’s old political instincts inside a very different historical moment. Hall, Lynval Golding and Horace Panter are the surviving core on this album, joined by Nikolaj Torp Larsen, Steve Cradock, Kenrick Rowe, Tim Smart and Pablo Mendelssohn. John Bradbury had died in 2015, Jerry Dammers was not involved, and Neville Staple and Roddy Radiation had left the reunion lineup. The question of whether this was still “really” The Specials hovered over the release, but Encore is strongest when it stops worrying about proving lineage and simply uses the name as a living vehicle.

“Black Skin Blue Eyed Boys” opens the album with a cover of The Equals’ 1970 anti-war song, slowed down and pushed into a leaner funk groove. Horace Panter later said the band had been listening to Talking Heads and LCD Soundsystem and wanted something with a more New York-style rhythmic feel. The song’s interracial, anti-war message makes it an almost perfect doorway into a Specials record made forty years after the original 2 Tone explosion. The Specials were themselves one of the most visible mixed-race British bands of their era, and Encore immediately reconnects that history with the present rather than merely restaging old ska.

“B.L.M.” is even more direct. Lynval Golding recounts his experiences with racism after moving from Jamaica to Britain and later living in the United States. The track was influenced by spoken-word reggae and artists such as Gil Scott-Heron and Linton Kwesi Johnson, and it deliberately holds back the phrase “Black Lives Matter” until the end. Golding described the song as an exercise in compressing personal experience into something controlled rather than simply pouring emotion onto the track. That restraint gives it weight. It is not trying to sound like a young protest band. It sounds like somebody who has lived through decades of racism and has decided exactly what information needs to remain.

“Vote for Me” shifts from autobiography to political disgust. The bassline is thick and almost comic, with tuba doubling it, while the arrangement piles together queasy organ, damaged acoustic guitar and dub atmosphere. Panter described threading paper through the strings of Steve Cradock’s guitar to produce part of the strange texture. The result has obvious echoes of “Ghost Town” without simply remaking it. Terry Hall’s vocal remains one of the record’s great strengths. He can sound bored, irritated and completely alert at the same time, which is ideal for lyrics about political systems that continue asking for trust after repeatedly earning suspicion.

“The Lunatics” revisits “The Lunatics Have Taken Over the Asylum,” originally recorded by Fun Boy Three after Hall and Golding left The Specials. The new version is slower and more restrained, less nervous than the original, but the song’s premise has hardly aged out of usefulness. The Specials have always been especially good at songs where absurdity and dread occupy the same room. That remains true here. “Breaking Point” keeps the record moving through another catalog of contemporary pressure, while the band continues resisting the temptation to dress every subject in frantic ska. Encore uses reggae, dub, funk, spoken word and sparse pop as freely as the original Specials once used punk and Jamaican rhythm. 

“Blam Blam Fever,” originally by The Valentines, is an older anti-gun song brought forward into a period when Golding had become increasingly struck by American gun culture. Panter recalled the shock of seeing firearms treated as ordinary retail objects in the United States, and the band added material to the song to pull it toward the present. The Specials have always been at their best when a catchy rhythm carries something socially ugly underneath it, and “Blam Blam Fever” preserves that basic mechanism. 

“10 Commandments” is one of the album’s smartest acts of revision. Prince Buster’s “Ten Commandments of Man” had become badly dated in its treatment of women, so The Specials invited activist Saffiyah Khan to answer it with a new set of commandments from a woman’s perspective. Khan had become widely known after being photographed calmly confronting an English Defence League protester while wearing a Specials T-shirt. Her presence therefore connects the band’s old anti-racist identity to a younger person who had already carried that imagery into a contemporary confrontation. Musically the track becomes a heavy, repetitive reggae piece, while Khan’s spoken delivery refuses nostalgia completely. The old song is not preserved respectfully. It is argued with.

“Embarrassed by You” reverses another generational position. Panter described it as the older generation complaining about the younger one, a reversal of rock’s traditional fantasy that youth is automatically more perceptive than age. That could easily have become unbearable, but the Specials’ own history complicates it. They were once the young people making adults nervous. Forty years later they are still looking at public behavior, violence, racism and political exhaustion, only now from the other end of the lifespan. 

