In Memoriam: My Copy of Chutes Too Narrow

My beloved copy of The Shins 2003 album Chutes too Narrow has died. 

Hardly remarkable. 

CDs are a poor archival medium. Especially ones that are used and loved over years and years. Ones that have traveled multiple states, lived in numerous rough textured folders, moved house over and over, slid in and out of player after player and played their contents for hundreds of hours.

Chutes Too Narrow is a nearly perfect album. There is not a weak moment on it. It is whimsical yet jaded, clever yet direct. Catchy and immediate yet layered and well wrought. I bought it the day it came out on a Tuesday in Autumn 2003. Fortunately, even before The Shins' inclusion on the Garden State Soundtrack in 2004, their new album was high profile enough to be stocked at the Muncie Best Buy on day one.

CDs give out all the time. Scratches, heat damage, basic defects...so why is this such a sad occasion? This is the first of my mainstays that has died of natural causes, from simple age and use. It was working fine a month ago when my wife and I listened to it while cooking, and now it's not. It's not just skipping in one place or a couple but nearly every song. The data cannot seem to consistently make it off the surface. It's eighteen years old. It has reached the end of its life. 

 I'll get another copy because I value objects even in the age of constant ubiquity. Because it matters to me that music marks time and so do things.

Fleet Foxes: Crack Up (Review)

Six years makes for a lot of water under the bridge, perhaps even the ocean's worth suggested by The Fleet Foxes's cover art for Crack Up. The band's first two albums in retrospect seem like the high water mark of the indie-sincerity wave of the 2000s. Beginning with The Shins and Iron and Wine, trundling through Death Cab for Cutie and Sufjan Stevens before finally peaking on the backs of Bon Iver and Fleet Foxes, only to smash its self to bits on the rocky shoals of Mumford and Sons. The wave has long since rolled back and as Crack Up opens Robin Pecknold sounds rather like a maritime ghost, lolling back to shore on an indifferent tide.

The muted, out-of-tune opening of first track I Am All That I Need/Arroyo Seco/Thumbprint Scar sets a tone of wounded uncertainty. Pecknold might be singing "I'm all that I need," but it sounds more like a left over lyric from headier days when he actually believed that to be true. The second section kicks up in the established Fleet Foxes fashion with sweeping percussive strumming and lush instrumentation but it takes a few moments for the trundling sleepy voiced ghost to move aside and let things begin in earnest.

The songs on Crack Up do not have the immediacy of the Foxes' previous efforts. There's no White Winter Hymnal or Grown Ocean. On first listen they seem to be merely describing the style Fleet Foxes built for themselves of neo-folk convention and widescreen ambition. For fans who've been waiting, remembering those first bracing listens of their self titled debut nine years ago or the relief of the worthy second album, a mere six years ago, Crack Up may be frustrating on its first couple listens. There are no stand outs. But there are long passages of the superficially familiar so the comfort of it might keep them coming back often enough to discover that this is an enchanting album.

On the third listen, Cassius, a second track that does not begin until the seven and a half minute mark is elegant and warm. The singles Fools Errand and If You Need To, Keep Time On Me, that on their own felt like underwhelming style exercises, in context become part of the tapestry. Therein is the novelty and the gear shift Fleet Foxes have undergone. Their old way was to deliver ornate but tightly wound sample pieces, compressed gems. Crack Up is a larger piece with patterns that emerge over further stretches of space. What first seems empty space reveals its self eventually as part of a larger set of features.

The listener may forgivably mourn the loss of their previous exuberance. But Fleet Foxes have delivered a patient large scale work that repays the listener's own patience and attention with lovely melodic expanses and the admirable craftsmanship that more than answers the question, "What were you doing for six years?"

Muscle and Marrow- My Fear (Track of the Day)

A rich percussive wash from Portland Oregon's Muscle and Marrow, this track builds an atmosphere of pulsing tension.
My Fear evokes attitudes of early 80's goth combined in textures of mid nineties Shoegaze and Trip-hop. Lower the lights, take a deep breath and float away on this track.

