Music's Greatest Hits

These are my favorite songs

[musicsgreatesthits]

Pathos Delay by Boilermaker (Goldenrod, 1996)

I think about the day I found out the singer passed away from skin cancer. I think about how much pain I felt for a person I hardly knew. A person that I never met. Boilermaker was an important band to me before the cancer took Terrin but it became something a lot larger afterward. It makes me regret any opportunity I had to meet him. Terrin first messaged me on a myspace page about emo that I ran. It was basically lists of things I knew and wanted other people to know, tons of photos I stole from elsewhere on the internet, and songs I liked that week. I'm not sure why he messaged me but we kept in contact through my personal myspace account up until a couple months before his passing. The sparse contact I had with him left a large impression.

I think about this song and I think about Terrin. I think about dying and how my brain gravitates toward it so often.  I find myself fantasizing about it in several ways.

I wonder about death.

I have confused death with a path, a viable option.

Death has scared me. I tried to run away, once, when it was there.

Death has made me feel comfort, knowing that it could give me respite from whatever my brain was doing to itself.

When I see others succumb to the other voice in their head, I think about how it easily it could be me.

This song has kept me company when the thoughts were present. They were like a best friend who distracted me with a joke or a walk around the park or a car ride to the beach. It might seem alarming that I need to be distracted but for many that suffer from that other voice, it is the nature of each action. Music can be simplified that way. A distraction. But it's such a powerful distraction. Sometimes it's the last distraction between you and the end of a gun, the bottom of a noose, the L-pill for your escape, the vertical slit. Boilermaker has kept me alive and that's why I'm writing about them.

[musicsgreatesthits]

Orion by Kickball (Highfives And Handshakes, 2007)

I recently got a tattoo on my leg that referenced a piece of artwork from an album of this band. I kind of wish I could translate whatever pain I felt during the process into the words of affection I have for them but I can’t. It’s an ice cream cone with wings playing a guitar. I could describe to you the train ride I took to Portland, Oregon from Irvine, California to see them but I don’t know how to make 36 hours feel like two weeks to you right now. They played this one there. They haven’t played a show since that night but they drop hints every now and then that it wasn’t their last. I’m shifting between different songs by them to give me some sort of inspiration but I can only sit and listen along. A tumbleweed passes between my ears.

I have used this to describe a different vocalist but it goes something like: I wished that there were an endless amount of songs that this person sang in so I could experience every single way their voice could be used.

I listened to this band for a year straight and I hope you can too.

[musicsgreatesthits]

Poison Tree by Grouper (self released, 2007)

This one bends time for me. The moments spent listening to this song feel suspended. Flowers in my backyard aren’t aging, the milk is not curdling, my eyes are not weakening. The only thing that carries me through time and space are it’s melodies. It is only when it’s finally over that I am aware that time has passed. I become so enveloped by the song that I get disappointed when it’s over. It’s as if the song owed me more time than it’s three minutes offered me.  I’m amazed the song even crawls out that far. When I reach the end, three minutes always ends up feeling like just one. 

I think each time I listen to this I also feel like I want some kind of parasitic organism to burrow into me and overwhelm me with it’s purpose. I want to be transformed like the way this song transforms me.

[musicsgreatesthits]

I Was the Sword by Funeral Diner (Clean Plate, Electric Human Project, 2007)

As a teenager, I used to listen to songs that I found powerful and would wish that I could relate to the lyrics a lot more than I could. I liked the feeling it gave me. I had tiny angers and frustrations and they sometimes felt a lot bigger than they actually were. The hardest part about it wasthat I didn't have an outlet for these problems. Talking about them only did so little for me. There were different kinds of music that were therapeutic to me but the one that I gravitated to the most was this style of punk. For some reason, I had a lot more patience with this kind of music than any other kind. I think it was because I felt such a high when I first heard it. It was worth it to slowly crawl through meandering songs that went nowhere. This music was frantic in a specific way that I eventually realized had many things in common with how I liked to move my body to music.  My body felt more right. I felt more comfortable when I could move to these rhythms because these were the types of rhythms I liked moving to the most.

