so that was a lot of decades of music in a go

Oh Olivia.

Oh my God Olivia. I just--when she started crying I thought I was going to, too. I hate her being this unhappy, but she's so not over it, and she really shouldn't be. She was gone and no one knew it, and then she came home, and okay, this may not be party territory except it kind of fucking is. In a way. And you want people to have missed you at least a little and are glad to see you and well, you find the other you was here and no one noticed and there is no way on earth that doesn't suck even if you weren't narrowly escaping conscious vivisection.

It's perfectly logical they wouldn't know, or couldn't (though I argue when you are dealing with a canonical alternate universe you plan for this shit).

But Peter....

"She's...much quicker with a smile. Less--less intense, maybe."

Oh Peter. Next tell her how the sex was awesome. Adding on because I thought she was you was so not the way to go. I get this is self-flagellation like an Olympic sport, baby, and you're pissed and guilty, but no.

I mean, I get they will work through this and everything, and Olivia's heartbreak and her just accepting that yeah, she's not ready or able to move on from this and to just let herself feel it is a good thing. But man.



Now that that is out of the way, music! As it's been a while.

My Chemical Romance - The True Lives of the Fabulous Killjoys

I didn't expect to like the entire album; they're either hard hit or complete indifference. So far my repeat-one is Summertime to the point I have unconscious and conscious lyric retention. I haven't done that since Adam's entire goddamn album. I can't tell if they changed or I have; I need to listen to their earlier albums and find out. Eventually.

The Kings of Leon - Come Around Sundown

I only pulled two of their songs so far, Radioactive and The End, and I play The End against Summertime on a two song multi-repeat playlist. I couldn't even tell you why, but they work like that like espresso and mocha. The End especially appeals to me; it's still a repeat-one. They're nothing like One Less Reason or Hurt, but this song is so much the odd stepbrother of Use Somebody. The only thing that irritates me with them is whatever they recorded in is heavier than pretty much anything else I have and I have to adjust my sound a lot so it balances.

Wars - Hurt (single)

I love the entire few seconds of stripped down vocals leading to getting hit by sound like a truck. I cut it with The End and Augustana's Hey Now, but on it's own it's intense enough; unlike the songs I liked of theirs, this is some gorgeous music above and beyond the vocals and lyrics, and a world away from Falls Apart in sophistication if not in the music itself; less violent, less brutal in execution, even if the intensity is the same. Then again, I'm not sure anything can match Falls Apart for me. I like feeling it quietly before I'm slammed into the concrete with what they're getting across, and Falls Apart kept eerily calm before bringing the world to its knees.

Stand By Me - John Lennon (single)

Off Power to the People that went on sale at Amazon during Black Friday week, so I grabbed it because he's a musician I appreciate more than like. I know he's amazing and his work is seminal, but he's like going to listen to the orchestra or a night of chamber music; it's not music I live to, more music I have to sit down with and really absorb.

Which is how I spent a week going around singing Power to the People and Give Peace a Chance a few decades too late and asking people if they want a revolution. Which yeah, don't we all? Stand by Me, don't get me wrong, will always be Ben E. King for me, but it cut through a lot of the block I had on John Lennon as a popular musician, not just a superstar, icon, artist, and activist. Being hugely respectful of a musician's work is apparently a really good way not to want to listen to them. Imagine, gorgeous as always, and even better cut with A Perfect Circle's haunting cover. I remember only vaguely when he was killed, but my parents were apparently extremely affected by it. Considering they are both conservative and not terribly into music, that's saying something.

Which is why I went ahead and got pretty much the entire Beatles catalogue.

That probably needs an entry of its own, because so much of it, again, falls into music that I know intellectually is amazing, groundbreaking, that inspired and even defined a generation, but it's not emotionally engaging for me, though I like it. Let It Be is in most people's blood by now, but I fell in love with it all over again listening to different versions, then Paul McCartney doing it for Good Night New York, where it broke my heart. Here Comes the Sun was a surprise; I forgot I loved that song. Revolution, Revolution 1 and Revolution 9 back to back was an experience, and I took a detour for Bruce Springsteen singing War (What Is It Good For?) which, just leave me alone, IDEK what happened there? The aesthetic of the Beatles, like Elvis, like even Janis Joplin, feels like I'm missing a crucial generational element of absorbing it as more than an intellectual exercise. Not that I don't like; more that the gut-level obsession doesn't kick in.

