Crashing Dream

Once again, I made you wait a long time for the latest podcast. I could make a million excuses for my delay but why bother? It’s here and it’s been a fun one to put together as there is a lot of great new material out there. I have a sampling of the new releases here and will have even more to share next week. As always, if you have any comments, send me an Email at
bill@crashingdream.com or click and add a comment right here. Feedback is always appreciated. It’s great to know that people are actually listening to these things.

Here’s a quick reminder on how to listen. If you are using iTunes 4.9 or above you can simply choose “Subscribe to Podcast…” from the Advanced menu and enter this URL.

http://feeds.feedburner.com/CrashingDream

This will enable iTunes to automatically find and download new episodes of this podcast as they become available.

If you’d just like to listen to this episode you can download it by following this link.

Here’s waht is on this week’s podcast.

I’ve finally managed to get episode 5 of the podcast up. It’s been a bit hectic recently, so I apologize for the delay. I hope to get back to a weekly schedule now that fall is here. I’d really love to have feedback on the music I present here. Also, if you have any music you think I might be into, I’d love to hear about that as well.

As always, feedback can be, Emailed to me at bill@crashingdream.com or you can take it public but adding comments right on this blog.

Here’s a quick reminder on how to listen. If you are using iTunes 4.9 or above you can simply choose “Subscribe to Podcast…” from the Advanced menu and enter this URL.

http://feeds.feedburner.com/CrashingDream

This will enable iTunes to automatically find and download new episodes of this podcast as they become available.

If you’d just like to listen to this episode you can download it by following this link.

Here’s the scoop on the music in this episode.

Episode 4 of the podcast is up now. This one is kind of all over the place. Since there was not much in the way of new stuff to check out this week, I based the show around stuff that has been in heavy rotation on my iPod this week.

As always, feedback can be, Emailed to me at bill@crashingdream.com or you can take it public but adding comments right on this blog.

Here’s a quick reminder on how to listen. If you are using iTunes 4.9 or above you can simply choose “Subscribe to Podcast…” from the Advanced menu and enter this URL.

http://feeds.feedburner.com/CrashingDream

This will enable iTunes to automatically find and download new episodes of this podcast as they become available.

If you’d just like to listen to this episode you can download it by following this link.

Here’s the scoop on the music in this episode.

I’m a little late this time around, but here is episode 3 of my podcast. I focused on a few bands I just recently discovered and threw in a few older things that seemed to fit in at the moment. I hope you’ll enjoy this one.

As always, feedback can be, Emailed to me at bill@crashingdream.com or you can take it public but adding comments right on this blog.

Here’s a quick reminder on how to listen. If you are using iTunes 4.9 or above you can simply choose “Subscribe to Podcast…” from the Advanced menu and enter this URL.

http://feeds.feedburner.com/CrashingDream

This will enable iTunes to automatically find and download new episodes of this podcast as they become available.

If you’d just like to listen to this episode you can download it by following this link.

Here’s the scoop on the music in this episode.

Here are a few quick words on some releases (both old and new) that I have picked up recently. My goal is to give you a quick synopsis of my views in just a few sentences. These are all based on first impressions from a few listens and in many cases I’m sure my opinions will change over time. I’ll be giving more attention to some of the more significant releases in future posts.

Audible - Sky Signal
Polyvinyl Records
I first came to know Audible because band members Jim Kehoe and Mike Kennedy are former members of Matt Pond PA. The music on this debut album is low key, airy indie pop - perfect music for a summer afternoon. Stylistically, it doesn’t stray far from the chamber pop of bands like Matt Pond PA and Pernice Brothers. Initial listens didn’t leave me with anything that makes this record particularly stand apart from the pack but if you are a fan of this particular style of pop music, it’s worth checking out this band.

Brian Eno - Another Day on Earth
Rykodisc Records
When I heard that Brian Eno was releasing his first album of vocal pop music in over 20 years, I really wasn’t expecting to get another “Baby’s on Fire” but I was expecting something that would push the envelope of the pop music world in some way. Instead, we receive a pleasant dose of ambient electronic songs with Eno’s often processed vocals. I’m sure I’ll find myself listening to this some more but it strikes me more as something someone like Midge Ure or David Sylvian would come up with, not Brian F’n Eno. After waiting so long for another dose of songs from Eno, I expected a bit more.

Ox - Dust Bowl Revival
Second Nature Recordings
This band is the real deal and this is probably my favorite new find over the past couple months. Ox are a Vancouver four-piece who have a unique take on the down home roots music that I love so much. This release brings to mind Neil Young circa Harvest Moon or Silver and Gold or the more personal side of Ryan Adams from his Whiskeytown days. The real appeal of this record is the fragile nature of the best songs. The vocals are raw and often imperfect and the music sometimes feels as if it is very loosely held together. This combination results in an edgy tension that helps these songs rise above the pack of alt-country artists. The songs that tread in a more straightforward pop songwriter direction aren’t quite as successful but there is so much to love throughout this record. Highly recommended.

