ONE RECORD project.

The music you love at any particular time is determined by your attitude and surroundings. I’m now in my early 20’s and living in a massive city. I listen to melodic post-rock to zone me out of the mundaneness of the daily commute. I listen to old school hip-hop cos I feel a part of a multi-racial maze of concrete. I listen to new music so I can stay on top, impress with my knowledge, get in there first and ultimately use that to make money, make friends and be happy.

When I was 15, in a small Irish town I was stereotypically teenage. Angry, silly, devastatingly awkward. I didn’t know what I was at. I just wanted to have the life that I thought other people were having. But though hindsight is sweet, it would have been nice to know at that stage that pretty much everyone feels the same. Determined to be different in some way I found the loudest, darkest music I could find this side of actually making out lyrics. Thin Lizzy, Sabbath, Slayer, Maiden were all there but nothing ever struck me like the anvil to the face that was Master of Puppets. I heard it before this but this was when it was most important to me.

Battery gets you immediately. Twenty three gradually layered guitars, sustained lead in unison like a buildup to the battle, the frantic cavalry charge just over a minute in.that sets the tone for this unmovable beast. “Cannot kill the family, battery is found in me”. I still have no idea what this means but at that age you consider the writer of such far out stuff to be a madman, the guy who’s figured it out, how to rock and be happy forever.

We figured the title track was about drugs. But not Lucky Strikes, cans of Bulmers and soapbar hash. Real drugs. “Druggies” drugs. These guys weren’t at that though, they were running on mini cans of Bud and pure rock n’ roll energy. Which may be why the allure wore off, or at least I started broadening my mind musically. I noticed the cracks in a wall I’d imagined for myself. There was no Demascus moment. I guess one day I decided, unbeknownst to me, that I’d try punk and reggae or whatever.

The Thing That Should Not Be is a weird one and it took me a while to like it. Musically it’s fascinating, it’s got an unsettling pace to it, like a circus theme song caught in a tornado bound for hell. Welcome Home (Sanitarium) is pure emotion, dark and full that I remember inciting a near religious moment when I heard it live. I often downplay the impact this music had on me. It worries me that so little of the music I love has ever incited that kind of feeling in me. I suppose music serves a function. I need music to calm and educate me. I need to stay cool, in control, on the ball. But back then, music was pure venting. I was pissed off at everything. Metal was pissed off at everything. And not in a cool way. No time for that bullshit. Just time to let loose and rock out. I’m not joking. This shit was and is to many people, deadly serious.

Of course as a mix of conscientious youth and know it all dipshit I knew about war and I was violently against it. While anti-war music on an album that sounds like a battlefield was a perfect match, it was Leper Messiah that got the blood pumping. It is the battle between God and money. I was familiar with cult scenarios. I didn’t know what to make of God. I tried to make it work with the divine but like a relationship on the rocks but ticking along we should have nailed it there and then. The more you rely on something that you later no longer believe in, the more you have to learn later on. But whatever of my unsureness on the overall picture, I was fully sure that anyone looking to make money out of religion by conning people when they are emotionally at their most vulnerable i.e when they’re engaging on a hugely personal scale with something they cannot see, hear or even sense, are the most despicable human beings.

Orion is pure and utter music wankery. In the best possible way. Is it prog nonsense? Or a bizarre futuristic rock opera masterpiece? I like it.

Damage Inc. then wraps it all up. Atmospheric intro. Then a final barrage of advancing Panzers. It’s mayhem. It’s exactly what happens when you successfully harness a fully functioning young persons attitude, vigour and rage. And that’s what the whole album is. That’s what heavy and fast music does for an expanding mind, surging hormones and guilty conscience in a small, wet, boring town. Music is like religion, some people find their own way but most people coast along as their surroundings dictate. Had I grown up in New York I could have been a skinnies and leathers Strokes kid, in London I might have been a Nu Raver, and in Tokyo it might not have taken me so long to fall in love with Yellow Magic Orchestra. But I had no fashion distractions, no cool places to be and no money to do any of it anyway. I had a cracked case with Master of Puppets in it. It served me well

The 13th Floor Elevators are probably best known for their song ‘You’re gonna miss me’ from their first album ‘The Psychedelic Sounds of..’. This is primarily because of it’s inclusion on the first ‘Nuggets’ compilation. However it is their second album ‘Easter Everywhere’ that is considered one of the true classics of the Psych era. The opening track ‘Slip Inside This House’ alone assures it’s status as a classic.

