(Vinyl Love is a series of posts that quite simply lists, describes, and displays the pieces in my growing vinyl collection. You can bet that each record was given a spin during the drafting of each corresponding post.)
Artist: Slowdive Album Title: Souvlaki Year released: 1993 Year reissued: 2011 Details: Music on Vinyl, 180 gram
The skinny: Just over five months ago, another great 90s record turned 30 years old and this one an iconic shoegaze classic. But as I wrote when the song mentioned below appeared at number twenty-two on my list of favourite songs from 1993, Slowdive was a group from the original scene that I never properly appreciated until much later. I had “Souvlaki” dubbed to cassette but rarely listened to it. I had to track it down again much later when I felt compelled to give them another chance and of course, this time it stuck. So by the time the original members reunited again in 2014, I was getting to be quite the fan and I had already added this Music on Vinyl, 180 gram reissue to my record shelves. Of course, both of their post-reunion records are also on my shelves and I’ve seen them live now twice, including their amazing show in support of their newest record in Toronto back in September. And I can tell you, this record hit the platter a few times before and after that show for the mood-setting and memory shake-ups.
Broken Bells is a collaborative project between The Shins’ frontman James Mercer and über-producer/musician, Brian Burton (aka Danger Mouse). I first came across Burton’s work care of his production efforts on the second Gorillaz long player, but I really stood up and took notice when he recorded an album with Cee Lo Green under the moniker Gnarls Barkley. Of course, I was already late to party at that point. Danger Mouse had already snagged the listening public’s attention a few years earlier with “The Grey album”, his infamous mashup of the obvious classic albums by Jay-Z and The Beatles. After the success of Gnarls Barkley, Burton was called in to produce albums by The Black Keys, Norah Jones, The Good, The Bad & The Queen, and Beck. For a while there, it seemed that everything he touched turned to gold, including this album with James Mercer as Broken Bells.
In the case of Mercer and his band The Shins, on the other hand, I picked up on them very early on, well before they received the plug by Natalie Portman’s character in the film, “Garden state”, though, I wasn’t so sure I agreed with her bold proclamation at the time. I never saw their music as life-changing but I definitely enjoyed it. Interestingly, I became a bigger fan of The Shins after listening to Broken Bells. It was as if his collaboration with Brian Burton opened my eyes to Mercer’s talents as a songwriter. Another golden win for Burton, I guess.
Indeed, I took to “Broken Bells” immediately, much like I did with The Postal Service’s 2003 classic, “Give up”, an album to which I’ve often compared this one. It bears the same mélange of organic and electronic sounds but where that album pushed boldly forward into futuristic space, “Broken Bells” felt more retro. Yes, there are nods towards science fiction but it isn’t the future we envision today, rather, it’s the present day that we imagined in the past. On many of the songs, Burton and Mercer seem to encapsulate the listener on a silver screen era rocket ship, jettison all of the technical laws of space travel since discovered, and return us to the romance of the thing.
This is the way of the entire album. It sounded like no other music being made in 2010, yet each song sounded instantly familiar, like you grew up listening to Broken Bells’ remixes of the music to which your parents’ parents listened. It is ten tracks of utter brilliance and yes, romance, employing all the cannons in their symphonic arsenal, reinventing the songs and their structures at a whim, a well-placed horn blast here and a shock of string flourish there, like the musical equivalent of a Jackson Pollock painting that shouldn’t work but does. You listen to it and find your way to the end of the album, not knowing how you got there, not really knowing anything except that you want to restart it all over again.
In case you haven’t listened to the whole thing already, here are my three picks for you off the album worth listening to right now.
“The ghost inside”: We start things off four tracks in. “Just like a whiskey bottle, drained on the floor. She got no future, just a life to endure.” The heavy lyrical themes of isolation and haunted introspection are subverted by falsetto vocals, handclaps, humming bass lines, haunting melodic synths, it all sounds so dark and disco, you just need to add smoke machine and the words fade away.
“Vaporize”: Track two starts off sounding like it could be an early Shins track, all Mercer and acoustic strumming, until the vibrating organs and that dirty, hammer-down rhythm kicks in and the speakers low end blow out like beautiful confetti. The words, though, remain thoroughly Mercer. “What amounts to a dream anymore? A crude device, a veil on our eyes.” The ideas dance and dare, play upon depth and angle slyly within the melody, unique and happily hummable.
