Life Changers: Part 4 (A New Hope).

Yo.  Little bit of news first.  It’s been announced that the surprise opening act on the upcoming Jane’s Addiction/NIN tour is (for the moment) the band Street Sweeper, which features former Rage/Audioslave guitarist Tom Morello and The Coup rapper Boots Riley.  This is the first I’ve heard of The Coup or Riley but I’m guessing we’ll be hearing more from these dudes given the high profile slot to debut their music.  You can listen to a tune right here.  The holepuncher verdict?  Been there, done that.  Hey Tom? If you’re going to be in a band that sounds so much like Rage Against the Machine why not just be in Rage Against the Machine?  And didn’t that sound get stale, I don’t know, about nine years ago?

Anyway, speaking of Reznor he apparently dropped this bomb on Twitter the other day:  “You know that feeling you get when somebody embarrasses themselves so badly YOU feel uncomfortable? Heard Chris Cornell’s record? Jesus.” YOWZA!  That’s pretty cold. Note to Cornell: see yesterday’s Badmotorfinger post.  Note to Reznor: are you really that freaking excited about Street Sweeper?? Really??

Okay, let’s move on and wrap this list up today which is easily going to be the toughest five to pick.  I know exactly where to start though…

16)  Sunny Day Real Estate – LP2 (1995)

Here’s another record that pretty much made everything else I was listening to at the time seem so embarrassingly bad in comparison.  I didn’t even realize that I had heard Sunny Day Real Estate before 1995 (that came later when I saw the video for “Seven” and remembered the Ah Ha-ness of it) and by the time LP2 was dropped the band was pretty much over.  Well, for the first time at least.  They’d get together and break up again later, releasing two more very good albums to go along with the emo bible that is the band’s 1994 debut Diary but “The Pink Album” has always been my favorite.  It’s kind of a weird album.  The songs have odd structures and quiet moments where you expect loudness and vice versa, but I also feel like it’s an album that absorbs you because of this.  It’s almost begging to be listened to repeatedly just to kind of make sense of it all, specifically singer Jeremy Enigk’s lyrics which ocasionally sound as if they were sang with his back to the microphone.  But this album has it all; it’s noisy, sweeping, uplifting, depressing as a funeral for a kitten, playful, and dare I say pretty?  Yes.  Definitely pretty.  In some ways, I wish the band had let this disc be the curtain call on their career as it left SDRE at the time with a mystique that provided part of the joy of being a fan and established a sound that was just beginning to be imitated.  When the band reunited in 1998 their sound had changed into something that was a little easier to swallow and lacked the sense of discovery that I got from listening to LP2.  To this day, there’s still nothing that sounds quite like it.  Here’s the song that hooked me, though unfortunately it’s an inferior live version (just get the record already!).  This is “J’Nuh”:

17) Chavez – Gone Glimmering (1995)

I’ve written about Chavez before, so I’ll keep this one short.  Basically, I think this is the record that more or less got me listening to indie rock and yet it’s definitely one of the heaviest (at least guitar wise) albums that could ever possibly fit into that genre.  A great band, a great brilliantly concise record, and one that was just horribly overlooked at the time and has only recently started to get some of the praise it deserves.  This following song is so good and the lack of videos on YouTube so depressing that I’m just going to post this for a record breaking 2nd time on this blog.  Here’s “Break Up Your Band”:

18) Radiohead – Hail to the Thief (2003)

Not a whole lot to say about this record.  I liked all of Radiohead’s previous output, save for Pablo Honey which I still find pretty uninspiring, and I’m fairly convinced that 2008’s In Rainbows is actually the best thing they’ve ever done, but it was this album that really floored me with what the band could achieve when all of their influences came together perfectly.  By my math, there are about nine songs on this album that would individually be career bests for most other bands.  The thought of nine such songs appearing on the same record is kind of mind blowing.  And seriously – listen to the last half of this record starting with “There There” and finishing with “A Wolf at the Door.”  Just an amazing succession of tracks that lift this album above anything else you could compare it to.   Rest assured if any band writes a song as good as this next one, it’ll be Radiohead themselves.  Here’s “Myxomatosis”:

19) Wilco – A Ghost is Born (2004)

This is getting really tough now but I have to give this album its due.  I honestly don’t even really know how to describe what Wilco did on this record.  The band came to the attention of the masses earlier as a rootsy, Americana, alt-country mish-mash led by singer/guitarist Jeff Tweedy but then shifted gears into something more layered, more electronic and electric, and definitely more eclectic.  And isn’t that always when bands start getting interesting and start making their best music?  I find that’s certainly the case with Wilco and A Ghost is Born is a record that dominated my iPod for a long while.  It’s a record where you can hear a band taking chances and doing exactly what they want to do.  But what’s maybe most interesting about Wilco’s experiments is how they manage to retain a sense of cohesiveness, even with a track like “Spiders (Kidsmoke)” stuck right up at the front of the record to test the listener’s patience.  When they reach for something outside of what might be comfortable, they do so without ever ceasing to be Wilco.  It all still fits under the same umbrella, somehow and that’s not something that should be overlooked.  Here’s “At Least that’s What You Said,” and if you drop out before the 1:55 mark then bad things will happen to you:

20) Mastodon – Blood Mountain (2006)

I don’t know how it happened exactly, but this is the album that got me listening to metal again.  Mostly I think it was born out of boredom with everything else I was listening to and me getting tired with the ever increasing lameness of indie rock bands stealing their sound, their look, and their names from the obvious influences that had come before them.  And so I discovered Mastodon when I had already been going back and listening to some older metal (Iron Maiden mostly), and initially I wasn’t sure I liked it.  The biggest threshold to cross with modern metal is the growling style of vocals that most bands employ these days and Mastodon is no exception.  Still though, I kept coming back to it and listening to the band online and eventually bought the cd.  At last, I crossed the aforementioned threshold and it felt like my eyes had been opened after years of having them sewn shut (by Alice in Chains).  I’ve found so much new music lately that I really, really like and I owe that to this record for starting the slippery slope.  Truthfully, I think Leviathan (2004) is a stronger album than Blood Mountain, but that’s like saying a hot cookie is better than a cold one.  It’s still a damn cookie and you know you want to eat it.  What I love most about this band is that it just feels genuine.  I don’t get the sense that they’re trying to be the heaviest band on the planet.  They’re just trying to write interesting songs and they somehow have managed to extend beyond the metal community without excluding that group either.  Who else could boast touring with Slayer and playing Bonnaroo?  It’s ridiculous.  There’s no way to understand how they’ve become successful other than the simple fact that they are GREAT at what they do.  The potential for this band is unlimited and it’s probably only a matter of time before they become the biggest name in heavy music.  Good for them, I say.  Here’s “Hand of Stone” live:

And there you have it.  A long-winded journey into my musical muck.  Enjoy your weekend.  More Monday…