Liner Notes (August 21st, 2020)
Lots of good music out this week. This week’s newsletter shares my thoughts on music and entertainment I enjoyed this week and has a playlist of ten songs worth checking out. This week’s supporter Q&A post can be found here.
Three Things
This week, I started a new feature I’m calling “My Nostalgia.” The idea is to go all the way back and detail my entire musical journey. I want to explore the albums that got me into music, and the history of AbsolutePunk, up to 2005. (I’ve already done 2005 to present via the “Back to” series and all my best-of lists/this newsletter.) This week’s article looks at 1998, when I was 15, and I first discovered Blink–182 and MxPx. There’s even a (hilariously grainy) video still of when I got Cheshire Cat for Christmas. I also put together a playlist on Spotify and Apple Music from the music of that era.
I am still really enjoying the Jim Adkins podcast. Almost all of the guests are right in my wheelhouse of people I want to hear from.
I’ve added quite a few more reviews back into our database. This project is still churning along. I think I have about 150 more to go. To go along with this, I made a slight change to the tag pages to better draw attention to older reviews if we have more than five in the system for an artist. The tag pages are finally becoming what I’ve always wanted: a one-stop collection of everything we have about an artist that’s easy to sort and find what you’re looking for.
In Case You Missed It
Music Thoughts
A lot of new music out today. The Killers released, easily, their best album in a long time. Maybe their best in at least the last decade? It walks between being a colossal stadium album and a breezy long open road album. I could barely get through their previous album, so this was a pleasant surprise.
Bright Eyes still sounds like Bright Eyes. Not sure why I expected anything besides something that makes me think I’m in college sitting in the dorm getting real deep into my feels. It’s good. I missed lyrics like this, little things where he strings together phrases and prose into tight, clever passages.
Nightly finally announced a full length. It immediately jumps onto my anticipated list. This will be one to keep an eye on toward the end of the year.
The Night Game released another new single. The production and layers in this song are ridiculous. There’s got to be at least a hundred things going on in this one and a nice big chorus. I want to hear this damn album as a whole. It’s hard to find an emotional connection to one-off songs—it me, the album defender, logging on again.
New Carly Rae Jepsen is a fun little song. Still not on streaming services though, which is a little weird; however, the video is a joy.
Only had time to spin the new Bully album once so far, but I liked it.
Next up I’ll be checking Blaqk Audio and Cut Copy. Then reading through our Albums in Stores Today comments because it looks like there’s a whole lot of other stuff I should be checking out as well.
Entertainment Thoughts
The first movie in the time of COVID–19 I’ve seen is .. drumroll … Host. And it was good! It was the exact right length, got in, did what it needed to do, freaked my shit, and then knew when it was time to call it a day. It’s basically quarantine Paranormal Activity over Zoom. But it worked.
The Old Guard on Netflix feels like it would have been a great mini-series. It tried to do too much world-building for a film, but not enough character development, and it ended up being good, but feeling disjointed. A mini-series would have let us get to know all the characters a little more, give it more of a serial/comic-book vibe, but probably can’t get Charlize in that case. I didn’t love it, but I’d watch a sequel.
Magic Camp felt like a Disney movie of a different generation. Sort of like a cute little family movie night affair starring (in the past version) Jack Black that I woulda watched in my youth. It was heartwarming enough to be a nice evening watch. Apparently, it was filmed in 2017, which makes every scene with Jeffrey Tambor tough. This would never have worked in theaters, but as a Disney+ film, it’s fine.
This week’s TV show was Teenage Bounty Hunters. And yes, this is absolutely my shit. It kind of feels like an R-rated version of all the weekly serialized shows I loved as a kid: a little Veronica Mars, a little 90210, a little Alias. The sisters crack me up, and it’s been a nice change of pace to watch something with a bit more levity each night.
After an episode of TBH, we’re re-watching Pen15 to get ready for the upcoming season. This is easily one of my favorite shows of the past few years. It’s impossible to get through an episode without pausing and having a ten-plus minute discussion with Hannah about something the episode reminds us of. Last night we got into a debate over screen names (long live Twenty8FootFall), which led to us finding her LiveJournal online from 2004. Oddly, she doesn’t want me to revive all of these artifacts on Chorus for posterity. Frankly, I don’t get why not.
I finished The Hunting Party, a perfect summer/beach read mystery. Then I read The Slow Regard of Silent Things, which I enjoyed, even though it’s entirely (intentionally) weird and very different. It was a fast enough read that all the complaints I read online afterward didn’t really bother me. (My word is every online fanbase out of their mind once they reach a certain critical mass. Yeesh.) Next, I read A Good Girl’s Guide to Murder, and I’ve got about a half-hour left in it. It’s basically a fictional Serial but with a high-school senior trying to solve a murder mystery plaguing her town. It’s decent, but I’ve read this same story multiple times done better.
Random and Personal Stuff
The past week was much better health-wise. I cut out a lot of snacking and, mentally, felt more tapped back into making this a priority. After hitting my water drinking goals for over a year, I treated myself to a new water bottle. This is the kind of thing you do at 37 apparently. It’s very exciting, lots of drama. I’m very cool.
We haven’t decided what pizza we’re doing tonight, but we have decided to try a salad we’ve got our eye on instead of garlic knots. This has big, “Maybe Bed, Bath, & Beyond, I don’t know, I don’t know if we’ll have enough time” energy to it, doesn’t it?
Ten Songs
Here are ten songs that I listened to and loved this week. Some may be new, some may be old, but they all found their way into my life during the past seven days.
The Killers - Caution
The Night Game - I Feel Like Dancing
Nightly - Summer
Coheed & Cambria - Jessie’s Girl 2
Stand Atlantic - Eviligo
Blink–182 - Untitled
Bully - Every Tradition
Bright Eyes - Hot Car in the Sun
This Wild Life - Coffee for Your Head
Taylor Swift - The Lakes
This playlist is available on Spotify and Apple Music.
Community Watch
The trending and popular threads in our community this week include:
The most liked post in our forums last week was this one by St. Nate in the “General Politics Discussion VII” thread.
I hope everyone has a great weekend. Now I have to go see what is going on with Twitter embeds in the forums. Looks like Twitter broke something, again.
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Previous editions of Liner Notes can be found here.