I need to work on that.

Save Me San Francisco - Train

I like most of it, rarely love it, not since Drops of Jupiter that once held the record for all-time repeat-one for eight months while I was writing Jus Ad Bellum in X-Men. Yeah, no idea why. I adore that song. Overall, this album is so much better than their first, but I don't adore any one song. Not yet anyway.

Drift Away - Dobie Gray (single) and Drift Away - Uncle Kracker

Classics are classics for a reason. This is pretty much what set me off on Let's Discover John Lennon when it came on the radio and I immediately really needed the song right now. These two versions are similiar right up until you realize how much they aren't; the same bright energy and richness of experience, the feel of a guitar and a dusky porch and celebrating the wonder of rock and roll, but two such different men bring their experiences to the song. Gray's voice is beautiful, and Kracker's enthusiasm is just uplifting.

I'd kill for a woman to cover it. I was trying to think of someone with the kind of voice to carry it off, then realized that was stupid; the voice didn't matter, but the feeling behind it does. I'd like to be surprised and have a modern cover made to round it out.

Everybody Knows - Concrete Blondes and Everybody Knows - Taller Children

An already eerie song taken a new eerie direction. Concrete Blondes captures the despair and resignation and grimness of reality gritty and dark and matter-of-fact; Taller Children is experimental with a hard, stripped wooden beat and a woman's nearly expressionless voice and someone using maracas in a very unsettling way, before a sudden melodic line that completely throws the song. I don't know how I feel about it yet. Third part is gorgeous and not as unsettling and with a uneasy, bouncing beat thing. I can't background this song. It's like Taken By Tree's Sweet Child O'Mine cover, which granted, I heard it the first time in the trailer of Last House on the Left crooning over torture-murder-rape, but even without it, the song leaves me a little uneasy. Then again, so did Guns and Roses, and for so many reasons.

Interstate Love Song - Stone Temple Pilots(single)

I always think I don't like them, until I count up how many of their songs I have. The thing with them, it's love or turn off the radio, and that's a lot of songs that turn off the radio. I like this one, though I can't tell why exactly; it's just fast and rushing forward.

Dust - Augustana (single) Hey Now - Augustana

For five songs total that I like by them, my playlists are dominated with them. Dust, like The Frays You Found Me just work for me, though totally different in pretty much everything; despair and your musical approach to expressing it are illustrated by them. Hey Now though....

For some reason, that one has gone into secondary renaissance for me, and I burned that one out this summer on repeat. I kind of blame One Less Reason for being so endlessly dark and Hey Now is just--not. I can't explain why it worked for me or how. The slow, subtle build, the instruments creeping up on his voice, despair turned sideways into something like hope, or at least a kind of narrow-eyed determination for something more, something better.

Which covers current adventures in music. I'm bracing myself for a Pink Floyd and Sister Hazel marathon due to Black Friday MP3 sales at Amazon. Pink Floyd is another aesthetic that has never clicked (with one or two exceptions); this should be explored. Or something.

Anyone else have musical thoughts? Recs? Ponderings?

Comments

[aurora]

FRINGE BROKE MY HEART IN ABOUT 800 PIECES. OW.

I've been making my way through Kanye's new album and it's far from bad!

[nagasvoice]

It's possible you're just not a Beatles person. zagzagael put up an interesting post awhile back about she was always a Stones gal at heart, and never did get the Beatles, inviting readers to comment with why they were so passionate about them, to explain it to her.

[seperis]

Not--exactly? My parents were conservative in Texas--I was raised on Nashville country pre-George Strait and before the modern country revolution, but it doesn't gut me either (this may be why it took years and years before I thought of music as more than background and my teens were really difficult when I couldn't get into anything and couldn't explain why, though I liked tons of it, the stuff that hit was far and between). I like the Stones, too, and I like Elvis, but the aesthetic misses me as a genre entirely, not because it's not good, but because it doesn't hit me emotionally.

