Month: September 2022

Released on the star-studded day of September 16, Suede’s Autofiction may be the best album of the season, if not the year.

An album I didn’t really see coming, much less anticipate until the release of its singles, Autofiction is the year’s biggest shocker to me. Suede is never a brit-pop band I especially latched onto. Being a massive fan of the whole Brit-pop genre, I obviously love the entirety of 1996’s Coming Up, but Suede largely always felt far too operatic and theatrical to me.

But with this release, Suede has mastered their glam rock tendencies but has not gone overboard into excess like they often did in their youth. Meanwhile, they also didn’t fall into the aging rock band trap where they abandon their old sound and themes due to “aging” (cough cough Death Cab). It’s a tough balance to find, and is rarely found by older bands nowadays. And perhaps that is what makes this album the masterpiece it is. Autofiction isn’t a rebirth of Suede, it’s an evolution.

I’m not going to lie and say I’m a Suede expert. I have not listened to their 2018 or 2016 albums. I don’t know the band lore. But this album has won me over, and will most likely lead me to go through their whole discography looking for more.

Let’s begin at the beginning with the first track on Autofiction, She Still Leads Me On. It’s probably the poppiest song on the album, not that is pop-y by most means. She Still Leads Me On sounds the most like a Coming Up era Suede song, but not in a recycling-old-sounds way, but in a perfected-what-we-do-best way. In the song, Brett Anderson describes his continuing attachment to his mother and his childhood in a way that almost anyone can relate to. The song itself is a wonderful, upbeat opener that gets the listener introduced to the slightly darker Autofiction Suede sound without jumping into the more new-wave Suede tracks.

But as She Still Leads Me On fades, the listener gets swept into a much angstier Personality Disorder. Dropped straight into a driving guitar riff and Brett Anderson’s chanting sing speech, the listener gets a proper introduction to Autofiction’s audio environment. The highlight of the song has to be Brett Anderson’s sing-speak. In a recent interview with Super Deluxe Edition, Brett Anderson said “I’ve wanted to try that style of singing for a while. I’ve always loved The Fall and Mark E Smith was the master of that style of singing… I wanted to try to make it my own. That’s what you have to do: take influences from other music and make your own crappy version of it.”

more to come later this week…

  This paper aims to explore the quality, popularity, and legacy of Oasis’s 1995 album, (What’s The Story) Morning Glory? This album gave Oasis international fame and set off Oasis’s campaign for becoming rock music icons. Including massive hits like “Wonderwall”, “Don’t Look Back In Anger”, and “Champagne Supernova”, this album found huge success in the nineties and spearheaded the Britpop movement, and continues to be relevant to many today. Formed in the early nineties, Oasis includes band members Liam and Noel Gallagher, Tony Mccarroll, Paul McGuigan, and Paul (Bonehead) Arthurs. (What’s The Story) Morning Glory? continues to be a defining album in the British-Rock canon and Oasis has inspired many modern popular groups like Arctic Monkeys, the Killers, and Coldplay. This paper wants to answer the questions: how was (What’s The Story) Morning Glory? received by critics and the public? What was the reason for its success and why did it resonate so heavily with the masses? How did it become the face of the nineties Britpop scene? And lastly, how has it impacted music today? This paper expects to find that (What’s The Story) Morning Glory? was met with critical and commercial success and that that success largely came from the album’s relatable lyrics and reflection of British culture at the time. This paper also expects to find that Oasis’s long-term success is largely due to its connection with British working-class culture and the Madchester movement. Keywords: Oasis, Britpop, British-rock, Liam Gallagher, Noel Gallagher, rock music, nineties, Madchester, Manchester

On Friday, September 16th, Death Cab for Cutie’s tenth album came out with much anticipation from me at the very least. Although not identifying as a lockdown album, Asphalt Meadows is undeniably fueled by the thoughts and themes of a forty-year-old man questioning ‘what happened to the world?’ after a pandemic and a Trump regime. At times astute and at other times dated, Asphalt Meadows is yet another Death Cab album that finds itself so timely it almost needs to age out of that time to shine on its own.

