Hope Kelly does Republica’s ‘Ready To Go’ next.

The Dark Side Of The Moon was released 50 years ago today. To me, it’s on the shortlist of greatest 20th century albums. Here’s the achingly ethereal “Great Gig In The Sky”, a vocally-soaring highlight from that landmark work:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T13se_2A7c8

Goodbye Tower Records! I wanted to save the last post of this virtual year to honor Tower, which shut its doors late 2006. Tower came into my world in the Autumn of 1987 when I was a student studying in London. Tower in Piccadilly Circus was a multiple storied music candy store filled with vinyl, CDs, posters, movies, books, and everything music! Weekly UK singles and album charts were literally in front of you with CDs and albums! Chart singles, dance, books, movies in the basement where one could enter from the Piccadilly Tube Station, pop albums on street-level, jazz and classical (in separate rooms), soul, country, soundtracks, and specialty labels on the 1st floor. WOWSA, the multiple listening stations; so many wondrous discoveries! My version of heaven. When I was in London in the early 90s, Piccadilly Circus had the Holy Trinity of Record Stores, Tower, Virgin, and HMV, all within a 5 minute walk. I would visit these Temples and spend inordinate amounts of time in each. Throw in multi-storied Waterstones Books, also in Piccadilly, and an entire evening or afternoon would joyfully fly by.

Back home in Chicago, Tower Records was located on Clark and Belden, which was one block from our house (a life goal achieved!). Partner would patiently peruse the magazines and movies, allowing me to lose myself in pop, jazz, and classical. It was a frequent weekend night ritual and a source of entertainment. There was also a Tower in the Chicago Loop on Wabash, right next to the EL.

I would always visit the Tower in NYC, located right next to Lincoln Center (2nd floor). I also visited Tower’s in San Francisco, Thailand, Hong Kong, and the Philippines. I would spend the weekends in Makati (the Filipino Biz District) at the Shangri-La (one of the nicest hotels I have ever stayed at). There was a Tower in a nearby mall where I could score English and Asian releases that were not available in the US, at very cheap prices.

In 2006, I was working in Downtown Chicago when Tower had its Going Out of Business Sale and would frequently visit the Tower Loop. Things had not been going well for a while and it was like a family member had become ill and was dying. Sure, I loaded up on heavily discounted CDs, but these were sad times. Short sighted, but I did not realize that shortly thereafter, Virgin would also fall, as would other brick and mortar music retailers, even soulless Borders, and what was the other one?. HMV is alive, but a shell of its former self (fond memories when there was not one, but two MEGA HMVs when walking from Tottenham Court to Oxford Circus to Bond St. in London.)

Tower in Japan was separately licensed and I experienced the multi-story music megastore Deja-Vu when we last visited in 2016. Located in Shibuya and every bit like the Tower I can remember, except lots of music I did not know. I did score CDs by Kyu Sakamoto, Pink Lady, Nujabes, and lots of uber cool Japanese Jazz! Tower operates online as well. Rough Trade, Fopp, and independent record stores in the US, UK and elsewhere are wonderful, and thanks to the resurgence of vinyl, are doing well.

I still miss the Tower Records I once knew and will ALWAYS LOVE! Thank you to founder and visionary, Russ Solomon and all those who made Tower Records so special and such a blissful part of my life.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DrcCAwL01fI

This is really introspective. Really digging it. I think he’s trying to say that IF darkness had a son, then he would be there AND that temptation is the father and that he would bathe in holy water and also that temptation should leave him the heck alone! That’s just how I interpreted it, though. The “IF” is super key to getting it, I think

One of my favorite #1s of this virtual era. I didn’t quite recognize the song by its title, but playing the video, I recognized it instantly. And… I really like Nelly Furtado’s look in the video. Simply classic!

There’s also just a lot of bad art that seems to conflate being disturbing (esp. in the realms of sex and violence) with being challenging or subversive. Depiction isn’t endorsement, for sure, but depiction isn’t necessarily a meaningful inquiry either. Often it’s just schlock (which can be fun under the right circumstances). But I agree that the fail cases are not immoral, they’re just bad.

I think it’s telling in the case of this show that nobody is actually scandalized by the contents, the reaction is more of an eyeroll. Even the person objecting called it a fantasy “any toxic man would have” – like we’ve seen it, and even if we haven’t, we get it. If you’re going to be an edgelord, it does at least have to be edgy. This is giving “Manson going door to door trying to shock people.”

This is my first time posting. I’ve read this column since 2020, but for some reason I didn’t decide to post until now. I was born in 2002, but I love pop music ranging from the 60s to the present. As for this song, I think it’s one of the best number one hits of the decade. It’s insanely catchy. The production is incredible. Her voice sounds relaxed and cool. It’s a 10.

