Soup

Like most people, most snobs i guess, since i'm probably kind of one at least a little bit, i never gave Blind Melon much of a chance. Back in my college days, my first college days anyway, i was diving into the dollar bin at Half-Price Books almost weekly, and buying almost anything recognizable. It probably stemmed from a desire to outdo my dad's music collection at the time, and while i've certainly won that race by now, i'm not sure what it's gotten me. That was so many layers of digression we could call it a cake and it'd be a full meal.

So during those halcyon times, on one of those aforementioned expeditions, i fished out Blind Melon's self-titled first album. It never got much play, other than to slide No Rain onto my obligatory 90s alternative playlists. If i listened the whole way through the album, it never resonated with me. But for some reason, i've always been a completist, a habit i'm kind of trying to curb nowadays, and i also collected the followup, Soup. If Soup ever even touched my CD player, i do not recall it.

But here i sit, in the Year of Our Lord Two Thousand and Fifteen, an avid reader of The Onion's more serious but still foul-mouthed entertainment arm, AV Club, consuming a series of articles taking a look back at the world of twenty years ago, and a long article extolling Soup appears. I was more than a little surprised; i had previously felt of Blind Melon that sugary, pop-infused hippie vibe Steven Shehori describes at the end of the article's first paragraph. It didn't seem like the sort of entertainment The AV Club would, well, entertain.

I read the full article and i felt a little bad about my treatment of the band over the years, by which i mean completely ignoring them save for their one diabetic coma ballad. There was clearly more to unpack here. So i set about doing that.

The Mobyfort, of course, still contains virtually every CD i've ever purchased; when i was in high school i made the mistake of selling off an album i didn't like that would later become very important to me (Boys for Pele by Tori Amos). I simply hadn't understood it at the time. So i had vowed to never make that mistake again, a promise to myself which has paid off on more than one occasion. cKy, for example, had an album i didn't appreciate when i first bought it; since a track popped up when my iTunes was on shuffle one day, they've become one of my favorite bands. Elastica falls into this category. I'm probably going to have to write something up about Sunny Day Real Estate this year, too, because damn. So, i put on all of the Blind Melon i had and listened to it.

A couple of times.

That AV Club article was pretty eye-opening to me. Soup deserved to be a classic. It's truly saddening that the politics of the record industry did to that band what they did, although wholly unsurprising. Toes Across The Floor should have been Blind Melon's big 90s hit, over No Rain. There's so much raw power in that song that i wasn't expecting. Even Galaxie, the only charting track from the album, could've taken that honor under better circumstances. It may have fared better overseas, but the reactions at home were still not what the band deserved. Shannon Hoon's death was every bit a blow to music as a whole as Kurt Cobain's was; we just never saw it that way before. All in all, though, there's not much i can say here that the AV Club didn't say better.

I'm gonna go listen to this in my van for a while.

Too Formidable to Resist

Most years, there's that one album i just listen to so many times that the Poor-Ass Christmas may as well just be a copy of that album. 2008 was Kerrang!'s Best of 2007, for example, although in the end i was so sick of it that none of those songs made the cut. 2012 was very nearly t.A.T.u.'s Waste Management. This year, that album is Wolf's Law by The Joy Formidable.

I don't know why it took me so long to get to this point. I first came into contact with The Joy Formidable three years ago when i went to see A Place to Bury Strangers open for them, and they blessed me with one of those performances where every single note rips through your flesh and embeds itself in your heart, reminding you why you love music. Why i didn't buy their album at the show, i don't remember, but Finding Wolf's Law in the clearance bin at Half-Price Books this year was excavating treasures from the tomb. Even the guy at the register was astounded by my find. 

It would seem that i listened to it (probably on Spotify) and didn't like it at the time. Well, if i could send a message to past me, it would be "you are wrong." All of their albums are fucking balls-out epic. And i mean that exact word. "Epic" is a term that gets abused frequently on the internet, but i think it's wholly appropriate here. Each of their songs has such an enormity to it that getting swallowed up in the music is less of an option and more of an inevitability. When they named their first major release "The Big Roar," it was an accurate description of what the package contained.

So i don't know what's going on the PAC this year from Wolf's Law. I think i've narrowed it down to Maw Maw Song, Little Blimp, or Bats. The first of those is my favorite, but it's also almost seven minutes long, which is a pretty big chunk of real estate on one of these comps. That won't necessarily stop me, though.

(I also wouldn't totally count This Ladder Is Ours out yet, either.)

The Way I Feel About You (Armed Love)

The (International) Noise Conspiracy became one of my favorite bands so slowly, so subversively, that i didn't even notice until last month that they've probably been high in that pantheon for years.

They were among the handful of bands that i brought back with me from New Zealand in 2008, having a track on the two-disc Punk-O-Rama volume 8 compilation that defined the second week of our journey. Why that track (A New Morning, Changing Weather) didn't make the 2008 Poor-Ass Christmas, i'm unsure. Probably because by the time i assembled that comp, i was so sick of hearing those songs that i wanted as little representation from Punk-O-Rama 8 and Kerrang! Best of 2007 as possible. This was a mistake. Shit, the PAC that year probably just should have been a direct port of the Kerrang! disc. But as it stands, even Biffy Clyro's A Whole Child Ago, the Kiwiland, Ho! theme song, had to wait a year for inclusion on the 2009 comp, the year The (International) Noise Conspiracy called it quits.

Over the next couple years, i obtained a few T(I)NC albums as they came available in Half-Price Books's dollar bin, and they gradually received more and more rotation through the CD player, and when i eventually set up the digital Mobyfort, through that. It was noticeable enough in 2013 that the song Smash It Up landed on the PAC that year, but at that point i really just thought it was that song that was really doing something for me.

But it took another road trip with accidentally limited musical selection before i finally figured out the truth. I drove across Ontario in July of this year, just me and my dog, to enjoy nature, unplug from the internet and the rest of human society for a while, clear my head, and get some work done. I loaded up my iPod with music for the trip, and then, in my mad scramble on the Tuesday i left to get everything together and thrown into the van, i forgot the aux cable i needed to play the damn thing through the van speakers. This left me, for the first day and a half, with only two albums in the car to listen to: The Buzzcocks's Singles Going Steady, and The Rolling Stones's Sticky Fingers, the fancy two-disc reissue that had just come out. Both of these were in the van by accident; Singles Going Steady simply because it was left in the CD player when i unloaded everything else before the trip, and Sticky Fingers because i'd just picked it up at Target the night before and hadn't brought it into the house.

When i finally managed to pick up an aux cable a day and a half later - and then only by compromising my morals and stepping into a Wal-Mart - i got on the road and the first thing i put on my iPod was The (International) Noise Conspiracy.

And that's when i realized my true feelings for those four boys from Sweden.