It is 8 solid minutes of relentless, dirty guitars spitting fractals over rolling drums and a popping electronic jug. The vocals run almost throughout, Roky Erickson’s pained voice distilling the philosophies of ancient mystics seen through youthful eyes. The song was written by jug player Tommy Hall and it is an attempt to combine the general beliefs of the psychedelic movement, taking it’s influences from Eastern and Christian mysticism and Mayan culture among many others. The lyrics often seem to be nonsensical, like much from the psych movement, but on deeper interpretation, the song is a very loose conglomeration of all these philosophies and the end result is like an acid trip, evoking the feeling of an epiphany just out of reach.

“Four and twenty birds of Maya
Baked into an atom you
Polarized into existence
Magnet heart from red to blue
To such extent the realm of dark
Within the picture it seems true
But slip inside this house and then decide.

All your lightning waits inside you
Travel it along your spine
Seven stars receive your visit
Seven seals remain divine
Seven churches filled with spirit,
Treasure from the angels’ mine
Slip inside this house as you pass by.
Slip inside this house as you pass by”

The song perfectly captures the open mindedness of the psych movement and while it may be a disparate philosophy, the true values it espouses; fearlessness, humanity, curiosity, empathy and compassion are something the world could do with a lot more of. This song is an experience and it stands alone to such an extent that the remainder of the album feels like a comedown from it.

Once upon a summer, two growingupgirls, maybe even women, ventured North, and very much together. It’s hard to say just how much happened. I wouldn’t want to be so silly as to try to measure the immeasurable or anything, but my sources tell me tides pulled new ways those three months. It was one (not the other) who found and claimed this precious, precious article and it became part of their one bedroom unit and ties them still today. You see there’s a woman in Ireland with THE MOST MAGICAL
voice! It is crushed and silky and rasps itself around my insides. It sounds like TEXTURE.

Her lyrics unravel me and sit me back happy in my bobbing bay…
I remember I read that Life was S-shaped, and from my place on the bell curve, I turned my back on her, resounding on the drum of summer.

Such words awash with waves of guitars, drums… flow over you. If you have ever opened your eyes and ears under the water and taken in the echos and blurs and white tiles, you’ve been to a very similar place.

These songs were safe and clip-clopped on, the way lovely warm, hollow things do. What am I saying? They still are! So beautiful, so reliable and the soundtrack to what may remain the most memorable summer? And no harm done if that’s the case.

“I first heard Jefferson Airplane’s ‘After Bathing at Baxter’s’ during the long hot summer when I was seventeen.
For the first time in my life I had a group of friends the same as the ones I used to be jealous of. Life was great, it felt fresh and I was blissfully aware of how young I was. Something else I had become palpably aware of was the ability of books and music to transport me to different states. It had always happened but I had never stopped to think about it.

‘After Bathing at Baxters’, which I listened to on repeat through warm, restless nights gave me a joy and sense of freedom and boundless possibility I had never experienced through music. Everything that was good at that time coursed through me when the opening feedback of ‘The ballad of you & me & Pooneil’ screamed in my ears.

The album still fills me with a love for life and hopefully always will.”

So they say that music is the universal language of mankind. It is some 3 minute melody that hits you, in your bedroom, while you’re walking, in a nightclub. For some it is the words that you believe have been written just for you, and screw anyone who looks cock-eyed at you for telling you otherwise.
For others, it is a series of melody movements, chord changes, and bass progressions that, and I might as well get lost in over exaggerating explanations, and hit you right here; right in the core of your body. For me and the song ‘Girl Anachronism’ by the Dresden Dolls, when this song is let loose around my ears, my stance changes, a smile creeps across my face, and fuck it, I get the feeling that I can do anything.

Do I feel like I am Amanda Palmer? No. She IS this unstable, misplaced character, that should not be in this decade, this century, and my sheltered life can’t compare to everything that she has gone through. So why the hell am I so attached this song then? If her lyrics don’t sum up my personality, why do I regard it as my theme song? Because I believe we all have a little bit of crazy in us, whether it’s right there in the surface in the way we speak or act, and burrowed so far beneath our skin that only a severe amount of vodka would let it bubble through to force you to smash that glass in order to get someone to just fucking listen.

