Put me in, let me run with the Lazy Saturday.

I’m cheap.  I love my local record shops (Blue Arrow for used stuff, Music Saves for new), but every now and again, I tap the internet for vinyl to save a couple of bucks.  (I’m a vinyl neophyte, as Mrs. Citizen hit me with a turntable for my birthday a mere two months ago, but my record collection is growing.  Stop by for Radiohead and The Who if you’re in the neighborhood.)  I ordered Dark Side of the Moon from Amazon, used, for four dollars.  Six with the shipping.  I can’t do better than that locally.  I feel like a dick for giving cash to faceless corporations instead of my friends and neighbors, but it happens.  (If it makes you feel any better, I haven’t bought a book anywhere but Mac’s Backs for like a decade.  Granted, I’m a library guy by nature, but I still do my civic duty when I need some Calvino on the shelf.  Just saying.)  Dark Side of the Moon showed up in my mail today.  It’s probably impossible to count the number of times I’ve listened to it overall (average twenty times a year since I was 14, maybe?  That’s only 220 spins.  Seems low.  500?), but I’d never heard it on vinyl.  It made me think of four things:

1.  The picture above is of the cover of the LP that I got in the mail.  It belonged, at one time, to Deb Hume.  I know that the “D” stands for Deb because she wrote her whole name on the inside cover.  She probably wrote it in 1973.  We don’t often have physical artifacts to associate with our music anymore.  Deb Hume owned this record.  I can’t write my name on my electronic copy of Wild Mountain Nation.  It exists, to a degree, in an imaginary realm; I can’t touch it.  I don’t know what this means, but it’s weird.  (If you are Deb Hume, drop us a line.)

2.  Dark Side of the Moon has sold something like 45 million copies internationally.  And it is really fucking good.  In this century, we equate selling a bunch of something with poor quality.  The highest selling record in 2008 was that Coldplay thing.  I did not listen to it, but I’ll assume that it ate balls. (The radio song with the bells that they played on SNL made me want to turn the gun on my self, at the very least.)  2007’s highest selling record was the soundtrack to some Disney movie about high school kids.  What the hell?  All of a Sudden I Miss Everybody and Armchair Apocrypha came out in 2007, but maybe twenty people bought them.  When did selling records turn into being awful?  When did not selling records become a badge of honor?

3.  There will never be a record as culturally universal as Dark Side of the Moon again.  What’s the best record of this decade?  (The 13 albums people have me thinking about this.)  It’s Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, right?  That’s not really up for debate, is it?  Are people going to be excited that they’re getting a vintage vinyl copy of that record in the mail in 2037?  I don’t know, but I doubt it.  Cultural fragmentation means that less things become things that nearly everybody likes.  There is nobody in a place where they have record players who hasn’t heard “Money.”  There’s no 14 year old American male who hasn’t heard all of Dark Side of the Moon.  It doesn’t seem like that’s going to happen again with a record anytime soon, regardless of it’s quality.  (Brief extension:  I’m not saying at all that Dark Side is the greatest record ever made, or even that it’s better (whatever the hell that means) than something like Yankee Hotel Foxtrot or OK Computer. But.  Because there’s so much specialization in media, records are never going to mean as much to as many people as Dark Side. Dig?)

4.  It’s easy to forget how good this record is.  Holy shit.  I love it so much.  Conservatively, I’ve listened to it 300 times and the guitar solo in “Time” still makes me feel like I’ve never heard it before.  Just saying.  (If your formative years were like mine, you’ve seen this version of “Time” before; if not you’re in for a treat.)

In music news that isn’t thirty five years old, I’ve been spinning a really intriguing EP from Washington DC-based Last Tide all week.  It’s dense and heavy, but tuneful and catchy; that is a solid combination of factors.  The Broken Places feature five songs that sounds like The Twilight Sad with a slightly heavier infusion of The Cure; again that’s a good combination.  There’s also a bit of vocal variety, with some songs featuring a female vocalist (”Shapeshifter” is a total winner) and others featuring a dude (as the track below).  I like bands, generally, that have more than one pitch, (The obvious exceptions are bands that have one really good pitch, a la Mariano Rivera, but that is a discussion for another day.) so this is another factor in favor of Last Tide.  You can hear the EP at the band’s myspace; it’s a solid investment of your time.  (Random tangent:  it feels cool to tout a band from Washington D.C.  While Last Tide sounds nothing like Minor Threat, I still feel like I might have felt if I was writing about “Out of Step” in the early 80s.  Good times!)

Last Tide – A Traitor in my Mind

We’ve talked about the British hip-hop duo The Forcefield Kids before.  The recently released Home EP was packed with strong rhymes and head-nodding beats.  The Forcefield Kids are back with another EP, Harmony & Dischord, on November 2; in the e-mail they sent to us that accompanied the record, they expressed their satisfaction with the new material (specifically, they said it was good).  Their feelings are well placed.  The things that were good about Home are jacked up a notch in the new release.  The lyrics are compelling and complex; the beats are almost impressionistically spare.  If you think about traditionally American forms of music (jazz and the blues, principally), you often get interesting results when you filter those idioms through different cultural traditions (Chano Pozo and the Rolling Stones, for instance).  The same holds true for rap and hip-hop.  In a less abstract way than someone like MC Solaar, The Forcefield Kids are making American music that sounds foreign, which is really cool.  You can check new tracks from the last record and keep abreast of new developments at their myspace.

The Forcefield Kids – Razorblades

Akron/Family’s Set ‘Em Wild, Set ‘Em Free is one of my favorite records of the year.  Today’s discussion started with epochal albums, those albums that listeners can return to decades later and enjoy or pass along to their children with pride; Set ‘Em Wild, Set ‘Em Free isn’t going to sell forty-three million copies, but I will be stoked the first time my kids put it on the turntable. “Gravelly Mountains of the Moon” and “Last Year,” are two songs that I’ve wanted to post for months.  I finally got my hands on live versions of them and they are spine-tingling (making me even more bummed out that I was out of town for the bands Cleveland appearance this summer).   The Dead cover is just as good.  (What percentage of the audience was hoping for “China Cat Sunflower” next?  75? 90?)  Set ‘Em Wild, Set ‘Em Free is a record I’m putting in the time capsule; the tracks below offer some support for that position.  (“Last Year” sounds like it might have been performed unamplified.  I want to punch the drunk with the inflated opinion of his pipes in the face.  You’ll know who I’m talking about.)

Akron/Family – Gravelly Mountains of the Moon – Live

Akron/Family – Last Year – Live

Akron/Family – I Know You Rider – Live