Albums To Live By, Part Two

Mojave 3 – Ask Me Tomorrow
Everybody knows what happened in New York in 2001. Still, I’m amazed even now when I think back at just how miserable everything was for that entire autumn and winter. That December there was only one album – this one. One of the very few albums that I’d rate as perfect, this is a heartbreaking, sublime marriage of songwriting and atmosphere, full of sighing, morning after ambiance. It’s an album I have to handle carefully, because from the moment I put it on I experience a near-overwhelming swell of emotion, particularly if the weather is right, or my body and mind are feeling particularly ragged. I really, really hope that it never loses that power to destroy me, I’m not sure I could make it if it did.

Blinker the Star – August Everywhere
I said there was only one album in December 2001 but I was lying. This was a few years old at that point, but it was then that I got really into it. The first CD I bought after moving to NY (well, not counting a Radiohead bootleg from Generation Records), it has the glow of late summer sunshine to it, and I guess in ’01 it also carried the memory of a time only a few years previous when things didn’t seem so dark and hopeless. I’m not quite as sensitive with it as with Mojave 3, but it’s beautifully layered arrangements and aching harmonies get to me still.

Flaming Lips – Clouds Taste Metallic
Not to belittle the achievements of Soft Bulletin and Yoshimi, but this is my favorite Lips record, and I dare say that they had a certain flair here that was diminished by the sophistication of later efforts. It’s the exploding, energetic randomness that I miss – the collision of colossal drums, church bells and noisy, joyously out-of-tune guitar at the end of “The Abandoned Hospital Ship,” the plinking toy xylophone that pops up out of the blue for about 5 seconds in the otherwise riff-rocking “Guy Who Got a Headache and Accidentally Saved the World.” Maybe losing Ronald Jones meant losing the guitar madness, and if so that’s a huge shame, because on this album and Transmissions From the Satellite Heart he shows himself to be one of the most inventively madcap guitarists around. The massive, My Bloody Valentine-like maelstrom kicked up on “Kim’s Watermelon Gun” would be almost frightening if it weren’t surrounding such a giddy pop tune (about killing celebrities no less!). From what I’ve heard of the new Lips record, Wayne Coyne has dropped his vocal range a bit and is singing in key, and I think that’s a shame too. Nothing’s more enjoyable than hearing him warble wonderful melodies that are just a notch out of his range, and in the 90s he and Malkmus and Dulli formed the Holy Trifecta of Great Bad Singers. Down with professionalism!