Tag: Ratboys

Favourite “New” Music – October 2022

I think it’s important to know what kind of nerd you are. Nerddom can be very arcane, a subculture with shared codes that is impenetrable to those not in the know, or more expansive, a mass culture experience that brings together people whose only commonality is, say, a love of manga or “Lord of the Rings” or old Sub Pop cassettes. (I made that last one up, but I bet it exists.) And while I have my attachments to the broader nerd world – music, of course, but also superhero movies – what I really am is a data nerd.

So, what does that mean? Well, I love numbers. I am in thrall to things with a quantifiable value. That means, of course, that I have a Fitbit, and have at times been obsessive about hitting my targets. I can get lost in sports reference books and websites – basically long lists of numbers detached from context. I have similarly wasted considerable time reviewing movie box office receipts and television ratings.

In music terms, it means I have a serious attachment to where songs rank on the hit charts. I bought RPM regularly in the ‘70s and ‘80s and Billboard in the ‘90s and ‘00s, and it was totally for the weekly charts, not the articles. The pleasure I got from seeing how long a song was on the chart, or what was rising with a bullet, or if a favourite song entered the chart, is inexplicable, and, yes, kind of weird. But I have always loved numbers and their cold objectivity.

The ultimate music data nerd was Joel Whitburn, who passed away in June 2022 at the age of 82. Whitburn started analyzing Billboard’s charts in college, then put his knowledge to work at RCA in the ‘60s before starting his own company, Record Research, in 1970. Since then, Record Research, through a deal with Billboard, has published a seemingly endless series of books for other music data nerds telling us what is in those charts.

When I started this blog, I quickly realized that if I was going to reference chart performance by a song, I needed a better source than Wikipedia, and naturally thought of Whitburn. I had owned one of his books forever ago, a compilation of Top 40 singles through 1984, and it was heavily thumbed until it finally fell apart and was discarded. There are lots of his books available in stores or from places like Amazon, but for a true nerdgasm, you need to order from the company directly, and pay a serious premium to get the 1,200-page monstrosity pictured above shipped to your home. It’s been worth every penny. Browsing its pages, I see the names of bands and songs that I had long forgotten, and it’s been a joy to revisit oddities like the whispy soft-core pop of Christopher Atkins’ “How Can I Live Without Her” from “The Pirate Movie” soundtrack. It is not a good record, but I liked it enough in the summer of 1982 to record it off CJCB for a mixtape, and was so very glad to experience its horribleness again. Only a true music nerd, a Joel Whitburn, would understand.

And with that, here are my favourite “new” albums from last month:

  • Faces – A Nod Is as Good as a Wink … to a Blind Horse (1971) (I am yet to have a bad experience listening to a Rod Stewart record, and, yes, that includes “Blondes Have More Fun”.)
  • Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers – Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers (1976) (Yeah, I know – I should’ve listened to this decades ago.)
  • Nick Lowe – Labour of Lust (1979) (See Tom Petty, above.)
  • Steve Miller Band – Abracadabra (1982) (I have always disliked the title song, but the album is a soaring meeting of power pop and new wave that feels like the soundtrack to a John Hughes movie, which is high praise in my book.)
  • The Three O’Clock – Sixteen Tambourines (1983) (1960s Britpop/psychedelica filtered through an indie pop sensibility.)
  • Public Image Ltd. – This Is What You Want … This Is what You Get (1984) (I think the widespread dislike of this record is about the audience’s expectations for what John Lydon would give them instead of a comment on the great brooding pop record that he delivered.)
  • The Screaming Blue Messiahs – Bikini Red (1987)
  • The Posies – Frosting on the Beater (1993)
  • Nerf Herder – Nerf Herder (1996) (This is the band that would result if first cousins Bowling for Soup and blink-182 had a baby.)
  • Sloan – Action Pact (2003)
  • Ratboys – Happy Birthday, Ratboy (2021) (A strange blend of folk/country-tinged pop and early ‘90s female-fronted indie rock.)
  • Julia Jacklin – PRE PLEASURE (2022)
  • Sofie Royer – Harlequin (2022)
  • Sudan Archives – Natural Brown Prom Queen (2022)
  • Melt Yourself Down – Pray For Me I Don’t Fit In (2022) (Jazz-funk with elements of Afrobeat, punk and hyperdriven ‘90s indie pop.)
  • My Idea – CRY MFER (2022) (Lily Konigsberg can do no wrong in my eyes.)
  • Shygirl – Nymph (2022)
  • BODEGA – Broken Equipment (2022)
  • Steve Lacy – Gemini Rights (2022) (Neo soul smashes up against psych pop and comes out the other side as its own distinct thing.)
  • Sorry – Anywhere But Here (2022)


Favourite “New” Music – June 2022

I tend to assume that people of my own generation have similar cultural touchstones. Depending on your interests, it may be where you were when Paul Henderson scored the winning goal in the Summit Series (I’ll save for another time my tale of Valentine’s Day, an English-style pub and the relationship that my friend and I almost ended by drawing the male partner into a discussion about said event, together with “Seinfeld” “second spitter” on the grassy knoll reference), having your mind blown the first time you saw “Star Wars”, your pride when the American diplomats escaped Iran with the assistant of Uber-Canuck Ken Taylor, or the sorrow when you learned John Lennon had been murdered (lying in bed after one of the greatest weekends of my life, still). I am, of course, wrong in that assumption, and received another reminder of this yesterday.