This is the kind of aggression that helps me reallocate stress, tension and anger in the most complete way. I feel drained and satisfied after hearing this music or listening to it on a bus ride or playing it live to a couple kids. It is what I needed and it’s what I keep wanting. I’m still completely in love with this kind of punk.

[musicsgreatesthits]

Thin As Clouds by Chokebore (Amphetamine Reptile Records, 1995)

The kind of song that makes a walk glow with importance and make gestures, smells, and sights pulse starkly at all of your senses. The kind of song that makes you aware of how much this will taint your memories and how much your memories will taint this and how you’ll try to cover them up with newer or better memories or how you are too scared to try and create any more because the ones you have stuck to this are too beautiful to let go, the uneasy awareness of how easily that can happen, how easily your brain can turn on you.

[musicsgreatesthits]

Thank All You Guy Helpening by 1994! (Inkblot/Square of Opposition, 2010)

I met Chris at the first Stomping Grounds show in Lancaster in 2008. 1994!, Osceola, Something Fierce, We Were Skeletons, Outclassed and Fullchin played. I had been really excited to see his band and had spent the past two years digging up various Lancaster and Lehigh Valley bands. Eventually, I followed 1994! on a couple tours and for a good 5 years I would see Chris at least once. He is the kind of person that I would have no problem seeing every day for the rest of my life. He visited me in the hospital once, along with the other people he was on tour with. This was at a point where I had finished being sick from the chemo and had beaten the 14 day fever. I think it really helped me through chemotheraphy knowing that they were going to visit. When they did visit, it only lasted for fifteen minutes but for a short time after I felt very empty as if a light had been turned off inside me.I felt really grateful I made friends across the country who cared enough about me to visit.

1994!’s songs are usually frenetic but they have written slower songs in the past. I’ve only been able to see them play this twice but I would pay a lot of money to see it again. (I wrote this before I bought a surprise plane ticket to see them at Shea Stadium in August and they did play it). The last time I heard it played was in Chris’s apartment this past December. We were sitting there waiting for something as he sat picking around on the guitar. Eventually, he started playing the song. We sat in obedient silence during the song as well as a short while after. I forgot what I said to him but it was a stark moment in time. Something that should have been documented. If I’m in the right mood, this song can make me cry. I don’t think I’ve told them how amazing this song is and how much it means to me. This is a song, like Ana Gabriel’s “Luna”, that transcends their genre. It no longer exists as this “punk” song. It’s now this “wonderful” song that is able to make you feel something every time you listen. Thank you 1994! for making me feel something.

[musicsgreatesthits]

Luna by Ana Gabriel (CBS Columbia, 1993)

Ana Gabriel is one of the earliest artists I can recall hearing as a child. The first language I learned was Spanish. I later learned English from watching television and from being at school.  I think for the most part I was annoyed at her raspy singing voice but over time it grew on me. As time passes, my brain associates smells and sounds  and textures with memories and each time I came across one of the smells or sounds  or textures associated with a memory it would be as if i saw that memory flash across a screen. I have a lot of memories of her singing in the background attached to people and places that I no longer have and that is one of the reasons this song is beautiful to me. The triggering doesn’t happen all the time but when it does the sound of my grandma becomes clearer to me, the hallway of my house in Garden Grove is long and dark and daunting to me again, the smell of cigarette smoke from my aunts and uncle discomforts me again. I don’t have a lot of memories of my Grandma because she succumbed to her cancer when I was almost four years old. This song came out about a year before her death so this song as well as many others are attached to some of the last memories I had of her. 

The song isn’t specifically tied to the event but it’s really hard for me to not hear this song and remember the night of her death. She died in our house. She was living with my mom, her daughter, and making trips back to Tijuana whenever possible. She went through radiation and treatment but continued to smoke up until her death. The single most vivid memory I have ever had and probably will have is being woken up by very deep sobbing. It wasn’t a sound I liked hearing so I got down from my bunk bed to hear what it was and in the hallway I could see my grandma slumped against my mom. There was a lot of blood. I could see it in my mom that what was happening to her mom was the last thing that was happening to her. I was confused. She yelled at me to go to bed. I used to wonder why I listened to her. I think I felt like I was in trouble and was not allowed to see what was happening. I wish I hadn’t listened. The next thing I remember is being held by my uncle as we both sobbed. I distinctly remember crying because of the smell and not because someone had died. It took a long time to process that. I love this song not because of it’s lyrical content but because of how passionate Ana Gabriel sounds. It’s one of those performances that transcends the genre and represents pain brilliantly. I love that listening to her helps me remember my grandmother better.

