This one's for Scotland, man - for Scotland!

Clive has a nice music weblog, somnolence, which you should check out if you have not already done so. I would put a link to it on my links page if I had one, but I don't (I'm not sure yet if I really want to remedy this: I used to have one but I didn't like having to decide whether to link people on it, for whatever reason).

Listening to the Beta Band, "Around the Bend", I was suddenly struck of a memory of walking across central campus in Ames, a couple of years ago. Very hot day, grass brown and dying in the fall, beautiful sky. I was listening to "Mogwai Fear Satan" and striding with big steps, in a hurry (but not really) to cross campus for a class. Then I saw the sky and it combined with the music and it was the first time I ever remembered crying at all to music, even tearing up. I tried to write about it during class, but I couldn't get the words to come out right - I still can't. But it wasn't from the song being "sad" (I don't think that one is, even), or from the music overwhelming me in a direct sense. Right then, I felt sad because of how great, how beautiful, everything seemed at that moment. Sad because it made me just want to feel so much more, let go - and I felt like I couldn't do that.

I get this feeling a lot, but not usually that strongly. Hearing "Around the Bend" just now it seemed as if this sort of thing is at the heart of so many of the Beta Band's most climactic moments, like here, or in "Eclipsed". Or maybe I should say "climactic," because they might still sound pretty restrained to a lot of people - as if the band are too stoned or just too incompetent to really hit the big choruses. But listening I never feel that way at all - and maybe this is why.

And I only have one other disc of Jobim stuff, which is totally schmaltzy compared to the Getz/Gilberto one, so sometimes I really wish Getz would just shut the fuck up. I mean, yes, he plays great and everything, blah blah blah, but he's way more cutting, and a lot louder, than everything else on the disc. At the moment I would much rather listen to the dude mumbling stuff in Portuguese.

Or just the rhythm section tinkling along for all eternity. This has got to be one of the best-sounding discs I own, in the class of live-sound-reproducing discs. The sound on most other jazz from this era is comparable, but because of the music they're playing the sound on this disc is a lot more distinct, and the quiet volume makes it seem finer (sort of in the sense of 'more delicate').

The omnipresent acoustic guitar, playing the basic samba rhythm, on the Getz/Gilberto album, retains some sort of percussive properties but most of the time it's so quiet that it sounds quite unlike anything else I can ever remember hearing. I find myself ignoring everything else in the songs and simply focusing in on my left headphone, blissfully listening to the gentle rhythm over and over and over again...

Sometime last week I told Ethan I was listening to a Soundgarden CD, and as is typical, he made fun of me for (still) liking any grunge. So later I thought I'd listen to Pearl Jam, specifically No Code. While I still listen to Nirvana frequently, and I've listened to a lot of Soundgarden in the past year, and Alice in Chains' Dirt a few times, I've sort of been avoiding my Pearl Jam CDs. I bought No Code during my freshman year, which was right before I started snobbishly disdaining mainstream rock music (or, to put it differently: disdaining my past). We even got rubber stamps with the album art design on them (see the picture three over and two up from the bottom left on the front cover art) because we bought it the morning it came out. At the time, I loved the album, and played it all the time. I also didn't see what the problem was everyone was having with it. (Well, I did see, but I didn't see why people had to be so stuck on hearing the band play the old music.)

But with time, I sort of drifted away from Pearl Jam. I stopped listening to their records. Not really out of any explicit decision to stop - it's just that, whenever it occurred to me that I hadn't listened to one in a long time, it also occurred to me that I didn't really feel like remedying the state of affairs. But the band released Yield just at the tail end of the time I felt like a fan, so I bought that too. It had some good songs on it, ones I that I liked and that affected me. But it all felt too conventional, too plain-old-rock, for me, for the kind of music I thought I wanted to listen to, so I sort of pushed myself (already drifting) further away. Once, looking for something to spend money on and hoping to feel some old feelings, I bought the live album that came after that. But I never listened to it much at all. So by the time the next album came out, I had drifted too far away.

By then, though, it wasn't completely a musical thing. I had since come to remember that I like the simple songs, too, the rock songs, and that the label they're on doesn't really mean much to me. I don't know what their new album sounds like - maybe I would like it. But I've got plenty of other things to hear right now, so I guess I just don't have time. There are other people doing the simple songs.

I regret this a little, partly because of the personal meaning the old records have for me. And I don't mean that like any sort of direct correspondence to real life: hearing "Indifference" come on in the car making a special moment with her, or stewing in my room with "Spin the Black Circle" on - normal teenaged life stuff, sure, but just in the general background, not any big moments.

No Code still sounded good to me. But does that mean I'm going to make more of an effort? I'm not sure.

The ending is a dud (in the 'fizzled out instead of exploding' sense), though. Too bad fadeouts weren't widely used on jazz recordings of this time. Cyclic/droney twenty minute songs require good exit devices.

At the moment I'm entranced by the long sort-of-Spanish modal number from Coltrane's Ole Coltrane album, "Ole". One way it's obvious that there's "rhythm everywhere," like Coltrane liked: if I try to follow Elvin's pattern on the snare, I get a little tripped up, unless I focus very explicitly on it and not the rhythms from the two bassists, the piano, Trane or Dolphy, or the other things Elvin is bashing.

The most touching thing I have heard today: the way Kurt Cobain says 'thank you' at the end of 'Aneurysm' on the live album.

The most exhilirating thing I have heard today: the sped-up intro to 'Smells Like Teen Spirit' on the following track.