Playlist suggestions:
Follow with- Chemtrails by Beck

King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard- Gamma Knife (Track of the Day)

Following on Dead Ghosts' tack sharp evocation of 13th Floor Elevators' garage psychedelia we throw it into MC5 Detroit style overdrive. King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard seem to perpetrate the primal mistake of hippie posturing, trying too hard. Their band name aches with "look-at-me-please" desperation and the only way to redeem it would bee to rock so hard the name does not matter because, a rose by any other name...

And they do.

King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard manage to screech and squeal and pulse and rush with fervid punk volume while maintaining a lush psychedelia

Rocky Said by Dead Ghosts (Track of the Day)

The wonderful privilege of creativity is not in providing what people want but in arriving with the thing no one asked for but which everyone needs. To wit, Dead Ghosts' eerily accurate evocation of mid sixties garage psychedelia. The sound of enthusiastic amateurs with a gland full of hallucinogens, an afternoon in an analogue recording studio and some gorgeous old amps with real spring reverb. It's how most of us grew up imagining the passage to another dimension would sound.

Twisted Knife by Black Vulpine (Track of the Day)

-by Tzarathustra

Black Vulpine is fronted by two female vocalists, which, when combined with their particularly 90s influenced take on stoner rock, makes the whole thing sort of sound like the answer to the question "What if Veruca Salt was a sludge band instead?" 

https://blackvulpine.bandcamp.com/

Jangle Me: Five Songs Chiming out of the 80s and 90s

There was a particular guitar tone born in the 1980s on the midwestern and southern independent concert circuit. It can be almost directly traced back to the twin arrivals of REM and The Replacements. It was ringing and bright yet capable of shades of melancholy.


It got picked up and homogenized into the stereotypical mid-nineties guitar sound. It became the gen-ex totem associated with pop-lazy music tastes, bottoming out with the Friends and Party of Five TV themes.

But it is still possible to cycle back and reclaim it, to remember how fresh and enigmatic it could be in the hands of REM or how brash and confrontational when handled by Paul Westerberg et al.
These five songs run from 1985 to 1996 and are like worn flannel with the whiff of incense and old sweat in the threads, energetic memories to animate you right now.

Weekly Vinyl Pt 2 (Caring is Creepy-The Shins)

I seem to remember the early 2000s a little different than some.

Listeners who had been invested in the independent music scene through the nineties often view The Shins with minor distaste because they were a shot across the bow of the lo-fi dry-humored world of Pavement et al. To those whose ear was attuned to Lou Barlow, Stephen Malkmus, and Guided by Voices The Shins could seem embarrassingly sincere and overly polished.

Coming to them from mainstream music, the post-disco shellac of teen pop, the frat boy hyper dirges of Nu Metal, and the sad sack dribblings of Coldplay (the last of which, full disclosure, I was very attached to at the time) The Shins sounded loose, breezy, low maintenance and fantastically bright. They were a breath of cool perfumed air in a stultifying musical climate.

I picked up their first album from the rack in 2001 based solely on the cover and the Sub Pop label on the back. Revisiting it now I can still remember the immediate smile that spread across my face from the first notes of Caring is Creepy and which did not fade until well after the last song ended.

Weekly Vinyl Pt 01 (Coma Girl- Joe Strummer and the Mescaleros)

This begins a weekly feature where I will shoot and post videos from my record collection.

The sound, the physicality, the personal connection with an object not connected to any network and not sending back meta-data to advertisers, its attention is on you and yours upon it. Because music is important. Not anyone's opinion about you, and not how many other people are listening with you. It's the glory of sitting close and watching it spin.

In this case it's the first track from the late great Joe Strummer's last album, Street Core. I discovered this album from a magazine compilation that featured the second track, Get Down Moses. I heard the song and then almost immediately found out he had passed away. This album, apart from being incredible, has a close spot in a lot of music fans' hearts and when it was released on vinyl for Record Store Day back in 2010 I snatched it up greedily.

