☔
I have kinda genuflected at the altar of this album since it first came out.
I owe at least two of my "meh" bands to it/them.
It was the sound of Liverpool in my head; rainy, grey, moody, caught between gothic stoicism and a dappled-light magical realism of moonlight reflected on the waves that surround that port city. Tough and tender. Bluster and vulnerability. Light and shade. All in one package. Just like Liverpool itself.
My friend Rob Elba and I did a full podcast episode on it a few years ago that still stands up pretty well as a definitive evaluation of what singer Ian McCulloch once boastfully called "The Greatest Album Ever Recorded" (not that I'm making him wrong about that). Will's guitar playing never, ever left my head -- I tried to model my whole "less is more" approach upon his twinning of Television and the Velvets.
"Silver" and "Seven Seas" could chart today, they still sound so fresh.
May 4, 2024
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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
My friend Rob and I did a lengthy/detailed version of his That Record Got Me High podcast about this one 👂🏻
Feb 24, 2025
Shameless self promotion alert -- my new book (published by the good folks at HoZac) is officially out on Friday and some of the advance press is now starting to land, which is fun to see. (You can order it here, if you're so inclined: https://hozacrecords.com/product/aifl/)
Our friends at Flood Magazine were among the first to write it up and decided to feature a book about EPs by.... posting a playlist of some of my/contributors' favorite songs from their favorite EPs. Sounds about right!
"His new book An Ideal for Living: A Celebration of the EP, both makes a case for the format’s legitimacy and backs that claim up with a fairly bulletproof top-25 EPs list for every decade dating back to the 1950s. From the Joy Division release referenced in the book’s title to the iconic Simon & Garfunkel collection depicted on the book’s cover and well beyond, duBrowa is intent on helping readers understand the value of these truncated tracklists as being much more than an afterthought in an artist’s oeuvre."
BONUS POINTS FOR THE USE OF THE WORD OEUVRE. :)
May 30, 2024
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Hey tyler hopefully this doesn’t violate some PI.FYI golden rule
But after nearly two years of writing, editing and arguing, my book about the EP is coming out in May and can be preordered here:
https://hozacrecords.com/product/aifl/
The book is about the origins, history and cultural impact of the EP since these little objects first started coming out in the 50s.
Over 50 of my music biz friends then helped me shape the list and review the top 200 ever released, according to us (ha).
For those of you who are into this kind of geekery/snobbery, I can’t wait to hear what you think. A labor of love, as all books are! ❤️
Mar 27, 2024
“Songs Of a Lost World” coming to a goth listening station near you Nov 1 🖤
The fr FW Me Friday the 13th the world was looking for
Sep 14, 2024
I will fail to explain just how much this band meant to me in the 90s.
So I will borrow from AV Club who did a fine job of distilling it:
“Unwound is the best band of the ’90s. Not just because of how prolific, consistent, and uncompromising it was, but because of how perfectly Unwound nested in a unique space between some of the most vital forms of music that decade: punk, post-rock, indie rock, post-hardcore, slow-core, and experimental noise. That jumble of subgenres doesn’t say much; in fact, it falls far short of what Unwound truly synthesized and stood for. Unwound stood for Unwound. But in a decade where most bands were either stridently earnest or stridently ironic, Unwound wasn’t stridently anything. It was only itself. In one sense Unwound was the quietest band of the ’90s, skulking around like a nerdy terror cell. In another sense it was the loudest, sculpting raw noise into contorted visions of inner turmoil and frustration.”
R.I.P. Vern Rumsey.
This is their finest song, from their finest album.
I really can’t say enough about the sheer bloody minded genius of this group. 🖤
Mar 23, 2024