The Benja-man Is Verbose

I don’t think I’m unique in that I like rock because, of, well, the parts that rock.   A killer riff or solo that goes loud, or a chorus in which the singer goes loud to sell the emotion of what’s being sung is a classic because it works, and makes the listener feel something.   It’s a classic for a reason.   Other styles of music don’t trigger quite the same thing in me, which is why for such a would be intellectual I gravitate towards the loud stuff.   If it doesn’t make me want to turn the volume up, I’m starting from the point of being more likely to appreciate than love. I enjoy the National’s music overall, and these posts have been in part a chronicle of my gradual acceptance of the fact that they don’t really “rock” the way I want from my rock bands, yet being unable to escape from the fact that the rockier moments are still usually my favorite tracks.   This doesn’t mean anything about how good a band they are, just that they aren’t a pump-your-fist...

Despite having little in the way of a life and despite already being enmeshed in two projects that in theory should demand every moment of my "blogging time," I'm adding a third that will probably take precedence over the other two and hence probably drive away any audience I could conceivably be building.  Yay? In advance of (and possibly after, depending on how slow I am) of his farewell tour - for which purpose I am going to Sweden this fall specifically to catch a few gigs - comes a series of blog posts highlighting the music of Scottish singer-songwriter Derek William Dick, better known by the somehow less embarrassing stage name of Fish . Since the beginning of 2021, before which I'd never really listened to any of it, I've become deeply enmeshed in this man's songs and devoted a large portion of my earbud time to all things Fish.  Hopefully I'll be able to communicate why.  Unlike the way I've been writing previously, this is not a first listen ...

There are different ways of listening to music with various levels of attention.   Personally I can’t be doing anything else involving reading or else it completely fails to register.   Although I do listen to music in the car, I always wonder whether I’m not doing it justice because the car speakers don’t always capture the nuances.   I do best if my headphones are in, and try to avoid dismissing something out of hand if I haven’t given it at least one listen with headphones.   So, walking, working out at the gym, and chores like laundry are ideal music time.   And further I’ve had enough distractions at the gym that I really try extra hard to not pull the “this doesn’t deserve a second listen” trigger if I’ve only heard it at the gym.   Being a music nerd takes effort , man. My first listen to High Violet was in the gym not knowing any songs going in.   So of course it’s going to be an incomplete take.   I’ll talk through the three main phases...

What’s the anatomy of a song that really gets me excited?  That’s the sort of question that it’s a challenge to answer given that I’m trying to talking about music through a non-musical medium.  But I’ll make an attempt to use my words to explain why “Mistaken For Strangers” is so great.  The open chord that forms the main riff is the first thing you hear, and it’s both driving with that nervous tension I like in National songs (especially after Bryan comes in) and hauntingly dissonant.  They keep hammering that riff for awhile because they know how good it is.  Matt’s run-on-sentence delivery is perfect for the verses leading into the record’s best hook on the chorus.  I want to sing along but also feel dread about the premise of being filled with quarters, whatever that means, or being mistaken for strangers.  Lyrics throughout the track have a splash of the usual bullshit word salad, but they also convey a few images that speak to me.  For reas...

Everything Remains (As It Never Was) sits in a central place in the Eluveitie discography wherein the so-called discourse online seems to be even more sharply divided than it is about everything else.  Either this is a real low point and a clear sign that the band had temporarily or permanently lost the plot, or it's the best thing they ever produced, a pinnacle to which they'll never be able to live up.  As always, my opinion is my own, so here's one man's experience with it. Track One:  "Otherworld" Well, it's an intro track.  It has a nice gurdy melody.  It has some spoken-word stuff that straddles the line between cheesy and appropriately foreboding.  "Nothing shall last," indeed.  Obviously, main role is as a lead-in to... Track Two:  "Everything Remains As It Never Was" And we're back to the trademark brand of metal/FUCKING FOLK MUSIC.  Some new wrinkles here and there, like the distorted effect on the vocals at ...

You know how it is.   You’re listening to a record for the first time and you’re trying to put together a narrative, and since you don’t remember the songs all that well but are trying to have something to say, you make sweeping statements about how things be.   Well, I’m going to have to slightly walk a few things back.   Last time I described Boxer as basically a pleasant blur of mid-tempo soundscapes and concluded that this was basically the mode that the National operate best in, and slightly bemoaned that they’d never be the band I’d go to to rock out.   Well, this listen through, “Fake Empire” played out about the way I remembered, with a great twisty piano line and a straightforward vocal melody.   It’s not a different type of song than, say, “Wasp Nest,” except for the part where “Fake Empire” is actually enjoyable to listen to – it just does their thing better.   So I was in that mode of expecting moody stuff and briefly wondered if the second ...

Now sans the Kirstler brothers, but with Päde Kistler on bagpipes and vocals, here's another Eluveitie record!  I obviously wasn’t listening at the time so I don't know how this was received – a band that previously fit closer to death metal than anything else is now releasing an acoustic female-fronted record sung only in Gaulish that’s part one of a two part story?   Um...?   For what it’s worth, scrolling through reviews from the time suggests that acoustic records were all the rage at the time, and that Eluveitie were actually making a very expected move similar to what some of their peers in the folk-infused metal world were already doing.   I’m arbitrarily making the rule that when this band engages in its “folk” side and does a record with no English, I’m not required to do the same track-by-track breakdown I do for their “metal” side.   That way I can focus on the listening experience.   (And that helps me out because then I don’t have to make ...

I previously quipped that repeating the same thing over and over doesn't necessarily make it a hook, but whenever I think about the National now my brain has the unfortunate tendency to start humming "we're out looking for astronauts, looking for astronauts, we're out looking for astronauts, looking for astronauts" over and over and over and over.  It's one of those fairly unpleasant earworms.  Sometimes I can make it go away by switching to the "we'll get away with it" part from "The Geese Of Beverly Road," and that's better.  It is high time to move on with this little project!   And so we move on to a record that generally seems to be regarded as the start of the band's peak.   This record is when they started charting regularly - not top ten yet or anything, but somewhere in the Billboard list - and becoming better known as critics' darlings.  It's sort of the record we’ve been building up to, as after throwing a f...