Gather ‘round class, it’s time for music appreech-iATION! This means, yes, you have to be desperate enough to achieve good music that you can look past a band name like The Moistboyz or an album title like “Such Fun” (Annuals).
Now, ideally the appreciation of music should be intuitive and not scientific, the latter of which would be suggested by I think something within Mr. Holland’s Opus somewhere, but here is where I must present to you this cook I worked with one time who literally lulled into like a catatonic coma when I would mention the name “Moistboyz.” This is of course the Ween offshoot of the Dean Ween variety along with Oliveri of Queens of the Stone Age, a couple hard rock debutantes with a real nose for tomfoolery (see the awesomeness, or awe-inspiring stupidity of “Down on the Farm”). Actually, I must admit, it took me a while to get into the band because of the name alone, about which I imagine Dean Ween is having quite a laugh somewhere, given some apathy to his financial situation I guess.
Such Fun has been well… really swell, to be exact, the second album of Adam Baker and the Carolina indie rock bandits the Annuals, and will certainly make you wish they actually were annual, putting out an album every year. As far as I know only Ty Segall does that, but then Annuals’ music is far more complex, and Such Fun is full of this palpably egalitarian stylistic VARIETY as if it were, well, the project of somebody who’s undergone such tragedy as they way I understand it losing like all of his family members (one journal I looked at still had the gall to call Baker “self-pitying”… I’m going to go out on a limb and say they’re not too familiar with his back story, I usually being someone adverse to back stories of any kind).
When I got the impetus to write this post I still felt like something was missing, like the effeminate, in particular (this is how my perverted brain works sometimes), so I thought of the weirdest, spookiest and most nonsensical yet somehow ironically rhythmic music I could recount and it was Lou Canon’s sprawling epic beastie of an LP Suspicious, which I probably ranked way too low at #47 of 2017, but then 2017 was a doozie now wasn’t it.
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[1] The albeit generally commendable now defunct journal cokemachineglow.com even failed to even REVIEW the album, apparently lacking the knack of how stupid the very concept of a “followup album” is in life.