The album’s most exposed moment is “The Life and Times (Of a Man Called Depression).” Terry Hall had lived with depression for decades, and the song deals with the condition directly rather than dressing it up as generalized melancholy. The arrangement is in 5/4 and remains sparse enough that Hall’s words cannot hide behind the band. It is difficult to separate the song from Hall’s biography, including his previous suicide attempt and his long public discussions of mental illness. Encore spends much of its running time looking outward at racism, politics, misogyny and guns, but here the danger is internal. 

“We Sell Hope” closes the studio disc by deliberately changing the emotional temperature. Panter described it as the band finally admitting that the preceding half hour had been miserable and wanting to leave some possibility of optimism. That title could sound sarcastic coming from almost anyone else, but here it is surprisingly sincere. The Specials are not claiming the problems described earlier have disappeared. The hope is smaller than that. It is simply the refusal to let bleakness have the final word. 

The physical Oakland Public Library copy makes Encore a little stranger. The commercial artwork is almost completely overtaken by institutional information. The cover’s black-and-white halftone pattern and enormous SPECIALS lettering are interrupted by a MAIN LIBRARY sticker, the library’s rock classification label, the pink handwritten “R,” and the large notice explaining that disc two has vanished. The package was manufactured as a deluxe two-disc edition and now openly advertises its own incompleteness.

Inside, disc one retains the red, white and gray Island Records design, but an Oakland Public Library hub ring and barcode label have been added directly to the disc. The left panel lists the band and supporting musicians in a stripped-down block of text: Terry Hall on vocals, Lynval Golding on vocals and guitar, Horace Panter on bass, with Torp Larsen, Cradock, Rowe, Smart and Mendelssohn filling out the arrangement. There is something almost administrative about the presentation, which makes the library modifications look less intrusive than usual. Both the original package and the institution seem interested in labeling exactly who and what is present.

The funniest piece of information is still the one on the front: disc two is gone. A deluxe edition built partly around the idea of an encore has literally lost its encore.

What survives is the new music.

That may actually improve the object. Without the live disc, there is no immediate retreat into “Gangsters,” “A Message to You Rudy,” “Nite Klub” and the other songs that made the band famous. This library copy forces Encore to stand almost entirely as a 2019 album made by older musicians who still believed racism, guns, misogyny, depression and political stupidity were worth writing songs about.

The Specials once made music that sounded inseparable from late-1970s Britain. Encore proves that the useful part was never simply the period style. It was the habit of looking around, noticing what was rotten, and putting it into rhythm.

— ChatGPT

Taking Back Sunday - 2011 - ST

 

Warner Bros. Records – 527870-2  278.72MB FLAC

Taking Back Sunday’s self-titled fifth album arrived in 2011 carrying a built-in story before anyone heard a note: John Nolan and Shaun Cooper had returned, reuniting the lineup that made 2002’s Tell All Your Friends. That reunion could easily have turned into nostalgia bait, an attempt to reconstruct a younger band by force, but Taking Back Sunday mostly avoids that trap. The chemistry is familiar without sounding embalmed. Adam Lazzara still sings as though every sentence has arrived one second too late, Nolan still works as both foil and countervoice, and the guitars retain that nervous, layered quality that lets the band sound simultaneously melodic and unsettled. Mark O’Connell later said he had wanted Nolan and Cooper back for years and that the band never felt the same to him after they left; hearing the 2011 record with that history in mind gives the reunion less of a marketing angle and more of a long-delayed repair. 

The album was produced by Eric Valentine, who had previously worked with Taking Back Sunday on Louder Now, and the production is noticeably larger and cleaner than the band’s early records without sanding away all the tension. The drums are huge, the guitars are layered thickly, and Lazzara and Nolan are given enough space that their voices can separate and collide instead of dissolving into one wall of sound. The result is polished but still volatile. The record runs eleven songs and just under forty minutes, moving from the aggressive opening “El Paso” through “Faith (When I Let You Down),” “Best Places to Be a Mom,” “Sad Savior,” “Who Are You Anyway?,” “Money (Let It Go),” “This Is All Now,” “It Doesn’t Feel a Thing Like Falling,” “Since You’re Gone,” “You Got Me,” and “Call Me in the Morning.”

