Gutbucket Music

Tumbling music stuff very occasionally

[neil-gaiman]

What was the biggest lifestyle change you made for health's sake? Was it quitting cigarettes?

In terms of life span, yes, it would have been giving up smoking in 1993.

[hummingbee-lievable]

I remember hearing about this in a podcast (agh, I cannot remember which one, perhaps the one with 616? On Spotify). It's a beautiful and sad story where he shares about his last visit with Terry and how he managed to quit smoking. (They connect, I promise. I'll have to try to find the episode.)

What really struck me personally was the way that he did it: by placing a carton of cigarettes in the freezer, so that if he ever decided he was done quitting and wanted to say "f%#@ it, I'm getting a cigarette", the option was there.

To me, dealing with some addiction issues of my own, what this was was permission. It was taking this part of the self, the part that I personally detest, that I regard as weak and gluttonous and hungry, always hungry, it was taking that part and saying that it was okay that it was there.

I have a container of edibles and a bottle of whiskey in the freezer now.

And I'm not fixed, I'm not healed; I'm just better. Thanks to his sharing that story, I got to do the same. I stopped fighting myself so much, and just took those parts of me and held them. They're here. They're never going away. But that's all that they are, all that they have to be. There.

I'm not punching myself and being surprised at the welts anymore.

I think this relates to a problem that we can all relate to.

Because whether we like it or not, we have ugly thoughts. Ugly feelings. We look at a stranger and we are automatically on guard because they represent the possibility of any negative outcome. Because they are not familiar and therefore not safe (biological instinct). We look at ourselves in the mirror and hate what we see. The weight, the marks, the twists in the wrong places, the hair that will never be tamed. We watch someone fall apart and hate ourselves because there's nothing we can do but watch and tell them that we love them. We fight with teeth and words because somehow we think that will help us. We have so many instincts seared into our folds, and not all of them are appropriate anymore.

There is nothing we can do about quite a lot of it. And yet we still detest it. We look at the freckle on our arm and it is an enemy because it is there. We look at the instinctual fear and hate ourselves further.

What Neil taught me, with sharing this story, is that we can hold these things without making them anymore than what they are. Just a carton of cigarettes in the freezer. Just an addiction. Just a freckle. Just an instinct that can be worked past, and suddenly a stranger is a friend.

We cannot make the things we dislike about ourselves the enemy without making ourselves into one.

When I heard that story, it inspired me to look at the mirror and just accept what I saw. That I am what I am.

And it doesn't mean I don't want to be better: I do. Always. But it means that I have a starting ground to improve, and I'm not fighting myself in doing it.

So thank you, Neil, for sharing the ways you've learned to hold yourself.

And thank you, for listening.

[gabrielora]

When I was younger and researching the autism diagnosis criteria and symptoms, I thought “oh I couldn’t POSSIBLY be autistic.” Because when I read “takes everything literally” I thought it literally meant EVERYTHING and I was like “I don’t take EVERYTHING literally, just most things!” And I just realized the other day that it didn’t actually mean EVERYTHING and that was an overstatement.

[hauntedchronicler]

#these tests always do shit like this#and its just like why would you phrase it like this when its specifically a symptom to misinterpret this (via @tbhliteraltrash )

[friendlyfrankenstein]

ok hold on actually i rb'd this before with just tags but im going to come back in on this again

any medical diagnostic you will ever undergo does not mean "always 100% Every Time Ever you have this problem". And it sucks because they will phrase it in a way that SOUNDS like 100% Every Time including on the testing for being a person who has trouble with how specific phrasing is supposed to be.

literally the example I always use is I spent way longer without glasses then I should have because the eyesight chart diagnostic is "identify the letter", so I went 'ok the point of this is to do good identifying letters'. Then i realized

they want to know if I can see. Not if I can identify that a blurry shape is an A because of its unique outline.

So i started qualifying my answers with "blurry". Blurry A, Blurry Y, Blurry Z. Now I have glasses.

they do not make this clear. I do not know why. But you can more or less apply this to any medical diagnostic, and if it's a written diagnostic if your answer is 'sometimes' and the only answers are 'yes or no' you put Yes.

Do I have trouble getting out of bed? Sometimes, yes. So the answer is Yes.

Regrettably tests are made for and by non-autistic people and aimed at non-autistic caregivers and medical experts, which isnt how it should be, and makes it one more complicated thing to navigate. World a hell.

[beautypasseslikeadream]

Similarly, if the answer is, "No, because I have a strategy," the answer is really yes. If the question is, "Do you have trouble being on time?" and your thought process is, "Not any more since I started setting four different alarms and putting everything in my planner as starting a half-hour earlier than it really is." the answer is yes, because you've had to use unusually complicated techniques to address the trouble that you have. Having figured out away to outsmart the problem means that the problem was there to begin with.

