Army of Me - Bjork - Post - 1995

So, as of 2PM today I will be embarking on a little bit of a journey. My friend Anand and I will be heading off to Berlin for a couple of days. From there, we'll be flying to London and meeting up with our friend Rance. We'll try to catch the Arsenal v Sunderland match on Saturday. On Sunday, we'll be picking up a rental car and driving up the length of England, all the way into Scotland and stopping in Glasgow. On Monday (my birthday) we'll rock it out in Glasgow. Tuesday we'll head back to London and catch Arsenal v Roma...Wednesday I'll be back in the states.

This may be a pipe dream, but I hope to do some blog updating while on the road...if not, I'll come back with plenty of updates.

Anyway, this is in my opinion the best Bjork song...debate while I'm away.

The Army Corps of Architects - Death Cab for Cutie - Sub Pop Singles Club 7 Inch - 2000

This is one of those rare songs that I can actually remember where I was the first time I heard it. Not because this song is especially memorable (it's not) but because it is the B-side of a much better song...however since that song starts with a "U" (Underwater) I probably won't get to it till like 2012.

When I first moved to the city, one of my favorite cheap ways to hang out with my friends was to go to my friend Rance's place and listen to music. Rance had a good size record (by which I mean vinyl) collection, and his roommate had an even bigger one. My friend Josh, who I had just started hanging out with, was a member of the Subpop single of the month club and had just gotten the latest from a new Pacific Northwest band called Death Cab for Cutie....this probably would have been around January of 2001.

I sometimes miss those times, of just sitting with my friends and listening to music and drinking beer. I miss the ability to be totally captivated by new music, but now I sit back and wonder about those times "How did we just sit around and listen to music and not do anything else?"

Army - Ben Folds Five - The Unauthorized Biography of Reinhold Messner - 1999

I was having weird nostalgia for this song and decided to download it a couple of weeks ago. I had a fragment of the chorus stuck in my head and couldn't quite remember how the rest went. I could also hazily remember a party in May of 1999 where it was played and wanted to bask in that brief moment of long forgotten nerdy youth. It's odd the details I remember from the night, as it's mostly a blur. I remember a lot of making out in my pantry. I remember there was an SNL on TV that Sarah Michelle Geller hosted and she did the skit about a magazine that was just about women holding their own boobs a la Janet Jackson on Rolling Stone. I remember jello shots. And I remember me and some friends trying drunkenly to sing along to this song at the top of our lungs, though none of us knew the words. The thing is once I reheard the song, I instantly remembered why it was not entirely successful and doesn't even really hold up as a guilty pleasure in the way that other BF5 songs have in my subconscious.

I never understand the strategy of having a loud verse followed by a restrained chorus. I mean, I understand it as like a contrarian artistic choice...the typical structure of a pop song is to have a verse that climaxes in the chorus. Though hardly the inventor, Cobain popularized the formula of quiet verses that explode in the chorus (with an acknowledged nod to The Pixies of course)...so the late 90's tried to turn that on it's head by reversing the equation. The problem with this course of action is that...the verse-chorus-verse structure just works! And while you may get style points for defying our expectations, it is ultimately a frustrating experience. The verses work to build excitement for a climax that is downplayed, again...full marks for fucking with your audience, but at the end of the day the pay off is why I listen to music.

Arms Aloft - Joe Strummer and The Mescaleros - Streetcore - 2003

Wow, you blink your eyes and all of the sudden it's two weeks later and you haven't touched your already ridiculously ambitious blog...sigh. It's busy times here in my life. Work is insane, the world is falling apart, and I have a bitch of a chest cold (my second of the winter)...and I leave for a weeklong vacation in 6 short days.

Though I must say nothing gets you jazzed up for a trip to drive around England and Scotland quite like Joe Strummer singing about driving around England and Scotland. I shall add it to the Driving In England playlist, post haste.