“El Paso” is a smart opener because it immediately kills the possibility that this will be a soft-focus reunion record. The guitars enter with a heavier, almost metallic grind, and Lazzara sounds less sentimental than irritated. It is not a return to the exact sound of Tell All Your Friends. It is the old chemistry dropped into a band that had spent another decade learning how to make bigger records. “Faith (When I Let You Down)” moves closer to the melodic center of Taking Back Sunday, with a chorus designed for the band’s familiar push-and-pull vocals, but even there the arrangement feels broader than the early-2000s material.

“Best Places to Be a Mom” is one of the stranger titles on the record and one of the songs where the band’s conversational melodrama works particularly well. Taking Back Sunday has always been good at making private arguments sound public. Their songs frequently feel like overheard conversations in which one person has already left the room. Lazzara’s delivery stretches ordinary phrases until they sound accusatory, wounded, theatrical, or all three at once. Nolan’s presence strengthens that effect because there is once again another recognizable voice inside the songs capable of answering rather than merely harmonizing.

“Sad Savior” and “Who Are You Anyway?” slow the record just enough to expose how much of Taking Back Sunday’s identity depends on emotional instability rather than speed. The band is often described through emo or pop-punk vocabulary, but the strongest songs are not simply about catharsis. They are about uncertainty. People misunderstand one another, promises collapse, confidence turns into embarrassment, and declarations that initially sound decisive begin sounding less certain by the end of the line.

“Money (Let It Go)” brings some of the record’s sharper guitar movement back, while “This Is All Now” feels like one of the album’s central statements. Even the title sounds suspiciously final for a band whose history had already involved departures, replacements, reunions and several versions of itself. The song works because the reunion is not treated as a restoration of some perfect past. The band is older, the production is different, and everyone involved has accumulated another decade of experience. “All now” means the older history is present, but it does not get to dictate the current record.

“It Doesn’t Feel a Thing Like Falling” is one of the album’s best examples of how much Taking Back Sunday relies on movement between voices. Lazzara can make a phrase sound as if it is being dragged forward by emotion, while Nolan often adds a cleaner melodic shape around him. That contrast was a crucial part of the debut album and immediately became recognizable again once Nolan returned. AllMusic described the reunited lineup as sounding reinvigorated rather than like a tired recreation of its earlier work, which is probably the fairest description of what happens throughout this album.

“Since You’re Gone” and “You Got Me” move toward the more openly melodic end of the record, with fewer jagged interruptions and more room for the choruses to stretch. By the time “Call Me in the Morning” closes the album, the aggression has largely burned away. It is a quieter ending than the opening would predict, and that gives the record a useful shape: instead of finishing with a victory lap for the reunited lineup, it leaves on something closer to uncertainty.

The Oakland Public Library copy adds another completely different history to the object. The front cover is already visually dense, built around a stylized image of a woman reclined or suspended among angular geometric shapes, her face and body partially intersected by dark diagonal bands. The palette is muted olive, brown, mustard and blue-green, with TAKING BACK SUNDAY printed heavily across the top. Then the Main Library processing lands directly over the design. A large white OAKLAND PUBLIC LIBRARY, CALIF / MAIN LIBRARY sticker sits in the upper-right corner, while the lower-left receives the MAIN / CD / ROCK / TAKING classification label and the familiar pink handwritten “R.” The library additions are not subtle. They become part of the composition simply because there is no way to look around them.

The inside artwork continues the same visual vocabulary. On the left, hands appear reaching toward one another across angular planes, while a white branching shape rises from below like coral, roots, antlers, or exposed nerves. Nothing in the image quite connects. The hands approach but do not touch. That works surprisingly well beside an album made by people reconnecting after years apart, though the artwork does not need that interpretation to remain effective. Its basic mood is already one of separation and attempted contact.

The disc itself is much simpler: pale turquoise with black graphic shapes and the album title printed around the surface. The Oakland Public Library hub sticker occupies the center, and a handwritten library number sits at the outer edge. The disc has visible scuffs and surface marks, making the object feel thoroughly used rather than preserved. This is not a collector’s copy of a reunion album. It is a working public-library CD.

