Related Recs

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Beck’s “Mutations” album

I bought Beck’s Mutations album the day it came out, and I loved how Beck collected so many concepts on that record.  After listening to it, I made the decision to write down all the ideas in my head, so I started carrying a pocket notebook.  It’s been 24 years since then and I still write in one every day.  Beck changed my standard of what a modern songwriter could or should be doing.  I came from the indie-rock mentality where everything was sort of homespun and amateurish, Mutations made me realize that a contemporary artist could make a record at the level of Bowie, Bob Dylan, Joni Mitchell, Leonard Cohen.

@adam-green

Nov 2, 2022

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If you don’t already listen:

Ten by Pearl Jam is one of my all time favorite classic/hard rock slash grunge albums. Hole’s album Live Through This is more of a melodic grunge/alternative rock, but a solid female vocal album. I feel like it never really got all the flowers it deserved because it was a female vocalist at the same time. I just ignore the fact that it’s Courtney Love lol. I’ve said this in a rec before and I’ll say it again: I will listen to ANYTHING that Chris Cornell worked on lol. He was a part of a few 90s grungy bands, so if you haven’t already definitely check out Soundgarden, Audioslave, and/or Temple of the Dog. Superunknown by Soundgarden is probably one of the best known. Some are popular enough, but ones I feel were all pretty quintessential 90s albums that were a great part of the sound.

@saylor

Jan 19, 2025

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"the kinks are the village green preservation society"

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).

@coreydubrowa

Oct 27, 2024

Top Recs from @spud

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m&m’s kissing

love this photo

@spud

Feb 28, 2025

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THE SPACE BETWEEN

When looking up in a densely packed forest, i find there is so much beauty in the cracks where the sunlight escapes between a canopy of trees. Like maps of rivers, or veins in the arm, the space between has so much merit in its own and more, so many stories to tell. I love looking up! We should all make more of a habit of it! Wings of desire!

@spud

Feb 15, 2025

4

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MARY AND MAX

This is the best film you’ll ever watch. It is beautiful, sepia filled, and spewing with the colours of Sydney and NYC. It made me cry harder than ‘the Notebook’ and laugh more than I did watching ‘Bridesmaids’. This film is one of a kind, and (as a composer) the soundtrack is so unbelievably cool. Mary and Max has a place in my heart forever and I won’t ever stop recommending this film. You need to watch it. It is the epitome of bittersweetness and uncomfortable growth and you will learn so much just in your first watch.

@spud

Feb 15, 2025

4