Don't forget Michael Gira's song of the same title from Angels of Light's How I Loved You (and the live album We Were Alive!). Granted, that one is from around 1999 or so, so the coincidence isn't there as strongly, but it's still interesting. Was everyone reading Longfellow at the same time?
Interesting aside: The original title of "Gloomy Sunday" translates to "The End of the World"; the lyrics were apparently a response to the rise of fascism in Europe at the time as much as they were about depression.
My Halloween tradition: listening to Calibretto's Dead By Dawn EP.
There are plenty of genres out there scarier than horror punk (with acoustic guitars and cheap synth-organs, no less) but these seven songs have a unique way of getting under my skin. I think it's the fact the EP starts off so upbeat, so tongue-in-cheek with its black humor. ("But when I see your pretty face / it's hard to hate the human race"—ah, true love!) So I get caught off-guard by the songs' slide into overwrought but completely straight-faced dread and mourning. ("If you leave me, know just maybe / strangers in the dark are waiting. / When you're gone there's nothing I can do"—is that a warning, or a threat?)
I think that this track is my final confirmation that Sufjan Stevens has indeed gone off the deep end in the best way possible. Or rather, was never really out of it in the first place.
What has he been doing recently lately, anyway? He's clearly still, y'know, alive, but what of music?
I don't think there's been any news since 2012, the year Silver & Gold came out. He did a few other collaborations that year: a split 7" with Rosie Thomas, and an EP with Serengeti and Son Lux.
Presumably he's still recording Christmas EPs and sending them to his family as gifts every year. After all, that's where Songs for Christmas and Silver & Gold came from. The last disc of Silver & Gold was recorded in 2010...
I hope Sounds Familyre Records is going to do another edition of their A Familyre Christmas series.
technically it wasn't released this year so it can't really count toward my Year of Fantastic Music
but the album this is from is soooo gooood so far. I'd always liked one song by them but never bothered to check anything else of theirs out. I'm glad I decided to though, this song kicks ass.
(also I need to play LittleBigPlanet 2 now because this song is in it)
1995 in underground Christian rock: The Prayer Chain records a new album. Unlike the grunge of their last album, this is stoner rock with meandering melodies, vocals pretty low in the mix, Middle Eastern-inspired percussion, and long instrumental buildups on a few tracks. The story goes that, listening to this album, you can hear the band's frustration at getting jerked around by the industry and their record label, and you can hear the internal tension that would cause them to break up within a year.
Anyway, when The Prayer Chain mixed the album and mailed it off, their label decided it was not acceptable. Too rough, too bleak—it was commercial suicide (and the band members would later admit they were subconsciously sabotaging themselves). The label insisted the band write new songs, something they could "sell", though only one new song was added to the album. Three songs were dropped from the album, the track order was changed, and the whole thing was remixed.
The resulting album was named Mercury. It didn't make much of a commercial splash, but it was very well-received by those who actually heard it. These days, Mercury is pretty much guaranteed a spot on any list of "Best Christian Rock of the 90s" or "Twenty Albums That Prove Christian Rock Doesn't Have To Suck" or "Christian Rock You Absolutely Need To Listen To I Don't Care If You're Not A Christian This Is So Damn Good".
Of course, back in 1995, word spread almost immediately that Mercury had been subjected to label meddling. (In fact, the cut songs were included on the b-sides collection Antartica.) In the aftermath of The Prayer Chain's breakup, a bunch of fans wondered just what the original, label-rejected version of Mercury sounded like. Then, in 2011, the fans wondered no more. The band got ahold of their original mix and released it as a digital download on their website, under the title Humb.
This is where I come in. I had heard about The Prayer Chain for a few years but hadn't gotten around to listening to them. I was already vaguely aware of the story behind Mercury. When news reached me of Humb's release, I realized that this was a unique opportunity: my first impression could be the band's Original Vision(TM) rather than the diluted version.
And I freakin loved it. It earned an honorable mention spot on my personal Best Albums of 2011 list.
I told you all that so I could tell you this: I just heard Mercury for the first time. I need some more listens before I can say whether the meddling from the record label hurt the finished album. However, some of the changes are utterly baffling. The one new song, "Sky High", is not a radio-friendly single, but an extended jam—the longest song on the album, in fact. The Humb songs that got cut from Mercury were some of the most accessible tracks. Granted, one of those did feature a bridge that briefly degenerates into noise—BUT the Mercury mix of "Creole" has a new outro that's just as noisy as the bridge of that cut song, and probably lasts longer.
I'm not criticizing these changes on artistic grounds. I'm just surprised and confused: The label was worried that the album wouldn't sell, yet their meddling made the album, if anything, less commercial and less accessible than it was before.
it's not easy to describe loscil, but i would label this song either 'alternate universe dub techno bohren & der club of gore go on a little bit of a morricone kick', or alternately 'massive container ships slowly moving through a harbour at sunset'
"We thought we wouldn't play it [Black, Brown, and Beige] in its entirety tonight because it represents an awfully long and very important story and that I don't think too many people are familiar with the story." —Duke Ellington, addressing the audience during his Dec. 11, 1943 performance at Carnegie Hall
vaporwave was this thing where people on bandcamp tricked people on /mu/ into listening to chopped & screwed elevator music
Yeah, pretty much. Lounge Plunderphonics. Like witch house, some of it manages to be genuinely weird in an interesting way, but most of it is either relying on leftover '90s "irony" to be funny or just trying too hard.
Dear gods, now I'm imagining Dave Strider and Dildom Andes starting a "post-vaporwave" group.
If the remixing in question is subpar or overwrought, then I have a problem. If the results work, then I have no problem. I mean, I've heard some of Oneohtrix Point Never's stuff compared to or referred to as vaporwave, and although I think that's probably not terribly accurate categorically, I really like his work on the whole. It's creepy and cool and reminds me of everything I love about '80s experimental cassette compilations.
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New Dom & Roland, forthcoming on Metalheadz, serious old-school vibes