August 17, 2019 CD-2 I’ve really been looking forward to writing this next part – the last section of the previous instalment felt kind of like homework I had to get through – my listening has been ahead of my writing, and there’s some songs I’m falling in love with on CD-2! The opener, A …
Exploring “Join The Dots” – Series Intro, CD-3, Light My Bloody Fire & Shakespeare
I’ve long meant to properly curate the accidental prequel that started the whole Exploring the Back Catalogue thing for me.
I was on an alternative music forum when we acquired Join The Dots and was participating in a Currently Listening thread. Suddenly I was mostly currently listening to Join The Dots, which there is rather a lot of – and as usual when I’m listening to music that gets me thinking, I wanted to write about it and, eternal optimist that I am, perhaps even be able to engage in comparing notes with other listeners…
Exploring the Back Catalogue: Hiatus Reflection
Welcome back to my open music journal. It’s about to get underway again after a hiatus, and here’s why it’s been a year since I wrote anything new.
Last year I took a break from it to move the material from a forum onto my own space. You’d think that the best place to write this stuff would be a public forum specifically for the audience of the band whose back catalogue I am exploring. After all, my husband has a thing for writing recreational essays on the Cyberman episodes of Dr Who audio dramas, and duly places them on Gallifrey Base…
Exploring the Back Catalogue: Self-Titled, Lost, Labyrinth & Identity Crisis
I think this is a terrific album opener – heart on the sleeve, in your face, setting the tone and preparing you for what is to come.
Exploring the Back Catalogue: Self-Titled, The Promise, Pain, Grief, Faith & Other Personal Crises
Dickens is a master at summing up people in brief but evocative descriptions, and I think The Cure have a similar talent for summing up emotions and situations in (relatively) brief but evocative pieces of music. The Promise is a vivid portrait of deep disappointment and grief, and it instantly took me back to the last time I’d heard someone express these emotions, to the same painful extent. The fact that this was also on my iPod and in the garden probably helped to link the two; the brain does things like this…
Exploring the Back Catalogue: First Impressions, Self-Titled
The general vibe about this album from other people had been fairly negative – including from my husband, who sampled it in a record shop when it came out but decided he didn’t like the sound. But you know what, I’ve just given it a spin and I like it.
Just clarifying – looking at what’s been written out there, on Reddit and forums and in the music press, I get the general impression that quite a few of the original fans (or at least the most vocal ones) were never really happy again post-Wish (or some of them, post-Pornography). The extra-whiny complaining began with Wild Mood Swings, and never really ended. Sometimes I think that it’s common for people get stuck in a perceived golden musical age of their own teenage years, possibly because that’s when everything is fresh, and a lot of neural connections are being made, and people go through a lot of feelings. Once you’ve grown up, you may not be quite so easy to move or inspire again, particularly if there’s a tendency to nostalgia, and a dissatisfaction with the present in general. And the problem may actually be that, and not the music.
Exploring the Back Catalogue: Wish Wrap-Up
MANIPULATION, ANYONE? Unlike most of the other tracks on this album, Wendy Time is not a lovely track to listen to, but if you’re writing a tune about shameless manipulation and terrible pick-up lines, you probably don’t want a lovely tune – but one that reflects the nausea-inducing scenario related. And in that sense, the tune really fits, its unpleasantness and discord appropriate for the topic. Although this is not a song I’d go out of my way to listen to for its aesthetic appeal, I do applaud its inclusion on this album for thematic reasons.
There’s a whole swag of love-gone-wrong songs on Wish – and here’s one situation that could head that way but never does, because it’s nipped in the bud by the target of the manipulation, who is wise to it – which has me cheering, because so many people fall for this sort of thing.
Exploring the Back Catalogue: Wish, Love Gone Wrong & Love Gone Right
LOVE GONE WRONG, LET ME COUNT THE WAYS (finale) Cut is a jagged sort of number, a lament for a dying relationship.
Sometimes it’s like that and there’s nothing you can do – Sensate Focus won’t fix this and psychotherapy doesn’t look good here either; along with other tools they’re better at preventing this kind of disconnection that trying to fix something that’s broken into two separate pieces. Sometimes something is just dead, and all you can do is write a dirge. The sad thing here is that the death of the thing is so lopsided, as it so often is – with one party checked out, and the other wishing it wasn’t so. All that you can do then is to remember that there’s lots of other people you can connect with – and that thinking you’re never going to feel again like you felt about the person who checked out is a bit of a grass-is-greener thing, and a bit like when you’ve had a big lunch and you can’t imagine ever feeling hungry again – because you will.
Exploring the Back Catalogue: Wish, Toxic Families & Mass Communication Bards
LOVE GONE WRONG, LET ME COUNT THE WAYS (continued) End was one of our personal favourites on Show, which we had for yonks before Wish. I guess we’re not particularly into shiny music most of the time, so a song like this appeals to us way more than Friday I’m In Love, musically but also lyrically. Let me hasten to add though that if you were to go the other side of End into deliberately wallowing, wrist-slitting, let’s-lie-down-in-this-and-do-nothing-like-we-have-no-agency music, I’d be off the train as well, because I find that seriously annoying – the idea of deliberate victimhood, fashionable with some. There’s a huge difference between that, and healthy confrontation of dark things about life.
Exploring the Back Catalogue: Wish, Triggers & Ye Olde Venerated Man-Baby Philosophers
I’m really enjoying our new acquisition Wish, on multiple levels – musically there’s so much on there that’s lovely, and even the stuff that’s not I think is the way it is to reinforce the story told by the lyrics – e.g. Wendy Time isn’t exactly a beautiful song, but the quacking Donald-Duck type guitars and the dissonance and ner-ner-ness of the thing just goes with the portrait of an insufferable attempt at manipulation, which the narrator is wise to, which in turn makes me go, “Hooray!” because how many people fall for that, not just once but repeatedly…
It’s mostly like aromatherapy for your ears (not roses or geranium, and nothing fake with phthalates from the chemistry lab either, more like sandalwood and boronia), while the lyrics to most of the songs are written with great care, go well as stand-alone poetry, and make you think. If there’s a main theme, I think it’s interpersonal relationships and the human condition…but I would think that – it’s like, “What do you see?”