[M-Mu] Music Obsessions, September 2023

I'm curious if there's any interest out there in exactly how I structure these posts, as I use a very copy paste template at this point that I'm proud of for refining this far. This month won't be super chunky on actual albums themselves, as I spent a ton of my time on a kind of half vacation, and some time obsessing over non-music subjects, but hopefully it sates whatever monthly demand there is.



| Sonic Citadel (2019) | Deezer | Spotify |

Chromatic, harsh, abrasive yet still approachable, which is quite a feat for a noise rock album. I feel like this is a great kind of album when you want the chaos, mania, and intensity of noise rock, but you need it in a lighter dose, and don't exactly want to question if a panic attack is the right mood for the day...

except for the ending track, Van Halen 2049. Good fucking god, this month wasn't even the first time I listened to this, but the actual noise off this track was so intense, it bled into my dreams for that night. There's some frequencies that blare out near the second half of that song that send childhood-like fears and chills throughout me of some abstract terror in the incomprehensible and massive force that technology can have throughout my whole body. Hairs on end, makes me want to shiver.

It terrifies me with that final track. Good shit, but it's not gonna be for everyone.



| NO NOW (2015) | Deezer | Spotify |

An album becomes quite special to me when it frustrates me on a level where, amazing ideas come and go too quickly for me to dissect them, as if you're actually hearing the fleeting sparks of creativity drift across your peripheral vision, only to see them, or hear them fade too quickly to fully process. Some might find this infuriating, and I agree, but in the alluring way that hooks me really hard.

Trying to define the genre of this, you could just throw the "glitch pop" tag on it and call it a day, but my mind instead drifts to some dusty laboratory where a team of musical scientists dusted off this old, sparkly cassette from some unknown 90's boy band, cut it in two, then fed it into a machine that acts both like a particle accelerator, and a portal to another musical dimension, and this album is what came out of it.

It is mad sparky, very distorted, brimming with a ton of creative ideas that feel so heavily distorted and layered under electronic sludge that I just want to sink my hands into, and submerge myself in. It has a deceptive amount of technical proficiency to it that some may find frustrating in how hidden and layered it is, but I personally love the kind of musical digging it invokes. It isn't gonna be for everyone, and I feel that's exactly the point, it's why this album grips me so hard. Don't be surprised if more Clarence Clarity appears next month, I work through discographies like this slowly.



| Black Holes and Revelations (2006) | Deezer | Spotify |

I have a really hard time placing what I feel is peak Muse. They're always an awkward band to discuss that people either follow the broad opinion that "they used to be great, and they aren't anymore because everything modern is bad and things that existed in the past were good", or that "Muse is for old people stuck in the past, their current music is bad, and I don't like it because the political undertones are more like overtones with how blunt they are."

Personally, I just do my best to not let outside opinions influence how I actually feel about music, and if you want a crash course on my Muse takes; Will of the People sounded okay on release but just degraded to me after multiple listens, Simulation Theory just felt like it wasn't for me, Drones is over-hated, 2nd Law is over-hated, The Resistance feels like very coherent, solid, structured ideas executed really well, and while not the end of their discography, Black Holes and Revelations is what I actually want to put a quick spotlight on.

For how...messy and unstructured a lot of it sounds, it really feels like the best ideas thought of in a vacuum, then tied together with some very thin string. This feeling does actually make sense when you look into the backstory of how the album was actually made, and how tons of ideas created in isolation got thrown out, so that only what they believed to be the best remained. There's an interview from 2007 that I feel creates a really amazing context to the process of the entire album, and where so many different inspirations and ideas were pulled from.

I have difficulties placing it as my favorite album overall by them, but I feel it definitely stands tallest as their most interesting, at the very least. That, and there's something highly abstract about the cover art that I never quite stop thinking about when I discuss the album as a whole.



| Electriclarryland (1996) | Deezer | Spotify |

This is...a weird one, and it's not why you might think, because I actually don't suggest listening to it. This one wasn't going to make the cut, but...okay, just stick with me for a minute here, don't skip over this.

I took a decent to big vacation this month to visit Megaplex, and take a friend to some places I enjoy messing around in. One of those places is the Salvation Army, as they always have a giant collection of really dumb CDs. That day, I bought two. One was an intact copy of Roller Coaster Tycoon that to my surprise, ran and installed on my Windows 11 machine just fine. The other one, was Electriclarryland, by The Butthole Surfers.

Now, if you don't know anything about them...well, I was in the same camp as almost everyone, only familiar with the main hit they had that exploded in the 90's. Pepper. This is the same album that's from, and it felt like I was exploring below the surface of something that most assumed was a one hit wonder. I wasn't really sure what to expect really, I didn't know anything else off the album. So, what was thrown at me ?

Experimental punk. VERY experimental, it sounded...almost like the bad kind of experimental, like a bunch of teenagers threw together a parody punk album that mocked a lot of different styles popular in the 80s. It was...mostly an unpleasant listen with broadly incoherent, "experimental" lyrics, and I kind of wondered what the general consensus was on the album, because it had come off like they lost their minds and just threw anything at the wall. Maybe a few tracks were pretty good, but overall it uses the idea of experimental music to say what feels like very little.

As it turns out, the broad opinion I saw was that it was too commercial. Go listen to the album before this one, idiot. You've got to be kidding me. This wasn't even them at their stupidest. As I write this though, the self-imposed deadline on this post draws far too close for me to have the time to even explore what came before this, and the broader discography and history of them.

Don't listen to this, except maybe do I guess ? I, definitely don't recommend it, but it threw me for far stronger of a loop than I expected, which I felt merited a place here. I don't know anymore, just go enjoy Pepper, it at least gives the impression of having seriousness and emotion to it. I'm also just gonna say, at least the booklet matches the tone of the album.




Kind of a shorter month on music, I had a lot of away-from-computer things going on, and there'll likely be even more next month. Still, I always appreciate anyone that reads these all the way through. Sometimes, it feels like I write these in a void, but I've been told directly that people enjoy these and look forward to them, so I suppose I'll keep at it. If you did enjoy it though, feel free to leave a kudos, as I don't have any other feedback to go off otherwise. Next month will either be extremely short, or a colossal undertaking.

Stay tuned to find out, and thanks for reading regardless 💛