[musicsgreatesthits]

here’s what i’ve been enjoying lately. i might talk about one of these in the future. i’ll be posting more mixes in the future. thanks. enjoy for now...

it doesnt let me post the  playlist on here. so heres the link to the playlist on youtube: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLxPfy5TwUtPnkEf3a6-TjL6OFs3TTPNr3

[musicsgreatesthits]

No Hey by Harry Pussy (1997)

This is one of those bands that made me uncomfortable and excited at the same time. I had a hard time trying to understand Bill Orcutt's guitar playing. I couldn't understand how he was making everything sound so composed. He does a very good job of molding something that doesn't make sense into something powerful. Each melody feels abandoned, sewn together poorly but intently. It opened my brain up to a new world of discordance. I had appreciated cacophony before but when I would experience it I would appreciate melody and cacophony independently. Each served to either compliment or give respite. Listening to Harry Pussy taught me how to do both. How to give melody to something that generally does not have any. I think there are a couple songs I could have chosen when thinking about this band. I Don't Care About Sleep Anymore is a drunken stupor. It stumbles back and forth and barely holds it together. It's only until you reach the end of the song that you realize how beautiful it is as a lullaby. I chose No Hey because of how memorable the guitar line is to me. It's the type of song that makes me want to pick up a guitar and spend hours emulating. I'm not much of a songwriter but there are a handful of songs that really make me ache to become one and that's why No Hey is one of my favorite songs.

[musicsgreatesthits]

For Meg by On the Might of Princes

There are some songs I have trouble writing anything about. I think it's because I'm still trying to dig up the feelings I get lost in when I listen to this song. Songs like these make me feel really powerful and emotionally sensitive to everything. It makes me want to tell my friends that I love them. I guess if anything, my favorite songs remind me of that. They remind me that I love music and that I want to make music like this because that's the only productive I can think of doing with myself and how it reminds me to love my friends and to live life deliberately and openly. The singer met his untimely death last year and I think that makes this song even larger.

[musicsgreatesthits]

Big Fists by Azeda Booth (Absolutely Kosher, 2008)

A lot of the songs I listen to become marked with the people and places that I force to surround them with. I tend to push these songs onto people. Shallowly, to see their face react to something new. Subconsciously, to try and crowd all the ugly memories that are glued to a song with new and hopefully beautiful ones. The different places I'm in shade the way I take in a song. Weather, mood, obstacles, life trajectory, and friends all force me to listen to a song differently. I may pay attention more to certain verses or to the way a song is making me feel rather than what it sounds like. I get triggered when I am riding my bike throughout town and then for a tenth of a second something reminds me of a situation I was in. It's a fleeting rush of emotions and it leaves my mind scrambling to hold on to the moment. For several moments after all the smells and things I thought I knew but didn't or wish I knew but could never hope to all come rushing back to me. For those few yards, I am the person I was in that memory. I am what I used to be. It's a weird feeling and it usually haunts me for the rest of the day. I began to realize how awful or great a thing used to be. I found this song at a point in my life where I was finally going out into the world. By that time, I had flown to Pennsylvania for a month long trip, took a 36 hour train up to Portland, followed a band up to Portland and back and flew with my best friend to the east coast to see a band from Japan play a couple shows. I showed this song to everyone I could. It instantly felt sexy to me. It's the only word I've been able to use to describe it. As always, a lot of my listening habits arrived at a climax when I ended up staying in a hospital for three months. Chemotherapy brought out a lot of emotions I had been hiding for a while. I had many nights of restless sleep where I'd drag myself out of my bed and set up my IV cart and boombox and play a mix tape of songs I would make during  the day. The tape would start soft and end in roar. At night, I'd play the songs along the cancer ward as quietly as I could. They were there to keep me from feeling lonely or uncontrollably weeping. I played this song a lot and it made me cry a lot. It also made me feel really happy and hopeful. It reminded me of things I felt when I was on the outside. This was vital to me in the hospital because after 2 months I began to forget about the outside world. I lost the ability to write properly, forgot that simple things like smoothies existed and so on. I had been immersed in the day by day living of being in a hospital that I forgot the daily routines of the outside world.  I showed my friend Chad this song and it blew him away. I don't think he'll ever realize how valuable that reaction was to me while I was in there. I was kept in reverse quarantine. I wasn't able to touch anybody. My mom started to cry one day when she was saying goodbye because she wasn't allowed to hug or kiss me. The feeling of not being able to touch someone really made me sensitive to all the other ways I could feel intimacy. I treasured little exchanges like the one I had with Chad because it it made me feel less depressed to be able to make someone feel good instead of just making them worry. This song has changed over the years in it's importance and use to me and I love that it's going to keep changing as I grow older.