Let’s step back a moment, shall we. I own a lot of t-shirts, which are my go-to casual wear of choice. These are largely related to pop culture: movies (“Pulp Fiction”, “Star Wars”, anything Marvel), television (“Community”, “The Last Kingdom”, “WKRP in Cincinnati”), even literature (Haruki Murakami) and art (Roy Lichtenstein), the latter two courtesy of Uniqlo. Most were purchased by my wife as gifts, but last year, after the Festivus giving of cash stretched to include my mother, I invested said funds in another batch of my own choosing. And high on my list of choices (thanks to RedBubble) was this one:

Ah, yes. K-Tel. The source of so many of the records that I listened to as a child and young adult. 20 songs crammed into a space that usually held 10, so some of them were edited down to make room for the others. 20 songs when you at most wanted half of those, never knowing that some of the songs were on there because they were either (1) Canadian and helped fulfil CanCon regulations or (2) forced onto K-Tel in order for it to get the rights to a song it actually wanted. I can’t complain too much about either: as a lifelong hunter for new sounds (I always listened to the “B” sides, and sometimes ended up preferring them to the “A” track), those deep cuts certainly must have occasionally (I can’t say for certain right now) revealed to me a few songs that I might not have encountered otherwise, to my misfortune.

I would expect someone of my approximate generation to have had some K-Tel records, or to at least be familiar with them from endless television ads hocking their product. I was wrong. I wore said t-shirt to work yesterday, and ended up having to explain what K-Tel was to two colleagues who aren’t so much younger than me that the company could have been completely off their radar. Speaking to another colleague shortly after, he was shocked to be told this about our co-workers.

Anyway, I loved those records, and am glad to have had K-Tel in my life when I was young. 20 singles would have cost me around $25. For less than a third of that amount, I could in one blow increase exponentially the stock of my music collection. It’s too bad my colleagues missed out on that opportunity.

Which brings us to my favourite “new” music of last month. I try to avoid including compilations, so I mention here two such beasts:

  • Steve Harley & Cockney Rebel – Make Me Smile: The Best of Steve Harley & Cockney Rebel (1992). This guy was something of a big deal in Britain, though I’d never heard of him before. It’s career spanning, and thus sort of all over the place stylistically, but always a delight.
  • XXXtentacion – Look at Me: The Album (2022). He was not a very good person – serious issues with impulse control paired with a violent temperament – but a brilliant hip hop artist. A good subject for one of those “do we throw out the art because the artist is a piece of shit?” discussions. I fall on the “keep the art” side, but get the other perspective, because listening to Michael Jackson still makes me feel a bit squeamish.

And here is the actual list. Enjoy!

  • Paul McCartney & Wings – Red Rose Speedway (1973) (Critics are not fans of this record, which likely proves that most critics are more interested in being clever than being right.)
  • The Only Ones – The Only Ones (1978)
  • Aztec Camera – High Land, Hard Rain (1983)
  • Tiger Trap – Tiger Trap (1993)
  • Steve Burns – Songs for Dust Mites (2003) (Yes, it’s the “Blue’s Clues” guy, and he absolutely deserves more attention for his work as a musician. Glad those PBS paycheques freed him up to make this record.)
  • The Flat Five – It’s A World of Love and Hope (2016)
  • Tacocat – Lost Time (2016) (A perfect blast of pop punk – I will stan for any band that makes me forget my baseline anxiety for 29 beautiful minutes.)
  • Ratboys – GN (2017)
  • I Am the Polish Army – My Old Man (2017) (Frontwoman Emma DeCorsey put out a decent EP, “The Dream”, the following year, but nothing since. I’m waiting.)
  • Spoek Mathambo – Mzansi Beat Code (2017)
  • Nicholas Jameson – NJ (2018)
  • The Beaches – The Professional (2019)/Future Lover (2021) (Apparently, these two EPs will be repackaged as an album sometime soon, and that will likely also be a favourite listen when it comes out.)
  • Slothrust – Parallel Timeline (2021)
  • Ryan Pollie – Stars (2021)
  • Rosalia – Motomami (2022)
  • FKA twigs – Caprisongs (2022)
  • Caracara – New Preoccupations (2022) (A compelling emo-esque record that would fit nicely on your Jimmy Eat World or Dashboard Confessional playlists.)
  • Fantastic Negrito – White Jesus Black Problems (2022) (This feels like a recovered Sly Stone record.)
  • Sharon Van Etten – We’ve Been Going About This All Wrong (2022)
  • Ethel Cain – Preacher’s Daughter (2022) (Very disturbing record (umm, ritual murder and cannibalism), but you can’t shut it off. Still a bit haunted by this, several weeks later.)