mtadkins

Thom Yorke, Bill Graham Auditorium. 12/15/2018

Oddly, tonight I was having flashbacks to 1989 — pacing around my room, blowing off homework so I could listen to ‘Pictures of You’ on repeat. Play, rewind, play… & the foam headphones getting hot against my ears… feeling it all so deep. 29 years of Disintegration….

#IfOnlyIdThoughtOfTheRightWords

Built an opera house for you in the deepest jungle
& I walked across its stage singing with my eyes closed

I’ve got a love for you I just can’t escape
All of my love for you cuts me like barbed wire

I was meant to love you & always keep you in my life
I was meant to love you, I knew I loved you at first sight

– “Opera House“

Shortest time between hearing a new band for the first time & then getting a vinyl copy of the LP? Maybe this is it.

Its like a wonderful mix of my wistful, yearning, younger self’s heavy rotation of Cowboy Junkies, Galaxie 500, & Mazzy Star, with a little bit of a slowed-down Pixies vibe.  Plus I’m a sucker for lyrical, pining songs of lost love.

Even though the entire Cigarettes After Sex (yea., don’t love that name…) collection of songs sound pretty much the same, each song is a little gem, like facets of larger whole…  Been on heavy rotation for a month & I haven’t tired of it yet.

• I was massively into “Exile in Guyville” back in 1993 (sigh), & in fact I’m sure that I still have a battered & grimy CD — plastic case splintered & cracked from living in various cars & being moved around the country for 25 years — still buried in a box in my closet. There’s a new anniversary set out & I just took a break from weeks of binging on other nerdy podcasts to listen to this awesome new episode of the music-nerd show Song Exploder, which features a breakdown of “Divorce Song”.
• Aside from the deep dive back into the mid-90s, I’ve been bouncing back & forth between the new Jon Hopkins LP & the new album from Glitch Mob, which is pretty fun (even if it doesn’t have anything as glorious as “Between Two Points”  )
• I love reading David Foster Wallace, but assuredly he was an imperfect person & often a jerk, especially toward women.
• I had never heard of “The Oakland-Palestine Solidarity Mural”, but it’s only an hour away & now I’d like to check it out when next in Oakland.
• Growing up in a family that tilted toward Midwestern, evangelical Christianity, I’m familiar with the weird obsession with Israel & the ‘end times” talk of Revelation, Apocalypse, etc. The fact that evangelicals can allow this current treatment of Palestinian people, trapped in a modern day , state-sized, US-enabled concentration camp… & still call themselves “Christian” makes it clear how far from that ideal they’ve fallen.
• Other countries, the United States included (hey, we do have shrinking freedom of choice, support torture , & are developing an ever-expanding surveillance system after all…) will undoubtedly follow China’s “social credit” system, maybe we should avoid those companies that play along **cough** Apple ** cough** ….

My Top 20 XX songs (from great to awesome):

Its maybe unfair to include “Intro”, since its an undeniably hooky & badass instrumental piece, shorter than any other on the list. But #1 it is.

And obvs this is an “at this moment” kind of list. The top 5 are pretty static, but the rest shift around based on mood. As for “Stars”… I’ve yet to be near a sound system that can make it ‘too loud’ for me. #TurnItUp

The xx, live in San Francisco. April 2017 (Matt waving from the front row…)