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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Record #817: Charles Mingus – Mingus Ah Um (1959)

/ Nathaniel FitzGerald

Some years bear a strange significance in music history. Single calendars that compress massive explosions of musical ingenuity within their pages.

In 1967, it was psychedelic and progressive rock. In 1977, it was punk. 1991 brought multiple waves of noisy guitar bands, from grunge to shoegaze to post-hardcore to the massive umbrella of alternative rock.

For jazz, that year was 1959, which saw several seminal releases: Coltrane’s Giant Steps, Brubeck’s Time Out, Coleman’s The Shape of Jazz to Come, and Miles Davis’ Kind of Blue, which is arguably the greatest jazz record of all time by every metric.

But even among such legendary peers, Charles Mingus’ masterpiece, Mingus Ah Um, stands unwavering on its own two feet and swings mightily at all challengers.

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Record #816: Bad Brains – Bad Brains (1982)

/ Nathaniel FitzGerald

The conversations around the greatest punk band of all time are often focused in the rivalry between USA and the UK. Punks wax philosophical about The Ramones or The Clash, Black Flag or the Buzzcocks…(note: I’m intentionally omitting the band Virgin Records put together to reappropriate punk aesthetics).

One factor that’s not often brought up is that of race. True, there might not be too much to talk about there—for all its rebellion against the status quo, punk has always skewed heavily white. But for Bad Brains, whose legend demands that they’re mentioned in any conversation about important punk bands, their punk cred is tied intrinsically to their blackness, both in lyrical content and the way they were perceived in their early days.

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Record #815: Eugenius – Midlife (2020)

/ Nathaniel FitzGerald

I am by no means a connoisseur of hip hop. The hip hop section of my collection is very meager, and I feel ill-equipped to talk about hip hop in any sort of meaningful way.

That said, my metric for good hip hop is much the same as Justice Potter Stewart’s metric for pornography: I know it when I see it. And Midlife, the sprawling, mercurial debut from Cincinnati’s Eugenius, passes that test with ease.

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2021: Best of the Year

/ Nathaniel FitzGerald

2021 was a spectacularly immense year for music. It felt like all of the bands who weren’t able to tour last year spent 2020 writing and recording new albums. Then this year, they released them.

With such a flood of new music, it’s worth noting that almost every year end list I’ve seen looks entirely different. Many publications that I could usually predict with decent accuracy (NPR, Pitchfork, etc) listed dozens of albums that I never even heard of. I listened to more music this year than ever before, but I’ve never been so aware of what I was missing. Many albums that I would have/should have liked were released to widespread acclaim (i.e., Quicksand, Every Time I Die, Low, Maybeshewill, Failure, the list goes on) and yet I watched them go by, my attention already stretched to its limits.

In any case, here are the records that really grabbed me this year.

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Record #814: An Autumn for Crippled Children – All Fell Silent, Everything Went Quiet (2020)

/ Nathaniel FitzGerald

Last year, I said that An Autumn for Crippled Children’s Try Not to Destroy Everything You Love should have stolen them the title of “The Cure of Heavy Metal” from post metallurgists A Year of No Light. That album’s heavy use of moody synths, drum machines, and melodramatic grand pianos betrayed a great love for the Goth Rock legends that mixed surprisingly well with the blistering black metal guitars and shrieked vocals.

On last year’s All Fell Silent, Everything Went Quiet, AAFCC leaned even further into the goth, new wave, and post punk influence, making this sound almost like a Cure-worship album with added black metal elements, rather than the other way around. In either case, it certainly works.

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Record #813: East Ghost – If I Sleep (2014)

/ Nathaniel FitzGerald

One of the neat perks that comes from mingling around the DIY music scene is that sometimes, when you order something from friend’s label, they send you some freebies.

In this case, that would be when I wrote about Fashioner by In Parallel, my friend Bryan of Something Beautiful Records (and the podcast As the Story Grows), he asked if I had a copy of their debut, which he had put out, and offered to send me a copy. When that package came, it included this record from a band I had never heard of.

But believe me when I tell you: this is a true hidden gem.

Read more a yearofvinyl.com #eastghost #indierock #postpunk #postrock #vinyl

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Record #812: Aphex Twin – Selected Ambient Works 85-92 (1992)

/ Nathaniel FitzGerald

Years ago, I purchased Selected Ambient Works, Vol 2. My attempts at listening to the monstrous triple-disc collection of untitled tracks proved fruitless. I eventually sold it, and when I transferred the blog from Tumblr to a standalone site, the original post didn’t even make it over.

As it turns out, I thought I was buying this one. 

I had always meant to fix that in the back of my mind, but never got around to it. But when my podcast cohost brought this album up in a conversation about avant-garde and experimental music, I decided to correct my error.

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Record #811: Autechre – Tri Repetae (1995)

/ Nathaniel FitzGerald

Last week, while recording an episode on experimental music for my new podcast (oh yeah, I have a podcast now), I remarked that part of what makes Radiohead great is that they take the harsh weirdness of far more inaccessible bands and mold it into pop structures. “Radiohead would be the first ones to tell you, ‘just listen to Autechre,'” I said, and then I realized two things.

One: I didn’t know how to pronounce Autechre.

Two: I had never listened to them.

I promptly sought to correct that, and within half an hour of listening to their pioneering opus Tri Repetae, I ordered a copy. And now, I’m not sure which is harder to believe: that this record came out in 1995, or that humans had anything to do with its creation.

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Record #810: Drive Like Jehu – Drive Like Jehu (1991)

/ Nathaniel FitzGerald

1991 has been called “The Year that Punk Broke.” The success of Nirvana’s Nevermind led record companies to make a mad dash to sign all the noisy, abrasive, energetic bands they could find, leading to some absolutely bizarre major label deals for bands like Melvins, Smashing Pumpkins, and Jawbox. DIY stalwarts Fugazi purportedly turned down multiple million-dollar deals.

One of the noisier bands to land one of those deals was Drive Like Jehu, whose sprawling math-rock/post-hardcore masterpiece Yank Crime was somehow released on Interscope.

But Interscope wouldn’t have been interested had it not been for the success of their self-titled debut, which lacks none of the fury or ambition of its follow-up.

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