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One of the most underrated rock albums of the past couple decades. Gordon Phillips of Brooklyn Vegan wrote about it on its 10th anniversary if you like having some backstory to it.
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One of the least talked-about GOAT double albums ever.
I think I caught the band live for the first time on the “Sister” tour that preceded it - I’d never seen or heard anyone abuse guitars in such a creative and unusual way before that (or since).
Not a dud track on it.
A mind-blowing, life-altering, perspective-forming monster of a release. I was and have remained a fan ever since (and Kim Gordon is a goddess, I’ll go down with that particular ship forever).
When someone says “best NYC art rock” this is automatically my go-to reaction. Like a gallery showing for a new artist you can’t wait to tell your friends about. 🖤
P.S.: Yes it sucks that they're gone and I blame Thurston, of course.
Oct 8, 2024
Happy 2nd Birthday to what is, without a doubt in my mind, the greatest album ever made.Â
I found this band back in 2019 when their second ever single, sunglasses, popped into my youtube recommended. It had maybe a few thousand views at the time. That song was revolutionary for me, unlike anything i’d ever heard. I resolved to follow the band like a zealot from there on out. I read every interview, listened to every live bootleg, etc.
Their first record finally came and went in early 2021 with reasonable acclaim. I adored it and spoke about it with fervor upon release. I sent it to anyone and everyone. But there was a small nagging part of me that thought the band had not reached terminal velocity just yet.Â
I remember being slightly disappointed that a newer live staple “Basketball Shoes” (a 13 minute monster of a song) was noticeably missing from the track list. When I first heard a live recording of it in 2019, I already knew that it was quite possibly the best song ever written. (I looped this recording so many times that every aspect is committed to memory, even the distinct crowd noises.)
AFUT released 2 years ago today, and it was a revelation. A 10 track, hour long, jam packed record of nonstop hits. Anthemic and yet equally frenetic, Ants is nearly impossible to describe. I have to imagine hearing this album is what hearing Neutral Milk Hotel’s In the Aeroplane Over the Sea for the first time must have felt like. Somehow both alien and feeling as though it has always existed, it is impossible to imagine a world, or a time, where this record does not exist.
It is a generational record that words will simply never do justice. Thank you BCNR, Thank you Isaac Wood.Â
concorde will fly.
Feb 4, 2024
I'll state it right up front: This is a dad-rock rec.
Try to picture yourself (a theme of this album's third track, "Picture Book") back in 1968: songwriting pairs dominate the UK scene. Lennon/McCartney; Jagger/Richards; Page/Plant. Into this noisy fray saunters the Kinks' Ray Davies, who has had hits earlier in the decade with his group the Kinks that SOUND a lot like to guitar-up-to-eleven frenzy ("You Really Got Me," a number one, was said for years to feature a young Jimmy Page on the solo, until it was debunked) but is now fixated on a sepia-toned sort of quasi-nostalgia that is pivoting his band from England's Hitmakers toward the sort of cult band that would later be cited by Blur's Damon Albarn and Oasis' Noel Gallagher as a seminal source of material and influence (it's hard to imagine "Parklife" or "What's the Story Morning Glory" -- hell, Britpop, period -- without this album and the pathway it created).
Davies was busy wrapping himself in the cloak of the Union Jack, long before this sort of move would have had him branded as National Front (or Morrissey-adjacent). "Village Green Preservation Society" didn't sell much when it was released (it only went gold in 2018) but was notable for its acoustic, singer/songwritery pastoral vibe and a yearning for a return to a Middle England that arguably had never existed. Indeed, the mix of sarcasm and sentimentality that marks the title track ("We are the skyscraper condemnation affiliates/God save Tudor houses, antique tables, and billiards") and other key cuts such as "People Take Pictures of Each Other," "Last of the Steam Powered Trains," the music hall sounds of "Sitting by the Riverside" and "All of My Friends Were There" speak to a love of both the literal village green as well as the metaphorical village green -- many of these mementoes of the past are likely better left behind (which Davies either notes directly or through comparison) but the crank in him just can't resist making the point that a way of life and a slice of history is sliding away before our very eyes.
Davies spent part of 1968 writing satirical numbers for a late-night BBC comedy program, so it's entirely possible that this ironic sensibility (which would inform his writing from that point forward) spilled over into the writing and creation of this album. Earlier songs like "Dedicated Follower of Fashion" and "A Well Respected Man" pointed the way toward this endstate but Davies had never sustained it for a full LP. This was a novella about the premature death of England, The Concept and The Empire.
Two contemporaneous non-album tracks -- "Days" and "Wonderboy" -- do as good a job of explaining Davies' motives at the time (a sort of inward and wistful focus on their Britishness, which a five year U.S. performance ban for reasons that remain somewhat vague no doubt also created, by extension) as the album itself, which is nonetheless one of the first extant concept albums ever recorded.
These days, we think of Davies as doing his best work with a quiet, knowing, ironic smile -- this is the album that started his whole downstream career phase as the poet laureate of a quickly-evaporating Albion, which groups like the Libertines (and all their tongue-in-cheek Olde Ways mythmaking) were surely taking note of.
A top-ten all time record for me. All hail the Godfather of Britpop (I'm sure he hates that moniker but it doesn't mean it's not true).
Oct 27, 2024
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We're long overdue in thrusting "What do you do?" into the sea forever. It's time we collectively get down to what people are interested in instead of minimizing their vibrant existence by asking how they make money.
Mar 22, 2024