Three Song Cold Weather Groove

Winter has arrived where I am. I walked two miles in the biting cold and feel alive in that way only narrow survival can elicit. Your heart rate slows down. The world seems bigger when it's cold. And that's what I'm looking for from music today, slow engmatic expanse, the barely making it blues, a real winter groove.

To world oppressed by the blunt and obvious noise of teen pop and Nu Metal came the delicate elegant Icelandic band Sigur Ros. Their second album, first to be released in America, was called Agaetis Byrjun and came out in 2001. Its slow building but still hook-drenched melodies are perfectly cinematic and could even have you believing you're the hero in some slow-burn Kubrikian drama unfolding among ice and clouds.

Sixteies British folk band Pentangle perform here with an organic soul but also a nearly-mechanical precision that resembles some of Massive Attack's more elegaic moments. It's a lush enigmatic groove that seems to exist both in the future and past simultaneously.

You've gotten where you're going and feeling slowly returns to your extremities. Maybe you have a cup of coffee in your hand and you can feel you heartbeat as you look out the window at the blowing cold. Hopefull you have something as deliberately beautiful and considerate as Cannonball Adderly Sextet's Autumn leaves. With Miles Davis on trumpet and Art Blakey on drums you're not going to find it done better.

                                        

  

Down and Out in 1998

1998 is not a year that gets much love for its music. A lot of nasty things happened that year. The proper births of Nu Metal and Millennial Teen pop are not wrongs easily forgiven. The first Creed album, Britney Spears, Backstreet Boys, Limp Bizkit. It was almost terminally bad.

What '98 was good for though was being a depressed teenager. Even the bands that had until recently provided defiant angry Alt Rock turned up with down and out sad sack albums and I for one remember riding that trough to mope town pretty enthusiastically. It may not have been a great year to be listening to the radio, but it was the exact right time to feel morose and out of place, as demonstrated by these releases.

After losing their drummer Bill Berry REM turned up in late 1998 with what was broadly considered an uninteresting and tedious album full of navel gazing neurosis and tediously monotone musical ideas. I was not reading reviews at the time so all I knew was that REM had released an album that hit me right where I was. I still contend that it is a beautiful and subtly faceted album, emotionally vulnerable and completely hypnotic. It also boasts a bushel of delicate melodies that form like crystals and shimmer gorgeously.

I can perhaps sympathize with those who say that The Smashing Pumpkins Adore represents a major mainstream rock act co-opting and homogenizing underground music currents. It was obtusely out of character for them to suddenly try and be a techno act. The label bandwagon jumpers might well fit in this case. But what I cannot do is relinquish the memories of listening to this album into the wee hours of the night with friends on nights when the world felt enormous yet stagnant. A place where anything could happen but nothing ever did. It's pure high school and purely gorgeous to me, even now.

If this were ten years ago I might feel like I needed to defend this inclusion. Back when everyone was kind of getting tired of the Elliott Smith sadness wave that rose up in the wake of his suicide. Now I think he's just about due for another round of re-discovery. I got in on Smith in the wake of his contribution to the Good Will Hunting soundtrack and XO was his first release in the wake of that success. More than any other album here this represents to me a lost way of relating to and experiencing music. I heard Smith on a film soundtrack and had to hunt from store to store, town to town over the space of months and months to collect his releases. I acquired this album at a record shop that no longer exists, buying their only copy. I felt like a victorious hunter. And then listening to it I was alone and unique in a uniquely beautiful world I could feel confident no one for miles and miles had yet experienced. It was a feeling of personal connection and privacy within a physically represented pop culture that one would be hard pressed to find now.

Monday Morning Glory with Sister Rosetta Tharpe

A little something to explode your preconceived notions about rock and roll. Sister Rosetta Tharpe doesn't care if you don't think women can play guitar, or if spirituals and rock and roll can't make common purpose, or if pacifism can't stir the blood. This is a non-religious spiritual war whoop over the longed for death of all war.

