Random Music Talk CXXIV: Axver's All Out of Ideas

[cobl04]

American Dream is now comfortably my favourite LCD Soundsystem album, and I also think it's their best. Fucking stacked with great songs. And I think the title track is also slowly making its way up my song rankings.

 

[LemonMelon]

I'm with you, man. It's the lyrical direction that gets me. Those darker themes are resonating hard with me lately.

 

[cobl04]

Yeah, it's definitely his best lyrical effort I'd say, despite quite a few standouts on previous records. Really dives in deep on pretty much every song.

 

[LemonMelon]

I know Kanye is a shitbag and we all hate him now, but I was in the crowd for this and it was possibly the most cathartic live performance I've ever seen in person.

http://youtu.be/luCg4M8mM60

Somewhere in that crowd I'm singing myself hoarse with tears in my eyes.

The literal mic drop at the end hnnnnggh

 

[cobl04]

That's quite lovely, I can see that. Care to share a bit more about why you loved it so much?

 

[LemonMelon]

At a certain point, you've been following an artist so long that you gain the ability to put the blinders on and focus on the little victories that come down the pike. It's like family almost. When anything good happens, it's hard to be cynical the way you might be with someone you have no connection to.

It's been an awful year to be a Kanye West fan. Just terrible. And yet it hasn't because I've heard several Kanye-produced albums this year that were very good. The talent is there. So I go to Tyler's festival Flog Gnaw last weekend looking for something, anything to redeem 2018 for him.

Kanye and Cudi were far from perfect that night and most certainly not in mid-tour form. We're talking about two men who hardly ever play live anymore as they publicly grapple with mental illness and separate hospitalizations. But that context gives their wide smiles and dark lyrical content so much heft.

Context (and that amazing crowd) takes a song like Ghost Town, which has the form of a life-affirming anthem on the studio version without actually feeling especially joyous, and turns it into an actual triumph. A similar miracle happened to i by Kendrick when it transitioned from its single arrangement to the version on TPAB.

On a personal level, Ghost Town (both on Ye and Kids See Ghosts) resonates with me as someone who has battled depersonalization disorder for years - the concept of being "freed" from anxiety through sheer numbness. I don't think that's what the song is about, but that's what it speaks to. Freedom through the subtraction of one omnipresent weight.

So yeah, I got a lot out of that. It's the last performance I'll see live before my daughter is born and it seems like a fitting cap for an extended period of my life that will inevitably end and be replaced with something else. Hopefully something better.

 

[cobl04]

 

[mikal]

I’m going to announce my top 10 Biffy Clyro songs ranking within the next month for sure folks.

 

[Mack_Again]

American Dream is very much like a comfort food to me tho

 

[iron yuppie]

Beach House getting some love from the frat boys:


https://pitchfork.com/news/the-chainsmokers-new-song-beach-house-involves-listening-to-beach-house/

 

[lazarus]

Dad blasts bakers who made son’s pathetic birthday cake

Paul Hogan: “That’s not a frog cake”

I can’t stop laughing at the picture.

 

[Hewson]

Woolworths still exists?

I'm sure the cake will taste fine when washed down with Foster's.

 

[bono_212]

I thought I was prepared to open that link and hold back audible laughter, but I wasn't. That is too much.

 

[lazarus]

If the kid had liked dingoes instead of frogs, I wonder if the cake people would just have put an "8" next to the happy face in place of the "3".

 

[bono_212]

As in it 8 the baby?

 

[lazarus]

 

[HeartlandGirl]

I just wanna say hello to the SoCal contingent of B&C because I am in your hood! Drove out today to see Joywave and Sir Sly at the Fonda Theatre. Yay.

 

[cobl04]

Cake sucks.

Also, it's Safeway.

 

[Axver]

Safeway hasn't existed for years fucko.

 

[kabigon]

Supermarket names are the dumbest thing ever

 

[Mack_Again]

I havent listened to all of it but I really like this Makaya McCraven album, Universal Beings

 

[IWasBored]

The last time I saw a Woolworths was when I was like 4 or something so I’m not 100% sure what they sold, but I don’t think it was cakes. But we’ve got Safeways here.

Knowing what I know about words, their meanings, and Australia....probably neither of them are/were the same thing.

 

[Axver]

Fucken get around the New Zealand cricket team mofos.

 

[Axver]

My avatar really could not be any more superb today, what a fucking team, what lads, love every single one of them.

 

[Hewson]

The last time I saw a Woolworths was when I was like 4 or something so I’m not 100% sure what they sold, but I don’t think it was cakes. But we’ve got Safeways here.

Knowing what I know about words, their meanings, and Australia....probably neither of them are/were the same thing.

The Woolworth's I recall (downtown crossing in Boston) was a department store, don't recall them selling groceries or cakes.
And they've been closed for a long, long time.

 

[Hewson]

Apparently Woolworths in the US shuttered circa 1997:

https://www.thecrimson.com/article/1997/10/8/woolworth-closing-marks-end-of-an/

In US they were department stores, in OZ apparently they are grocery stores specializing in Australia's finest artisan decorated birthday cakes and of course Australia's national treasure Foster's.

 

[Kieran McConville]

Woolworths in Australia also shuttered in 1997. They've been cleverly disguising it for twenty-one years though. No end in sight. It's like one of those 'the boss has gone crazy!' sales, only forever.

 

[phanan]

Where I live, there used to be a Woolworth’s downtown, and for years after it was gone, you could still see the name cemented in the sidewalk.

They redid the sidewalk a couple of years ago.

 

[kabigon]

One of my enduring memories of LA is the difficulty of finding a supermarket open late at night anywhere. If you need a 24 hour bail bond, no problem though.

 

[lazarus]