John Paul Brammer wades into the candy culture wars (which are adjacent to the chicken sandwich culture wars and seem to provoke no less depth of feeling, if not many true casualties) on his Substack.
No one really asked for the M&Ms to be more relatable or for Velma to call out toxic masculinity. These are decisions massive corporations made because we are living in an era where personal morality is almost entirely defined by consumption habits, because consumption habits make up a good chunk of our daily lives.
The recent piece on the new wave of American shoegaze in Stereogum was nothing if not exhaustive. Spanning obscure sub-genres and scenes, it shone a light on some of the mostly heavier U.S. based bands carrying on the tradition of outfits like Catherine Wheel and Ringo Deathstarr. The piece demanded a desire to dig deep and attention span to match that ambition. I spent some time this week going through the bands.
I've been working on my blog design lately. Occasionally, a situation will arise in which I do something that totally messes things up, and I wish for the option to roll back to a "last known good" configuration. I used to love this option on Windows. If you (or a process or driver) did something that put the operating system in a bad state, you could always roll back to the last known good state and get things up and running.
Canned Dragons is a weblog about faith, noise and technology, written by Robert Rackley. "For the memory can both provoke the dragon and the memory can also subdue him." ~ St. John Chrysostom
I used to have a well-worn VHS cassette of Sonic Youth’s tour video, 1991: The Year Punk Broke. It featured a just-experiencing-stardom phase of Nirvana, but that wasn’t the reason I watched it over and over. I was more interested in the Sonic Youth and Dinosaur Jr. performances that were recorded at these giant European music festivals. Until Lollapalooza sprang forth from the mind of Perry Farrell, we didn’t have bands like Sonic Youth playing huge outdoor venues in North America.
I generally don't do year-end lists, but I like to share a couple of my favorites things from the past year. In this interstitial time between Christmas and New Year's, I get a chance to reflect back on what I've enjoyed, while having very few demands on my time.
I first wrote about Scout Gillett earlier in the year, when she covered a Broadcast song, before her debut record No Roof, No Floor was released.
Mastodon was created in 2016, and the site still harkens back to its origins, a time when Gamergate and the atrocious harassment of women in tech on Twitter was still very fresh in our minds. The platform was in a way a reaction to that and the rising toxic atmosphere on social media. At the time, Twitter was also in the throes of dealing with the side effects of a Donald Trump candidacy and subsequent presidency.
In a worship service recently, our pastor explored the genealogy of Jesus as presented in the book of Matthew. It was a thought-provoking homily about family ties. Alastair Roberts writes for Plough magazine about how we fit our own lives into the continuum of people that have come before us.
Moderns have become dulled to our own place in the generations, to the ways that we receive, bear, and pass on legacies, to the ways we are the harvest of former generations’ labors and how our own labors await the harvest of future generations.
I was already a fan of the angular and noisy Truman's Water, Glen Galloway's former band, when he launched Soul-Junk. The new group was conceived after Galloway had a tour van conversion to Christianity. My friend, who was not a believer, but was a fan of Shrimper Records, made me a mix tape with Soul-Junk's "I Turned My Back On You." I listened to the mix tape while I was exploring a return to Christianity.
Live at The Murmrr Theatre by DIIV
Perhaps the definitive cover of My Bloody Valentine’s “When You Sleep,” from their seminal album, Loveless, is Memoryhouse’s version from their 2010 Yours Truly live session. The song was breathlessly passed around the internet and gained Memoryhouse a fair amount of attention. When I saw Memoryhouse play live, I asked the band’s Even Abeele if they were ever going to record a studio version of the cover.