I personally don't think she needs the backing choir any more than she needs a second head but that doesn't make this any less a shocking thing to hear and see.

10 Neglected Songs From the Forgotten 90's

--Compiled by Tzarathustra--

As a connoisseur of 90's alternative music, I'm always coming across lists with titles like "12 Forgotten 90s Bands" or the like featuring extremely well-known bands like Collective Soul and the Gin Blossoms. Bands you may not have thought of in a while, but you still hear their music on in-store radio and nostalgia blocks on modern rock stations.

Well here's a good ten song playlist of 90s bands that were neglected in their day and are barely even rumors now. These are the no-hit wonders, the opening acts and local scene stars. They're forgotten heroes of 90s alternative rock.

Be: Frogpond

Formed in 1994, Frogpond released their first album in 1996 on Sony. Which tells you something about the rate at which guitar bands were being snapped up. This largely female outfit went from the Missouri boonies to touring behind their own album with Everclear in two years. And if you'll recal, in 1996, touring with Everclear was a pretty big deal.

River Otis: Dead Hot Workshop

From the same Tempe, AZ breeding ground that spawned Gin Blossoms and The Refreshments, this crop of dead-ender guitar rockers helped put the lie to "Alternative" as a thoroughly northwestern and depressive phenomenon. Sometimes it was just open chords and open roads on endless summer nights.

Sleep: The Fall Outs

The Fall Outs were A part-time concern of a handful of Seattle locals in the early 90s. They were the kind of band that results from compulsively creative people being in the same place for a long time and occasionally needing to have fun and make music. The title track off of their 1995 sophomore album is a spiky and ragged punk work out that in subject matter mirrors what was being expressed by Greenday, but retaining everybit of harried and authentic credibility Greenday never really even pretended to have. Credibility is depressing. Credibility gets forgotten. But the good news is it still sounds awesome!

Bury Me: Fig Dish

Beneficiaries of the turbulent climate surrounding the Chicago music scene in the early nineties rush to find the "next Seattle," Fig Dish wer swept up in the same signing binge that brought us Smashing Pumpkins and Liz Phair. Later they were victims of a more litteral type of climate turbulence when a blizzard in Nebraska wrecked their van and equipment while on tour. Their sound lights the 90s synapse in anyone who formed that circuitry in record stores that smelled like incense, and on nights cruising that smelled like your friends' second hand smoke and fields of ripe corn.

Mighty K.C.: For Squirrels

An infamous "What if" of 90s Alt Rock, For Squirrels were on the verge of releasing their first album, but on the road back from a successful gig at the iconic CBGB's in Manhattan their van blew a tire and overturned. Their vocalist, bassist, and manager all died in the crash. About a month later their first album Example was released and got a surprising degree of positive notice thanks to its debt to early REM, cracking the Billboard top 200.

Lone Star Song: Grant Lee Buffalo

A band that had the backing of the critics and their peers and which still recieves positive rememberance among discerning list makers; Stockton, California's Grant Lee Buffalo never quite hit the commercial heights they were likely hoping for. They never had that one song that would have gotten them heavy traction on the nostalgia circuit twenty years later. But their rich textures blending earthy and ethereal are still something grand to discover and behold.

Leather Jacket Weather : Coyote Shivers

Perhaps best remembered for his appearance in the 90s nostalgia-mainline film Empire Records (Watching it now is like shooting a cocktail of Clinton era ennui, Crystal Pepsi, and Friends reruns right into your eyeball), eccentric rock journeyman Coyote Shivers also provided the capstone song for that film as sung by Renee Zellwegger (Sugar High). Leather Jacket Weather displays a ragged bounce and humor that recalls Stiff Records product of the late 70's but with big KISS-inspired guitars.

One More Astronaut: I Mother Earth

If you have an empty spot in your playlist right between Smashing Pumkins, HUM, and Our Lady Peace, might I recommend I Mother Earth. Formed in the same Toronto, Canada as gave us Our Lady Peace, I Mother Earth was Perhaps lost in the buzz surrounding the hit machine release that was Our Lady Peace's Clumsy for the length and breadth of 1997/98. But there is no denying their ambition, and the time to circle back and pick them out, if you haven't already, is now.

