pantoneocean / music roundup: april 13th-14th

WE'RE... SO BACK????? i mentioned this in an earlier post of mine to my dedicated fanbase of one user, but i am bringing back the music roundups in a different format!!! i've started rounding up my discord friends and acquaintances and listening to music i think is interesting in a voice call with me streaming the music and that's gotten me to listen to exponentially more music than i had in the 3 months i spent getting high as fuck listening to grouper slowed and reverbed. i think this is a much more productive way of listening to things, and yadda yadda cataloguing thoughts on music that i've listened to, yadda yadda, my fan knows this swirlies' they spent their wild youthful days in the glittering world of the salons is an acceptable excursion into noise pop and defines swirlies as being the aloof third sibling of my bloody valentine and slowdive that left home at 18 never to return (unless you're into happy families, in which case that would be lush). i enjoy the little bleeps and bloops that are added around the album, and "sounds of sebring" is a somewhat memorable song, but other than that i genuinely have nothing else to say on this. despite this languid attempt at commentary or even summarizing the sound of an album, i must include it here as it was an album i listened to for this session. that's how it goes sometimes ffo: battery acid there's a very specific type of music that baxter's 1998 self-titled album captures, in being drum and bass fused with a completely unrelated genre. i feel the pinnacle of this is love spirals downwards' flux, which combines drum and bass with ethereal wave and dream pop-- baxter on the other hand, employs trip hop and in doing so creates a mellow, downtrodden, city-dwelling atmosphere. it does this so seamlessly that you wouldn't think they were two separate genres that were even being combined in the first place... the late 90s in general had a lot of both genres and by 2002 i feel like they mostly disappeared, so this works as a very cool time capsule as well! i'm just a baby! there's not really any track that wows me with the exception of "ballad of behaviour" but the lyrics are generally bleak or melancholic in nature. this is a very good thing for a work such as this; drum and bass, to me, feels like a genre that gravitates toward that feeling of being trapped in a giant, empty city, where the world seems very big and you seem very small. it's one of my end goals to wander around through a city at night-- dangerous as that might be in the united states-- with something akin to this album playing. i do not think it would be this album in full as i am not so fond of "love again" and its weird cheap preset on its synthesizer, which brought me out of the rhythmic haze, but other than that the rhythm sequencing and drum breaks are quite enjoyable! great for nighttime activities, such as writing. points at screen as opposed to many bands of the time, these guys are from sweden, and you can really hear the cardigans in the accent of the vocalist at times. not wholly relevant but something interesting i noticed. this is also one of the vocalist's appearances before he transitioned. hell yeah on rateyourmusic i'm mutuals with a 30-something guy from the united kingdom who is, by my estimate, the king of knowledge on electronic music and he had a rating on this album from around 2011. i asked him for albums that sound like this (drum and bass-tinged trip hop) and he sent me no less than 32 recommendations... suffice to say there's going to be a lot more like this coming up in these posts! yay! ffo: everything but the girl, concrete, sad drunks leaving the dancefloor, concrete, concrete stan getz? the "girl from ipanema" guy! (or, a guy involved with its popularization in the united states)! i know that guy! in the album focus, he takes a saunter with swing composer eddie sauter in what can best be described as saxophone improvisations improvised over an orchestra, which is a novel concept i find surprising i'm only now discovering. i thought this was a perfect, winning combination... a string section with one (1) saxophone? this is going to be one of the dopest, most soothing albums out there!! ambient music before ambient music!! lo-fi jazz beats to study to................ in hindsight, if i had to make any remark on that i suppose it is a good thing that this album doesn't want to be background music, yet those aren't always for the right reasons, as in, these string arrangements are often too kitschy and swing-y for their own good. the song "her" is great! i think it sums up what i thought this album was going to be, but in admittance-- it sounds like a movie soundtrack. i.e, music to be played in the background for little get-togethers, as many jazz-type albums were made for during this time. this isn't necessarily a bad thing-- again, background music is effectively what i was looking for as i discovered this album, and chose to listen to it anyways-- but this brings up a different question entirely. is it better to be pleasant and forgettable, or confusing and frustrating? "i remember when", "once upon a time", and "a summer afternoon" probably bridge together the soothing and 'experimental' parts of the album the best. songs like "i'm late, i'm late", however, really remind me that this was made in the very early sixties... meaning it's dated as hell. this song is the worst offender by far; several parts of "pan" fall into this similar trap. somehow, despite this, it's one of the better third stream albums i've listened to. (i say this like i've listened to a lot in full, which i haven't... but still). side note, i'm going to be honest, my feelings on all of the songs i mentioned could change within the hour ffo: cool ass motherfuckers smoking thirty cigars in a damp soggy mushy yet somehow crusty alleyway cracking their heads against the wall about the one that got away be it a criminal or loved one or even THEMSELVES!!! WHAT!!!, finding nemo chauchat's unhappiness. i feel that says a lot about what to expect from these guys to begin with, but for this one, let's also take a look at the album cover: one guess as to the quality of the recording. hey, that's correct! now, what about the material? hey, that's correct! (what the hell is that creature on the album cover? a dog? cat? pokemon?) this is an album that feels both smaller and bigger than it is-- and incredibly hard to pin down because of that. it's literally just some guy and his, i assume, friends clipping the hell out of a shitty 4-track recorder. i use harsh language but i feel this becomes a benefit-- there's an instance where he (that is, tyler whitney, the head guy of chauchat) plays an extended sequence of guitar harmonics at the end of "pining part four", which is something i've never heard before with such warbly, low-quality equipment... and it ROCKS! these limitations almost become a part of the music; tape warble makes guitars sound like they're weeping-- very very apt for this album--, drums sound compressed and imbalanced, and roars of guitar pedals sound muffled and fuzzy. i don't see these as bad things. somehow, i found myself drawing comparisons