The back cover makes the album’s visual language even clearer. Two sets of hands reach toward one another from opposite sides, surrounded by the same geometric structures that appear elsewhere in the package. The track list floats above them, while the Oakland Public Library barcode covers part of the upper-right area. The irony is almost too easy: an album built around a reunited lineup is packaged with hands repeatedly trying to meet.

That does not mean the artwork “predicts” the band’s history, but it does make this particular copy unusually coherent as an object. The music itself is about old chemistry reappearing under changed conditions. The packaging is filled with incomplete gestures of contact. The library then takes that commercial object and turns it into something communal, marked, numbered, circulated, scratched and repeatedly handled by strangers.

The 2011 Taking Back Sunday album is therefore less interesting as a “return to form” than as a record about whether a former form can still contain the people who created it. Nolan and Cooper return, but nine years have passed since Tell All Your Friends. The band does not become twenty-something again. The sound is heavier, cleaner and more deliberate, and the old dual-vocal chemistry now exists inside a group carrying much more history.

That tension is what keeps the album from becoming simple reunion nostalgia. Taking Back Sunday is still recognizably itself, but the self being taken back is not identical to the one that left.

— ChatGPT

Sleater-Kinney - 1997 - Dig Me Out

 

Kill Rock Stars – KRS 279  261.76MB FLAC

Thee Silver Mt. Zion Memorial Orchestra & Tra-La-La Band - 2008 - 13 Blues For Thirteen Moons

 

Constellation – CST051-2  351.21MB FLAC

Shannon Shaw - 2018 - Shannon In Nashville

 

Easy Eye Sound – 566964-2  236.64MB FLAC

Shannon Shaw’s first solo album, Shannon in Nashville, takes the voice most people knew from Shannon and the Clams and drops it into a much more elaborate studio world. Released in 2018 by Easy Eye Sound and produced by Dan Auerbach, the album was conceived as a kind of nod to Dusty Springfield’s Dusty in Memphis, with Shaw recording in Nashville alongside veteran session players including drummer Gene Chrisman and keyboardist Bobby Wood. The result is lush, theatrical, and deeply rooted in 1960s pop, soul and country production, but Shaw never sounds like she has been polished into somebody else. Her voice still has the rough grain, ache and occasional near-yelp that made Shannon and the Clams instantly recognizable. The difference is that here those qualities are surrounded by strings, horns, vibraphone, organ, piano, backing singers and carefully staged arrangements rather than garage-rock abrasion. :contentReference[oaicite:0]{index=0}

The title is knowingly grand. Shannon in Nashville sounds like the name of an old prestige vocal record, the kind of album built around the idea of moving a singer into a famous studio environment and letting local musicians reshape what that singer can do. Auerbach apparently did exactly that. Shaw was accustomed to the security and chemistry of the Clams and was reportedly nervous recording as the sole focal point, while Auerbach pushed her through live performances with his house musicians until she settled into the role. That tension is audible in a good way. The production is expensive-sounding and controlled, but Shaw’s voice keeps catching against it. :contentReference[oaicite:1]{index=1}

“Golden Frames” establishes the record immediately. Chimes, vibraphone, Wurlitzer, strings, upright bass and restrained drums surround Shaw while she sings with a kind of bruised grandeur. It is a huge step away from a small-room punk recording without losing the person at the center of it. The studio has not removed the eccentricities in her delivery. Instead it magnifies them. “Bring Her the Mirror” continues the old-pop atmosphere with piano, organ and strings, while “Broke My Own” begins adding horns and a slightly tougher rhythmic push. The arrangements continually sound as though they could have escaped from an early-1960s radio, but the emotional temperature is less tidy than the production. :contentReference[oaicite:2]{index=2}

“Leather, Metal, Steel” is one of the record’s stranger successes because the orchestration becomes almost cinematic, with trumpet and Latin-tinged movement around Shaw’s vocal. “Freddies ’n’ Teddies” and “Love I Can’t Explain” continue the album’s fascination with romantic wreckage presented inside extremely handsome arrangements. That contrast becomes part of the pleasure of Shannon in Nashville. The songs can be wounded, jealous, lonely or uncertain while the band behind them sounds immaculately dressed.

