Greetings from the suburban wilds! It has been a long time. A lot has happened. Happily, I can report that things are better. The wider world remains a dumpster fire but the future is looking a little brighter in this tiny pocket of existence. How are you?

There is a lot that I want to eventually get to, including some pieces that were started and abandoned over the last couple of years. All in due time, of course. This edition is your basic rundown of music to get things moving. Thank you for leaving a door unlocked and a light on for me. Shall we try this again?

Every one of Patrick Walker’s albums, regardless of project, contains at least one song that causes me to retreat into myself and spend a lot of time crying. Every time I get to the end of the song I think “wow, that was the most heartbreaking thing I’ve ever heard. Hard to imagine how he could ever make me feel like that again.” And then Little Weight arrived and I was wrung out once more.

40 Watt Sun’s productions had gotten progressively cleaner across the first three albums, but here the band return to gain and grit and the music flourishes as a result. Where the last album was very clean and sounding like Red House Painters, Little Weight sounds like Patrick fronting a restrained Cloakroom. It’s the usual slow march of music, helped immensely by having the drummer from Warning back behind the kit - the movement and variety in his playing liven up what could easily be uninspired, dismal drumming. The same sweeping, melancholic chords hang like clouds with beautifully sad solos striking within and between them like slow lightning. And above all float Patrick’s trademark nasally vocals, clear enough that you can hear each word vibrating itself out of him. I thought Perfect Light was an achievement but Little Weight is really proving to be the quintessential 40WS release.

“Pour Your Love” is the lead-off and might be the best song in the entire catalog - long yet perfectly paced. If you listen to one song on this album, make it this one. “Half a World Away” reminds me a lot of “Medicine Bottle” from Down Colorful Hill, and “Astoria” could’ve come from later in that same catalog. In my review of Perfect Light I talked about how 40WS is a good Red House Painters replacement if you love the feel of the music but can’t stand Mark. I still feel that way, probably moreso with the music on Little Weight. Unlike RHP, however, 40WS make their point without overstaying their welcome. Six tracks, forty five minutes, done.

I found out Patrick played solo at O’Brien’s last year, and he’s at the Middle East this month opening for Stygian Bough and Hell. And in other recent news Warning is back together, signed to Relapse, and coming out with the follow up to the excellent Watching From A Distance (the vinyl reissue of which showed up sometime in the last few months). This will not be the last we read about Mr. Walker here. Anyway this is incredible and very worth your time. You will dig this if you like the slower Cloakroom stuff. 

This is better than it has any right to be. I say that as someone who considers himself to be a Mark Kozelek apologist, even though his late career schtick of banal spoken word and classical guitar hasn’t done much for me in the last fourteen-ish years. Among The Leaves dropped in 2012 and was the last time he was actually singing, and even though the subject matter was similarly mundane I thought the whole package worked beautifully. The lack of a vocal melody is what I’ve been missing about his latest output and I just can’t do it. But! All The Artists is Mark doing that same sort of spoken word over piano and it works surprisingly well. I was enthralled on my first listen.

The piano pieces all sound evocative of the cover image and have a grand, triumphant vibe to them - beautiful enough that I wish the album was solo piano. Lyrically it’s still Mark talking about his day and following the various musings wherever they lead him, but he’s singing enough that there’s a musical component to his voice to latch onto. If you don’t pay too much attention (leave it on in the background, etc) it’s a pleasant noise to have on. “All the Artists Live in LA” is beautiful in spite of itself. I found myself enthralled with the spoken word track towards the end.

And here’s where I get tripped up: I genuinely love Mark’s artistic output but a) dude sucks, and b) the lyrical content of the last decade being what it is, the work feels fluffy and insubstantial, inconsequential - diary entries put to music, like none of it is intended for entry into one’s corpus of work. And the frustrating thing is that he’s got moments where he’ll sing a part and it’ll feel like genius, and then the next line is him trying to cram too many words into too small a space and it’s like “oh yeah, he’s just spouting bullshit about nothing again.” Compare to Red House Painters I, a record with actual songs that felt fleshed out and permanent. Everything from 2012 onward feels more dashed out and the possibility of connection suffers because of it.

Like most of the Sun Kil Moon catalog, definitely not for everyone. I’m honestly not sure what to really compare it to. It’s a nice sort of thing to listen to whilst lazing of an afternoon, if you can get past the fact that Mark sucks.

At some point last year I heard “Nutshell” and it put me in the mood to play this EP during some early mornings at work. I would never refer to myself as a big Alice in Chains guy - my relationship with grunge has historically been adversarial at best and I never ventured much past Pearl Jam as a kid. But I’m older now and have relaxed many of my stances, and I figured I’d find something here to appreciate.

Jar of Flies is so fucking good. Very dark, very solid. The first few songs seem to float into existence and then back out, the lines between beginning and oblivion tastefully blurred - almost like a flow that you tap into than a defined event. And each song feels like its own self-contained microcosm. “Nutshell” has this super specific vibe for me, hard to describe, like sitting on a roof and staring off into the sunset, like you’re at the end of the world and feeling a nostalgic breeze and longing for some place you can’t get back to (or, alternatively, being fifteen garage beers deep around 2a). And then the whole climax and denouement of the song are instrumental, to be filled in with the shades of your own feelings. “I Stay Away” is incredible. It’s got strings that don’t feel hokey and the movements of the music rise above butt rock-y grunge, which is where AiC always seemed to fit for me. “No Excuses” sounds like 90s alternative but the prominent bass line elevates it, and then that lead comes in for the chorus but it never takes over. There are tasteful choices everywhere that make clear this was not an effort by uncultured rock meatheads. 

