Five & Five on Friday 9/1/2023
Art about work, work about Art
Happy Friday! Congratulations on making it to the end of the week. As you head into your weekend, here are five recommendations and then five micro reviews of albums from my high school CD collection. Maybe you’ll find something new to read, listen to, or do this weekend. See you next week!
I have returned from vacation with a twofold excitement. First, it was a wonderful surprise to see an influx of new subscribers when I made it home. Thank you for letting me take up space in your inbox, I promise to use it responsibly. Feel free to read The Mission Statement if you want to catch up on who I am and what I’m doing. The second reason for my excitement at vacation’s end is that the end of one month means the beginning of the next, and that means… it’s Bandcamp Friday Babyyyy!!! As they do on the first Friday of most months, Bandcamp are waiving their cut of any purchases made for the next 24 hours, which means that artists stand to make a much bigger percentage from their sales. So if you’ve considered buying a Lamniformes album, Lamniformes shirt, or the mysterious Laughing Stock demo, today would be a great day to do so.
The end of vacation also means that my calendar is starting to repopulate with GIGS. The first one on the horizon is an especially interesting one. On September 6th, I’ll be drumming for a special three-piece arrangement of Bellows, performing a set of brand new songs and never-before-played live classics at Sundown Bar in Ridgewood, Queens. Some have said that Ridgewood is the fourth coolest neighborhood in the world, will this be the fourth coolest show you’ve seen in 2023? Only one way to find out.
Bellows isn’t the only band I’m playing with this month. On September 29th, I’m drumming with Dan Rico’s band to celebrate the release of his new single “Maybe I’m Scared” at Union Pool. We’ll performing that song along with a number of other sophisti-punk bangers from Rico’s catalog. The last time I visited Chicago I heard someone dub Dan “the sexiest man in Logan Square”, and since Logan Square is still a cooler neighborhood than Williamsburg you can only imagine how sexy the tunes will be there. Or you can grab a ticket and find out for yourself.
Don’t let me convince you that I spent all of my vacation fantasizing about my drum kit, I also spent time catching up on Severance with *~my girlfriend~*. I knew I was going to love this show the minute I heard the premise. The show’s first and, for the foreseeable future, only season follows the employees of a mysterious company that have had their consciousness split between their work and off hours. On top of all the juicy sci-fi implications about the nature of the self, the show is a great comedy about office culture and productivity culture in America. Currently the show is only available on Apple TV, if you’ve let that stop you from checking it out before, trust me that it is worth the hurdle.
One last rec to anyone interested in the business side of the music industry: pay attention to what’s going on with BMI. There’s a good chance that BMI, one of the two major groups that collect royalties on behalf of songwriters, might get sold to private equity firm any day now. There’s good reason to believe that a for-profit version of BMI would happily cut a large swath of “under-performing” songwriters from its roster. That would be a major shakeup in an already wacked out industry, so bone up now and get ready for stormy weather.
Now, onto the five micro reviews. Long time Lamniformes Instagram followers will recognize these from my stories back in late 2020, however they’ve been re-edited and spruced up with links so that you can actually hear the music instead of just taking my word for it.
Live Bootleg 07.23.06 by Isis (2009) - Post Metal
A recording of Isis’s performance of Oceanic front to back at All Tomorrow’s Parties. Justin Broadrick shows up to do some ambient stuff at one point. It cannot top the studio version but it is a fascinating companion piece. It is much easier to make out individual instruments and track how their parts evolve over the course of a tune. They also play a lot of the material way faster than the original recordings.
Lullabies To Paralyze by Queens of the Stone Age (2005) - Rock
Their previous record was in constant rotation for me, so I was very excited to grab this one when it came out. I liked it a lot at the time but it never overtook Songs for the Deaf. Neat that this record has two distinct vibes, the concise rock tunes upfront and the rambling jams near the end. Makes the record feel like it moves from the show to the after party.
A Dramatic Turn of Events by Dream Theater (2011) - Progressive Metal
Probably the only prog album to be promoted with a reality TV style competition for a new drummer. Unsurprisingly I had a lot of opinions at the time about who “should have won”. Skip the ballads and you’ve got an above average Dream Theater record, with a few very inspired passages that I’d put up there with their best work.
Death Therapy by Forward to Death (2005) - Hardcore Punk
Got this as part of a “10 Random CDs” deal from Deathwish Inc. To this day I know absolutely nothing about this band. Pretty solid, no frills, no nonsense hardcore punk. Not much else to say about it!
My Arms, Your Hearse by Opeth (1998) - Progressive Metal
The first Opeth record with Martin Lopez on drums, although when I first bought it I thought of it as the one with “Demon of the Fall” on it. This record kicked off one of the all time runs in heavy metal. Pretty much a decade straight of great Opeth albums starts here. Very appropriate for the onset of Autumn.