The Firehose #9: All Jetsam No Flotsam

Welcome to The Firehose, a personal listening diary from Chris Banks. You can follow me on Bluesky or RateYourMusic if you haven't already. There should also be a subscribe button somewhere on the page that'll send it to your inbox for free. Let's get to it.

My New Year's resolution in 2024 was to stop tracking the books I read. I realized that the rigidity of a reading goal was changing what, how, and when I read, and I didn't want Goodreads (an Amazon property) to have that kind of power over me. If you go to my profile, it still lists Yoko Ono's Grapefruit (which is great, btw) as in progress. This might be the only New Year's resolution I've ever been successful at, but I'm still pretty proud of it. I'm both forgetful and obsessive by nature, so aggressive list-making and record-keeping can be a great tool for me to combat that, but eventually, I can start maintaining the lists for the sake of the list and not my own. Tossing it all out was freeing in a way. I have no idea how many books I read in 2024, but I know I enjoyed every one of them, and that's what matters.

I'm still not sure what my 2025 resolution will be. I'm taking this time to inspect what serves me and what doesn't and trying to prune the latter. I'll let you know where I net out.

Let's talk about music.

The Guests - Popular Music

In 2018, I was at the now-defunct music venue The Boot & Saddle to see Philly punks Dark Blue. They're one of my favorites since my buddy Mike introduced me to them a year or two before that. I wasn't familiar with any openers, but avoiding anything at Boot and Saddle was hard unless the bar was full. Onto the stage came a synth/keyboard setup and a singer wearing a CCCP hammer & sickle shirt tucked into his dress pants (there was a full band, but after 7 years, most of the images elude me). Okay now I'm curious.

After four whacks to an electronic snare, they ripped into "Watching the War," a song about watching global military violence unfold that you can't do much about. Fast-forward to today, and "Watching the War" comes up on shuffle from their LP Popular Music, and suddenly, this song resonates with me for entirely different reasons than it did back then.

Popular Music is easy to draw comparisons to The Cure and other dark synth-pop acts of yesteryear, but the explicitly political message is what has given the record staying power for me. "Killing Spree" is a song about political violence against fascists that you can shake your hips to, which I don't get from Woodie Guthrie or Paint it Black.

The album closer is an ambient-ish outro with text-to-speech "vocals" that gives the mission statement for the record:

The Guests' output has functionally ceased since Popular Music. Their rhythm section, brothers Hart and Kyle Seely, are in Philly rockers Sheer Mag, whose ascent has been fun to see. Guitar/Synth player Alkiviades Meimaris released The Angels with Guns to Their Heads b/w They Want Me Dead under The Guests' banner in 2023, but mentions it was recorded "during the depths of the plague" so I assume it was recorded a few years earlier. I'm going to venture a guess that this is probably it from the band, but Popular Music has a staying power few records have for me, and I'll always appreciate that.

Rita Payés - De camino al camino

I first read about Rita Payés in Line of Best Fit while it was 8° outside in South Jersey, and I didn't expect to love it as much as I do. Modern jazz releases are like drinking from an actual firehose for me, and few have much staying power. But Payés music has an infectious warmth that fills the room and invokes the sun hitting the back of your neck, regardless of the actual temperature outside.

Being Dead - EELS

I heard Austin TX's Being Dead a few months back with the song "Blanket of my Bone" and loved it. Finally, a band in the garage space was invoking Vivian Girls' blend of dreamy Lynchian garage rock, which I hadn't heard since, well, Vivian Girls' last album in 2019. This is helped a ton by singer Falcon Bitch's vocal similarities to Vivian Girls Cassie Ramone, but musically the band has some different punches to pull. Songs will invoke Radiohead ("Big Bovine") or Devo ("Ballerina") but they always return to their home base of garage rock.

Thank You, Dream Girl

I've enjoyed watching the Hit Em genre emerge from the internet, which shows that this whole mess can still theoretically be used for something good.

For the non-extremely online folks in my audience, Hit Em is a genre that writer and musician Drew Daniel came up with in a dream.

“Had a dream I was at a rave talking to a girl and she told me about a genre called “hit em” that is in 5/4 time at 212 bpm with super crunched out sounds thank you dream girl.”

Daniel's essay in Parapraxis is a great read. As a music fan it's extremely not for me. Fast electronic music makes me incredibly jittery, but I must say that I'm rooting for more dream-based music genres to emerge.

This has been done for a few weeks now, but in light of the ongoing downfall of the American Empire™, it felt trivial to hit publish. Thanks for sticking with me. Take care of yourself out there.