Month: January 2022

Record #827: Gypsum – Gypsum (2021)

/ Nathaniel FitzGerald

Working for a music site, I’m constantly inundated with press releases and review submissions. After a while, it all starts to bleed together, like a never-ending Pandora station with messed up seeds that plays in the background.

But every once in a while, something grabs my attention, like a nugget of gold in the muddy silt of a riverbed. As a mineral, Gypsum may not be very valuable, but the band that bears its name was enough to make me feel like an old timey prospector.

Their debut record came across my inbox and, after ignoring it until the week it was out, I was instantly enraptured by the genre-bending songwriting, rich atmospheres, kinetic grooves, and engrossing harmonies.

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Record #826: Diiv – Is The Is Are (2016)

/ Nathaniel FitzGerald

Few records have hit me with the same immediate and enduring affection as Diiv’s Oshin. That record’s blend of post punk, shoegaze, Krautrock, and surf rock hit me like a truck full of bricks at first listen, and remains one of the richest albums in my collection with every repeated listen.

So it might seem odd that I didn’t devour their sophomore album, Is The Is Are, with as much voraciousness.
But that error is all mine, because the sophomore record takes the same elements and stretches them to fit an ambitious double album that is far more personal while remaining just as alluring.

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Record #825: Deafcult – Auras (2017)

/ Nathaniel FitzGerald

Throughout the history of shoegaze, bands have tried hundreds of different techniques to create the huge blissful walls of sound the genre calls for. Of course there’s gliding, the method developed by Kevin Shields and aped by ever other shoegaze guitarist ever (guilty), but bands have also tried everything from walls of amps to layering dozens of takes of the guitar parts to more guitar pedals than one person should be able to understand.

Brisbane Australia’s Deafcult employ a novel method that’s genius in its simplicity: they just have four guitarists.

It’s an elegant, if obvious, solution and the results speak for themselves on the hazy, crushing atmospheres on Auras. 

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Record #824: Coastlands – Death (2020)

/ Nathaniel FitzGerald

Discovering music used to be so hard.

Usually, you were entirely reliant on the help of a tastemaker friend or a record store employee who had the time to sort through the silt to find the gold they’d pass on to you. Besides that, you could scour the websites of record labels you liked or study the liner notes of your favorite CDs to find what bands the bands you liked would work with. Then you’d take all of that to the P2P network that hadn’t been shut down or overrun with viruses yet and hope that the file you downloaded was properly labeled (it usually wasn’t).

These days, great music just falls in your lap, via the recommendation algorithms of your streaming service of choice and the endless stream of posts from likeminded music fans online. Or, in the case of Coastlands, the band might just start following you on TikTok and end up being super good.

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Record #823: Beastie Boys – Ill Communication (1994)

/ Nathaniel FitzGerald

First impressions are a powerful thing. Like many people, my first introduction to the Beastie Boys was “Fight For Your Right,” an irreverent and ubiquitous track that struck many as a novelty. And at the time of that track, the Beastie Boys were a novelty: the three Jewish kids from New York had transitioned to hip hop after their hardcore band found a burst of attention with the jokey rap song “Cookie Puss” (after which they hired an aspiring DJ named Rick Rubin).

But after riding the novelty act thing to notoriety, the Beastie Boys decided to get serious—a memo I had largely missed until my wife picked up a CD copy of Ill Communication on my regular detour at Vertigo Records in Grand Rapids. Listening to it on the drive home, I realized what an idiot I was for not just buying the vinyl at the same time, because this is truly one of the greatest records of all time.

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Record #822: Airs – Apart (2015)

/ Nathaniel FitzGerald

I’m starting to worry that my weak spot for noisy, crushing shoegaze is going to become fatal. Sometimes, I’ll hear a few seconds of fuzzy guitars with washed out vocals and start frantically searching for vinyl copies online.

That happened last week when I came upon Airs, the now-defunct “Loudest Band in San Francisco” on a playlist on Spotify and scoured the internet, eventually purchasing what seemed to be the only copy for sale online. In fact, given that Apart is the only release from Airs that saw a vinyl release, this was the only Airs wax for sale on the whole internet.

And I had to have it.

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Record #821: The Get Up Kids – Problems (2019)

/ Nathaniel FitzGerald

The seeds of my rediscovery of the Get Up Kids were planted in 2019. I was writing for a music review site, and the site owner messaged me asking if I was ever into the Get Up Kids, because they had a new album coming out and he needed someone to review it. I said that I listened to them a little bit, but wasn’t a superfan. He said, “that’s better than anyone else,” and sent me Problems. 

What greeted me when I listened was a collection of emotional power pop that hit many of the same sweet spots of their classic work.

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Record #820: The Get Up Kids – On A Wire (2002)

/ Nathaniel FitzGerald

Sometimes, context has a way of tainting our perspective. When we’re in the midst of events, we’re sometimes too close to be able to see clearly.

Case in point: On a Wire, the follow-up to their classic sophomore album, Something to Write Home About. While I personally wasn’t enthralled enough by that record to follow them any further*, many die-hard fans were disappointed with this disc to the point that they felt betrayed.

But for me, having come back to this record with two decades of space between its release and my listening, hearing it without the crushing weight of anticipation and dashed hopes allows it to blossom into a wonderful collection of great songwriting and catchy pop rock.
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Record #819: The Get Up Kids – Something to Write Home About (1999)

/ Nathaniel FitzGerald

Over the years, I have stated publicly and often that I missed the Get Up Kids when I was in the throes of my emo phase. Most publicly, on the first episode of my podcast, which I host with a Get Up Kids superfan.

As a teen, I had a copy of the B-sides and rarities disc Eudora, but really only loved a couple tracks on it. I have a vague memory of buying Something to Write Home About, regarded by many to be their best, but I don’t remember being very enthralled with it.

However, a couple months ago I bought a box of records from a friend that had a number of emo classics, including many from TGUK. “I might as well keep this one,” I said of this disc, before putting it on and realizing something surprising…

I knew every word to this album. 

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Record #818: The Cure – Pornography (1982)

/ Nathaniel FitzGerald

It’s taken me until my mid-30s to realize something that should have been obvious: the Cure really is one of the best bands in the world. Yet approaching their immense discography now, and not as a teenager when I no doubt would have spun their albums on repeat, has proven to be a daunting task.

Of course, I’ve loved Disintegration for a few years now, but sorting through the rest of it, I feel rudderless in a sea of gothy pop songs. Recently, I decided almost on a whim to order a copy of Pornography, their fourth record, and one of their darkest.

And it’s appropriately titled: like pornography, this record is almost exploitatively intimate, often uncomfortable, yet basely alluring.

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