This is around the time where I remember hearing a lot of the number ones in the radio, so looking forward to more of these in the future.

Executive Producer: Cocaine

One scene that was never shot reportedly involved Tesfaye’s character bashing Depp’s character in the face, to which she smiled and asked for more, giving Tesfaye’s character an erection. Another discarded scene from the rewrites was to include Depp’s character begging Tesfaye’s character to “rape” her.

I don’t see any problem with depicting “salacious” or “graphic and disturbing sexual content” and it’s odd to me that suddenly there are a lot of people so vocally opposed to this sort of thing existing. I understand someone not wanting to watch that sort of thing but I keep seeing people talk about this kind of stuff that seems to equate depicting something with endorsing it. Artwork should be challenging and shouldn’t have to explicitly state what moral, political, ideological, etc stances it’s taking and should allow people to draw their own conclusions. I often find that art that starts from a expressly political point of view ends up being rather flat and boring. It’s much better to allow these larger ideas to emerge from the stories we tell. I’m also a firm believer that art can act as a container for some of the uglier aspects of humanity. I think it’s rather important to allow these dark feelings, impulses, observations, and fantasies to play out in artistic works so they can be explored and worked through. The tensions that arise from these kinds of art and fact that many people find some pretty ugly and dark things to be entertaining are definitely worth exploring. Of course fiction and reality sometime bleed into each other and that is also an interesting space to explore. I just hope we aren’t moving towards a place of actively trying to get rid of anything that is troubling or challenging in some way. Will this show be any good? Will there be anything worthwhile that emerges from this work of art and the stories and images within it? I have no idea. This just seemed like a decent place to express some of my thoughts on this.

Thought it would be worthwhile to report to folks here, who would be more likely to be up on independent music and songwriting that I saw Mount Eerie play this week, and he debuted 9 new songs that I guess is at least the start of what a next record could be.

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First of all, what was notable was that instead of playing solo acoustic guitar, like most Mount Eerie shows, he played with an electric guitar, going through multiple pedals, that were fed into two large amplifiers, so it was loud!

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A funny part of that was the venue had put signs up that warned basically “This will be a quiet show, out of respect for the performer, please do not talk loudly during the set, including at the bar.” That made total sense because I had seen Mount Eerie play the first set of shows after his wife’s tragic death, and the ballroom where he played (6 years ago or so), had a bar and open kitchen in the corner, so even the clinking of plates and glasses, as well as the chatter, did annoy the performer, and was incongruous to the people in the crowd openly weeping. There must have been an assumption, rather than communication, on the part of the venue, because this was loud as hell!

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In the past 6 years, because of the intense autobiographical nature the songwriting went in, any new Mount Eerie (or Microphones!?) release has been a check in, with “How is this person doing these days?” Well, at this show, he talked directly to the audience and engaged in a lot of back and forth banter, and someone asked him directly, they shouted out “How are you doing?” He said, “Great” and it felt genuine, as he was continuously cracking self-aware jokes that had himself and the crowd laughing.

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About the new songs: they sounded like a return to some continuity and stability that was present at earlier stages of the Mount Eerie project, like 2006-2012, Black Wooden Ceiling Opening up to Clear Moon. In fact, after he played the new songs, he played a bunch of songs from that period of time, and it all did feel cohesive and of one piece. I think he said one new song was called something like “Fog and Wind” and it can’t hold much more closely to common motifs than that. The narratives were also closer to what they were in the earlier era, describing more small moments of daily life, where the existential or profound reveals itself in the mundane.

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Maybe a few places off the top of my head that evoked the more finely detailed autobiographical period would be a song where he references that he saw his young niece wearing a Nirvana Nevermind T-Shirt, that immediately goes to reflections on context and the churn of the old in the new. There was another song where he described coming back from camping, and reflecting about how people go on meditation retreats where they can’t hear the cries of people who can’t escape the harsh conditions in the world, and references the cataclysmic forest fires that have effected the whole West Coast up to Washington and BC, and grateful that the air wasn’t choked with smoke then, and reflections about apocalyptic thinking that has always been around.

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The part in the new songs that I found most moving was a song where he talks about seeing flashes of lightning so distant on the horizon that he can’t hear the thunder. He puts his 8 year old daughter to bed, then goes to do the dishes, where there is still a window where he can see the flashes on the horizon. There was a line, and this is paraphrasing from memory, where there is an emotional moment and he says, “No one burns like me, at the sink, looking out the window. I am in love with the last of the light.”

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This is also all in context of a tremendous amount of feedback and distortion in the guitar sound, with overtones and harmonics inside the intense oscillating vibrations.