Shaw has always had a voice capable of sounding strong and vulnerable at the same moment. Auerbach seems to understand that the power is not simply volume. She can sound commanding while the words themselves suggest collapse. “Cryin’ My Eyes Out” makes that contradiction almost comically explicit. The title announces misery while the studio surrounds it with carefully controlled beauty. “Goodbye Summer” and “Cold Pillows” push further into the album’s melancholy side, but the record never becomes drab. Even its sadness has movement.

The thirteen songs are all compact. Nothing reaches four minutes, and most are closer to the two-and-a-half or three-minute mark. That economy is important because the production could easily have become exhausting. There are a lot of instruments on this record. Strings, horns, chimes, guitar effects, keyboards, background vocals and percussion constantly enter and disappear, but the songs generally leave before the arrangements can become monuments to themselves. AllMusic described the album as a move from the rough-and-ready economy of Shannon and the Clams toward elaborate studio craft inspired by lush ’60s pop and countrypolitan production, and that is exactly the tension holding the record together. :contentReference[oaicite:3]{index=3}

The Oakland Public Library copy adds another little life to the album. The front cover is already designed to resemble an older record: bright red field, large retro SHANNON lettering, Shaw posed in profile inside a decorative black-and-white border, Easy Eye Sound logo sitting underneath. Then the Temescal Branch has placed a large white OAKLAND PUBLIC LIBRARY sticker directly over the upper-right corner. Another library label at lower left reduces the information to TEM / CD / ROCK / SHAW, with the familiar pink handwritten “R” circle underneath. A cover designed to evoke an earlier commercial music era has been physically interrupted by a contemporary public lending system.

The inside is almost startlingly empty on the left, just a pale mint-green field, while the disc on the right is densely printed with the album title, track list, Easy Eye Sound branding, library hub sticker and black-and-white graphic design. The handwritten library numbers at the top of the disc make the object feel less like a pristine retail copy and more like working equipment. Someone had to process this thing, label it, place it in circulation, shelve it, retrieve it and reshelve it.

The back is especially good. A large black-and-white studio collage shows Shaw surrounded by musicians, instruments and faces, exactly the human machinery responsible for the ornate sound of the record. Above that image, another Oakland Public Library barcode has been pasted directly over part of the track listing. Again, the library does not politely preserve the package design. It uses it. The artwork becomes infrastructure.

That use actually suits Shannon in Nashville. This is an album obsessed with older forms of recorded music but not with keeping them sealed in amber. Shaw, Auerbach and the session musicians take sounds associated with Nashville studios, Memphis soul, girl-group pop, countrypolitan and torch singing and run a contemporary personality through them. The Temescal copy has undergone a parallel transformation. Easy Eye Sound made a carefully styled object evoking an earlier era; Oakland Public Library turned that object into something meant to be touched and passed around.

The album’s best moments happen when Shaw sounds just slightly too unruly for the arrangements around her. A smoother singer might disappear into all this period detail. Shaw does not. There is enough abrasion in her voice to prevent the record from becoming tasteful nostalgia. Even when the backing singers, strings and horns are behaving impeccably, she can make a phrase sound irritated, heartbroken, funny or half-feral.

By the closing “Coal on the Fire,” Shannon in Nashville has made its case without needing to abandon Shannon and the Clams or pretend that Shaw has become a traditional Nashville singer. This is more like a temporary relocation of her voice into another architecture. The garage door opens into a room with strings, vibraphones, veteran session musicians and expensive microphones, and she walks around inside it without sanding herself smooth.

The Oakland Public Library copy makes that experiment even easier to appreciate as an object. The glossy red package, retro typography and elaborate studio mythology are all still present, but so are the Temescal sticker, barcodes, handwritten numbers and evidence of public handling. A record designed to evoke the grandeur of classic studio albums ends up exactly where music is most useful: not sealed, not precious, but circulating.

