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Entries categorized as “Rediscovering Our Record Collections” 39 results
Bobby Evers writesAlbums I’m Just Now Getting Into: “Body Talk” by Robyn
Whoa hey! This Deepwater Horizon thing is pretty crazy, right? And what’s with all this Wikileaks stuff? Man, 2010 is a pretty crazy year so far, right?
What’s that? It’s actually 2012? Coulda fooled me, because I just got into this Robyn album SO. EFFING. HARD.
OK, so I missed the boat by a couple years.
But let me be clear here: Body Talk is an amazing album.
Things I knew going in:
1) Robyn was a Swedish pop icon from the late 90’s who made a crazy comeback in the mid-2000’s and then took fans and critics by storm, emerging even more universally-loved than
2) This album was a 3-parter (with Body Talks 1 & 2 featuring 8 songs and this album being THE ALBUM)
3) Don’t fucking tell Robyn what to do.
Why I missed the boat:
I am not necessarily the biggest fan of POP MUSIC as a genre, or dance music as a thing. If something is really catchy, it will win me over eventually, but for the most part I was wondering what all the hype was about. I heard Konichiwa Bitches and Don’t Fucking Tell Me What To Do, and I think those songs as standalones were not going to make me LOVE Robyn with the ferocity that I now do.
Additionally when Robyn played at Pitchfork in 2010, I was dying of heat exhaustion against a tree to the side of the stage, and the sound was not that great at that angle, and I was again wondering what all the fuss was about.
Clarence Ewing: The Million Year Trip writesRediscovering Our Record Collections: Morphine’s “Cure for Pain”
During my brief time living in Boston, I wasn’t nearly as big a Rock music fan as I am now. In college, my exposure to music was still pretty much limited to what I picked up from school marching band, the a-cappella group I sang in, and Top 40 radio (which, compared to today’s offerings, I now realize wasn’t all that bad).
Clarence Ewing: The Million Year Trip writesRediscovering Our Record Collections: Thomas Dolby’s “The Golden Age of Wireless” + “The Flat Earth”
Growing up in Omaha, Nebraska in the mid-1980s, before the existence of the Internet and MP3 players, meant you had to look a little harder to find new and interesting pop music. Fortunately I had a sister who was plugged in to the few places in town where one could find new stuff that wasn’t featured on Casey Kasem’s Top 40. One day she got hold of two albums on cassette tapes that I dutifully sponged off of her and that introduced me to the brilliant synth-pop of Thomas Morgan Robertson, a.k.a. Thomas Dolby.
Bobby Evers writesRediscovering Our Record Collections: Harvey Danger’s “Where Have All the Merrymakers Gone?”
My sister went to California and informed me of a new song I absolutely had to hear. But because we had DirecTV with MTV2 back at Mom and Dad’s, I’d already heard it. I didn’t get the record right away; I borrowed it from a friend and listened to it over and over again before buying it myself. Thankfully I was able to exchange an Everclear CD at K-Mart and traded it for this disc.
Bobby Evers writesRediscovering Our Record Collections: The Weakerthans’ “Left & Leaving”
In our school there were maybe four kids who knew who Propagandhi was. And while we, in our Jncos and imitation Airwalks, appreciated their hardcore anarcho-feminist messages and loud, aggressive attitudes toward homophobia and thought control, we all had an amount of covert joy when the one song on the album(s) written and sung by bassist John K Samson would come on. They were sweeter, quieter, and concerned matters that hit a little closer to home; relationships with small towns, emotions, longing to break free of the mundane.