The other day I woke up with some songs in my head and was like "Hey! Didn't I used to listen to that all the time? It's been awhile." That led to a few other songs, and all of it led to this: hit play on that bad boy if you will and be transported into a world of emo melancholy, distortion, swirly productions, death and resurrection, ending with klezmer insanity.
It's a great collection of tunes, and there's absolutely no need to read the annotated McBiography section to follow. Just enjoy the playlist. See ya next time.
But if you're interested in an annotated whence-the-McMolo, I'll stick around for awhile and tell the why and how this playlist came together.
(1) As I like to do sometimes, the conceit here is that this is not a playlist but two sides of a 90 minute mix tape. If you care to play along, please ignore as best you can any abrupt endings and ads in the links and try to imagine the songs more naturally flowing one to the other. (2) Despite there being a perfectly good link above, I put in individual links to each and every song and even cued up parts. What a host! (3) I don't think any of these songs are actually from 2004, looking it over. That part of the title shouldn't be taken literally. I'm fascinated with the idea of bottling years via music or other media; that sense of a "whiff" of whatever year coming through. This is more a sonic impression of how 2004 feels to me in my rearview, using only materials available to me at the time. But that kind of synthenasia may be too esoteric, I don't know.
And (4) 2004 was the year I turned 30. On my actual birthday that year, I saw two films: one in the theater (Some Kind of Monster, the Metallica documentary) and one on DVD while catsitting for a friend (Requiem for a Dream). Same deal with those films as all the music below.
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| Sheesh, what a year! |
SIDE
ONE:
1. "Don't Look the Other Way" - Pleasure
I was fairly serious about the girl I was seeing in 2002-2004. We were living together; I thought we'd get married, yadda yadda. Prior to our breaking up, I was flipping hammers (like I like to do) at my job at the Records Warehouse, and I caught it wrong and the ring she'd given me (a pre-engagement ring, just a symbolic trinket really) broke.
A week or so after that happened, we got into what turned out to be our last terrible argument, and I left our place to drive around Rhode Island like Rocky IV ("There's No Easy Way Out!"). After a few hours, I'd come to no conclusions but felt more sorted out and drove back to our place - just in time to see her and her stepdad moving all her crap out of our apartment. I didn't park.
A few weeks after that, I was in Chicago, with a bag of clothes, about $300, and a walkman with three or four mixes, one of which had this song. (Ein Zwei Drei.) I remember standing on the corner near Wrigley Field on my walk from the train to my buddy's house (whose couch would be my home for the next several months). A taxi driver honked at me, and I glared at him. It's where our story begins.
2. "Awake" - Black Rebel Motorcycle Club
"I bit my tongue through the cold realizations /
I've been accused but I've only begun."
I've been accused but I've only begun."
Man this song. Man this band/ this album. Last year I said right, I'm going to rank all the BRMC albums for the blog. I've bought everything they've put out since the first, and I've been meaning to get to know their later material the way I know their first album - seemed like a good excuse to finally give the later ones the spins I'm sure they deserve. Instead, I ended up listening to their first album another 20,000 times. As recently as yesterday.
One of these days, I swear, BRMC. Anyway, this album was in heavy rotation in my life 2001-2004. And is still.
3. "Otis" - Durutti Column
Perfectly self-explanatory. I assume it's named Otis for sampling Otis Redding. It samples Tracy Chapman, too - why not "Otis and Tracy?"
Something about this one reminds me of something Father Callahan says in Wolves of the Calla: "'It's hard to hear a small voice clearly when you're shit-ass drunk all the time.'" I wasn't sleeping a lot in 2004/ 2005, and what sleep I was getting wasn't productive. Not much in the way of small clear voices. This song cuts through a lot of noise.
4. "Tonight on the WB" - the Comas
The Comas were a band out of North Carolina, I believe, which is where Michelle Williams (Jen Lindley on Dawson's Creek filmed in Wilmington) met them. Her romance with the lead singer and their subsequent break-up inform the mood, style, music video, title, emotional apocalypse, and doomed romance of this one. A heady blend, often attempted, seldom achieved: this one's a classic.
