On Fandom, Obsession and Discontinued Cheetos

I was a "first fan" of the Star Wars franchise.  I still have deep set admiration for the first three movies, the Original Trilogy.  As I get older, I think about my lifelong "love" for A New Hope, The Empire Strikes Back and certain parts of Return of the Jedi.  I also recognize how infrequently I choose to watch them; not even once a year on average.  I do that religiously with other closely-held movies from my childhood.  Not a year goes by that I don't watch at least 20 favorite horror movies, the same number of comedy movies and a few less sacred sci-fi movies.  There really aren't that many great sci-fi adventure movies from the 70's and 80's.  Maybe that's one reason the original Star Wars movies are held in such high regard by people of my generation.  The amazing special effects for the time are another reason.  There are countless other reasons, based on logic, nostalgia and also a bit of stubbornness.  The Original Trilogy is made of sweetly unique fantasy movies constructed with tons of heart and a creative spirit.  The first two movies in the OT, the best Star Wars movies of all, are chill-inducing love letters to all kinds of movies that fans of film hold dear.  They play on universal themes of good vs. evil, love and hate, teamwork and perseverance against enormous odds.  You know, those "RA-RA!" themes that most good and many bad blockbusters include.  But with Star Wars the intent seemed so genuine, so "not all about money".  Even as a "first fan", I'm not the best representation of a Star Wars fan.  Is it possible to adequately define such a thing, and is that thing "good" for movies?

I know why I cared about those first three movies.  I sat in a theater for A New Hope's first run.  That's really all it took.  I owned the first action figures, the vehicles and ships, the Death Star Tower, the pajamas, the bed sheets, the wrist watch, the earliest flashlight light saber, the ANYTHING ELSE I could get my hands on with Star Wars stamped on the package.  Seeing the other two movies really didn't increase my feelings about Star Wars, but when I did see them I judged them as equals to the original.  I realize I'm not special because I saw one of the world's most popular movies in a theater or because I owned some toys.  I don't own one piece of merchandise from those first amazing years to be a Star Wars fan anymore.  Many of my age peers kept their trinkets and preserve their love of Star Wars in physical form.  I sort of envy them.  All of my collectibles disappeared after my parents divorced.  Because of this, I see a strange symbiosis between maturing too quickly away from Star Wars and experiencing the breakup of my family.

Lots of people latched onto Star Wars as it helped open a uniquely exciting time in film history: the birth of the blockbuster event movie.  Movies like The Exorcist and Jaws were surprising cultural events, exhilarating for moviegoers in a communal way and for movie executives with new powers to achieve enormous box office totals.  There were plenty of highly successful movies before the 1970's (Gone With the Wind is still near the top of the all-time box office list when adjusted for inflation), but no one had seen big summer movies engineered in every way to please audiences before the days of Spielberg and Lucas.  These two creators liked to make movies with universal themes, well-defined antagonists/protagonists and comforting three-act structures.  In other words, they knew how to please ticket buyers and elicit repeat viewings.  The way the best blockbuster movies know which buttons to push in us partially explains why they stick with us over time.

People still love Star Wars today.  But is it real love, or is it better defined as nostalgia?  Nostalgia is "a wistful or excessively sentimental yearning for return to or of some past period or irrecoverable condition; also: something that evokes nostalgia."  That sounds a little like love, but still less organic than the real thing.  Nostalgia is wishful thinking based on past experiences, wanting something to feel like it used to feel, or even feel like something for which we should feel nostalgic. That sounds like a snake eating its own tail a little bit more than it sounds like love.  I think a lot of Star Wars love survives with nostalgia as the secret ingredient.  I won't spend much time describing how much I don't relate to Star Wars fandom now, or how wrong-headed it is to anticipate a similar level of sheer pleasure from each new generation of films only because we found pleasure in the first ones decades ago.  I will, however, try to explain how I perceive Star Wars fandom filtered through my own experiences and feelings, and draw comparisons to other forms of obsession based on nostalgic, often ill-conceived worship of assumed perfection.  I imagine dogged, obsessive Star Wars devotees as holding on to the nostalgia of the original magic rather than consciously renewing love for a property because it is always worthy of such devotion.  I will also try to separate current Star Wars fans into logical groups, from "original fans" like me (which includes several sub groups), to the successive generations who don't have that history but still find themselves drawn into Star Wars obsession by the people aggregating machine known as Hollywood.

You might ask a relevant question or two at this point before I begin to lay out all of this unsolicited analysis: How am I qualified to judge the preferences of other Star Wars fans on any objective level?  Also: Why do I find it necessary to question someone's love of a fictional entity if they enjoy it benevolently and it isn't hurting anyone?  I'm not sure I can answer either question in a satisfactory way.  Everything ounce of motivation I have for for writing this post is about perception and feelings about the prospect of new Star Wars movies.  Past quality does not promise future quality.  Can original fans really take the time to temper their feelings about a movie they worshiped so long ago, so the new product can stand on its own merits?  If so, the culture doesn't seem advanced enough to use that Star Wars obsession power for any other societal good.  I am worried that people who wait around for Star Wars movies so they can celebrate that magical past portion of their lives that makes them the happiest also don't do anything else with as much devotion and our society is in deep trouble because of it.  I won't compare Star Wars devotees to violent extremists, although there are similarities in emotional attachment to purity and rejection of those who do not respect the faith.