As backwards and intense and angry as the song is, I love how she tries to rationalise how the situation could have been avoided or “made better” is they had only waited that little bit longer. As much as I think I’m doing fine in this 21st century, the majority of us, which definitely includes me, thinks “if only I was this age in that time, I’d fit in a little better there”. But we can’t, can we? Without hesitation, I can then say that the next best thing for me then is a song that makes me equally as happy. This is the only song I don’t hold the literal meaning to; it’s a calming smile that spreads across my face knowing that.

Between the ages of eight and fourteen, I was in a hole of depression having witnessed my mother’s death, my little brother aquiring nightmarish and irreperable face, head and brain injuries, and my father’s subsequent depression and alcoholism. I was wracked with anxiety, and entirely incapable of functioning in society, even if that society did mostly consist of the ten other perfectly mild-mannered children in my class. I spent a lot of time on my own, and had panic attacks that I kept to myself.

At the time, my isolation from normal human relations was such (or so I perceived) that I felt like an alien on a foreign planet, or as if there was a glass sheet between myself and the rest of the world, muffling everything that could get through to me; OK computer managed to echo the emptiness and remoteness I felt, and extend it out into emotions of anger and pain, which I suppose I had to start dealing with to start functioning again.

Interpol’s ‘Turn on the Bright Lights’ is a moody and ethereal humdinger of a record. Its rhythms and beats constantly unsettle, poised as they are against a wall of wailing guitars that come to the fore like the last sleep twitch of some weird fever dream. The baritone of Paul Banks is seamless, almost elemental, and sits in the mix like a narrative voice as opposed to a lead vocal.

If this record is a sonic landscape to a febrile imagining, then his voice is at once compass and current, gently and subtly reinforcing the leitmotif of dreamscape and illusion with lyrics like “Well she was my catatonic sex toy love-joy diver” on ‘Stella was a diver and she was always down’. The absurdity of the lyrics defy understanding, further grounding a sense of the surreal.

Imagine being alone in the woods, having an inner monologue with the ghost of Ian Curtis, having downed a bottle of Calpol and you’re not very far off. The tone throughout is dark, its opacity lending to the songs a sense of heartbreak, buried deep and nearly, nearly forgotten.
To dismiss this music as ‘depressing’ is to miss the point entirely, this is night-time music, weird and beautiful.

The album that’s most definitely affected me is Jeff Lewis and the Junkyard’s “Em are I”.

I was living in Dublin about 3 years ago when I came across it, and was going through a particularly shitty time in my life. Since getting a 1,700E tax rebate I’d taken it as a sign to quit my teaching job to concentrate full-time on smoking weed and taking valium.

I never really left the house unless it was to go to town to pick up off our dealer or go to tesco’s for super noodles and batchelor’s minestrone soup. I absolutely hated leaving, cause I was usually wearing clothes I’d been wearing for a week straight, was unwashed, unshaved and generally terrified off seeing someone I knew. I’d become really bored and disillusioned with music as well, but I’d heard some Jeff Lewis on and off and liked it so downloaded the album on a whim.

Most of his stuff is really folky, but the first track on the album “Slogans” is a really indie loud shouty number, with the chorus line “So I kept repeating it to myself; till I convinced myself it was true; that everyone you meet is not better than you”. I’d usually be listening to it on the bus on one of my pick-up trips, and “Roll Bus Roll” is impossible to dislike when you’re sitting on grimy public transport dying to get home.

All in all, the album made me feel better about myself, and opened up a huge folk phase that was really important in getting me involved with music again. You’re always happier when you have something rolling through your head that makes you want to pick up the guitar and sing again.

When I reflect, I cannot thank my horrible aunt enough for giving me that crummy christmas present that year.

Remember when you were a kid and you wanted money? Not an old voucher. How boring! I remember how ungrateful and annoyed I was at that angst ridden age of fourteen, walking into town in the soaking rain after school one day then hitting the music shop & searching for something of a 10€ value, back when CD’s came at more of a price.

Nothing. I couldn’t find a thing, I wanted a Pumpkins or Nirvana CD, something ‘cool’. Not a ‘Now thats what I call..” or ‘Chart-hits 04’.

Disappointed, I then hit the ‘bargain-bin’ and had a reluctant rummage. As i began culling my way through reject CD’s, I came across The Cure’s Disintegration. Having never heard them before, (only the band name) and fed up I took a chance and exchanged the voucher for it by .Practically racing home, I arrived soaking wet and ran to my room, threw it in the CD player and jumped on my bunk bed not expecting to hear anything amazing. I remember when ‘Plain song’ started as the rain pelted the window pane and I just thought ‘wow & fuck’ excited and confused all in one. It sounded like nothing I had ever heard before.

