15 Albums That Mean Something to Me: 'Alopecia', Why?

Basically, you just can't ignore an album the first lyric of which is

I'm not a ladies' man I'm a landmine 
Filming my own fake death. 

Can't ignore, can't argue. I STILL get goosebumps every time I listen to it. It is one of the ones whose lyrics I have shamelessly plagiarised in my own writing. This is probably one of the few albums that makes it on here according to musical merit more than the memories I directly associate with it - mainly because, unusually amongst these records - it was recommended to me by someone that I didn't know very well, and chased it up simply because I was looking for new music (well, mainly. Also he had trendy glasses and LOOKED LIKE A YOUNG STEVE ALBINI.) We still don't know each other terribly well, so it wasn't one of those albums that became friendship/relationship defining (let's not beat about the bush, I pretty much only ever check out music because someone I crush on recommends them to me.)* However, this is a bit of a double edged sword, because I do feel a sense of ownership over Why? that I have with very few other bands. You know how, if you get introduced to a musician by a friend or a lover, there's often this slight sense that you're an imposter - not *truly* a fan, just someone who likes this band because someone older/wiser/better-informed/looking/in some other way unattainable - knows a lot more about them than you do. You know that feeling, right? Of course you do, because you're reading about music on the internet, and the ONLY reason anyone ever does that is because they're looking for that elusive sense of belonging. I'm right, yeah? That sense that you know enough about a band to not be embarrassed when someone calls you on your knowledge. Otherwise, why would you give a fuck what the name of the bassist is, would you? You don't. I know you don't. You know I know you don't. You and I both just don't want to look stupid.

But yeah. With Why? it really wasn't like that. The boy I was trying (VAGUELY) to impress didn't live in my city, so basically I was just allowed to get on with it. They were kind of my secret, you know? Which meant that I didn't have to know the names of all the band members or the chronology of their different releases: I could just listen. Really listen. And I lapped this album up in a way that happens very rarely to me. And it's so meaty - lyrically, it's just unbelievably dense, and even the resonances in Yoni Wolf's intonation repay seriously close attention. One of the lyrics from the album runs:

'I'll suck the marrow out - and rape your hollow bones Yoni'

Right, so *I'M NOT WEIRD* - but this feels to me like an apt metaphor for what you do with this album. It's undeniably lyrically oblique - abstruse, even - but it's insistent and when you listen to it, you force meanings onto it. Meanings, perhaps, that doesn't quite fit the individual lyric or the delivery but makes perfect sense to you at the time - and for me, that means that this listening from one end of this album to another is stuffed full of memories that have literally nothing to do with the album itself. For posterity, I will now record the most prominent example:

'You're a beautiful and violent word
With the skinny neck of a chinese bird'
('These Few Presidents', Alopecia)

This never fails to remind me of Sam, who's always struck me as birdlike. This was particularly the case when we were first going out because he had a fuzzy shaved head which really put me in mind of unfledged down. I remember going to stay at his house after Christmas, when we hadn't seen each other for a while, and I'd been listening to Why? a lot in the interim, and we were in bed together and it felt so nest-like that the image stayed with me, and it's now become an integral part of the way that I think about him.

Jesus. It is too much to talk about all the different things this album means to me. Take it as read that EVERY song on this album has three or four moments in it that have memories that strong - that fucking physical - attached to them. And that, my exciting TWO READERS, is why it is in my top 15 albums ever.

PS: After I am done with my Top 15 albums, I may do a Top 15 Why? lyrics, and go into more detail about the images they evoke for me. PROJECT JAZZ HANDS! 

And here endeth the lesson.

 *For the purposes of pointless autobiographising, I have for years been vaguely meaning to organise my record collection according to which boys I was trying to impress with each purchase. This has never happened due to SHAME, but perhaps now is the time.

15 ALBUMS THAT MEANT SOMETHING TO ME #3: STOP MAKING SENSE, TALKING HEADS

So, not that many people have been reading these posts (2 for the last one I wrote. A WHOLE TWO. One was my boyfriend; who was the other???? SOMEONE WHO DOES NOT KNOW ME PERSONALLY IS READING SHIT I AM PUTTING OUT ON THE INTERNET OMG I AM FAMOUS)

Annnnnnnnywayyyyyyyy...