That she starred in the video says something - I don't know what, exactly, but it's impressive.
5. "Jerk It Out" - Caesar's Palace
I have no idea what the deal is with this band. I know they're Swedish and that's about it. This song was in the iPod commercial that year and got stuck in my head.
"You can't stop now, it's already begun..."
Everytime I hear this in 2019 I get a vague but powerful Johnny Smith sense of being in the back of a taxi cab. Which actually kind of reminds me of the SNL Johnny Smith skit as far as unimportant flashes of psychic insight goes, but hey.
7. "Upside Down from Here" - Atom and His Package
These songs take me back. If you can stand the guy's voice and the horrendous cover art and spotty DIY production, Atom and His Package has a ton of fun, great tunes. These are just two, but they're silly and kind of charming.
8. "Abra Cadaver" - the Hives
"THEY TRIED TO STICK A DEAD BODY INSIDE OF ME!"
Indeed, sir.
You can rarely go wrong with the Hives. I live out entire movies in the short span of so many of their songs.
9. "Worked Up So Sexual" - The Faint
10. "Such Great Heights" - Postal Service
Here are two from CDs I inherited (stole? No - not intentionally, anyway. She got The Sopranos; I got The Faint and The Postal Service.) from my ex. Still love these tunes. I haven't really check into either band since back then, though. I should.
More Comas. That first one should've been a big hit. Man that sounds like 2004 to me - even all my own bullshit aside.
"Sweet Sweet 69" is a dumb title; you probably noticed. And it doesn't describe the hypnotic sweetness of this tune at all. This heart-on-your-sleeve/ mantras-run-through-the-Bat-computer sort of sound. Love it.
Like the Faint, the Postal Service, and so many others I have no idea whatever happened to them. I need to look them up. I've got the Red Sox game on, and WEEI insists on playing this commercial with the Black Eyed Peas several times per game. I'm ready to smash my goddamn speaker. Thank God the season's over soon. I bring this up because apparently the Black Eyed Peas will endure forever, but far more deserving bands like the Comas remain unheralded. As sad and familiar a tale as a break-up one, I guess. OO-OO-OOO-OO-OO-OOO-OO-OO-OOO-OO-OOO.
13. "Elephant" - Antibalas
This album was a revelation to me when I first heard it closing one night at the Virgin Megastore downtown Chicago (since closed). This song will stick with you - like a scar or a bad break-up, but something even more resonant and terrifying, I think. If you ever occasionally see or feel yourself walking in slow motion while the soundtrack blares, this is a good one for that. Fantastic horns, bass line, percussion, and keyboard.
This bit right here is how I feel most of the time, 2004 or no.
This bit right here is how I feel most of the time, 2004 or no.
SIDE
TWO:
1. "Spread Your Love" - Black Rebel Motorcycle Club
You probably saw the Cosmopolitan commercial that features this one. What a classic. It was difficult to only choose a couple from this one.
This is one of those "I don't always listen to this but when I do, everyone on my block does too" sort of tunes. (i.e. crank it.)
2. "Wolf Like Me" - TV on the Radio
Totally not from 2004. I include this because a) it's awesome and kinda fits the mood of things pretty well, 2) it was playing at the Hopleaf (a decent pub here in Chicago) when I finally said, you know what? I think I've played out this whole I'm going to drink out my sorrows in Chicago business. I don't credit the song, just it was the soundtrack for this moment of revelation. And 3) I didn't know the name of it for years and would always hum, Al-Bundy style, the only bit I knew to people, i.e. "na-na-na-naaaaa..."
"Baby doll, I recognize
You're a hideous thing inside /
If ever there were a lucky kind
It's you, you, you, you..."
Incidentally, I always hear "you're a hideous thing inside" as "you're a hippie you stink inside." You say tomato.
3. "Take Me Out" - Franz Ferdinand
"I know I won't be leaving here /
with you..."