Before jumping into the nitty-gritty of the review, I need to supply some context for my personal relationship with Death Cab for Cutie. Being the child of two ex-hipsters I basically grew up on the songs off of ‘Plans’ and ‘Transatlanticsm’ and ‘Narrow Stairs’. My parents had the ‘Open Door’ EP on vinyl hung up on our wall my whole youth and I spent a lot of time in coffee shop drive-throughs with songs like ‘Soul Meets Body’ accompanying my wait. And so naturally I’ve grown up with Death Cab as one of my favorite bands. So much so that I have the artwork for that same ‘Open Door’ EP tattooed onto my forearm and I just recently saw the band live in April.

So needless to say the release of this album was always going to be a highlight of September for me. The last album, ‘Thank You For Today’ was something I found bland and too far from the old Death Cab sound when I first listened to it, but after exploring it again this year, I found songs like ‘Gold Rush’, ‘Northern Lights’, and ‘When We Drive’ to be really interesting and complex songs both musically and lyrically. And so I was prepared for this album to sound like an angsty sister album to the minimalistic and cheerful ‘Thank You For Today’.

And it does, but it also doesn’t. This album has left me lost as to how I really feel about it. The first half of the album feels a little cliche and stale to me. Musically its either too similar to the minimalistic sound of ‘Thank You For Today’ or awkward because every time a song builds up to something it quickly retreats before the listener can identify a chorus or hook. Lyrically it’s that of a Gen X man who finds himself disillusioned by modern politics and reality and cell phones. And although I understand the world has very quickly changed and I’m sure the state of things today is disheartening to anyone past the age of twenty-five (as it should be), for someone my age who has grown up in this world, it can’t help but feel reminiscent of an old man lamenting on “the good old days”.

But there is a massive shift in the song ‘Foxglove Through the Clearcut’. A beautifully unique and lyrically elaborate song that finally feels like the first “evolved” Death Cab song since at least ‘Thank You For Today’s ’60 and Punk” if not all the way back to ‘Kintsugi’. Gibbard sing-speaks the song, similar almost to Slaughter Beach, Dog’s Jake Ewald in ‘At the Moonbase’. This spoken word format lets the swelling orchestral really shine, but also honors the poetry of the lyrics and makes for one of the best songs of 2022.

And the rest of the album (minus the honestly boring ‘Wheat Like Waves’) is a standup good Death Cab album! Some songs do shine brighter than others (‘I Miss Strangers’ is easily the second-best song on the album) but overall the latter half of ‘Asphalt Meadows’ leaves me perfectly satisfied as a die-hard Death Cab fan.

And so I’m left feeling torn as to how this album lines up compared to other releases to me. I think ‘Asphalt Meadowns’ is better than ‘Thank You For Today’, perhaps only because of the genius ‘Foxglove Through the Clearcut’ but still nowhere close to the glory of pre-2016 Death Cab For Cutie. Nonetheless, Ben Gibbard knows how to write a damn good song, and even more than that knows how to write some genius lyrics. While not a new ‘Transatlantisicsm’, ‘Asphalt Meadows’ is a clear step up on the modernized, grown-up, Death Cab For Cutie sound.

I’ve recently been reading Lizzy Goodman’s 2017 book, Meet Me In The Bathroom. Goodman’s oral history of the NYC music scene follows the development of American rock and alternative music throughout the late nineties all the way to the late 2000s. With interviews from The Strokes, Interpol, LCD Soundsystem, The Yeah Yeah Yeahs, and more, the book is filled with anecdotes about many household names today. But more interestingly, the book includes the stories of many bands that didn’t make it. Like perhaps one the best-known-least-known bands in rock history, Jonathan Fire*Eater

With roughly 10,000 monthly listeners on Spotify, Jonathan Fire*Eater is essentially unknown to modern listeners. But their influence is felt in many of the more successful bands of the era, with Yeah Yeah Yeah’s Karen O citing their haphazard and theatrical performances as especially influential to her own way of performing and Interpol’s Paul Banks praising Jonathan Fire*Eater’s sense of style (that happens to be similar to that of early Interpols).