It was introduction into music for me that could achieve both dark, dreamy and haunting moods through quite a light, lullaby-like way and I was utterly amazed that it could do that.

It opened up a whole new world for me, music I didn’t know existed and to this day remains one of my favourite records and bands ever and I thank that mean aunt dearly for that shit voucher, it all worked out well in the end.

So, there I was. Learning the guitar, a quiet lad with a lot of anger. Listening to Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd, and Steve Vai. Great music, but it wasn’t sounding like I was feeling at the time. It just wasn’t as intense. And yes, there was Metallica, but it was too straightforward.

There was Dream Theatre, but the lyrics were cringe and the music was more than I could comprehend at the time. And then, I got introduced to the record that would be my favourite record ever made.

Grace by Jeff Buckley was the only album I ever heard where I fell in love with every song on the record, every wailing high, every whispering low, every word carefully chosen, awfully dictated, wonderfully sang. The guitar work was amazing to me, it could go from reverbed clean tone to metal tone distortion in the space of a single song, jazz chords and simple open’s used perfectly in unison.

What I loved most at the time was the courage it takes to emote so much passion, so obviously, and put it on a CD, and wonder what people are going to think of this - it gave me the courage to write lyrics more obviously passionate, or just plain old obvious in general. (Later on in life, I fell in love with it again after learning that Thom Yorke was going to stop singing if not for being inspired by this record - it would have been another awful lost)

R.I.P Jeff, and thanks!

A dark and mystical introduction to music with meaning,
Sioxsie and the Banshees album “Peepshow” loured me into a world much like that described in their song ‘Ornaments of Gold’.
It became something that helped me escape the reality of my surroundings.

This album shaped my imagination into a distorted, scary but strangely comfortable playground.
Filled with hurricanes of emotion, I went from high to low with every verse..
Like that terrifying rollercoaster I couldn’t get enough of as a kid.

Similar to the teddy you are given as a child, for comfort,
you hold on to it simply in fear of losing the momories it gave you in the earliest, most influential years of your life.
For me, this album is as warm as that teddy.
Born the same year, 1988, Peepshow and I were handcuffed at birth,
and will remain together until I am dead - until “The Last Beat of My Heart”.

“Bloc Party aimed to create an album that appealed to followers of different musical genres”, is the opening line of the second paragraph on the Wiki page for Silent Alarm.

The success of that aim can never be underestimated.

2005 was the year that I left school, with a head full of long unkempt curls and clothed in the baggiest ripped jeans I could find. For the previous four years I had been a heavy metal fan, never missing the opportunity to miss out on getting stuck in on any rough and sweaty moshpits which are customary to hard rock gigs. That is until I heard ‘Helicopter’ by Bloc Party - who were an emerging new band on the British indie scene at the time. An ex-girlfriend of mine had put it on initially.

The opening riff just caught me straight away. I remember listening to the full song, and not saying anything, so as to not ruin my heavy metal image by saying I liked an indie song (we were supposed to hate Indie music you see). Once she left, I just had to text her and ask her the name of the song that I had heard earlier. When I found out, I must have listened to that song over 60 times, and not long after I rushed out to my local record store to buy their début album. This music was different, it was new, it had something for everyone.

From the politically charged aforementioned ‘Helicopter’, to the regretful heartache of ‘Like Eating Glass’ and ‘This Modern Love’, this album was a voice for the awkward young who had reached a crossroads. ‘So Here We Are’ seemed to sum up everything that was ever going on in one’s young life in 3 minutes and 52 seconds, and it’s video was perfect in maintaining the songs sentiments. It helped me form opinions for myself, dance like a lunatic, judge others around me, move on from one relationship to another, and it influenced me to investigate a whole new genre of music that I hadn’t been aware of before.

I became obsessive with the album for a while, and it led me on to doing my utmost to see the band live and to know every song and every lyric they had ever written. Even the b-sides to the singles off the album are vastly underrated and show a band who were on top of their game at the time.

To this day I consider it in the top 3 best albums of the last decade. Unfortunately, I somewhat fell out of love with the band after it’s 2nd and 3rd LP’s, but you can’t deny the brilliance of their first effort, and within my own music tastes I think this album will certainly stand the test of time.