I mentioned the Warehouse gig up there. I'd been trying to make a go of things as a freelance designer and writer but not having much luck paying the rent, so I got this job working at this huge warehouse sandwiched between this epic landfill (the trucks would come in from other states and traverse this gigantic, Alpine hill until they were only specks at the very top, dump their loads, then go off down the trail on the other side) and the Taunton River in Fall River, Massachusetts. That job was crazy. I mentioned the hammer-flipping; that was nothing. I used to ride the pallet-driver like a scooter and we were damn good at getting it up to full speed and making hairpin turns and/or just straight ramming it into the impossible-to-topple warehouse bays. My favorite was whipping that thing through the narrow doorways. One inch to the right or left and you'd lose a finger or worse. I never put on a lifejacket again.
I bring all this up because I had a few shifts between the big break-up and leaving for Chicago, and this was on the radio all the time that month (June 2004, WHJY.) If I squint hard enough I can see that guy, whizzing around on that pallet-driver, saluting an empty warehouse the way downer fighter pilots would salute the enemy ace that shot them. See ya later, Rhode Island.
4. "Symptom Finger" - The Faint
I don't know what I see when I squint at this one, but it's kind of cool.
5. "Call It Ours"
6. "There and Back Again" - the Legends
There was an emotional kind of rawness to much of the late 90s/ early-to-mid aughts music. Which, as I type that, seems too vague a statement to make - and wouldn't it be true of earlier eras as well? Perhaps any era of music.
Anyway, this is a band I never kept up with either, but this album - like Antibalas and like the Comas - came to my attention from that gig at Virgin Megastore. That was a fun job. My first job in Chicago was working as a PA on Batman Begins. Which sounds cooler than it was; I got paid like $147 for something like 60 hours of work. My 2nd and more enduring one was at Virgin Megastore.
I'm suddenly realizing typing this up that a song is totally missing from this mix-tape: "Common People," the cover of the Pulp song by William Goddamn Shatner.
Not only is it awesome, but I'll never forget working at the books counter one day and the Megastore DJ (Madrid Perry) playing it and calling my attention to it over the loudspeaker. I had no idea Shatner was covering Pulp songs. Did it change my life? Shatner always changes my life. Through music we renew ourselves and shed many skins. The Pulp version was part of my 2000 break-up; suddenly here was the voice of Shatner coming over the loudspeakers in this new arrangement.
Anyway! The Legends. Virgin Megastore. 2004.
7. "Rifles" - BRMC
8. "Don't Ask Me" - OK-Go
9. "As Sure as the Sun" - BRMC
One of these ones does not belong! It felt that way at the time, too - this OK Go song would get in my head at the oddest, most non-that-song's-mood times. They wrote more than a few pretty much perfect tunes; this is one of them.
The two BRMC songs are likewise perfect. What do you want me to say? Bottled 2004, man, all of this. (Even if it came out in 2001.)
10. "Saker Man Ser"
11. "Celsius"
12. "747" - Kent
Here's a band that put out on English-version of this album and it didn't do anything for me. But once I heard it in the original Swedish, I said "A-ha." Or the Swedish equivalent of that. Great stuff. That ending of "Celsius" is exactly what the WB was trying to do on every last one of its shows."747" samples U2's "With or Without You" rather brazenly during its ending coda, perhaps not as brazenly as The Verve sampled that one Rolling Stones song.
For the record, the Kent album Isola came out in 1997. I first heard it in 2002 or around there. BMcMolo has come unstuck in time. A suitable explanation for the coda as well:
13. "In the Marketplace, All Is Subterfuge" - Frank London's Klezmer Orchestra
If you've come this far, you've learned a little about me - perhaps too much - but perhaps not enough about how all the above bottles that eau de 2004. I sympathize, if so. Some things can be playlisted but not fully explained.
Kind of an odd thing to say after so much attempt at explanation, I grant you.
~
In 2005 I discovered Brian Wilson's remastered SMiLE, and that set me on a whole different path and wavelength. A tale for another day? Probably not.
