August Albums (it's already alliterative)

Another month of records. Many good.

August, huh? Weird month. September is weird, too. Neither month has their thing. We spend both months sort of complaining that back to school is coming too soon. Or that the Halloween decorations shouldn’t be out yet. I googled “August decorations” and it’s pretty much just sunflowers and pumpkins. We’re harvesting tomatoes and the farmers market has started, sure, but in general the tail end of summer needs a hook. It’s kind of my favorite part of summer because it’s cooling down but you can still swim in a lake, but we’re all worn out from the heat and barbecues. The most anyone can say about August is that it went by fast.

I can’t believe I listened to 31 more dang albums. Let’s talk about some of them.

The Albums

And in the Darkness, Hearts Aglow, Weyes Blood

This is my second Weyes Blood album and her second time in a top five. That I haven’t already purchased both this and Titanic Rising is simply a formality. Oh and I just read that I’ve been pronouncing the name wrong. It’s not “way-es blood,” it’s “wise blood.” I’m pretty glad I didn’t buy this yet just because my worry is that I would have asked for it by name at the record store and have the 20-somethings laugh at me and I’d never be able to come back. Speaking of things I learned on Wikipedia—and I do want to talk about the music soon but this is too good—Weyes Blood is pretty much just Natalie Laura Mering, who was raised very religious. One of the things that caused her to question her faith is both funny and interesting:

there are always things in the Bible that really bum me out.... I became really obsessed with the Kids in the Hall as a kid, and they had Scott Thompson, who's like the one gay member. I remember having this feeling that 'Oh, Scott Thompson isn't going to heaven? How could that be?' That was my first big tipoff that something wasn't quite right with dogmatic Christianity. And then I was just trying to undo it at the age of 12."

Anyway Weyes Blood is beautiful, modern, classic, timeless. I love it so much.

Brick Body Kids Still Daydream, Open Mike Eagle

There’s a podcast I was recently recommended called “60 Songs That Explain the ‘90s" and I’ve quite enjoyed it, though I do skip around to songs I already like and care about. The episode about They Might Be Giants’ “Birdhouse in Your Soul,” really grabbed me because there was a guest on there, a rapper, who says they’re his favorite band. He was so funny. I was almost all the way through Brick Body Kids Still Daydream when I realized that I was listening to that guy (I don’t remember names very well). Anyway I made the connection because I recognized the thoughtful, funny dude from the podcast (he’s also a standup comic). The lyrics are really what grabbed me. Listened to this while hiking last week and it was a fun chill time.

Version 2.0, Garbage

There’s something about Garbage. The combination of vocals and music style feels more timeless than I’d remembered. I think before giving Version 2.0 a spin I would have shrugged and said “I never got into them but liked the hits;” lumping them in with any number of post-grunge commercial acts that I didn’t pay a lot of attention to. Like Bush. But Garbage is no Bush. They sound so good. Call me Oscar the Grouch because I want to live here full time.

I Walked With You A Ways, Plains

This record would have won many months, but in August it was up against a buzz saw. It’s so beautiful. I think when I was a teen I secretly loved The Chicks-style country music harmonies and suppressed it for more or less thirty years. Now it makes me cry. This month I also listened to half of Plains, AKA Katie Crutchfield AKA Waxahatchee, and I loved it. But her voice combined with Jess Williamson’s makes some kind of magic.

Bronco, Orville Peck

I’ve lost track of all the people I’ve recommended Orville Peck to. His sound is so immediately unique and somehow familiar that I find it to be arresting from the very first notes. Every song on here is a classic. When I pick my favorite album I usually put the top five in one playlist and listen to it straight through. Because I already loved every one of them it creates the mildly frustrating experience of every album being so good that I can’t pick a favorite. I listened on a marathon while driving to Utah State University and back for a wetland botany training and I can picture the exact place I was when I realized Bronco was the best album of August. It was getting McDonald’s breakfast at 6:30 AM. The track was “The Curse of the Blackened Eye” when he sings “Acting out the opus of your last eternal ache.” The sandwich had bacon on it, which is a rare treat I give myself when it’s 1.5 hours into a 2 hour drive that started at 5. When I got home I treated myself to this record.

My Recommendation from the Vault:

Donde Estan los Ladrones?, Shakira

I was on a zoom call with a bunch of natural resource agencies and someone asked who was on my shirt and when I told them it was Shakira someone said I’d have to show them my moves sometimes. I said, and I was proud of myself at the time for this, “oh no, I can’t dance. My hips lie all the time.”

I don’t know if I still pride in that joke but it worked at the time. We do what we need to in order to survive video calls. Speaking of which if you served a Mormon mission you also know that you did what you could to survive in a world in which you were cut off from all pop culture for two years. That’s why I didn’t know about Version 2.0; it came out when I was in Mexico sweating through two shirts a day. In fact, I’m still learning about things that happened between 1998 and 2000. I didn’t know there was a Woodstock ‘99 until this year when I watched a documentary about it.

What I did not, could not avoid was Shakira. This album was hitting hard in Mexico and even though I wasn’t allowed to put music on and listen, if I was on the back patio writing letters to home and someone next door was playing some it’s not like I couldn’t listen, you know? Or if we were visiting a family and their teen daughter was watching music videos in the living room, it’s not like you could prove that I was leaning as far towards that room as possible to soak it in.

This album has a soft spot in my heart because someone was selling bootleg cassette tapes outside of La Ley grocery store in Ensenada for 10 pesos and I bought it, but to remove the temptation of listening to it and breaking the rules, I mailed it to a cute girl with pretty hair I was writing letters to, who I eventually married. Partially so that I could get that tape back.

Anyway this is peak rock Shakira that she started experimenting with in another classic record Pies Descalzos. She’s dabbled in it since, but I think most Americans know her as a latin pop artist. Most people upon a first listen compares her to Alanis Morissette, which is pretty fair. Shakira got a record contract at 13, Alanis at 14. Both made two pop albums before breaking out with a world-changing rock album in 1995. Only one has done a super bowl show that made lots of Utah moms get into fights on Facebook about whether it was too sexy, though. So far.

All the Rest

Oh the Y/N columns mean first have I heard of the artist and second have I listened to the entire album before. This may be the first month where every single album recommended was new to me. That’s cool!!