The Firehose #7

Welcome to The Firehose, a personal listening diary. You can follow me on Bluesky or RateYourMusic if you haven't already done so. Let's get to it.

Welcome back to my increasingly poorly scheduled newsletter. How are you? I've had a draft of this going for about a month now and couldn't quite get what I was going for on the page. So, taking inspiration from our lord & savior Rowdy Roddy Piper, when I can't find the answers I change the questions. This is now a listening diary instead of whatever it was before. I'm trying to take the pressure off myself to write something perfect and instead just keep stuff moving and document music I found insteresting. Perfect is the enemy of good, and all that.

Also, I deleted or misplaced the old Firehose header Photoshop template I was using. I was never quite happy with it, so I took the opportunity to make the one you see above. The photo was taken by Mick Haupt, with modifications by me.

Here's what I spent the last month on:

Johnny Blue Skies - Passage du Desir

Sturgill Simpson is a genius who regularly wrestles with what it means to be a musician and how much he wants to deal with the music industry. Most interviews or profiles mention how much he hates being interviewed and profiled, which I guess I am also guilty of doing here. So it's surprising that he'd drop his given name for an alias after ascending the country music industry, but not that surprising. Plus, if you were paying attention online, we had about a month of DISCOURSE around the name change, allowing Sturgill Simpson = Johnny Blue Skies to be stomped into your brain forever.

Moving beyond all that, because none of that actually matters, Passage du Desir is a fantastic record in the modern country music canon. But it's not just a country record. The opening track "Swamp of Sadness" would feel right at home on Simpson's initial trio of cosmic country records, 2013's High Top Mountain, 2014's Metamodern Sounds in Country Music, and 2016's A Sailor's Guide to Earth, but Passage du Desir has more tricks up its sleeve and starts playing them immediately. "If the Sun Never Rises Again" is a warm, fuzzy 1970s Southern Rock song that makes me want to rewatch The Last Waltz. My wife called "Scooter Blues" "A Jimmy Buffet song for Millenials," and I can't top that descriptor so I won't even try. "Jupiter's Faerie" is Simpson doing what he does best: a big country-tinted song that crescendos in a really satisfying way. Sort of an inverse "It Ain't All Flowers."

I have to stop myself from doing a boring "this is what every song on the album invokes in me" write-up, but I think the varied nature of this record is a good indicator of where Simpson's at at this point in his career. He's paid his dues, and now he gets to write "musician" as the occupation on his taxes. The tickets will move, and the streams will accumulate whatever pittance they earn, not because he wrote a killer single but because he's Sturgill Simpson. The payoff is that he gets to extend himself creatively and make an anime album companion, or a couple of bluegrass records, or change his name to Johnny Blue Skies. He can change the rules if he thinks the game being played by the music press is unfair (which I'm not sure if I agree with, but I don't like to be scrutinized either). His catalog shows that he's earned it, and he's taking advantage of that freedom.

For a couple of weeks after the album dropped the last notes of the closer, "One for the Road" would play and I'd ask myself "what do you want to listen to now?" And for the longest time I wouldn't have a better answer than "Passge du Desir again." Some days I'd listen to it 7 times in a row. It's one of my favorites in 2024 and absolutely worth your time.

MSPAINT - Post-American

The other week I was listening to The First Ever Podcast with Steven Hyden as the guest. The podcast was pretty much made for me, I've been a fan of the host, Jeremy Bolm and his band Touche Amore since someone hipped me to their demo on The B9 Board, and Steven Hyden is one of the music writers I always look out for. The conversation was good, Hyden was talking about his new book There Was Nothing You Could Do: Bruce Springsteen's "Born in the U.S.A." and the End of the Heartland, but also spent a lot of time discussing the state of music and how he came up as a music writer. He said something that stuck with me, though, and that's what I'm connecting to MSPAINT.