Out of my Head: Junkhouse

Another example of how the nineties brought roots textures back into rock and roll mainstream. Even though Junkhouse never made it terribly big they were on a major label. And at the same time bands like Counting Crows were proving that the public were hungry for these sort of rustier home brewed sounds. Out of My Head has a straining urgency and a sense of building sonic excess that climbs from pensive to purgative.

Freeway: Salmon Blaster

Perhaps more easily recalled by 90s kids north of the U.S. Canadian border. For residents south of that line Salmonblaster are a fun late stage discovery. Especially if you're looking for that jolt of attitude and energy that always seemed to just barely peek through on 90s alt rock radio between Stone Temple Pilots singles. You know the kind of, "What the F#*K was that?" moment where you hear a song and get as close to the radio as you can to see if maybe they'll I.D. the band because you know they'll never play it again. Because that's just not how radio works.

  But hey, "...there's this new band we think you'll enjoy. So strap in everyone for the first single off their debut album My Own Prison, it's Creed!"

And lo, dark days were upon us all.

Sound of the Future (Or, How to Die Forgotten)

By: Tzarathustra

If you want to hear a compact history of contemporary music, look no further than The Winston's virtually un-listened-to B-side from 1971 called "Amen, Brother". It's a pretty standard funky soul song, but then something happens just after the 1:20 mark: a drum break so prescient and hip that it's been omnipresent for the last thirty years. It's known as the Amen Break, and it's pretty much the basis for sampled music as we know it. This is the birth of techno and hip hop who knows what else, all in one short drum solo.

It's crazy that this one obscure song sounds so incredibly like 1971 right until the break, which now sounds like it's been spliced in from a 1998 techno track. It's also crazy that someone in 1980 or so picked up an old vinyl record and decided, "This will be the sound of the future."

Even crazier, but somehow not surprising, is that the composer of the song never saw a penny's worth of royalties, and the drummer who performed the song (G.C. Coleman) died homeless and broke in 2006

Rock. Is. Not. Dead. (Pt 1)

                                       photo by Bertrand used under creative commons    

by Tzarathustra

For a while there it was thought we'd soon be awash in great music as technology liberated the masses of bands that were waiting to break out. Then came years of computer music as technology liberated nothing so much as its self and rock music was purportedly on life support. 

This series is my justification that rock and roll is not dead, or 

even close to it. The kids may not want loud guitars anymore, but 

there are isolated enclaves of dirty rockers doing their thing. I'll 

admit that there is probably no rock revolution waiting to storm the 

gates of pop culture because that's not the world we live in 

anymore, but there are a ton of great bands out there toiling away 

in obscurity, doing it because they have to just to get it out 

somehow, just waiting for people to listen to the great things 

they're doing. 

What will follow are the ones that I've stumbled across lately. It's all heavily indebted to the blues in various ways, as all good rock 

music is. It's dirty and loud and satisfying, as all good rock music 

is. Everyone keeps pondering how we're going to save rock and roll, 

but they're looking at it backwards. We don't save rock and roll. 

Rock and roll saves us.

First up is The Blackwater Fever from Australia. Somewhere between the bluesy riffing of the Black Keys' early days and the psychedelic sludge alternative of Soundgarden and Monster Magnet 90s alternative

Marilyn Manson: The Pale Emper (Review)

      

The new Marilyn Manson album The Pale Emperor flows slowly like lava, driven primarily by bass and drums rather than the brittle processed guitars of the past. The second single "Deep Six" might be about the heaviest thing on the album, the rest falling closer in tone to the first single Third Day of a Seven Day Binge, with its rock steady beat and lurching bass. Manson hasn't crafted atmosphere like this in some time, maybe since Golden Age of Grotesque, and it sounds like he's traded some of the raw aggression for a sense of nocturnal desperation, not unlike the Afghan Whigs or Nick Cave in some places. The Pale Emperor sounds almost classy for a Marilyn Manson album, like dark suits and spilled wine.

