Vikings & Beekeepers

Last year I did a list of the 10 worst songs from 2008’s great albums and I had so much fun doing it that I decided to give it another shot for ’09. Unfortunately, I didn’t really hear a lot that I actively disliked from my favorite albums. Sure, there were a few stinkers from some albums, but too often I was complaining about songs that didn’t really service their corresponding albums or in other cases were just a tad overrated. None were necessarily that “awful.” Still, I’ve got issues with all these songs, but it doesn’t get really bad until over half way through. These artists are on watch anyway. 

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With 2009 coming to an end, so does the decade. Of course, for music blogs, that means lists, lists and a few more lists. Well, let me just say, “Me too!” I’ve got a slew of lists planned for what I’m assuming will be the next few months, with some year-end stuff coming just around the corner and some decade reflections coming shortly after. I have a top 100 of the decade all planned out along with a list of the decade’s best EPs, but until then, let’s start slowly with my final Quarterly Review of the year. Happy 2010, everyone.

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The cliché for most of these “Check Your Blind Spots” entries is that the artist in question was someone I just missed out on due to my age or simply refused to embrace due to some bulshitty backlash of my own creation.

Metallica is a bit of both. Metallica’s fourth album, …And Justice For All  came out when I was six, several years before something like metal would be a viable genre to listen to (at the time, my idea of metal was “Ballroom Blitz” – close, but not quite). By the time I was of age (let’s say 14 or 15), pop punk was my drug of choice and Metallica (circa Garage Inc.) was considered to be the enemy. That’s not to say that I wasn’t exposed to Metallica at the time, but they were a band associated with a certain kind of person in my town and I tried to keep my encounters with those dirtstach’d and mulleted heshers to a minimum. No one wants to have his bike stolen, especially by some skinny burnout in an AC/DC tour shirt.

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It’s a curious case about Captain Beefheart’s (aka Don Van Vliet) Trout Mask Replica. On the one hand, it’s one of those iconic albums with its immediately recognizable album art and its token position as the lone “out” album on any middlebrow magazine’s greatest records of all time list. On the other hand – quick, name me one song off the album! OK, that might not be fair, but I’ve had many first-hand experiences where self-professed Beefheart fans say, “Trout Mask? Ehhhh, it’s overrated.”

On one side of the spectrum, Trout Mask Replica is the “If you only own one Captain Beefheart album…”, while on the other side it’ often considered a mere lesser light in a storied and celebrated career or simply one of those albums that Just. Doesn’t. Hold. Up.

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Every time I do one of these, it feels like there’s one album that really stands out, followed by a glut of solid albums that are good, but don’t resonate at the same level. Every quarter seems to go like that, including this one, but sometimes the last week or two of the quarter brings in a wealth of albums that seem so good, but provide you with significantly less time to really soak them in. That’s what happened here. I don’t really know how much some of these albums will hold up or how much they can improve with time, but a few of the albums on this list feel like something special even though they have all the hallmarks of being “growers.” On top of that, I haven’t even heard new albums by Mission of Burma, Om, Tyondai Braxton, Why?, Circulatory System or Kid Cudi. So…things could change by the end of the year.

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Pop quiz:

Who were Dexy’s Midnight Runners?

a)    Forgotten 80s one hit wonders that briefly made a splash stateside with some dubious fashion choices and the celtic-inspired new pop song “Come On Eileen.” Essentially, Nena in overalls.

b)    A once white hot English band that scored eight Top 20 songs in the UK and began making headway in the US before flaming out and falling off the radar completely.

c)     One of the most compelling bands in the history of pop music, releasing three drastically different, uniformly excellent albums that hold up to this day, despite popular opinion.

d)    All the above.

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A part of becoming a music nerd is going back and retracing the annals of music history to discover (or rediscover) music that, while long since canonized, has yet to properly grace your ears. Being born in the early 80’s means that there are decades and decades of music the preceded me that I needed to discover, especially since I didn’t really start giving a crap about music (not counting Weird Al and early Beach Boys) until I was a teen – the mid-90s. When making the conscious decision to become a voracious music listener, however, I had to choose certain streams of music over others, leading me to totally miss out on zeitgeist-capturing artists in my very own time. You chose grunge, I went with pop punk. You went with Smashing Pumpkins, I went with Weezer.

Despite this, I have had years to retrace my steps on several of these key figures of the mid-to-late 90s. There is one glaring omission, however, I have yet to pay any attention to up to this point: the late and many would say, great, Jeff Buckley. Most egregiously, while several of my friends and peers became obsessives and loyalists, I never gave two shits about his 1994 album, Grace.

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I’m back! Thanks to job stuff and an overwhelming busyness, my duties as a blogger have gone by the wayside. Thankfully, this Quarterly Report is around to keep me on track. The music these last few months has been incredible and I can only assume I missed a ton. Hopefully I can rectify that by year’s end.

I plan to dedicate a little more of my time to this thing, so stay tuned for a few new “Check Your Blindspots” and “V&B Hall Of Fames.”

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The first three months of 2009 have been ridiculous. There’s just been so much good that has come out, leading me to feel wholly inadequate to truly judge it fairly. The truth is, however, I like all the albums mentioned here as much as one person possibly can, making me dubious that anything else could have been much better from the last three months. Of course, this is all said without me having listened to new albums by Fever Ray, Antony, Propaghandi and who knows how many other artists, so I could still really be missing out. With that said, with the exception of number one, I’ve enjoyed everything here pretty evenly and deciding which albums not to write on was based almost solely on what I wanted to write about the most. Here’s to the remaining nine months of the decade.

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I know it seems that every other post I make on Vikings & Beekeepers is intended to be a new series (Alphabetical iPod Diary, Pain For Pleasure, Overrated/Underrated), but I really get the feeling this one’s going to stick.

As voraciously as some people like to ingest the musical landscape, it’s downright impossible to keep up with everything ­– it’s part of the reason actively discovering and listening to music can be so daunting, there are always stones left unturned. Even the oversized boulders get passed up from time to time. As much as I love to devour music at a gluttonous rate, there is so much out there that I haven’t heard, and some of those albums have been thoroughly canonized and are considered to be quite essential and/or important in their own right. There are several factors why a person may have missed out on these kinds of big-ticket albums, and probably the biggest reason is generational (although there a million other reasons like genre ignorance, passive, non-committal listening or just plain old, ugly contrarianism). I began really listening to music in the 90s, which meant I had several decades’ worth of beloved, groundbreaking and historical music to catch up on. Which means every year leads to new discoveries, but that pile of “yet to listen to albums” has hardly been dented.So that’s essentially what I’m aiming to do here. Let’s get all our bases covered. Let’ check our blind spots. Read the rest of this entry »