Noo Outlet 9—The Summer Ends
My needless take on a throwaway diss quote, some great albums with big feelings and sad Moogs, updates on cute names like Katy Kirby and Cindy Lee, and actually not a single Brush of Note—sorry!
So, realizing there’s no actual publishing schedule, no money being made or lost here on Noo Outlet, and of course how nothing in life is promised, I took the summer off from the newsletter. I got out and enjoyed the long throes of light and warmth while we had them. ‘Twas nice. Anyway, now the sun sets at six again, and we’re so back.
I’m late to the game on this one, but finally read the quote “Writing about music is like dancing about architecture” (or, in its predecessor, “…like singing about economics”). The idea being that such an endeavor is at its root illogical. Sure! Great! I’m not going to challenge that notion so much as say, for my part: Both things sound cool to me, and what’s it to you? I write about music because I love music, and because I enjoy reading other people’s writing about music. My focus is on the positive reviews, the ones just so excited about what’s being created that they want to tell people about why they love it. I treasure the attempt to ascribe the experience of listening to great music—something far more complex, immediate, and infinite—into the plane of written word. For better or worse, this translation is a very human thing, as we seek to decipher and convey our own nebulous feelings, and because we are social creatures at our core.
But the point, though perhaps there really needn’t be one, is to channel some attention toward excellent creations. Writing about music (or novels, or paintings, or brushes) is an effort to further meditate on and develop ones own appreciation for the thing, and sharing that writing is an attempt to kindle in others some reverence for the original work that caused that sacred gratitude and awe in the writer.
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Music Recommendations
Fall is finally here, noticeable even in the Bay Area, and with it some retreat back to interior spaces and, perhaps, interior feelings. With it, I present some emo-adjacent fall sounds for your astronomical autumn. All three bands feature guitars, synths, and boy-girl vocals, and all come from cities you’ve almost certainly heard of, but naming another act from those rather-less-celebrated metro areas might be a struggle. As someone whose high-school hometown favorite group1 also exists in the prog-y emo realm (and may actually have taken their name from the same Everyone Asked About You lyric their compilation is named for?), I think it’s fair to say that makes their successful rise from those scenes all the sweeter.
Rocketship—A Certain Smile, A Certain Sadness (1996)
{pop} {ambient} {electronic} {indie} {rock} {twee}
One exquisite thing about life is that you’re always so much closer to knowing absolutely nothing than you will ever be from knowing absolutely everything. You haven’t a hope in the world of actually seeing every beautiful temple, of hiking all the exquisite trails, of tasting each lovely fruit, and certainly not of beholding all the delights in art. And that is truly a gift and a passage to great peace and freedom.
This Rocketship album was a reminder of that axiom for me. All of a sudden (about 26 years after it was released), here was this excellent LP, right in my genre wheelhouse, slid to me via text in a single-song recommendation with no annotation, this album living in Stereolab’s world, where artsy pop songs could quickly melt away, leaving simmering, frothy tide pools, or transcendently beam up into higher outer orbits where the atmosphere brims with intercontinental radio interference. Guitars are filtered to bridge pickups so they might clang and jangle more than they actually resonate. Analog synth oscillators sustain the music’s flow, the organ’s current sustaining the system of the song. Affected vocals sing wistful romances. Bows skip and scrape over strings, open hi-hats and snares beat most of the time signatures. Though some passages are primarily centered on plodding, thick bass guitar lines and emphatic floor tom/bass drum, the mix throughout is a bit light on a consistent low-end. I enjoy the dynamics, and appreciate their patience and range.
I believe it was more than a year after first listening to this Rocketship album that I noticed it was released on Slumberland Records, a most celebrated label that took up residence in Berkeley/Oakland in the early 90s. Intrigued, I looked a little past the Rocketship Bandcamp page (which lists the artist’s more recent home, Portland) and found that this perfect, shining star in the constellation of UK/France’s Stereolab and Australia’s Broacast was from none other than Sacramento. Like, Deftones and Cake-era Sacramento. Maybe that’s not that interesting, but I love that type of context.
RIYL: Stereolab, Broadcast, The Pastels
Rec’d Tracks: “I Love You Like The Way That I Used To Do”, “Let’s Go Away”, “We’re Both Alone”
Label: Slumberland
Everyone Asked About You—Paper Airplanes, Paper Hearts (2023 reissue of 1997–2000 material)
{midwest emo} {Little Rock}
Distance and missed connection are written into the band name, the collection title, and so much of this *ahem* tweemo band On the title track of this collection, singers Hannah Vogan and Chris Sheppard duet the lines, “There’s an ache in my heart and I can feel it // there’s an ache in my bones and I can feel it // and I’m onto you // and I don’t know what you’re thinking”, which may as well be emo’s thesis statement. You’ve got yearning that wrenches the soul, wist that wreaks havoc on the body, interest that’s become infatuation, and the pain created by the distance between yourself and the person/place you aren’t yet one with.