Manson at his peak was a man of the times, and never an artist that people could picture doing his schtick at age 70 like the Stones (though I imagine that in the late 60s it was hard to picture the Stones still doing it at that age either), but The Pale Emperor shows us hints that Marilyn Manson might just find a way to age while remaining a viable artist. It definitely shows that despite the confused feel to some of his last albums, he's found a way to write honestly in the 21st century, without the need to resort to blunt force or elaborate artifice.

In a recent interview, he credited the sounds on this album to his time spent working on Sons of Anarchy, where he was exposed to more blues and blues-based rock than his background in goth and industrial had offered. Of course, that's not to say that he picked up a battered acoustic and a glass slide and started wailing about working the fields - it is still identifiably a Manson project, but perhaps for the first time he's leading with something other than excess. There is a stripped-down feel and slower tempos to many of the songs, and while the blues may not be overt, it is very definitely present in the voodoo drums, warm guitar tones, and diabolical swagger. It's clear that while Manson always wanted to be our devil's advocate, we are dealing with a different devil here, because the record feels less like a shocking dare and more like a tempting suggestion.

 

2014 in Review Pt. 2 (A Great Year for the 90's)

Here at this blog we like the nineties. And while many opinion makers and music reviewers slag off the persistence of some of these twenty-plus-year careers as flogging a corpse, it does not change the fact that 2014 was a great year for the decade of my teens, the decade of theatrically morose guitar bands and youthful disaffection. Listening back to the year in music one can easily be lulled into feeling like the last 20 years never happened...a pretty reassuring fantasy for most.

--by Tzarathustra--

Counting Crows: Somewhere Under Wonderland

A spry album that plays with the idea of Americana in a way that only the Crows can do. It's viewed through the lens of nostalgia, yes, but that lens isn't rose-tinted. They're courageous enough to speak the truth and talented enough to do it over a set of songs that run the gamut from bouncy fun to wrenchingly poignant. Glad to see they're still going strong.











Bush- Man on the Run

This one is ironically more memorable than their last album Sea of Memories. It hearkens back to a sort of Science of Things vibe, with the thick guitars combined with occasional electronic accents. Rossdale has written some good vocal melodies on these songs that take me right back to the 90s. This isn't a groundbreaking record by any means, but I don't think any of us have ever expected that of Bush. We only needed them to rock like those days would never end, so this is a nice addition to their discography.







Foo Fighters- Sonic Highways 
There are two ways to look at this album. It could be viewed as a bit of a conceptual failure by some, because the band did eight songs inspired by eight different cities as a love letter to America's classic rock and roll heritage, but instead of the incredible diversity that you might expect, it appears that the Foo Fighters' triple-guitar attack kind of quashed the regional character of the songs. Without a guide, you'd be hard pressed to determine which city inspired which song. On the other hand, just the attempt to be more diverse gave the band the extended sonic palette that they've been lacking for the last few albums. This record's spirit does reside firmly in 1976, but if you can appreciate some Springsteenian gigantism, there is some memorable work here.



Smashing Pumpkins- Monuments to an Elegy 

A short, sweet demonstration that Corgan can still pull out some engaging tunes, even if they are dripping with synth burbles and reverb. The whole thing comes in at just over thirty minutes, which for Billy is a demonstration of remarkable restraint (thought there is another LP already partway done). That restraint is one of the album's biggest strengths; elements arrive, entertain, and then bow out. Nothing stays around long enough to become tedious or overcooked. This is a strong outing for Corgan, and though I understand that it is no longer 1995, part of me is still holding out hope that he can rediscover the power of a dry distorted guitar tone.

2014 in Review pt.1 (Monster Magnet)

It's an easy knee jerk reaction at the end of every year, looking over "best of" lists, to think that
nothing interesting is going on. Music journalists comb through their year's listening and try to make it all seem more important than it was, jamming hyperbole on top of overstatement until Rolling Stone is trying to convince everyone that U2 released the best album of the year.


