One thing that’s driven home by driving with other people: I don’t listen to enough music. Driving with Kristen is always a blast of music that’s outside of my own universe. A mix of bluegrass and samba and rock and old metal and sometimes even numetal. Today it’s a mix of Mumford & Sons and Them Crooked Vultures. The former being a band that Susan introduced us to during her visit, the latter being a supergroup formed of the singer from Queens of the Stone Age, John Paul Jones (THE Mumford and Sons are young and fit and hip and slightly frenetic. I’ve really liked videos of watching them play, but the album’s a bit more tame, as if they were netted by a producer who knows what those indie hipster kids like and tried to reproduce it…. there’s an element of shoegazer gloss over their headbanging nugrass frenzy. I’ve got to listen more to the tracks to see what I really think of it… it’s possible that it’s just not loud enough.
And I’m not quite sure how I feel about Them Crooked Vultures yet either. It sure sounds like fun music to play… but it’s a bit chaotic to listen to. The singer likes swelling melodies that are beginning to make me feel slightly seasick and I feel sort of like a LOT of the riffs are revisiting some of Jimmy Page’s most fractured moments with Zepplin. It’s nice to hear a band with a superstar bass player who is NOT as forefront as Les Claypool or Flea or Victor Wooten…. so JPJ is mixed very foreward, but he’s been given that 70s EQ, very flat but very present – and moving and dancing all over the place.
My audience at Java Mammas. Lot’s of peeps came out – many for the first time. It was a crowded, sweaty, fantastic night.
There’s also a very basement-quality to the drums that I’m enjoying, a great lo-fi feeling to the whole disc – but all-in-all the songwriting and musicality of the album seems to be all over the place.
Both of the above are recordings that are hard to listen to while driving. They’re so multi-layered that I can feel myself simply zoning out as I listen to different textures. I especially have trouble focusing on the road while listening to basslines as I sort of tune out my other senses…
In any case… I need to listen to more music. Suggestions, anyone?
Movement can easily be mistaken for meaning, momentum for mission… and sure enough, at the end of the a long day I know nothing REAL has been accomplished, just another day down, but the busy frenzy of it all had me convinced that something important was happening.
Just breathing, going through the motions.
I worry about days that pass like this, waiting for my Life to recommence. There are days when I come away feeling like I’ve made a bunch of peoples’ Lives just a little bit better – and actually today I DO feel like I was a bright spot in several dozen peoples’ days – but was there anything beyond that? Am I progressing towards something? Or just running in place hoping that through sheer energetic commotion, through some sort of osmosis of motion, that entropy is staved off a little bit longer.
My mood matches the weather, matches the music. Tears of Mars: powerful vocals, sweeping guitars – SO much passion – somehow the hurtling of the car, the grey of the rain and Siah’s voice just rage together, forming some sort of cyclone that I get to sit in the centre of, calm in the eye.