Bob Mould - Body of Song
Yep Roc Records
Bob Mould is back with a real guitar-oriented rock album for the first time in years and I give it a big thumbs up based upon initial listens. The guitars are loud, the hooks are big and the vocals full of emotion. In short it’s everything you used to expect from something with Bob’s name on it. It’s going to take a few more listens to really absorb this and see how it compares with his output from the early 90’s but if you’re a fan, I’d recommend checking this out.

31 Knots - The Curse of the Longest Day
Polyvinyl Records
This was kind of an adventure pick based only on the fact that I tend to generally like bands on the Polyvinyl label. After a couple listens, I still haven’t found much to recommend on this EP. It ranges from art rock that brings to mind Wolfgang Press or Blonde Redhead and louder, quirkier material that isn’t far from the Modest Mouse axis of modern rock. While nothing is particularly bad here, there is also nothing that really makes this material stand out from the crowd.

I should know by now that in the music world, nothing is forever (unless you’re Mark E. Smith and The Fall), but still it came as a shock when I read last week in Boston’s The Weekly Dig that Karate was calling it quits as a band.

Karate was a band that always stood out from the pack amongst Boston bands. During the indie rock heyday of the 90’s when so many local bands were spending their energy courting the major labels hoping for an easy path to success, Karate just hunkered down and did the punk rock, DIY thing. They toured relentlessly, put out singles and albums and always seemed to be full of energy. I always thought the band had much more of a DC ethic in the way they did business. That instantly creates interest in a band for me. When a band believes in themselves enough to do the hard work and make the sacrifices, I feel like I should invest the time to listen and try to understand what they are up to.

Karate was also always willing to take chances and grow as a band. While I liked their slow-core beginnings, they were never satisfied to stick to that one sound record after record. Although I didn’t always personally like the directions they chose to go, it was clear that the changes came from a natural curiosity and not some master plan to make it big. These explorations also allowed the band to play with ideas until they really worked in a big way. I’m sure that without some of the Geoff Farina guitar noodling that I didn’t personally connect with me, I would have never had a chance to experience the glory of 1998’s The Bed is in the Ocean. This was the album that pulled it all together for me. The lyrics were smart, but cryptic enough to make me think. The guitar playing was brilliant. The guitar sound made my hair stand on end. To top it, off the album was full of hooks. Karate had really made a record that transcended the indie rock sound. Along with Hum’s Downward is Heavenward from the same era, they had set a standard for other bands to aspire to.

Just as they captured me with The Bed is in the Ocean, they just as quickly lost me with their follow-up record. That was both the beauty and the frustrating aspect of Karate. Even with this frustration, I would keep coming back for more because I never knew what to expect and I knew that there would be something interesting to discover in each record.

My patience finally paid off with their final release, Pockets. Once again, they pulled the whole thing together. The hooks were there. The guitar sound was there. There was also an eerie resemblance to Steely Dan popping up here and there. It may sound crazy but it worked. Pockets was one of those records that was in constant rotation for months as I listened to every nuance over and over. I was lucky enough to again catch the band live on a two night stand in Boston last year and the live show was just as powerful as the records. Little did I know this would be my last chance to check them out.

Now that I’ve processed the fact that they are gone, I’m sure I’ll be going back and listening to all of those records, even those that I didn’t quite get the first time around. There’s a good chance I will eventually connect to some of the ideas that may have been a bit too far out for me at the time. Even if I don’t, it’s great to know that they were doing what they wanted. In the end, if a band doesn’t believe enough in their own music to take chances, how can they expect to really forge a connection with their audience?

Karate Resources
Southern Records band page
Geoff Farina page
Buy Karate at Insound.com

I’m back once again with another podcast. I’m quite surprised I managed a second one in one week but I’m having fun putting these together. This one largely centers on bands and performers who made a splash with a band a while back but have continued to make music with new projects that maybe haven’t received as much attention as they should have.

As always, feedback can be, Emailed to me at bill@crashingdream.com or you can take it public but adding comments right on this blog.

Here’s a quick reminder on how to listen. If you are using iTunes 4.9 or above you can simply choose “Subscribe to Podcast…” from the Advanced menu and enter this URL.

http://feeds.feedburner.com/CrashingDream

This will enable iTunes to automatically find and download new episiodes of this podcast as they become available.

If you’d just like to listen to this episode you can download it by following this link.

Here’s the scoop on the music in this episode.

I have this horrible habit of giving up on bands after a couple records for no good reason. I don’t know if it’s a short attention span on my part, a desire to find something a bit more hip or what, but I end up missing out on a lot of good bands as they mature and change. Thankfully, over the past year thanks for the wonder of emusic.com, I’ve been able to go back and rediscover many of these bands. Emusic offers a legitimate download service that allows you to download songs and albums in a cheap and convenient fashion.

A while back, Emusic expanded their offerings quite a bit and added a lot of classic indie rock. I found myself downloading and enjoying many things I wouldn’t even think of looking for in a record store. So a few months back, I came across a Teenage Fanclub compilation called Four Thousand Seven Hundred and Sixty Seconds: A Short Cut To Teenage Fanclub. I was excited to see their name and a nostalgic feeling came up as I downloaded the album.