[musicsgreatesthits]

Sink is Busted by June of 44 (Quarterstick, 1995)

I listened to Engine Takes to Water throughout this year because I was revisiting the album and was enjoying their earlier sound that was more aggressive. I remember liking Sink is Busted but for some reason this time around I felt it more. It was sort of odd. I never thought there was anything wrong with the song but I just began to play the song over and over on my drives around town. The guitars are really hypnotic and put me in this pensive mood. My eyes would already glaze over by the time the vocals crawled in. I wasn't annoyed by that either. Each time the song came on again, I would pay attention to something different. I would catch myself trying to feel the amount of fuel being fed into the intake port by applying different pressures to the pedal or notice the blood pulsing into the arm i had been tensing up all night or isolate and follow an individual instrument in the song. This song is really nice to ride a bike along to on a cold night or when you're feeling vulnerable and you're in public and you're walking alone and you need something to help you along. I love when songs envelop and transform my environment into something more sensitive to my emotions. This song changes me every time I hear it.

[musicsgreatesthits]

Intuition by Feist (Arts and Crafts, 2007)

I didn't have a good relationship with her work as Feist when this album was released. It wasn't until I stumbled onto this song that I started to listen to her other songs in a different light. It's probably because I got so obsessed with this song and the way it made me feel.  I would scan each of her songs to see if any of my favorite moments I found in "Intuition" had been matched in others. I love the moments after her voice stops singing. I didn't notice it at first but there was this beautiful echo that lingered afterwards. I always wanted the echo to project louder than it did. I wanted the echo to rattle my eardrums. I wanted it physically. It seems to be another characteristic of my favorite songs. I want to feel them ring throughout my body. I want to jump and scream or sit pensively and have my thoughts overwhelm me. I have a lot of horrible memories attached to this song and I kind of love it in a strange way. I can remember how the air tasted when I was listening to this song on a bike ride or how my swollen chemo feet dragged and the radio clinked along the empty hallway of the cancer ward at 3 AM or how I made a collage for a person I never wanted to see again and how I showed it to her and how the only text on the page was "To have grown old with you" or how I listen to it now and hope to make a song as large as this.

This the collage I made while listening to this song and thinking of that person. I never finished the collage which fits with how I felt with our relationship.

[musicsgreatesthits]

Capital Distracts and Imprisons by Bucket Full of Teeth (Level-Plane, 2005)

This is a favorite mine because it shows how weird they tried to get with this band. The intro rips right through which is followed by beautiful dissonance and it kind of works. They would also use really good blues riffs and blend them into their own fucked up version of grindcore. I like that they tried to mix all these weird ideas together. I think that's when a band is influential to me. It's not necessarily when they are successful with their ideas but when they make a large enough leap to land somewhere where they haven't been before. I really love this song and sometimes when I think of bands or songs I want to post entire albums or multiple songs together because this band didn't really ever have a bad song. I think my favorite part is the ending. It's what I'm patiently waiting for each time I listen to this song. They should just make a whole song of that riff.  It's like I'm getting punched in the side of the head with their drum pedal. I don't really go crazy for heavy riffs or rhythms but for some reason this one really struck me. They only played a couple shows and were mostly a studio band but if they ever decide to do something again, I will probably be dumb enough to fly across the country again.