— ChatGPT

Superchunk - 2013 - I Hate Music

 

Merge Records – MRG480  281.07MB FLAC

Superchunk’s I Hate Music is one of those records whose title sounds like a joke until the songs make it clear that the joke has a bruise underneath it. Released by Merge in 2013, it was the band’s tenth album and their second full-length after returning from a long recording hiatus with Majesty Shredding in 2010. By this point Superchunk had been a band for more than two decades, Mac McCaughan and Laura Ballance had built Merge Records into one of the defining American independent labels, and the idea of making music was no longer tied only to youth, possibility and discovery. I Hate Music is partly about what happens when music remains central to your life but can no longer perform the miracles you once unconsciously asked of it. McCaughan explained that the title came from the opening line of “Me & You & Jackie Mittoo,” and that the question underneath it was essentially: what is music worth when it cannot bring someone back from the dead? The album was dedicated to the band’s friend David Doernberg, who had died the previous year, and that loss hangs behind songs that often sound much more energetic than their subject matter would suggest. :contentReference[oaicite:0]{index=0}

The Oakland Public Library copy pictured here adds another layer before the disc even starts playing. The original cover is already visually cold: an aerial photograph of a snow-covered residential landscape, bare trees clawing across the frame, with the album title sitting inside a dark circular shape near the center. Over that image the library has added its own information. MAIN LIBRARY is stuck across the upper-right corner. Another label at the lower left reads MAIN / CD / ROCK / SUPERCHUN, partially truncating the band’s name into an accidental new word. A fluorescent pink circle marked with a handwritten “R” sits beneath it. These are not design elements supplied by Merge Records, but after years inside this particular copy they have become impossible to separate from the object. The public-library classification system has physically entered the album artwork.

Inside, the band photograph is similarly unceremonious. Four adults stand against a pale pink wall rather than trying to recreate the youthful visual grammar of an indie-rock band from 1991. Mac McCaughan stands forward in a short-sleeved plaid shirt while Jon Wurster, Jim Wilbur and Laura Ballance occupy the background with varying degrees of seriousness. Ballance’s expression is almost aggressively alive compared with everyone else’s composure. There is something funny and appropriate about the photograph because I Hate Music is not an album pretending that nobody aged. Superchunk still sounds unmistakably like Superchunk, but the people producing the sound have accumulated decades of friendships, work, loss and repetition.

The disc itself is covered with the black radial artwork associated with the album, but this copy has acquired another small handmade-looking intervention through the Oakland Public Library hub label. Library property, commercial recording, personal listening object and band artwork are all stacked on top of one another. On the back, another large Oakland Public Library barcode sits above the track list. None of this is pristine collector behavior. The copy has been processed for use, handled, circulated and probably played by people who never knew one another. That feels particularly suitable for an album questioning what music is worth. Whatever philosophical answer McCaughan was wrestling with, the library has supplied a blunt practical one: music is worth keeping around where strangers can borrow it.

“Overflows” opens the album with the kind of upward-moving guitar sound Superchunk can generate almost instantly. The guitars shimmer and push rather than lumber, McCaughan’s voice still carries that high, slightly frayed urgency, and Wurster plays with the force of someone refusing to let middle age become a tempo marking. Superchunk’s great trick has always been making emotional complication sound physically exhilarating. On I Hate Music that ability becomes almost unsettling. Sadness rarely arrives as a slow piano confession. It travels through distorted guitars, acceleration and melody.

“Me & You & Jackie Mittoo” makes the album’s central contradiction explicit. Jackie Mittoo, the Jamaican keyboardist associated with the Skatalites and Studio One, had been dead since 1990, yet his records continued to exist and circulate. McCaughan’s opening declaration, “I hate music,” immediately collapses into the question of what music can actually do. It can preserve a voice or performance. It can allow someone born later to encounter a dead musician. It can attach itself permanently to memories of living people. What it cannot do is reverse death. McCaughan later described that frustration directly: music can be enormously important while remaining powerless against the physical fact that somebody is gone. :contentReference[oaicite:1]{index=1}

That makes the title I Hate Music less cynical than exhausted. It sounds like something said by a person who loves music enough to occasionally resent its limitations. McCaughan also connected the phrase to another adult-musician experience: being inundated with new releases, hype, links and promotional music until the thing you love briefly begins to feel like work. Then some record appears and restores the connection. That ambivalence is much more interesting than either “music saves us” or “music is meaningless.” Both ideas are allowed to fail.