In many ways, Teenage Fanclub was my gateway to the world of indie rock. I had been a huge music fan for years but never really associated myself with any particular movement. All of the music movements of the 80’s from New Romantic to Mod to Goth all seemed so insular and based upon fashion. I was never drawn to music as a fashion statement. Sometime in 1990, I picked up the first Teenage Fanclub album, A Catholic Education. Somehow buying that album made me start looking into other bands on Matador Records. Similarly, buying a single from Superchunk turned me on to early releases on Merge Records. Here I began to discover a muisical movement based upon a do it yourself ethic from the bands and a label culture that was just based on putting out music that was good regardless of genre. Look at Matador Records back then. There couldn’t have been bands more different than H.P. Zinker and Teenage Fanclub but Gerard Cosloy was putting them out for seemingly no other reason than that he liked them. That was an inspiring and empowering idea and shaped my future in the music world for the next few years.

Getting back to Teenage Fanclub, I bought that first album, put it on my turntable and was awestruck. I hadn’t really been moved so much by a pop record since REM’s Chronic Town. Here was a band that was just masterful at writing catchy songs and also played them in an unpretentious, underproduced fashion. The result was a record that really connected on many levels. I envisioned a bunch of innocent Scottish kids who had listened to a lot of Big Star and Beatles records but were just doing their own thing with little regard to what was popular at the time.

Over time I heard rumblings that they were signing to a major label. That burst my bubble a bit as I still had this idealistic picture of bands doing their thing just for the music. Major labels were evil in the now insular indie rock world and no one (with the possible exception of Sonic Youth) on a major label could be trusted. So, risking my indie rock credibility, I ran out and purchased their second full length, Bandwagonesque. The joy I felt upon listening to that CD for the first time cannot even be described. Bandwagonesque was the perfect hybrid of the rough but charming indie rock of A Catholic Education combined with the big, lush pop sound of the first two Big Star records. That CD was in constant rotation on my stereo and their live show on that tour was one of my favorite shows of that era.

Soon after that, I started reading more about the band and discovered that they had left Matador Records on very bad terms. They had signed for a two record deal but began negotiating with Geffen before delivering a second album to Matador. After signing, they delivered the wonderful Bandwagonesque to Geffen and left Matador with a pretty atrocious set of studio out-takes and covers on The King. Matador declined to even out out this record and the days of Teenage Fanclub as an indie band were over. I took this stuff really seriously and for the most part turned my back on the band. After all, there were thousands of indie bands doing things for the right reasons. I was going to spend my money where it mattered.

Coming back to the recent past, thanks to Emusic, I came across this Teenage Fanclub compilation and downloaded it on a whim. Instantly I remembered why I liked this band so much. While it contained a few tracks from those two albums I loved, it contained a lot more tracks from subsequent Geffen albums and records that were released after Geffen dropped them. They were still making those classic pop songs but seemed to be finding their own way more and more. The need to sound like Big Star seemed to have passed them by and they were experimenting with more complex arrangements. Even with these more mature arrangelemts, they never lost the hooks and earnestness that attracted me to them in the first place.

A few months after downloading this compilation, I read that the band would actually be touring the United States. This was a real shock as I assumed that they had disbanded long ago. Even tough they weren’t playing near me in Boston, I decided that this occasion was worthy of a road trip and I quickly bought tickets and planned a trip to New York. This seemed a reasonble pigrammage since this was a band that had changed my way of thinking 14 years ago.

To top things off, Teenage Fanclub just released a new album, Man-Made this year. I anxiously downloaded it to see if any of that magic was left after so many years. This is a much more understated record than the ones that initially hooked me but after a few listens, I begin to appreciate the more nuanced approach. They still have that basic ability to create great hooky pop songs but they don’t don’t hit you over the head the way the earlier recordings did. The songs grow in a slower and more natural way - probably a natral progression as the band members have grown up. Man_made is a fine record and I’m looking forward to seeing how the live band has aged in the last decade. I’ll be seeing them this Saturday in New York and will likely be giving a report here sometime next week.

Here are some resources if you want to catch up on this band.

Teenage Fanclub Homepage

Buy Teenage Fanclub music at insound.com

So, I’ve decided to start another music blog. This time around, in addition to writing about music, I’m diving into the world of podcasts. These podcasts are basically mix tapes with my commentary. I’m just digging into the music I’ve been listening to and picking about an hour of music a week to share with the world. I hope to update this weekly when possible.

If you have any comments, you can Email me at bill@crashingdream.com or just add comments to these blog entries. I’d appreciate any feedback you might have.

Now, how do you go about listening to these things? If you are using iTunes 4.9 or above you can simply choose “Subscribe to Podcast…” from the Advanced menu and enter this URL.

http://feeds.feedburner.com/CrashingDream

This will enable iTunes to automatically find and download new episiodes of this podcast as they become available.

If you’d just like to listen to this episode you can download it by following this link.

Here is a brief overview of the music contained on this podcast. I’ll be adding more information and links to to labels and artist sites as I get time.