I'm trying to think what did, but I honestly didn't think of music as a concept of enjoyment itself until my late teens, early twenties in the post-Nirvana (again, like and appreciate, but not bone-deep) era. I want ot say Cranberries were the first band ever I felt as both something I liked and something I got and appreciated, which I think may be because my closest affiliation is alt-rock emotionally. Before that, if I were pushed, it would have to be Madonna, Placebo (I didn't know that then, it's only now I'm finding stuff I listened to obsessively in my teens that I didn't know who sang it, just taped off teh radio with a ? on the paper cover).

I keep meaning to go and pull those tapes and do a musical evaluation. I'm actually pretty sure that I was consistent in type if not genre from early on, just my type tended to end up in any genre. Alt-rock just tends to attract my type of musician a lot more than any other.

[(Anonymous)]

I was raised on classical music, and similarly disconnected from most contemporary pop sources, just in a different era.
Since then I've drifted in and out more for economic reasons than anything. I was starting to reconnect in college back in the 70s (you can waste a lot of money on generic disco, and I couldn't afford that) but after that, workin' lawn mowers, couldn't buy stuff during lousy job situations for years after that (thank you Reagan for *that* recession, almost as bad for poor folks then as what we're going through now). No intarwebz music-sharing during that era, only large media companies fighting the release of digital media (as opposed to vinyl) aka expensive. Dropped back in again about the time Sinead O'Connor got big, but somewhere around Stone Temple Pilots I think I figured out I don't have the patience for Bush-era whingeing buried and muffled under the percussion mix so nobody grownup would actually hear the complaints. Timid lil sheepses, yeah, rock on. (The Stones never shut up, did they?) Which sounds like I should go whap my cane on some of those kids on the lawn, come to think.
*waves cane*

[scy]

Hmm. I grew up listening to both the Stones and the Beatles, but I admit that I default to the Beatles more often. It may be due to my upbringing - or the fact that my father would, nearly every morning without fail play 'Start Me Up' by the Stones at furniture shaking volume to get us up WAY too early. Perhaps those two facts are related?

But, I do love the Stones, it's just - they didn't make a couple of charming movies that won me over as a small child? I could also say the same thing about Sean Connery's James Bond, which will always be superior to Roger Moore, no matter what - and marathons of James Bond movies and Red Dwarf were acceptable reasons for us to be up at midnight. *snickers*

Wow, I am COMPLETELY off track.

Anyhow, MCR! I did not love The Black Parade. I didn't DISLIKE it, but this album is my kind of happy place - from its unabashed geeky joy to its mocking of the vampire craze - OMG, JENN, I SWEAR, I AM CONTINUALLY REMINDING MYSELF THAT DANCING IN MY CUBICLE LOOKS WEIRD IF NOBODY ELSE CAN HEAR THE MUSIC. And to me 'Kids From Yesterday' REALLY sounds like 'last days of summer' *bounces*

'Summertime' - *cuddles you*

Basically, YES, I love the whole album and could go on at length about WHY.

You have seen the two music videos so far, yes?

[sorrel]

I also thought that Peter said the worst possible thing. I mean, I got what he was saying, and I think if he'd maybe phrased it differently, it might have worked- maybe if he'd found the words to say, "She seemed happier and I thought I was making her happier- making you happier- and I didn't question because all I want to do is make you happier, and because of that I've totally hurt you and I'm really sorry." Maybe if he'd said something a little more like that it might have worked, but I don't think so. Because I think as Olivia sees it, it's not just the violation (but the scene where she stripped the bed and found Peter's shirt in the laundry was one of the most heartfelt I've seen in a long time) but also because it feels like he didn't love her as much as she loved him. I mean, she loved him enough to hallucinate him into being even when she didn't know who she was, and he didn't even notice that he was sleeping with an impostor. That's pretty impossible to take.

I do agree that they'll work through it eventually. And I love that they can just settle in and say "I love you, and you love me" and have legitimate reasons for them not to be together, instead of stretching out the UST to ridiculous levels just to keep the viewers coming back. But this makes me so sad in the meantime. The bit where he came up to her in the garden and touched her shoulder and she flinched broke me long before she even started crying. Oh, Olivia. And she always cries like she's trying desperately not to and just can't stop herself, and her face just crumples, and it kills me.

[brownbetty]

re: Fringe, the scene in her apartment was so amazingly effective, with the clothes on their hangers, and the laundry in the machine. Acting! Sometimes it is done well, and then it really works!