...just to see the past that we grew up with, the music that we grew up with and we have a certain idea of like what our history is. Then you have these young people come in and they're rewriting our history. They're saying this band is great. And we're like, really that band? What about this other band, they're like, well, we don't care about that band.

Someone said to me that MSPAINT put out one of their favorite hardcore records last year, and my first "old man yells at cloud" reaction was, "You think this is hardcore?!" I mostly think genre discourse is dumb, and most online outlets list MSPAINT as some combination of post-hardcore, synth-punk, and post-punk, but I've seen enough hardcore circles discuss (both good and bad) MSPAINT that it's clear that there's some crossover into the hardcore scene. As the kids say, it's hardcore-adjacent.

I've thought a lot about the flattening of music fandom in the age of streaming. Back in my day (yeah, I'm doing that), there was a value proposition in anything you listened to. A CD costs $10-20, and you had to be pretty sure you would like it before buying it. This meant if I really liked Sick of it All, I was way more likely to purchase music that just sounded like Sick of it All than to take a chance genre-hopping. If I made music, guess what? It would probably sound a lot like Sick of it All.

Not only is that value proposition is gone, but it sounds archaic in 2024. For better or worse you have a large chunk of all recorded music ever at your fingertips. If your top three artists are Hatebreed, Kid Cudi and Einstürzende Neubauten you're only a little weird, and not a goddamn space alien.

If hardcore today can be (or be adjacent to) "Pat Flynn joins With Teeth-era Nine Inch Nails" we're all probably better off for it. Post-American is a great record, I would like to yell "BURN ALL THE FLAGS AND THE SYMBOLS OF MAN" in a mosh pit pile-on.

Quick Hits

Cindy Lee - Diamond Jubilee

Everyone loved this record a few months ago, and it took me forever to listen to it. The record it invokes most in me is Frank Ocean's Blonde. Both are reverb-heavy albums that fill the space you're in with a lush, relaxing vibe. A friend called it "the album you listen to when you do a bunch of ketamine after getting back from the club." I can't vouch for that, but maybe that hits for you. If you haven't listened yet, you should.

The Messthetics and James Brandon Lewis

I'll listen to anything that features the words "former Fugazi members," but few of those projects have the staying power that The Messthetics/James Brandon Lewis collaboration has. Jazz Fusion is too often just "jazz fused with the most masturbatory rock you've ever heard," so I'm not in love with that descriptor here, but this is literally a fusion of jazz and experimental punk rock, so here we are. The Messthetics keep to their formula of excellent, riffy, wordless rock, and defer to Lewis to carry the melody with his fantastic wailing saxophone. I wish I caught them when they were in Philly a while back.

Clairo - Charm

I dug Clario's very early Bandcamp stuff around 2013-14, but fell off as we got deeper into the 2010s when she really started to blow up as an artist. I didn't dislike that era of her music; my tastes were moving away from bedroom pop as a genre, and she was really becoming a trailblazer there. What I've always liked, however, is professional wrestling. So when I saw that Clairo collaborated with Beyond Wrestling/Wrestling Open for the "Juna" video, which heavily featured some of my favorite indie wrestlers (Joey Janela, Alec Price, Megan Bayne) I was curious. "Juna" has been a considerable earworm for me since I first heard it. Between this and Chapelle Roan wearing a luchador mask Lollapalooza it seems like pro wrestling is having a moment, and I'm here for that.

Fun Boy Three - Waiting

I have a pretty casual relationship with The Specials. I think I owned the first self-titled record and a Greatest Hits comp on CD, but I never delved deeper than that. So I was completely unaware of their side project, Fun Boy Three, until "We're Having All the Fun" came on Busytown, a radio show on East Village Radio from Mina Tavakoli and Sasha Frere-Jones. Great record, great single. I'm psyched to get more into Fun Boy Three's catalog.

Here's a running Spotify playlist of everything I ever feature here (Except Cindy Lee).

Hardcore will never die, but you will.