“The high road”: My very favourite song from 2010 starts with pixelated frequencies that melt into a sliding mellow groove complete with jiving handclaps and there’s that wicked singalong bridge that leads you out of the wilderness. “The high road is hard to find, a detour in your new life. Tell all of your friends goodbye.” This is the opening track on the album and does a great job setting the stage for the tracks to follow. I’ve written before that this is hipster funk for martians but I don’t think this precludes us mere mortals from getting on the bus.
Stay tuned for album #1. In the meantime, here are the previous albums in this list:
Much like the last time I posted one of these playlists based on an old mixed tape, I was downstairs in my basement recently, this time cleaning rather than looking for something, and I came across the same shoebox full of old cassette tapes. Of course, I stopped what I was doing for a good twenty minutes or so and went through said box to remind myself what was in there and to allow the memories of each to come flooding over me. I haven’t played any of these tapes in decades because I have long since dispensed with the last sound system that I had that could play cassette tapes and so I have no idea of any of them even play. I suppose I could get rid of some of the tapes I bought when I was a teenager because I likely now have it digitally or on vinyl format but I’m not certain I’d ever want to throw out any of the mixed tapes. They are as much a document of my own personal history as the photos, yearbooks, letters, and other random bric-a-brac I have stashed away.
Going through these cassettes, I decided it was time to do another of these playlists and opted to replicate one that I created myself, rather than one that was made for me, like the “Raging retro” playlist I previously shared. I chose “1993 mix vol. I” this time around because, as an artifact from 30 years ago, there’s a few fun things you can glean about it’s creator.
Who was 1993 JP Robichaud?
Well, he wasn’t yet inventing creative titles for his mixes, that’s for sure. For a tape called “1993 mix vol. I”, he wasn’t necessarily as concerned with putting together music from the year, indeed, given that it was the first volume, it was likely too early in the year for a mixed tape’s worth of music. Instead, the tape includes music to which I was listening at the time and going through the playlist, it’s obvious to me that I started with songs from the handful of CDs I had in my still new collection and then, moved into the purchased cassettes before finishing off the second side with songs from albums or mixes that had been recorded for me. I can also tell that it was still early on in my mixed tape making career because I hadn’t started strictly following my own self-imposed rule of one song per artist. Indeed, the two appearances by The Wonder Stuff on the tape’s first side betrays how big a fan I was of the band in the early days of 1993.
Some of the photos I’ve included here of the cassette and its J-card sleeve hint that I had a lot of spare time on my hands. I cut out letters from magazines to cobble together a cover and used stickers from old VHS cassette tapes to decorate the cassette. It reminds me that I would later get even more inventive in decorating these things, especially when I made them for others. And finally, the volume one in the title suggests that I fully intended to make more mixes before the year was up but memory does not serve at all as to whether there ever was a second volume created. There definitely isn’t one in the box.
Now before I get right into the playlist itself, here are some highlights that you definitely should check out:
The opening song, “Take 5” by Northside is the first song I’d ever heard by the lesser-known Factory Records product and the song that goaded me into purchasing my first CD, given that I was never able to find the band’s only album on cassette
I discovered the second edition of Mick Jones’ second band, Big Audio Dynamite II, before I ever really became familiar with his first band and the words to “Rush” were rarely far from my mind after I committed them to memory
As I mentioned above, The Wonder Stuff appears here twice, with two very different sounds: “No, for the 13th time” from their debut and “Welcome to the cheap seats” from their third album
The version of Spirit of the West’s “Political” here is the re-recorded rocked up version from “Go figure” because at the time, I was blissfully unaware of the far superior folkier original
The Barenaked Ladies were a few years from massive world status but they were already pretty big in Southern Ontario and “Hello city” was just one of the excellent tracks that graced their now classic debut album, “Gordon”
The Smiths’ “Please please please let me get what I want” closes things off as it did on many a mixed tape because its short length was often a perfect way to fill up the last bit of remaining tape
For those who don’t use Apple Music, here is the entire playlist as it appeared on the original mixed tape:
My (life in) music lists 