[niqaeli]

I am more Gen X, culturally, than I am Gen Y and in many ways I absorbed my parents' culture more than I did my own generations while I was it. So probably my bone-deep love of the Beatles springs from that. But also, McCartney was a fucking genius at the catchy and Lennon had a way with lyrics (even the nonsense ones). I don't mean that in a deep way, honestly: they were a cultural phenomenon because they were talented as hell but mostly, I swear, because they earwormed like a motherfucker.

The weird thing about listening to the Beatles for me, though, is I can hear the damage in Paul's voice already in their later work. And people often look at me like I'm crazy when I say that. But I can hear the ruin of his voice, coming. I don't know if it was bad technique, or the drugs and alcohol, but it's definitely there. And it's surreal, because it just makes the later work sort of -- more tragic.

I want someone to write the AU where Lennon lives and they finish reconciling and write music together again. Except, really, how could you do that right except through the music they would make? And who knows what music they would have made?

(Also, someday I will vid a vicious breakup to How Do You Sleep because, seriously, does not matter at all that they weren't sleeping together, that is exactly what that song is: a vicious, angry breakup song.)

[seperis]

And thank you, just bought How Do You Sleep and you wouldn't think something so poppy could be so pissed. Christ, I've had bad breakups I set to Alanis Morisette on high volume, but that's just--IDK. Still so angry.

I wonder what it's like to have to carry that in public, you know? I mean, when your breakup is not just public information, but the Beatles were at the time owned by public perception, they were so overwhelming and their lives so much lived in it. I wonder if it was natural that they'd perform their breakup like this, because it could never be private.

[seperis]

I would buy you in auction for a Lennon/McCartney vid to How Do You Sleep. Holy shit, the more I listen, the more it just--kills me. Slash would be superfluous in this case; holy shit. Yeah. I want.

You could totally do this. *encouraging* It's the Beatles! There's all the source in the universe.

[etui]

I love your music posts. I always spend hours on YT after reading them, trying out new bands. I think I'm going to buy that Augustana one. And maybe One Less Reason and Hurt too.

I just got into Fall Out Boy last spring. This summer the Blue Jays were using Long Forgotten Son by Rise Against as the soundtrack to their 7th inning game recaps. I looked them up and saw in the Wiki article that fans thought the CD sounded more like FOB than their usual, which was probably meant as an insult, but I took it as a recommendation. I bought the CD Appeal to Reason and I love it.

If you like heavy metal, have you tried The Damned Things, which is the new super-group Joe Trohman and Andy Hurley are in? Their new album Ironiclast was just released yesterday and is streaming here. I particularly like the first song, Handbook for the Recently Deceased. From the stats, I'm not the only one.

I love the Beatles. I got the memory stick with all the albums in 24-bit remastered stereo. It sounds amazing. I had to figure out how to stream music from the computer to the stereo because of it. I've always liked the 1965-era albums the best; Help! and Beatles for Sale are my favourites.

[minim_calibre]

I had very distinct reasons for disliking the Concrete Blonde cover of Everybody Knows (probably relating to their version leaving out some of the most brutal lyrics of Leonard Cohen's original song), but I think I need to hear this other version you mention.

[seperis]

It's--different. I don't know if I like it, but I love experimental covers and I love listening to this one, even if it leaves me unsettled.

Also try Constanza's cover of "God's Gonna Cut You Down" for a very Gen X by way of girlpop depression interpretation with techno undertones, it's bitter and the pop sounds so mocking it hurts to listen to. Johnny Cash sang it as a warning; Constanza did it like an inevitable promise. It's ironic in a good way.

I keep meaning to do a post just on reinterpretive covers; a lot of them surprise me when I figure out what they were doing with them and why. You don't, as a rule, take Johnny Cash or Leonard Cohen or hell, NiN and remix without having a bone-deep reason, and a lot of time, you can hear exactly why they wanted to do that song in their voices. Even Springsteen's cover of War had that in it, above and beyond the fact the original was sublime and perfect. Being able to sing what it means to you so your audience gets the both the original and the remix is amazing.

I love Cohen's hugely, but Concrete Blondes always hits me very different, and I'm not sure why. I think a lot of it is the resignation in theirs while Cohen's voice still expresses the power of the individual to make a choice despite it all.