This Little Rock, Arkansas band was fairly short-lived, but productive, and this compilation covers their LP and a few EPs released in a four-year span. These 19 songs come in just under an hour, and convey a powerful portrait of incredibly wide-eyed, oft-saccharine heart and the raw energy and passion that comes with the frustration of self and world not always meeting your hopes and ideals. If my timelines are right, Everyone Asked About You would have formed shortly after Chicago’s (well, Buffalo Grove’s) Cap’n Jazz broke up on tour in Little Rock, as fates would have it, and their influence sounds pronounced to me in EAAY’s music. The scenes were both very local, but also well-distributed, and fellow short-lived bright flames of greater-midwestern post-hardcore emo include KC’s the Get Up Kids, Milwaukee’s the Promise Ring, Madison’s Rainer Maria, Champaign’s Braid, to mention (and recommend) a few. I’ll name-drop Modern Football here, too, despite their Cap’n Jazz lineage, in case that baits anyone else into listening to this one.
Since picking this album for the newsletter, I had the chance to see this band perform at Bottom of the Hill, one of my favorite small venues in SF, and I was caught way off-guard by how young the crowd was. Seemingly 98% of the people there looked like they hadn’t been born by the time this band stopped recording music in 1999 (honestly everyone looked to me like they were 16–19), and I was more than a bit befuddled until learning that the band had recently been “virally Tok’d”—which rules! This very visibly young, very visibly queer crowd packed this low-key great, storied venue for this band that recorded some amazing and queer songs at a time they themselves were super young, and all hearts in the room really beat as one, onstage, on the floor, and on those few stools lining the rear of the room, where you could get off your aging feet :) I was on the floor, I swear. Just… toward the back.
RIYL: Cap’n Jazz, Tigers Jaw, American Football
Rec’d Tracks: “Paper Airplanes, Paper Hearts”, “Handsome, Beautiful”, “Greek to Me”,
Label: Numero
Los Campesinos!—All Hell (2024)
{emo} {indie pop} {indie rock} {Cardiff}
Though it’s sometimes tempting to ignore the Pitchfork-centric ratings world, I readily admit that I do care and pay attention to their output. Even after they sold to Condé Naste in 2015, the publication maintained a strong stable of great writers and gave them ample word count to pen the greater context around a band, a scene, and an album, somewhat defying the total brevity push (and not unrelated enshittification) of so much of modern media/journalism/business/life. However, the human can sometimes overwhelm the humanity, so to speak, and insider scoop says that there was an editor-in-chief that hated Los Campesinos! for years, hence it’s not until this their 6th LP out of 7 reviewed with a rating at 8.0 or above (!!) that they actually received the big Best New Music stamp of approval from the market-making juggernaut.
All that said… I’m going on 15 years as a Los Campesinos! fan, and I can’t think of any of my friends or loved ones that actually like them, so maybe that editor was onto something. But I love this band, and I hope some of you will too. Their unique—and uniquely persistent—brand of bitingly clever, achingly honest, emphatically independent, sociopolitically charged twee/emo-laced rock is really fucking good, and especially so on this album, which is well worth your heart and attention.
The seven-piece band is seriously dialed here, working contained-to-explosive dynamics that effectively emphasize the micro-to-macro shifts in the lyrics’ focus, which deftly, swiftly ranges from interpersonal foibles to international economics, football to religion, heartbreak to revolution. They gracefully wield the ability to summon and dismiss their unassuming but powerful grandeur. And they rip. Oh do they rip. Self-described as “Sleeper hits for weeping dipshits since 2006.” and “Yr ex-girlfriend’s favourite band” and “The UK's first and only emo band”, they know who they are and they don’t have to answer to what anyone else thinks. This album is entirely self-funded and self-released, and still charted top 20 in the UK.
I have a feeling this record will be a pretty divisive listen. Though the average appetites aren’t particularly hungry for 30-somethings playing bombastic indie-rock arrangements and belting heart-on-sleeve lyrics more commonly affiliated with teenagers, Los Campesinos! are leagues cleverer and decades more mature, with the composition and writing to match. For beginners to this realm: Maybe start with headphones or alone in the car, before you let yourself get all bashful about what it must look like? Then once you get over yourself and start singing along, I’ll see you at the next show ;)
RIYL: Tokyo Police Club, Johnny Foreigner, The World Is A Beautiful Place &…
Rec’d Tracks: The Coin-Op Guillotine, Holy Smoke (2005), Long Throes, Feast of Tongues,
Label: Heart Swells
Noo Sampler
As usual, here are the links to the playlist if you’d like to hear the recommended tracks from albums featured in this and prior editions of Noo Outlet.
Other things
I’m not sure why anyone shot this vertically among some of the most decidedly landscape-format paintings you’ll ever see, but: Here’s the great Caroline Polachek covering a crushingly beautiful Radiohead song that debuted in 1995 and didn’t make it on a studio recording until 2016. The personal history behind the song is powerful, the Thom Yorke recording of it is one of weapons-grade emotional heft, and Caroline interprets it gracefully.
Speaking (earlier) of youth and great lyricism and talent, here’s Katy Kirby on NPR’s Tiny Desk.
And whether or not you bought a copy on Geocities the first time around, here’s Cindy Lee’s still-genius, still-not-on-mainstreaming Diamond Jubilee album, finally available on physical media (3x LP or 2x CD!) at the label and even streaming/for download via Bandcamp.
Thanks, that’s all for now!
—Alex