[musicsgreatesthits]

the Moron the Merrier by Uncrush (Crank!, 1997)

All I know about this band is that they had a song on a compilation, one seven inch record with two songs and that they were from KC. The compilation track is good but drags along during certain parts. The compilation itself is an amazing collection of bands across the country including a number of which were released by Crank! The other song featured on the 7" is hard to get through. It's mostly forgettable and doesn't really pick up enough for it to be worth listening to more than once. The real gem is this song. I found this record in Santa Ana at Greene Records. I went there as often as I could and it was one of the first places I went to that had records that catered to my taste. This is where I found a lot of other KC bands. I picked up the record solely based on the Crank! imprint. I wish it had come with lyrics because I can't understand most of what they're singing. The vocals are cathartic to me. It sounds like they're shredding their vocal chords down to dust. I love this song because it feels like a pop hit in a punk world. An ear worm that is able to balance it's sub genre with more conventional rhythms and chords. From time to time, I still take a lazy search through the internet to see if anything about them pops up or whether they had gone on to do any other bands. I find that there were many others that met the same fate. Bands that existed for a short amount of time, wrote a few excellent songs and then broke up. I'll try to post more of them in the future. I posted this song because I want someone to stumble onto it like I did and feel what I felt, I want them to start a band because of it, to show their friends, I want people to save this record from the used bin forever.

[musicsgreatesthits]

Bless This Blood by Romantic Animal

I probably played this song 10 times when I first heard it. I don't remember what kind of feelings were stewing inside of me but hearing this song really set something off. Sometimes I get odd cravings to feel a certain way. It's usually something painful but just the feeling of being able to revel in it feels constructive to me. It makes me want to crawl into a shallow hole. A hole that reaches up to my neck, just enough pressure to make me feel slightly claustrophobic. Fine dark dirt surrounding my body. This is a miserable lullaby and I love when they find me and I love how they haunt me.

[musicsgreatesthits]

October by Abilene (Slowdime, 2000)

There was a disproportionate amount of time spent adding artists to my Launchcast Yahoo! Radio Station profile. I found a lot of bands through that radio station. I'm pretty sure I would add bands that I never ended up listening to or maybe not for a long while. I assume it was mostly to feel like my tastes actually had weight. Eventually, the radio station played a band called Hoover. This was one of those bands that I would not appreciate until a couple years later. I was not used to the way they sang and yelled and felt like it didn't really fit. However, I never discarded them because of it. Hoover had really dug their own weird spacey, dub influenced hole in punk rock. Since I was younger, I tended to lean towards the more cathartic parts but somehow I knew there were layers to the music that I couldn't appreciate until I was older. Either way, I spent every day finding new bands and grabbing as much of their music as I could. Eventually, the craze settled and I began to let it all sink into my skin. I was really interested in what Hardcore For Nerds, a great blogspot dedicated to music, called the Hoover family tree. They began to document every band those members shared. June of 44, Regulator Watts, Crownhate Ruin and then finally there was Abilene.

The way they described the band left me sort of impressionable. There it was again. I had found another weird band that I had hardly seen mentioned anywhere else and it was being talked about as some sort of monolith. Ever since I started crawling the internet for new music, I had run into that feeling. It was kind of addicting.

The words "slow burner" will always stick with me when I think of this band. This song crawls at an almost unbearable pace. It forces you to sit there and think. I get lost in myself when I listen to this song. This is the kind of song that takes multiple listens for you to realize all the tricks they incorporated. All the offbeat snare hits and barely audible vocals and the deafening space between each guitar note and how fluid the bass sounds as it crawls across each measure. The vocals are sparse and almost spoken. My favorite part is it's slow ascent to the climax. Probably because I can feel each instrument start to intensify very slowly.  I like how the quiet stroll gets interrupted twice. You anticipate a climax but it's taken from you at first. As someone else put it, "the guitars change it's swirling pattern and turn into an approaching pack of jet planes". I only wished the wavering guitar line at the end lasted longer. Along with the other songs on this album, this pushed me towards a new kind of patience that opened me up to more challenging pieces of music. And that's what can make a song so meaningful to me, when it spreads my patience thin and opens me up to newer ways of listening.