[minim_calibre]

I keep meaning to do a post just on reinterpretive covers; a lot of them surprise me when I figure out what they were doing with them and why. You don't, as a rule, take Johnny Cash or Leonard Cohen or hell, NiN and remix without having a bone-deep reason, and a lot of time, you can hear exactly why they wanted to do that song in their voices.

I would read the hell out of that post!

I think my favorite reinterpretive cover of anything is Coil's version of Tainted Love, which if you haven't heard, may be right up your alley. Not that it's surprising, what they were doing and why, in the context of the time, but it's still unsettling and powerful. (I think it's on Horse Rotovator, but all the Coil is in my closet, which is the least appropriate location to store them I can think of, frankly.)

Now that I'm home, time to track down that cover. And, while I'm at it, I should give the Concrete Blonde another listen, now that I'm older and one would hope wiser.

[seperis]

Leonard Cohen is hard to cover, though; to be honest, if I hear him sing something first, its' hard for me to like any one else doing it. I kidn of feel the same way about Let It Be and a few other songs that I feel should have a DO NOT TOUCH which is silly, and I try to work against, but--yeah. I get why it wouldnt' work for you; Concrete Blondes cover I heard off a soundtrack and before I heard Cohen's.

For an adventure, try Second Hand Songs, a cover database. It's huge and drugging. That's where I found out about the Costanza cover and a few others I've listened to. I don't like them all, but sometimes the fact I can feel they had a reason to sing it overrides that and I love it anyway.

(I own like, half the covers to Hallelujah now. I have to wait between getting a new one, because I'm so sure now it's been done but no, the next person bring something new to it and blows me away all over again. That song is magic.)

Looking up Tainted Love right now.

[seperis]

Okay, here's one that throws me so much and I love it.

Ms Jackson - OutKat

Ms Jackson - covered by The Vines

I still can't get over the The Vines backwarding the entire aesthetic and style. I still keep thinking it's a sixties cover and no. IDEK what to do with this one. I listen to it a lot, though.

(I also have wikied this to death to make sure they're serious on origin. Just--I may have missed a line somewhere, but wow. The Vines are interesting.)

[minim_calibre]

o.0

I think it breaks my brain. But not in a bad way.

[seperis]

*hands* I would ahve sworn it was a Beatles cover or soemthing. they are just so different, I didn't connect them at all.

[cat-77.livejournal.com]

Fringe!

Yeah, I loved that she was trying to keep her shit together but really could not, not completely, and how much she was trying to reassert just who she was and how she was different than the other Olivia, and people *still* did not really understand. And Peter? I got the feeling some part of him knew for quite some time, and just could not admit it to himself, so I rather liked the admission that he kept coming up with reasons.

'Tis going to suck and be uncomfortable in new and sucky ways for them both for a while. [Though, bonus points for managing to keep up the angst and sexual tension while still technically having the characters get together to break that tension, only to have to start all over again with more angst.]

[nrrrdy-grrrl.livejournal.com]

"Interstate Love Song - Stone Temple Pilots(single)

I always think I don't like them, until I count up how many of their songs I have."

SO FUCKING TRUE. I've even come to feel kinda bad about pranking them at my job. Kinda.

But this song. Its power to delight me remains undiminished after a zillion plays. Don't tell the rest of my post-high-school hipster peer group.

[elucreh.livejournal.com]

I really, really just can't forgive Peter for not knowing. Some of the signs were really obvious, and NOT explainable by her lifealtering experiences or whatever. Her memory wasn't eidetic, for fuckssake.


But Olivia. Oh, my girl. What I love about her, what breaks my heart about her, is that she's so much a person. She tries to tough things out, but they're hideous and awful and they break her. And yet she has to go on. I'm actually hideously relieved that pretending she was okay only lasted one episode, because having to watch and cringe for her was bad enough until her breakdown. I want to help her move and buy a whole new wardrobe.

[deadlychameleon.livejournal.com]

Which is how I spent a week going around singing Power to the People and Give Peace a Chance a few decades too late and asking people if they want a revolution. Which yeah, don't we all?

Well you say you want a revolution
Well, you know. We all want to change to world.