[hawthorn-and-ivy]

Having a system for a seemingly effortless-to-neurotypical-people task is a symptom until proven otherwise.

[neil-gaiman]

I read "Fahreinheit 451" and didn't like it very much. Is Ray Bradbury just not for me or should I try something else of his? (signed, A Man Who May Forget Ray Bradbury)

I love the short stories, particularly the ones from the 40s and 50s. Check them out before you decide you don’t like Ray’s work.

My Introduction to Fahrenheit 451 is partly to give it enough context to make it work as more than historical fiction.

[gutbucketmusic]

Review: Chimes of Freedom (Songs of Bob Dylan Honoring 50 Years of Amnesty International)

I wrote this review a month and a bit ago and since then I've returned to this album more than anything else I've reviewed. The review didn't get published, but I quite liked the way it turned out, so here it is:

For my money, Amnesty do the best fundraisers of any major charity, from 2009’s brilliant Freedom anthology of stories about the Universal Declaration of Human Rights to the annual Secret Policeman’s Ball.  And this mammoth four disc collection of new Bob Dylan covers has done nothing to change my mind.

Unfortunately, the idea of a joint celebration of 50 years of Amnesty and Dylan perpetuates the myth that he is primarily a protest singer, when he mostly stopped releasing political songs after he went electric in 1965, except for the occasional ‘Hurricane’. Despite this, Chimes of Freedom does a very good job of representing the restless variety of Dylan’s long career and quantifying the vast extent of his influence.

          Two Dylans appear most prominently on the album. The first is a prophet of doom, laying out in exquisite detail the coming apocalypse, with wonderfully overblown alt-rock covers of ‘The Ballad of Hollis Brown’ by Rise Against, Steve Earle’s fiery ‘One More Cup of Coffee’ and a fantastic spaghetti western version of ‘Love Sick’ by Mariachi El Bronx. Then there’s the Dylan who writes timeless songs of unrequited love. Ke$ha’s a capella version of ‘Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right’ is just stunning, unfairly hidden towards the back end of 5 and a half hours of music.

          The sheer size of the project, with artists representing almost every genre you could name, makes it somewhat unwieldy at times, but the common thread of Dylan’s songwriting is enough to hold the album together. The worst moments come from those who imitate Dylan’s recordings whilst bringing in nothing new, like My Morning Jacket’s ‘You’re a Big Girl Now’ which sucks the life out of the song with scientific accuracy. However, these moments are few and far between, and most of the artists reenergize Dylan’s songs with interesting interpretations. I never would have imagined it was possible to make ‘Blowin’ In The Wind’ sound as fresh as Ziggy Marley does. Covers like this make Chimes of Freedom easy to recommend to anyone who wants to know why Dylan is still pop’s undisputed heavyweight champion of songwriting.

And yes, there’s a Miley Cyrus cover on the album. It’s genuinely not terrible.

[gutbucketmusic]

It's an interview with Billy Bragg. We talked about stuff like the occupy movement and what good protest music can do. http://www.studentnewspaper.org/music/1166-nothing-to-bragg-about

[xxgothedays]

From gutbucketmusic. Thanks!

Aaaaand you know what all of you should be doing right now? Submitting more ideas for the countdown!!! :) DFTBA!

[gutbucketmusic]

Thanks for posting. Made my day :)

[gutbucketmusic]

Half Man Half Biscuit, 90 Bisodol, Crimond Review

          You would be forgiven for thinking that 90 Bisodol (Crimond) is a rerelease of an album from thirty years ago. Half Man Half Biscuit formed in 1984 and it seems like they’ve not felt the need to evolve their frame of reference from past then.

         This isn’t really a problem, though, when you have songs as brilliantly satirical as these. I don’t think it’s overstating it to compare Nigel Blackwell’s lyrics to Dylan’s at his darkest, funniest and most cynical. Blackwell and Dylan’s lyrics share the traits both of great storytelling and bizarre stream of consciousness rants. What also unites them is their tendency to reference other music and culture generally within their songs. You don’t have to look past the album title for this, which refers to the title of Psalm 23 in traditional Psalters, as well as the excessive use of indigestion drugs. Bands don’t come much less cool than this. It’s an example of the wonderful character Blackwell has created in his songs, a curmudgeon whose lyrics reference all of pop culture through a parochial view. He discusses everything uncool from a small Dutch football competition to the old TV soap Crossroads at the same time as the music references the most epic, international bands, including Black Sabbath and the Beatles.

