08 October 2015

Soundtrack of Your Life: The Club Is Open


Date: 4 October 2015, 7:12 p.m.
Place: Brickyard Pizza
Song:  "My Valuable Hunting Knife"
Artist: Guided by Voices
Irony Matrix: 8.5 out of 10
Comment:  I've never heard Dayton's Guided by Voices piped in over a public music system. Robert Pollard and the boys soared in the '90s with three essentially perfect albums in a row. The middle one, "Alien Lanes," featured this pop masterpiece. I found them around the time of "Bee Thousand," during an afternoon commute to work. I struggled to keep Evanston's low-power WNUR tuned in as I sat in the parking garage on Wabash Avenue listening to a GBV block party, hoping the signal would hold out long enough to get to the end of the set so the DJ would ID the band. The sound was primal, classic English freakbeat, as if the lo-fi psych pop had been playing while I was in the womb and I had finally rediscovered it. I traveled to Southern California and Chicago for their final shows in 2004 (2 Texas dates that I had tickets for were canceled), and I flew to Portland, Ore., for a reunion show in 2010. My favorite band. A longtime crush under the radar. "I want to shout out to the world ..."



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Date: 5 October 2015 9:32 p.m.
Place: Home
Song:  "Pardon Me"
Artist: The Magnolias
Irony Matrix: 2.5 out of 10
Comment: After a recent move, I'm culling my VHS tapes (!), and I'm sifting through the tapes I made at the end of the '80s and in the early '90s, mostly music videos from the Heyday of the Planet of Sound. Most are still familiar, but this nugget had been long forgotten. These guys represent the era well, with a guitar-driven sound that's more polished than the Dead Milkmen but not as powerful as Buffalo Tom.



BONUS TRACKS
And back-to-back in the Airport post office during the noon hour: Guns N Roses with "Paradise City" and Elvis Costello with "Pump It Up." Rough rock among the flat-rate boxes.
 

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