Hi pals,
I’m slowly emerging from my NyQuil cave. I say this only to excuse the lateness of my normally punctilious Thursday email now arriving in your mailbox on a Friday. Theoretically, if everything goes according to plan, we will be camping next to the beach (Oregon beach in November, so don’t get too excited) by this time tomorrow.
Let’s get into it.
Man on the Moon - Sugar
I was going to say it took me way too long to get into Hüsker Dü. Looking back with a critical eye, they should have been all over my Midwestern pre-teen punk rock picaresque. But I’ve realized that there’s no real use in retroactive criticism that places too much weight on shoulda, woulda, coulda. Instead it’s better to take delight in discovering something magical that had lived under a rock in your backyard for so long. As Hemingway wrote in A Moveable Feast: “Maybe away from Paris I could write about Paris as in Paris I could write about Michigan.”
In any case, Bob Mould’s post-Dü project, Sugar, has been doing it for me this week. Some of the songs veer a little too far into the college rock smarm that seemed to dominate the airwaves in the early 90s, but there are some bona-fide bangers on this record. Mould’s output has always hinged on the tension between the raw aggression of hardcore - a genre which he helped define or destroy depending on who you ask - and his innate sense of pop songwriting melody. Sugar lets the latter run the show, but on its best songs, it lets the former boil just below the surface, redlining the volume of a catchy hook to fall ass backwards into the kind of punk-dream pop that all the kids go crazy for these days.
She Will Only Bring You Happiness - Mclusky
When a friend posts a playlist, I love giving it a runthrough and imagining what circumstances led to its creation. Recently, my pal Bill Caperton posted one that left little ambiguity on that front. A pre-show warmup playlist for the reunion of his band Ela in Minneapolis who hadn’t played a show (at least to my memory) since the early Obama administration. In a way that gave me more fodder for the imagination. The songs on the playlist are mostly late 90s and early 00s indie rock from bands like Spoon, Pinback, The Wrens and Archers of Loaf as well as a nostalgic walk down the lane of early 00s Minneapolis bands like Askeleton, Tapes ‘n Tapes, The Tinhorns and Volante. It’s easy to see Bill and his bandmates jamming this playlist in the green room, reaching across the gulf of years, of cross-country moves, of kids and new creative endeavors and getting themselves back into a headspace that felt so immediate, so eternal in that moment.
This song by Welsh noise rock pranksters Mclusky kicks off the playlist. In the pantheon of Mclusky songs, it’s certainly on the tamer side of things. Not too difficult for a band who’s other hits include Lightsabre Cocksucking Blues, The World Loves Us and Is Our Bitch, and a song with the hook, “My love is bigger than your love, we do more drugs than a touring funk band, SING IT!” And that fits right in with the minute clockwork that marks the edges of that arc of time. Everything in the past was louder, emotions blared like primary colors on a blank canvas. But the more paint you add, the more muddled each color becomes. Fortunately for us, if we want to see those colors again, we can just reach into a song and pull out a memory.
That’s it for today. Thanks for listening.