There aren't that many of you all out there, but the two people who have read the last posts I did about '15 Albums That Meant Something To Me' may have noticed that they are usually associated with a specific time and place. In this respect, 'Stop Making Sense' is a trend-bucker. It sort of forms a refrain throughout my life: In fact, I can't remember a time when I *didn't* know that album - it's always, always sounded familiar to me. Trying to imagine what it was like to hear it for the first time is a bit like trying to remember what it was like to learn to write: except even vaguer and stranger, because no one ever *teaches* you to listen to Talking Heads, although if I had my way and also magically became education secretary despite not really being very pro this whole 'parliamentary politics' endeavour, I would probably make laws to ensure that this did happen. Anyway, it's always been familiar because it was one of those pieces of music that my parents had on tape and played in the car on long journeys, so until about 2001 I mainly associated it with the M4 (visiting grandma) the M1 (visiting other grandma) and the M11 (going on middle-class holidays.) Actually, there's a weird beauty to parts of the M11 route - mainly the fens- that works surprisingly well with the edgier tracks on 'Stop Making Sense' - try being 7 (in fact, it being your 7th birthday) and your parents getting you up while it's still dark to beat the traffic out of London and then falling asleep wrapped up in a duvet and being woken up with the sun full in your face in the middle of flat-as-piss-on-a-plate East Anglia BY THE LIVE VERSION OF PSYCHO KILLER WHICH IS JUST DAVID BYRNE AND A TAPE RECORDER. Plus you're about to stop at Little Chef to receive birthday donuts AND a copy of the Walt Disney Robin Hood film on VHS. Perfeck.

The coup-de-grace for me, though, and the real reason why this album makes it on here as opposed to any of the other parental car-based cassettes, is because when I finally got around to buying my own copy of the album (on CD this time) it was an extended version with an extra six songs tagged onto the original album track-list. So there I was, happily nodding along to 'Psycho Killer' and 'Burning Down The House' and then I went to the toilet and then I came back and WHAM BAM IT WAS 'THIS MUST BE THE PLACE (NAIVE MELODY)' AND SUDDENLY I WAS IN LOVE. IN LOVE. I've never, before or since, felt the shock of something so utterly and devastatingly beautiful emanating from something so familiar. It was so unexpected. I don't have children, but it felt like what I imagine it must feel like the first time you see a child of yours and for a minute you don't recognise them because you have suddenly grasped, in your bones and stomach, that they're not a child any more - they're an adult, and they're beautiful. Generally, you know, I don't go for beauty in music. I care about energy, and conviction, and sex, and intelligence. If it doesn't make me want to dance, or fuck, or cry, or inscribe the lyrics into my flesh (cf John Darnielle) then, for the most part, it can go hang. But this song, and this album, is beautiful, undeniably. It has the quality of something uncanny about it, for me. It keeps coming back, in slightly different forms. That's partly to do with the proliferation of different versions of the songs - firstly from covers (recent once include The Arcade Fire and MGMT, as I'm sure you know) and secondly due to the fact that, because Stop Making Sense is a live album, different versions of most of these tracks appear throughout the Talking Heads oeuvre. But I think for me there's something a bit more going on here. This album reminds me that even when you think you've got a band, or an album, or even a song, pinned - when you really think that you've wrung all the juice from it that you're ever going to get - you're wrong, basically. Music will always, always have the power to come back and bite you on the arse. And that, actually, is what you want it to do.

Here endeth the lesson.      

15 ALBUMS THAT MEANT SOMETHING TO ME #2: THE FUTUREHEADS, BY THE FUTUREHEADS

The first time I heard this album was in the Fopp on Rose Street in Edinburgh, August 2004. You remember back in the day, when most people didn't have the internet or iPods or anything and if they wanted to buy an album they hung around in record shops and waited for the grumpy dude behind the counter to put the record they were interested in on those little banks of headphones where you could stand and look really cool and hope all the boys noticed? Well, yeah, I was doing that, and to be honest I just stuck the Futureheads on because the other records available were Gang of Four's Entertainment!, which I mistrusted as too highbrow, and some irrevelevant shitey jazz that you're not legally eligible to listen to if you're female or less than 47 years old. Anyway, that probably holds the record for my 'best-single-music-related-decision-originally-taken-to-impress-boys'; it certainly outweighed spending 25 quid on Dylan tickets because I had a crush on some knobhead who thought he was the best musician that ever lived (spoiler: HE'S NOT). Anyway, I liked them immediately: the way that occasionally happens when you meet a friend of a friend in a bar and know by the end of the evening that you're going to spend a bit too much of the next decade making fart jokes on their Facebook wall. All of this was great, for two reasons. Reason 1 was that it meant that I knew of the Futureheads before they became famous for being That Band What Did A Cover of 'Hounds Of Love' Which Is Possibly More Eccentric Than The Original. I don't usually have the energy to know about good bands Before They Get Famous, so this was a rare treat. The second reason was that the second week I was in Edinburgh, I lost the CD carrier I had brought with me (yeah, 'CD carrier' muthafucka. Remember them? No, of course you don't, because you're on the internet and therefore 10) so the only music I had for the six weeks I spent there was the CD I had playing in my Discman at the time - this one. This is probably the one album associated with a specific time and place more strongly than any other piece of music I've ever listened to, ever. It's weird, because the album sounds definitively modern: those precise guitars and sweet-voiced, I-don't-give-a-fuck-about-gender-paradigms harmonies never fail to recall for me bruised, brooding, historical, masculine Edinburgh, but there you go. Memories that involve music are always like that: endlessly contradictory, endlessly compelling. And also, this album is so good. Just so fucken GOOD, man. I'm re-listening to it now, and I still can't fault it. Do you remember those chocolatey pretzel crisp things that you used to be able to buy around 1998/9? The ones that worked because they were all crisp astringent interior and then melty sweet chocolate on the outside, and then part of the pleasure of them came from just how unexpected they are? This album is like those guys: there's the crisp, brittle precision of Dave Hyde's drums, then the sugariness of the famous acappela backing vocals, and THEN ON TOP OF THAT THEY TALK ABOUT MURDER AND PEADOPHILIA AND SHITTY LOW PAID TEMP JOBS AND THEN THEY WHIP OUT THE KATE BUSH COVER AND START CHATTING ABOUT MAN RAY. Seriously, re-listening to this album now: these dudes are so under-rated. Everyone liked them, but no one seemed to think they were that interesting. And damn it, they are! They're clever and funny and interesting and actually, I'd really like to be friends with them. Even if in 2004, all I cared about was that they wrote kick ass music for indie kids to dance to and I thought that if I listened to them enough I would magically be transformed into the kind of girl that boys who look good in tight trousers wanted to kiss.

