From morning ... till the end of the day ...
At the gym on Thursday, the music selection veered from mainstream pop to the National*. There is was, the new single, "Tropic Morning News." I've been listening to the new album, "The First Two Pages of Frankenstein," and I read the band profile in the New Yorker a few weeks ago, and the new songs haven't clicked yet. After Siri plays the album, she wanders off to some Matt Berninger solo work, and those songs resonate more.
As I emerged from the locker room to start my workout, there was the unmistakable tenor of Berninger's mumble and the familiar new tune. My buddy Ralph had just emailed the other day, name-checking the song that seemed to be bringing him 'round to the band. The National had a run as my favorite band -- saw them live in L.A. at the Greek in 2016 and then at the Santa Fe Opera in 2019. My latest favorite is Waxahatchee, who often sings me to sleep for pre-dinner catnaps. What a little kick to see the National get within earshot of the millennials pumping iron on a Thursday morning in the High Desert
Date: June 29, 2023, 10:40 a.m.
Place: Chuze Fitness in Uptown Albuquerque
Song: "Tropic Morning News"
Artist: The National
Irony Matrix: 2.1 out of 10
* - After writing that, I realized that the National has won a Grammy and have had No. 1 albums, so maybe they've been mainstream for the past decade? Remember, we did hear them at JFK back in 2014.
Soundtrack of Your Life is an occasional feature in which we mark the songs of our relative youth as played over public muzak systems.
* * *
And then it was date night -- Wavves and Cloud Nothings double-billing it at Sister Bar. I assumed that Wavves would open, and we figured we had missed them when we walked in a little after 8 and saw the Cloud Nothings setting up their gear. They would proceed to thrash and burn. While they were setting up, the house PA blared classic New Wave.
Before the show, I had sampled a couple of Wavves songs, and the YouTube algorithm, for some reason, segued into a recent "60 Minutes" profile of David Byrne. I devoted 13 minutes to it and then dared my childhood friend -- who famously claimed to have tossed his Talking Heads vinyl in the garbage in the mid-'80s after declaring the band sellouts -- to make nice with the memory of Byrne, now white-haired and avuncular. While the Cloud Nothings tuned up, "Psycho Killer" played, and I appreciated the inner-workings of the Matrix in that moment.
(YouTube followed the Byrne bit with another recent "60 Minutes" profile, this one of production guru Rick Rubin. It was heartening to see and hear Chuck D as one of the prominent talking heads.)
Cloud Nothings often traded in dystopian distortion, often engaging in death races to the ends of songs. In the middle of songs they would descend into jazz-odyssey noodling, only to re-emerge with the beat to finish a song. Jayson Gerycz is a monster behind his center-stage kit.
We last saw the band just before Covid hit, in February 2020, when they opened for Cursive. Then, too, they deconstructed their songs before reassembling them, sort of their version of Nirvana's fast-slow-fast M.O. This week, though, they seemed miffed or annoyed, maybe because they were the middle band on the bill. The crowd was adoring the noise. There was a mosh pit that was mostly benign. For about two songs it was just young women slamming into each other, but they were friendly and pleasant about it. None of those skinhead skippers.
Wavves were OK, but we left around 10, mainly because there was just no way the headliners was going to match the energy of the bashers from Cleveland.
BONUS TRACKS
The aforementioned National single:
Highlights from the Cloud Nothings set, starting with "Pattern Walks":
And always a favorite, the Replacements homage"I'm Not Part of Me":
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