          In this idiosyncratic style, the album contains pretty much everything that was great about punk. ‘Something’s Rotten in the Back of Iceland’ channels the morbid humour of the Sex Pistols, while ‘RSVP’ is an irreverent, folky ballad worthy of anything done by The Pogues. But to describe the band solely in terms of what they reference does a disservice to how unique a beast they are, one that absorbs the entirety of pop culture and spits out songs with unique lyrics and brilliantly simple melodies. By taking in all aspects of modern life they create characters that are very human, encompassing aspects of existence rarely captured in song. 90 Bisodol takes you to 1984, and it’s brilliant.

[gutbucketmusic]

Switchfoot, Vice Verses Review

 With the album title painted black on the cover with broad brush strokes, it doesn’t take long to pick up that the theme of Vice Verses is polarities, a theme that matches the anthemic, U2 influenced rock. Switchfoot have always demonstrated great talent for contrasting dynamics in their songs and on this album the stop-start rhythms are even more pronounced, the big, loud chords disappearing just as fast as they appear. The picture is made more black and white as the album is largely just the band themselves, without any extra  instruments overdubbed. The guitars and keyboards play straightforward riffs that are pinned to rhythm section, making the drums and bass the focal point of the songs. Previous Switchfoot albums were characterised as much by their melodies and interesting instrumentation as they were by the rhythm, and the sometimes sludgy guitars make it seem as if the band have pared themselves down unnecessarily.

What’s always made Switchfoot worth listening to, though, is that they have a knack for mixing in other influences and styles, without undermining their basic sound. On ‘Selling the News’, which contrasts spoken word verses with big melodic choruses, they incorporate hip hop influences, and on some songs sound like they’re aiming for the clubs, with 80’s keyboards on top of dance drums. While this does provide much needed contrast to the walls of guitars, it does feel like they’ve absorbed both the better and worse parts of these styles and I let out an audible groan after being told to ‘put my hands up’, which goes to show that some of the lyrics don’t quite match up to Jon Foreman’s usual mix of striking images. When he sings ‘you’ve got your babies I’ve got my hearses/ every blessing comes with a set of curses’, it does have a nice ring to it, but I’m not convinced that Foreman owns a fleet of hearses.

The best moments of the album are the less heavy, more melody driven ones, like the beautiful, Gorillaz-esque ‘Thrive’. If you’re into this style of pop-punk then you may really enjoy the album, however it’s a bit hit and miss and doesn’t compare well to previous triumphs like The Beautiful Letdown or Hello Hurricane.

[gutbucketmusic]

The Silver Seas, Chateau Revenge (Blue Edition) Review

‘Special Editions’ of albums are ubiquitous at the moment. Often they seem like cynical attempts to get fans to pay again for music they’ve already bought. Because of this I was wary when approaching this acoustic release of The Silver Seas’ 2010 album Chateau Revenge.

To be clear, the original version of Chateau Revenge was a fantastic album. Described by Danny Baker as ‘the best band in the world’, The Silver Seas play a kind of shimmering pop that washes over the listener with effortless charm. Legions of indie bands from the past thirty years have tried to recapture the sound of classic ‘60s pop, but I’d find it hard to name one that has managed quite so successfully as The Silver Seas. With layered Motown guitars, uptempo drums and backing vocals that demand to be sang along with, you can almost smell the vinyl on every track. What made Chateau Revenge quite so remarkable was that this sound was applied to a set of incredibly catchy and well written songs. What is perhaps more remarkable is that the acoustic edition of Chateau Revenge throws this sound out the window.

The songs have been rhythmically and harmonically restructured and almost none of the memorable riffs have been replicated. The big sound of the first edition is replaced with much sparser instrumentation. While singer/songwriter Daniel Tashian’s understated vocals previously provided an interesting contrast, here listeners may find them a little dry.

Yet although some of the immediate charms of the first edition are gone, this acoustic album does better justice to the songs. Songs about heartbreak just sounded like standard pop fare on the Red Edition, but the acoustic arrangements feel far more melancholic, the intimate atmosphere highlighting the contemplative lyrics about former lovers struggling to forgive them. This gives the more subtle songs such as ‘Those Days’ the prominence they deserve. While these recordings may not be as catchy as before, the album is in the end a worthwhile project. I would recommend first getting a copy of the Red Edition, but as a second purchase, this complements it perfectly.

[gutbucketmusic]

Here Be Ramblings

Thought I'd set up a tumblr to catalogue some of my rants. I've just started writing for the student newspaper about music, so that stuff'll go here. It could be interesting to someone...