This was meant to be a facebook post, but then I got qualmist about how maybe it was a little bit too personal for friends only,and decided instead to post it to EVERYBODY ON THE ENTIRE INTERNET. HURRAH. Ok, here it is. It's about music, predictably: 15 ALBUMS: [The rules: Don't take too long to think about it. Fifteen albums you've heard that will always stick with you. List the first fifteen you can recall in no more than fifteen minutes. Tag fifteen friends, including me, because I'm interested in seeing what albums my friends choose.] DISCLAIMER: These are not the 15 albums that I love the most, or the ones that I think are best, whichever criteria it might be that you're using to define 'best' at any given moment. They're the ones around which memories have crystalised and hardened to such an extent that I fully expect to be hanging on to them long after I've started mistaking my children for my siblings and have been packed off to the nursing home/labourcamp/privatised incinerator for the elderly and infirm which will no doubt be the only option for impecunious OAPs once this government is through with our health service. ANYWAY THAT IS NOT THE POINT I AM NOW TALKING ABOUT MUSIC THAT I LOVE AND CARE ABOUT: 1 - The Mountain Goats - Tallahassee I first came across the Mountain Goats through the good offices of a close friend who was going through a horrendously painful break-up and, as a result, linked me to possibly the most acrid divorce ballad ever written, 'No Children'. Although I thought it was great, I was a callow 23 year old at the time, and was more interested in taking ecstasy and listening to Dodgy's 'Staying Out for The Summer' and Das Racist's 'Pizzahut/Tacobell' remixes to pay much more attention. When I finally got round to following up the tip, I bought the only MG album in the shop, the excellent but slightly less mindblowingly, accost-you-in-a-dark-alleyway-and-hold-a-knife-to-your-throat-while-divesting-you-of-small-change-family-keepsakes-and-probably-underwear arresting 'We Shall All Be Healed'. So I forgot about them for a while, and listened to some more Dodgy. Hey, I thought. Mountain Goats. They're on the longlist. I'll get round to it one day. It didn't matter that my friend was practically howling at me to buy Tallahassee. What the fuck, I thought. He howled at me to buy St Vincent, too, and he was definitively wrong about that. More Dodgy. When I finally did get round to buying it, it sat virtually unlistened on my iPod for a few months. And then it was November, and it was a pisswet day, and I was hungover as hell and I had the glaze in my eyes from too much shagging and I also had the sinking feeling in my stomach that, at the age of 24, I was learning to recognise as an early sign that I was falling in love (again) with the wrong person (again) and suddenly 'Staying Out For The Summer' didn't seem quite the thing. I was walking down Crookes Valley Road in Sheffield and put Tallahassee on - maybe because I wanted something to match the bile and dread of 'No Children', maybe because I was going to work and I knew that if I listened to it, I'd have something to talk to my friend about which wasn't this new and painful dread in the stomach. And then I heard: 'I handed you a drink of the lovely little thing On which our survival depends People say friends don't destroy one another What do they know about friends.' Bizarrely, that love-affair - despite possibly the most acrid beginnings in the history of relationships that John Darnielle might plausibly write a concept about - worked out pretty well. In fact, if anything, it's the only time I have ever fell completely, besottedly, and embarrassingly in love with two people at the same time. One of them, predictably, was John Darnielle.