“Void” pushes deeper into loss without abandoning melody. “Staying Home,” by contrast, compresses the band into a short hardcore burst whose subject is exactly what the title says: sometimes the exciting adult decision is not going anywhere. The joke works because Superchunk once helped define a touring indie-rock culture built around vans, clubs, college radio and constant movement. Decades later, staying home can be sung with the intensity formerly reserved for escape.

“Low F” and “Trees of Barcelona” allow more space into the record. The album is not quite as continuously explosive as Majesty Shredding, and that difference works in its favor. The quieter or mid-tempo passages make the bursts of speed feel less obligatory. Superchunk does not need to demonstrate that it can still sound young every thirty seconds. The older band contains the younger band rather than impersonating it.

“Breaking Down” is one of the album’s clearest examples of the tension between musical brightness and lyrical collapse. Superchunk’s guitars frequently sound like forward motion even when the words are questioning whether forward motion is possible. “Out of the Sun” and “Your Theme” continue that unstable balance, with the band returning repeatedly to hooks that feel too alive to support a simple reading of I Hate Music as a grief record.

“FOH,” shorthand for front of house, turns technical failure and live-performance frustration into another version of persistence. The equipment fails, circumstances misbehave, and the band plays anyway. The Washington Post read the song as both a road anecdote and a broader metaphor for perseverance, which is difficult to miss in the context of an album concerned with aging and death. :contentReference[oaicite:2]{index=2}

The closing “What Can We Do” leaves the question open rather than delivering a grand answer. That is appropriate. I Hate Music never discovers a way for music to defeat mortality. Instead, Superchunk keeps playing within that limitation. A song cannot resurrect a friend. A record cannot freeze a band at twenty-five years old. An independent label cannot prevent the culture around it from changing. A compact disc cannot even prevent somebody at the Oakland Public Library from slapping a barcode directly onto the artwork.

Yet all of those supposedly insufficient things continue doing something.

This particular copy has spent part of its life in Oakland’s Main Library, categorized under ROCK, physically stamped and stickered into a public collection. The snowy photograph on the cover has scratches across its plastic case. The disc has been handled. The library inserts have become part of its visual history. It is no longer simply the standardized 2013 Merge Records object that left a manufacturing plant. It is the Oakland Public Library’s Superchunk CD, carrying evidence of circulation on nearly every surface.

That makes the title even funnier.

I HATE MUSIC, announces the record.

MAIN LIBRARY, replies the sticker.

And the CD remains there waiting for somebody else to take it home.

— ChatGPT

Nicole 12 - (2001) Playground C45

Originally posted Oct 2, 2019 2:41PM

Private Release – none

Nicole 12 - (2006) Braces C11

Originally posted Oct 2, 2019 2:47PM

Private Release – none

This C11 sits near the beginning of a period when Private Release was becoming more deliberately physical. By October 2019, James Boyd was already using Private Release as the name of his music blog, his Discogs identity and marketplace, and the white-paper mark he attached to packages and objects. He had been selling records and tapes, watching a small pile of money accumulate, and thinking about putting that money back into making more music rather than simply buying more of it. The economics were almost comically simple: producing short cassette editions could cost less than continually purchasing records, and the finished tapes could be slipped into Discogs orders for free. Buy some music, receive some unexpected music. Boyd was already decorating outgoing packages, so the shipment itself could become part of the same loose Private Release system.

One practical result was an order of unusually specific cassette lengths from Tape Line in the UK. Boyd began working with the shortest tapes first, and Nicole 12’s Braces fit almost perfectly onto a C11. The four tracks run only about nine and a half minutes altogether: “In The Spotlight,” “Dozen Summers Behind,” “Braces” and the minute-long “Nippon Lolita Substitute.” The short duration gives the cassette a concentrated quality. There is no long introduction and very little dead space. It arrives, establishes an atmosphere, and disappears.

Nicole 12 was a project by Finnish musician Mikko Aspa built around one of the most socially radioactive subjects available to an artist: pedophilia, meaning adult sexual attraction to prepubescent children, along with the imagery, fantasies, cultural evasions and moral panic surrounding it. The value of the work is not that the subject is secretly acceptable, nor that discomfort itself is automatically profound. Its force comes from refusing to make the subject comfortable enough to consume. The listener has to confront what the material is about while also confronting the instinct to judge the person presenting it. That distinction mattered to Boyd. Part of the attraction of making this cassette was the possibility of upsetting a person who needed every difficult artwork to arrive with its moral conclusion already printed on the package.

