The Firehose #2

Welcome to The Firehose, where a guy who listens to too much music recommends the best albums he heard. You can follow me on Bluesky or RateYourMusic if you haven't already done so. Let's get to it.

The Most Important Thing

Cheap Girls - Kerosene

I've seen Cheap Girls a few times live, but the last time before they broke up was at the final Bomb the Music Industry! show. During their set, a friend turned to me and said, "I forgot how much I fucking love this band," which is more or less my experience every time I come back to Cheap Girls. They're not an act I listen to a ton, especially since they broke up 7 years ago, but whenever they come up, I think, "Oh yeah, this rules."

When I first heard Kerosene, I completely forgot it was a Bad Religion cover, assuming instead it was just a random B-side to one of Cheap Girls' records that I found super catchy. I'm not the biggest Bad Religion guy. I liked them enough as a teen, but I found their production a little slick for the kind of punk rock I was interested in. I think it works much better as a Cheap Girls song, but I'm probably in the deep minority there.

Recommendations

Sheer Mag - Playing Favorites

I was super into Sheer Mag's first few 7"s; I think they were one of the first few records my wife and I bonded over. I was less enamored by their full lengths after that, more because my musical trajectory and theirs diverged pretty significantly. They went for a more polished version of punk-tinged 70s rock, and I got into free jazz and punk that sounded like it was recorded in a methadone clinic at the bottom of the ocean.

Still, whenever a Philly band gets any buzz, I'm really curious about their new releases. I put this on and found myself going back to "All Lined Up," "Moonstruck," and "Tea on the Kettle" a lot over the week. Sometimes, you need to take a few albums off from a band to remember why you liked them, you know?

Alice Coltrane - The Carnegie Hall Concert

Curtis Amy/Dupree Bolton - Katanga!

At the beginning of this week, I had a root canal that kicked my butt for the next few days. During that time, rock guitar made my head feel bad, and jazz made me feel good, so I spent a serious amount of time with Alice Coltrane's The Carnegie Hall Concert. This record was recorded live in 1971 but shelved by Impulse to sit mostly unheard until last week.

Suddenly, everyone I follow online talked about how great this new Alice Coltrane record was. Ever the contrarian, normally I dig my heels in at that kind of thing. It took my roots getting canalled for me to give in, and holy cow, I'm glad I did. The record starts delicately (a term that came up in Aquarium Drunkard's piece on this record, and one that kept popping into my head when listening) and then descends into fucking chaos and back in a really beautiful way. The throbbing percussion was a nice distraction from the throbbing of my head, and I listened to the album front to back 2-3 times, trying to wring anything I could out of it.

You don't need a root canal to enjoy this, but it might help.

To come down from that, I put on Curtis Amy and Dupree Bolton's Katanga!, which is a similarly fun but definitely more straightforward jazz record. Curtis Amy was on records from the Doors and Carole King, and Dupree Bolton is a pretty obscure figure, having ghosted pretty soon after this record came out. It's a pretty obscure record. I'm unsure how it found me, but I really enjoyed it. It's a shame that Amy and Bolton are so obscure and never collaborated again; I'd be curious to hear how they would progress.

Amancio D'Silva - Konkan Dance

Since I was pulling on a jazz thread this week, I pushed this up in my queue. I don't know much about Amancio D'Silva, an Indian jazz guitarist who moved to Britain midway through his career and seemed largely unheralded in the jazz canon. I've been on a several-year-long jazz guitar kick, and I've been trying to find more interpretations of the genre from around the world.

Sometime midweek, I put it on the TV's Spotify app while I dooted around the living room. The first track, "A Street in Bombay," was a cool, mostly atmospheric guitar with simple percussion. It meanders for its 11-minute runtime, but it's a good vibe.

The second track, "What Maria Sees," really got me. I had to immediately research if this was something that came out in the 2000s because it reminds me more of a toned-down BADBADNOTGOOD track or one of Madlib's Beat Konducta releases than something from the early 1970s. The drums are crisp and lend themselves to a more hip-hop beat than I expected, and the bass straight-up sounds like a sample to me, even though it's not.

The whole album is great; I'm glad I found D'Silva during a week I desperately needed jazz to listen to.