to sarah records artists or a hyper-stripped down version of the cure in terms of its songwriting sensibilities (i feel this a lot in "mother take me here to die", like just read that title. in everything this album wears its heart on its sleeve); i assumed it the forwardly plaintive and unforced, spoken vocals and lyrics that read like despondent diary pages. (on his vocals-- i'm not too big on the way he sings, but it's ... fine. just good enough that it doesn't send me into a fury). i think this can be a little much, at some times-- this is apparent in the rather aimless "the monotony of jesus christ" (though i will admit it's not completely detrimental to the song)-- but it provides more intimacy to an already intimate-sounding album. other times the sprawling, 10-minute length soundscapes reminded me of some of the microphones' more experimental works, or even something like duster (which is what one friend of mine pointed out). i don't think this is something i could listen to every day because of how dense it is, but that's also a testament to how talented these guys are; there's so much going on, on a most-likely home recorded cassette, in their debut. the main negative i can give to this though is that it is recorded in such a low-fidelity manner; it reads as a really good demo cassette, not unlike elliott smith's roman candle. there's hints of added instrumentation that don't really reach their full potential due to these limitations, and there's some ideas and performances that aren't great (not big on the solo on "let the room destroy itself part two", for instance). in spite of this, though, this is very good for what the musicians were able to use to record. good job! ffo: crunchy drums, any somewhat indie/looser band just look at the bands i listed in this, or actually that same friend of mine also mentioned the demo cassettes from weezer, so try that, i haven't listened to them personally but there's gotta be something there i didn't intend it this way, but this last album acts as something of a parallel to unhappiness in being a (in this case only somewhat) melancholic singer-songwriter album that feels like it was never meant to be heard outside of a small circle of friends and family, but the key difference here is that this one lies within the constraints of the timeframe this was recorded. robert lester folsom's music and dreams is a 1976 release; still a few years off from the widespread adaptation of 4-tracks, 8-tracks, and all types of home recording. (whatever bullshit les paul was on doesn't count; i mean general accessibility). this means that studios still had a role in the recording process... meaning fancy equipment! microphones and outboard gear that shape the impression of an endlessly searched-for 'vintage' sound! and these guys, despite having an audience of some 100 people in their career, have that! (or something like that!). that's something i really enjoy about the obscurer artists in the 60s and 70s, even the people that are lost to time still have a modicum of decent recording quality. and by the stars does this deliver on that expectation! if i wanted to be really reductive, this is at its core a slightly folkier big star solo record that was ignored for even longer than big star was, but there's so much more going on here than that! everything has this sleek half-phaser, half-reverb, half-...something effect on it that gives the keyboard instruments a really cool sheen to it, which i also hear on the backing vocals (i listen to the title track, "music and dreams", as i write this). i'm also quite fond of the surf-drenched guitar tone on the untitled instrumental track. okay, truthfully-- this is soft rock. something close to yacht rock. not quite, but almost AOR... good recording quality is to be expected, but good songwriting is not. that's how the genre stereotype goes, anyway, so it's a good thing to say that it breaks those stereotypes... somewhat! somehow, someway, the opening guitar lick of "a new way" immediately made me think of saturday night live... i don't know why, or how, but i did not want to think of saturday night live at that moment. besides that, i mentioned during my writeup of sunflower by the beach boys (quota checked, good) how there's a strain of love songs that are about SEX!!!!!!!!!!!!! which presents itself in the song "spanish lady/brown eyed lady with blonde hair" (for me, despite being two songs, it's listed as one... which is odd) and "ginger". lots of different types of hair that he wants to get tangled with if ya know what i mean!!! up top! but, that's really the bulk of the problems i have with this album, and for the 70s you could do a whole lot worse-- it's not even that his love songs are bad necessarily, as "my stove's on fire" is a great, impassioned picture of a whirlwind romance that captures the fleeting nature of a bright, burning flame onto tape. "april suzanne"-- which, now that i think about it, would make more sense placed right after "my stove's on fire"-- has the fantastic aforementioned backing vocals, and is a stripped-down ballad about love lost and not at all what i expected going into this Waiting for a sunny day To dry away my tears Wishing that your love could stay For twenty-million years April Suzanne I've often dreamed of you And all those things wе've planned (i do think the specificity of twenty-million years is a little silly, but it is what it is). the closing track, "please don't forget me", is perhaps the most outright depressed song in the tracklist, a great folk number about remembering those who have left you... perhaps a followup to "my stove's on fire"? It's sad to sit here crying for a love that's gone away And there's no need denying that it never could've stayed Could've stayed Please don't forget me, it means so much to me That all the things we said and did stay in your memory Memory The things we thought, the things we shared The thoughts we thought and the way we cared It hurts to see you smiling with this broken hearted tears The thoughts I keep compiling from my many hopes and fears i have to wonder if these thoughts were somewhat brought up due to being a virtually unknown artist during the 70s, with his previous band abacus (a name, purportedly, chosen to be in the front of record shops in alphabetical categories) never releasing anything and this solo album being privately pressed to begin with. i wonder if he wanted to be a famous rock star when he was little he got his wish. he might be one of the only artists of this specific vein that's somehow gotten a new lease on his artistic life thanks to something of a social media and streaming boom that may be tiktok related (i wouldn't know for sure as i don't keep up with the application. don't consume short form media, kids) and he is touring Right Now, Right Now!!! he's coming to my city in about a month or so and i'm going to go see him when he visits. does unc still have it? let's find out! (he has an audiotree session from last year that has me thinking: he does!) ffo: cosmic country boys, 70s hippie burnout, the flaming lips too early and a dollar short, sleek shimmery orbs of sound playing over shag-carpeted grocery store intercoms cool