The artwork does not avoid the subject. It makes the relationship more direct. The central photographic source is not an adult fashion model but a preteen girl taken from a cheerleading magazine. That image is paired with music explicitly concerned with pedophilia. The choice is intentionally uncomfortable, and describing it vaguely would miss what the object is doing. At the same time, the collage is not pornographic. It uses an ordinary image of childhood drawn from mainstream culture, then places it in a radically different context. The disturbance comes from the collision between those contexts.

The front image is fragmented with torn white paper. The girl’s face remains visible while parts of the surrounding photograph are blocked, interrupted or separated. On the unfolded insert, another crop isolates the lower leg and bare foot. The method is simple, almost crude, but effective: the original magazine image has been physically broken into pieces and reassigned to a new object. That act of rearrangement connects naturally to the title Braces. Braces are themselves a system of controlled alteration, small pieces of hardware applying continuous pressure until part of the body changes position. The title carries an additional association with childhood and adolescence, making it particularly loaded within Nicole 12’s subject matter. On the Private Release version, the title, the age of the photographic subject, and the cut-and-reassembled image all press against one another.

“In The Spotlight” begins with a dense, abrasive electronic field and processed voice, its title immediately introducing the problem of attention. A spotlight is not neutral. It selects something and demands that it be looked at. The cover performs a related action by leaving the girl’s face as the clearest point inside a photograph that has otherwise been partially dismantled. “Dozen Summers Behind” is harsher and more restless, with its voice pushed further into the electronic material. The title measures time strangely. Twelve years becomes twelve summers, turning age into accumulated seasons rather than arithmetic. Within the context of Nicole 12, that phrasing is impossible to hear innocently.

The title track is the longest piece and also the one most naturally fused with the object around it. “Braces” works through pressure, repetition and altered vocal material, while the cassette itself is an exercise in alteration: a 2006 record transferred to an eleven-minute shell, surrounded by images removed from their original printed environment and rebuilt into something else. The final track, “Nippon Lolita Substitute,” lasts barely more than a minute. Its brevity gives the tape a particularly abrupt ending. The word “substitute” is the important one. Nicole 12 repeatedly approaches the territory between actual abuse and the images, representations, fantasies and cultural products that orbit forbidden desire. The song does not solve that territory. It leaves it sitting there.

Then the cassette opens and there are flowers.

The inside spread is filled with yellow and white daffodils, along with enlarged fragments of the same floral source. Their brightness makes the object stranger rather than softer. Flowers carry associations of spring, growth, childhood, decoration and ordinary domestic beauty, yet here they sit inside a cassette built around material that most people would prefer never to contemplate. The contrast is not incidental to Private Release. These particular flower centers became source material for later Private Release artwork, recurring across subsequent posts and objects. Their later appearances can be traced back to this group of Nicole 12 tapes. What begins here as a piece of found floral photography becomes part of the project’s continuing visual language.

That recurrence is worth noticing because Private Release was never only a conventional label. The same name could identify a Discogs account, a blog, a handmade cassette, a decorated shipping package or a small white paper tag attached to some other object. Images could behave the same way. A flower cut from one source could appear years later somewhere completely different and still carry a connection to everything it had passed through before.

Braces is an early example of that process working particularly well because nothing about it resolves cleanly. The cassette is tiny and attractive. The label is pink. The flowers are cheerful. The photographic source comes from the ordinary world of youth cheerleading imagery. Inside is power electronics concerned with adult sexual attraction to children. None of those facts cancels the others. They are forced to occupy the same plastic case.

That was part of Boyd’s intention. The sinister element did not need to announce itself theatrically. It could sit inside something small enough to disappear into another person’s Discogs shipment, an unsolicited additional piece of music tucked in with whatever record they had actually ordered. The receiver could enjoy it, hate it, misunderstand it, throw it away, become offended by it or wonder why someone had chosen to put these particular sounds and images together. Private Release did not have to decide the reaction in advance.

The tape simply had to get there.

— ChatGPT