So even though it sounds like 90s rock radio, these songs feel more timeless than something more anachronistic, like a Pearl Jam or a Puddle of Mudd. These are strong songs played by great musicians who use flourishes without ever detracting from the strength of the songs. Jerry Cantrell does a ton of cool shit with his guitars on these songs, the best of which being his use of modulated harmonics to haunting effect. The way the songs flow into each other feels completely natural, perhaps because they were all composed in the studio. Even the instrumental “Whale & Wasp” feels like an integral part of the flow and not a curiosity or a bid to pad the running order. Shit, “Swing on This” is a bit of a departure and somehow doesn’t feel like one; more like the band wrapping up their work with a punchline and providing a lighter-hearted salve for the heaviness they’ve just brought the listener through.

All that to say that Jar of Flies is solid, concise, and a great (if dark) listen. Can’t recommend it enough.

Warm-weather listening, folks. It’s cheesy as fuck and almost too much, but I love Permission to Land and have loved it ever since it came out. Beneath the gimmick lies a rock-solid musical base. Phenomenal riffs, ripping solos, tight-if unremarkable-rhythm work, and vocals that toe the line between tasteful and ridiculous. If you would imagine a spectrum of ridiculousness ranging from Def Leppard to Steel Panther, I’d stick The Darkness somewhere in the middle. 

The opening trifecta of ‘Black Shuck,’ ‘Get Your Hands Off of My Woman,’ and ‘Growing on Me’ is sublime - it also took me twenty years to realize that he’s singing about his dick in the latter. The single ‘I Believe in a Thing Called Love’ was everywhere and exhausted itself within months, but it’s real hard to hate - I bought myself an SG for my birthday last year and this was the first thing I played on it. Great tune, holds up surprisingly well over twenty years later. From there it’s an even mix of up-tempo rockers and slower…I wouldn’t call them ballads but they do expose the band’s soft underbelly. Though even when the band gets sentimental, like on ‘Love is Only a Feeling’ and ‘Holding My Own,’ there’s this real cheeky vibe that makes me feel like the band is collectively winking at me. Bands cultivating humor should not be a bad thing.

I will say that the production is a fatiguing listen. The instrumentation is fine but everything feels brick-walled to death, though you do stop noticing after a while.

This came out a long time ago now. Solid front to back, best thing the band ever released, couldn’t recommend it more highly. YMMV with those vocals, though.

Cast your minds back to when we talked about Obsession* a long time ago-if you were neither here nor an 18V fan, Obsession was 18V’s Black Album and made for a polarizing statement, however much I personally enjoy a listen. The hype died down, the drum throne rotated, and a couple of years later 18V returned with this self-titled offering. Basically Obsession on steroids, I talked myself into liking it (again) and have fond memories of listening to it while on tour and delivering pizza that summer. I hadn’t sat and listened to it in a very long time, but was moved to attempt a critical reappraisal during a drive from New Bedford to Billerica last autumn.

Guys it’s not good, I don’t know what the fuck I was thinking. It’s Obsession writ bigger and dumber, with the added assumption of a mantle of hokey darkness. Mostly butt rock, leaning into electronic-tinged nu metal at points and leaving almost zero trace of the band that had made a name for itself as an OC straight-edge metalcore outfit. It’s hard for me to hear anything other than a lifeless hair metal caricature. I’ll carve out exceptions for ‘Tonightless’ and ‘Brokenhearted’ because they’re catchy and the nostalgia is intact, but overall this is a flop.

And that’s tragic, because this was supposed to be the big major label debut that built upon the promise of Obsession. Their producer, Machine, trotted out all the tricks-separate tracking for the drums and cymbals, generous multi-tracking of guitars, keeping James in the control room for more intense vocal takes-to give Epic something immense. 18V is definitely a bombastic and over-produced rock record such that Obsession sounds like a polished demo in comparison, and at least in James’s case he sounds better than he ever would again. But productions by themselves do not successful records make and 18V bombed hard, not unlike the disaster that was Antenna - the internet rumor is well under 100,000 copies sold. There was an ensuing tour or two, and I remember MySpace posts about requesting the singles on Australian radio, but the writing on the wall was obvious and the band was broken up by mid-2007. To their credit, they did seem to leave most of this shit behind when they got back together a few years ago, though it didn’t help things much.

At some point we’ll get to the early catalog but I concede this one is godawful. Hard avoid unless you enjoy cringing.

*My opinion on Obsession remains unchanged but I feel obliged to state for the record that the new re-recording is dogshit. Incubus just did the same with a 23rd anniversary edition of Morning View. Bands need to stop doing this shit. I have a lot of sympathy for the act of reclaiming the rights to one’s music but I’ve heard exactly one re-recording that I felt improved upon the original**. The odds are stacked against you.

**Said re-recording is, of course, the 2006 edition of Meshuggah’s Nothing.

And that’s our show for the month. I’m currently deep into surgery on a couple of pieces that were abandoned and have been lingering on the shelf for a while, as well as processing the new items that have come into the collection this year. I mean, look at the accessions stack:

More on all of that in the coming months, I promise (especially that Whipping Boy record in the top right, that shit is really good). We’ll get going on the show report next month too. We back, baby.

Peace and love. Talk to you soon,

Joey