Fortunately the fact is that some interesting, strange, and compulsively listenable things happened and were released this year. In compiling my own list of high water marks I even began thinking that itwas (gasp!) a good year for music.

As far as I'm concerned "Best of" lists are a nonsense conceit that attempts to quantify the unquantifiable. So our list, which we'll reveal an entry at a time over the coming days should be viewed as a review of notable moments, cool stuff that happened, music worth revisiting. By the end, when we reset and refocus our ears for 2015 we should have a playlist that will refute the claim that "nothing interesting is going on."

MONSTER MAGNET: MILKING THE STARS

You could be forgiven for not knowing that Monster Magnet released an album this year. after all they just released one last year and this puts them off their long-established 1 every three years release schedule. But Dave Wyndorf got done mixing the last Monster Magnet album The Last Patrol, and wondered, "How would this sound if it were recorded in 1968?" This re-imagining is a pretty fair approximation of just that. They've turned down the gain a bit, added organs, and tweaked the arrangements. The songs have a whole different character to them, more acid trip than stoner sludge. Definitely a compelling experiment.

 

Apology Accepted, Weezer- Everything Will Be Alright in the End (Review)

by Tzarathustra



After one full listen-through, I can say that this is certainly the strongest record that Weezer has done since the Green Album. 

   




The first single,  "Back to the Shack" 

is a simple rocker that  functions as an 

outright apology for the bland pop 

experiments of the last few Weezer 

records, and they do seem sincere about 

getting back to the sound that we all know 

and love from the 90s. 

     Ric Ocasek is back behind the boards, 

and the big crunchy sound with the 70s 

stadium rock leanings is firmly in place. 

The songs all have that unmistakable Weezer 

catchiness and Cuomo's way with a melody, 

and there's a nice balance between the more 

serious relationship-type songs and the 

breezier songs. Overall it's fun, it's 

rocking, and there are some enjoyably weird 

arrangement choices throughout to hold your 

attention.

     The only thing that I think keeps it 

from being a truly great album like the Blue 

Album or Pinkerton is that those songs feel 

like they were written in more of a vacuum, 

or at least for a small devoted audience. 

Twenty years of big-time fame later, these 

new songs have a tendency to feel like Cuomo 

wrote them knowing that everyone was 

watching, and while he's giving the people 

what they want again, the songs have a film 

of self-awareness to them. Considering how 

much better the whole thing feels than their 

previous few records though, that's a pretty 

small complaint, and perhaps with more 

listens the songs will feel more lived-in 

and the album will settle into a spot beside 

their best work where that self-awareness 

won't be too noticeable. 

The Screaming Trees- Last Words:Final Recordings

 

In August of 2014 The Screaming Trees 

released their long rumored final recordings 

as Last Words: The Final Recordings. The 

band broke up back in 2000 with the songs 

comprising the album already long since in 

the can. But due to the poor performance of 

their previous album (1996's Dust) and the 

generally tepid mood of the industry towards 

their type of sound at the time, the songs 

found no home. 

     The Screaming Trees were signed by Epic 

in 1989 but came into the mainstream 

consciousness on the wave of enthusiasm for 

grungy northwestern rock that followed 

Nirvana and Pearl Jam's success. 

Specifically they had a hit (Nearly Lost 

You) from the soundtrack for Cameron Crowe's 

film Singles. The band bore only slight 

sonic resemblance to its peers. They always 

tended more toward psychedelic garage rock, 

rather than the harried and hard worn  Black 

Sabbath homages of their northwestern scene 

mates.

      
     Though they had a minor hit with Nearly 

Lost You and some name recognition, their 

career never really ignited. Their 1990's 

albums are among the top under appreciated 

recordings of the decade. And now, to add to 

that list, comes Last Words. It shows a band 

still possessed of fire and energy and 

sounds like what it is, a message in a 

bottle from a great 90's band banging on all 

cylinders. What more could you want?