Currently the F-word is in Berlin and I'm here. Next week I'll be in Dubrovnik and he'll be here. Soon after that we'll go away to Portugal together. Occasional seperate vacations are rather nice for all sorts of reasons, mostly having to do with mutual appreciation and personal space, but probably what I enjoy the most about it is getting the run of music I feel like listening to - things that are either too poppy or too whiny to bother playing around him when we both like Nick Cave, Tom Waits, pre-synthesizer R&B, orchestral, operatic and a bunch of other crap enough to not rub each other the wrong way. He's got his own things he listens to when I'm away, including Frank Zappa - yikes.
Anyways, that means right now I'm listening to:
Tricky, Maxinquaye. Probably the constant and fucking inescapable Michael Jackson playing everyfuckingwhere over the last week or so was what reminded me how much I miss this album. He samples "Bad" on "Brand New You're Retro" and I'm quite fond of it. And while this urge is already morphing into a desire to listen to a bunch of Massive Attack and some other Tricky abums, Maxinquaye is very dear to my heart. It was on constant rotation during the wonderful months that I went chronic, and it's really part of who Mistress La Spliffe is . . . but personal descent into drug dependency aside, really I just think it's so pretty, one of the prettiest albums I've ever heard. That's the thing about trip-hop, and it's why I get confused when people hate it. It's so pretty. To hate trip-hop, you've got to hate pretty. And who hates pretty? Assholes, that's who.
Wilco, Yankee Hotel Foxtrot. My feelings are split on this album and even if the F-word could tolerate the whiny quality of Jeff Tweedy's vocals (which one would think he could, Radiohead being okay apparently) I would have to keep it on low rotation anyways. I've written before about the fucking pain of getting a five-second blast of "I'm the Man Who Loves You" stuck in one's head on a repetitive loop, and even now I'm wary of getting it lodged back in there - last time it took about five fucking days to get it to stop playing. That doesn't change the fact that it's a damn good song and that the makes-the-Cure-look-like-the-Pizzicato-Five lyrics are not only not stupid, but accompanied by - once more - pretty. It's a marvellously pretty album. And who doesn't like pretty? Assholes, that's who.
The surprising thing about Wilco, though, was that when I saw them live it was still awfully pretty, despite the album feeling very engineered and very trippy in its own way.
Speaking of pretty and the Pizzicato Five - The Pizzicato Five, Made in the USA. No excuses or explanations here. I just love it. Maki Nomiya could be singing "twiggy fuck yourself up the ass, you aging nineties hipster" and I'd still love it.
And the last one is rather a cheat, because I'm sure the F-word would be okay with it, though he does laugh about how heroin-y it all is - but it didn't occur to me to put him back on until I realized I'd need a stand-in boyfriend for a few days, and that, ladies and gentlemen, is Chet Baker, Chet Baker Sings. I fucking love this album. And love his voice. This song makes me feel like I'm being cuddled.
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