The Dandy Warhols - The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald

I did not expect to like this as much as I did! I'm not the biggest Dandy Warhols guy, but I know a few songs via an old roommate I've lost touch with. I'm even less of a Gordon Lightfoot guy; my relationship with him begins and ends with Nico's version of "I'm Not Sayin'" (I am a huge Nico guy, though). I know the original version of "The Wreck..." and have listened a few times, but not recently.

As I understand it, this was recorded and put on early versions of The Black Album but dropped off later reissues. Then, in 2023, they ended up releasing this EP with two versions of "The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald" and two b-sides from The Black Album sessions.

The whole EP is 20+ minutes of big blissed-out shoegaze guitars and vocals competing to be heard. "Alien" ups the tempo a bit and feels out of place, but I can't complain about sequencing too much for a collection of b-sides (which I think ultimately this is). The whole EP envelopes you with distortion in a comforting sort of way.

Nick Drake - Bryter Layter

The Cure - Faith

As someone who came of age in the late 90s/early 00s, there's still a crop of artists with whom my awareness of their catalog hinges on what CDs I bought 25 years ago. Both Nick Drake and The Cure are among those artists. I'm a big fan of what I know and have meant to get around to the rest of their catalog forever, and I'm only recently doing so.

A good friend burned me a copy of Nick Drake's Pink Moon during my senior year of high school. It entered heavy rotation in early college, but that's all the Nick Drake I have listened to since. Pink Moon ruled so hard that I never really went any further.

Bryter Layter is a great listen, but it doesn't give me much I haven't already felt with Pink Moon. If the order had been reversed and I had a burnt copy of Bryter Layter in 2006, I'd still probably love Nick Drake. Perhaps this section would be about Pink Moon instead.

My route to The Cure has more twists and turns. Growing up, my dad was into many of their more popular singles, such as Friday I'm in Love, Love Song, etc. From a pretty young age, I was at least aware of them. Then, around my teen years, I was a burgeoning goth kid and was beaten over the head with Cure recommendations on web forums and LiveJournal. In my long-lost CD collection were Boy's Don't Cry, Disintegration, Bloodflowers, the 2006 self-titled album, and the 2-CD Greatest Hits/Acoustic Hits compilation*. Only in the past few years have I filled in the gaps with their expansive catalog.

Faith is an interesting listen in 2024. The album rules; I can comfortably say I loved the record and went back to it a few times over the week. What's interesting to me is, as a casual Cure fan I was pretty unaware of every song. None of these tracks made the 2001 Greatest Hits record; none are among the canon that even casuals (like myself) would know. "All Cats Are Grey" was the only title I knew gazing at the tracklist pre-listen, and that's because it gets name-dropped in The Mountain Goats' "Get High and Listen to The Cure." That said, it would be weird to pull any of these tracks out as a single. "Primary" was the actual single of the record, and that was the most obvious choice, but the record works best as a whole.

*I only really spent a bunch of time with the Acoustic Hits side of that greatest hits CD because I lost the first disc only a few days after purchasing it. Twenty years later, I'm still 99% sure I dropped it in the parking lot of a Hardee's in Hanover, Pennsylvania, when getting into my mom's minivan. I had put the CD in the case of Saves the Day's Stay What You Are, and that fell out when I hopped in. So it goes.

Music Writing I Liked

I didn't listen to that much this week, but I read a ton. Below is a bunch of stuff I liked.

I Saw The Armed for What They Are (Eli Enis/Chasing Sundays)

Light Pollution: The Roots of Ambient Jazz (Brent Sirota/Aquarium Drunkard) This was part of my root canal jazz trip.

Somebody That I Used to Know & In Conversation: Jason Black of Hot Water Music (Norman Brannon/Anti-Matter) Benign ancient punk-scene drama is fascinating to me, but this was interesting way beyond that.

Katie Crutchfield Reviews Every Waxahatchee Album (Steven Hyden/Indie Mixtape) Artist reviews their back catalog is one of my favorite listicle formats. Of course I loved this.

Partying With The U.S. Army At South By Southwest (Dan Gentile/Defector)

Alice Coltrane :: The Carnegie Hall Concert (Jarrod Annis/Aquarium Drunkard)

Held like a penny I found (Niko Stratis/Anxiety Shark) I love the way Niko talks about the new Waxahatchee LP.

Here's a running Spotify playlist of everything I ever feature here.

That's it for this week. Be well. Take care of your teeth.