The members of Jonathan Fire*Eater grew up together, being in bands with each other since elementary school, and eventually moved from Washington DC to New York City together. While they started off in New York City for college, the members eventually found the band getting to be well-known and celebrated throughout the city, leading to all five dropping out. Produced through a strand of luck ( or an interested indie label) Jonathan Fire*Eater’s first EP, Tremble Under Boom Lights was released in 1996. The EP has distinct nods to the music of New York City with Velvet-Underground-inspired psychedelic guitar and true NYC punk vocals, but has a hint of melancholia that feels akin to a band like Joy Division. Stand-out songs include “Give Me Daughters” and “Winston Plum: Undertaker”.

Their EP was met with positive reviews, leading to a long period of labels courting them until they eventually signed with DreamWorks. But their next release, the 1997 album Wolf Songs For Lambs, did not find near the success of their EP. Wolf Songs For Lambs had a similar sound to Tremble Under Boom Lights, but felt less polished, leading to disappointment for many critics and fans. Yet, there are still some tracks that can’t be dismissed as they are pure magic, like “Station Coffee” and “This Is My Room”. But nonetheless, between poor advice from DreamWorks, inexperienced management, lead singer Stewart Lupton’s drug issues, and the overall inflated ego of the band, Jonathan Fire*Eater split in 1998.

Three of the five members created a new band, The Walkmen, which has found reasonable success and is still active today. Meanwhile, Lupton continued to write poetry and songs until his death in 2018. Lupton’s death and Goodman’s book brought some attention back to the band, leading to a vinyl rerelease of Tremble Under The Boom Lights and some coverage in The New York Times and Vanity Fair. But nothing substantial enough to bring about interest or listeners.

My newfound obsession with Jonathan Fire*Eater has left me feeling scorned on their behalf. How does a band that serves as a precursor to The Strokes, Yeah Yeah Yeahs, and Interpol find themselves irrelevant to most alternative rock listeners today? Their music is not at fault, it’s accessible, unique but familiar, and a clever twist on post-punk revival. And while their short catalog is unfortunate, it gives listeners mostly high-quality music that isn’t brought down by filler songs and misunderstanding outsider producers. While their history is unfortunate, drugs and egos haven’t stopped listeners from listening to the majority of other rock bands.

And so I’m calling for a Jonathan Fire*Eater resurgence. Here are my favorite Jonathan Fire*Eater picks. I hope you enjoy them or even just appreciate them or at least understand what I’m trying to say.

The skyscraper model of culture is a model that illustrates the concepts of “high culture” and “low culture”. The model uses a skyscraper to show media that is “low culture” at the bottom of the skyscraper while the “high culture” ideas are at the top of the skyscraper, inaccessible to the people and media at the bottom of the illustration. The skyscraper model also includes a middle section that includes media that falls somewhere in between “high” and “low”. Media that fits into the “high culture” category includes Shakespeare, The New York Times, and classical music like Beethoven. Meanwhile, media that is “low culture” is more like trashy reality TV, Grand Theft Auto, and ultimate fighting.

The history that brought this model about has to do with the movement into the modern era of mass communications. The movement into the modern era brought the creation of mass media. Mass media brought the news, media, and culture that the upper classes had been enjoying to the average people, encouraging education and social upward mobility. But the upper class did not welcome this shift due to fears that mass media would appease the “poor tastes” of the lower classes and be bad for society. This led to the solidification of the qualities that make something “high culture”- hard to find, requiring education, expensive, and “low culture”- easy to find, not requiring education, and cheap. Therefore leading to the skyscraper model of culture, an easy way to organize our understanding of different types of media and these labels.

I am fascinated by how the media’s coverage can impact a movie, musician, or book’s success and how that coverage plays into the representation (or lack thereof) of alternative and minority cultures. I am hoping I will be able to find the answer to how the development of the media world we live in has affected artistic pursuits today and more broadly our modern culture. I am also interested in how the media’s dependance on telling a narrative affects the portrayal of real-life stories and people since it often means they are reduced to characters and plot points. My interest in music also brings me to question how our culture’s movement to a niche nation affects the development, production, and success of alternative music today. Especially when you compare the development and success of “alternative” music before the beginning of the digital age and now.

These questions all fuel my interest in media’s influence on art. Which of course is a very broad interest. I hope my time at Gaylord College gives me not only the ability to understand these complex questions and relationships, but also prepares me to produce media that contributes to the success and diversification of arts today.