Although this writing could be seen as a rant, I'll admit to writing out of mild disgust and anger to some extent, because the thing I loved so dearly for a few hot years only exists as a profit source for a mega corporation now regardless of its ability to entertain.  It feels like a well-publicized con that still finds plenty of willing marks.  It was probably such immediately after Empire Strikes Back, but the gag didn't feel so forced then.  I fell hard as a kid, became a member of the SW church, held the text close to my heart, marveled at every parable and revelation on the page and then...lost pace with those other members of the church who weren't satisfied with the source myth anymore.  They wanted to write their own gospels, compete with the Good Book and renew the pleasure of original discovery in every possible way.  They never let that first love of Star Wars be informed by the subsequent events in their lives.  They set the shrine in concrete and refused to leave its kneeling place.

There is no denying that there was something special about Star Wars in the 80's.  People who wanted more out of the story than was given in the movies weren't doing anything wrong, but they were establishing what a true "geek" was.  When other kids talked about the Star Wars "geeks" they were showing fear and ignorance of that obsessive nature.  They were not able to understand how the growth of the story beyond the borders of the movies began to work on some young minds.  Knowing that there was a whole universe of characters and species and battles future and past had almost a biological effect on some young adults.  They were different animals after knowing Star Wars, as if they fell into a radioactive pit of New Hope.  Some of those same people passed the genetic traits of Star Wars fandom to their children and have kept the longing for more Star Wars movies in the public consciousness to such an extent that even the quiet years and the weakness of the Prequels couldn't extinguish the franchise.  I wonder what young kids today really think about Star Wars?  Do they hold it up high and beg for the toys for some subconscious reason or are their "geek" parents and grandparents coaxing them along as proxy fans to keep the franchise alive? Obsession feels good for the obsessed, but the after effects can be a sense of loneliness, because no one else feels the exact same way, and the movie industry knows how to market to the obsessed, by keeping all the elements that attract us the most intact for future products.

I'm going to attempt to categorize Star Wars fans in 2015.  I won't prejudge the current movie or plans for future movies.  They may or may not be a return to greatness for the franchise.  I really don't care about that debate right now.  Let's assume that The Force Awakens is good enough to draw huge profits (which it will) and to justify future installments (almost a foregone conclusion).  So it will exist in the near-future as a movie franchise and likely attract new fans based solely on the new stories.  One gripe though: including classic characters in the new movie is shameless pandering to old fans and will not matter at all to the younger generations.  But let's progress from oldest to newest fans.  I'm a member of the oldest group, but I don't worship Star Wars now and haven't for a long time.  So my group is partly comprised of original fans who liked the movies and toys but have moved on.  Then there are original fans who did not move on or spent more time with the novels and other offshoots of the original movies.  Some of those more stubborn fans have also moved on, but a large portion of them are responsible for the continued success of the Star Wars universe.  Next are carryover fans who didn't see the films when they came out but caught on to the remnants of the original merchandising effort and watched the movies on video or cable, played the arcade games and bought the second or third generation of toys.  I know there was a time when the endless rows of hooks for three-inch action figures stopped filling toy departments, but I don't have a good feel for it because I was past haunting the toy aisle on a regular basis by then.

So in the gap between the mid-80's and the release of the first Prequel film, it is unclear who was propelling the franchise forward culturally.  It must have faded for some fans a little. There were lots of novels and comics to aid in mapping out the Star Wars universe, but I never paid much attention to them.  I was pleased when the Original Trilogy was finally released as a set on VHS, but I had recorded all three movies from USA Network long before that and only discarded those tapes in the past ten years or so.  I played the arcade games and then missed out on most of the console games as they hit because I never tried to keep up with console technology.  I was compelled to resist the gravitational pull of these products by some unseen "force", but many people did not.  Is it possible that the games, comics and books kept Star Wars moving at a sustainable pace until the Prequel Trilogy swooped in to promise new momentum?  If so, that proves the creation of a new subset of fans: those who played the games or read the books (maybe at the insistence of their parents after being introduced to the OT) and then wanted more movies.

The less said about the Prequel Trilogy the better (I for one have not seen them all the way through but I saw enough to know that the messy, over-stuffed CGI scenery, annoying lightsaber barrages and bad writing were not enough to feed nostalgia for another generation).  The subset of fans who saw those movies as kids have my sympathies.  If they consider themselves fans of the franchise solely based on the Prequels, there truly is an invisible "force" holding our universe together like Elmer's Glue.  How can they continue to care?  Again, maybe the video games and subsequent cartoon series were good enough to make it seem worthwhile, but did those things encourage the core-of-your-being devotion that many experienced with the OT?  Surely the Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter movies have surpassed Star Wars in modern movie fandom.  But maybe they have also sustained the instinct to care deeply about franchises in general, and there is enough residual love left over for Star Wars to keep it in the conversation.

Movie theaters today are full of people of all ages who don't want to sit still for a movie in public.  The culture of patiently enjoying the large shiny thing being projected in front of us has evolved because distraction by technology has become the norm, and some unseen "force" now makes us want to engage with the small screen in our pockets instead of the large screen shared by everyone in the big dark room.  So what does it take to grab the attention of these people now, let alone their obsessive love?  Market saturation plays a part, in my mind.  When three unrelated AM radio station sports shows simultaneously transition to the topic of the new Star Wars movie, as they did on my drive to work tonight, finding a way to avoid hearing about Star Wars in the modern world becomes a losing proposition.  There is an emotional wave of advertisements on every possible platform that threatens to suffocate movie goers if they don't go buy a ticket on opening day.  There's an air of "you are the outsider" if you don't buy into the hype on something as big as a new Star Wars movie.  The former geeks have become the cool kids now.  And hey, even girls might see this one!  This final subset of Star Wars fans are the ones who don't know any better.  They would take a chance on much less pedigreed genre films anyway.  If it turns out to be the new reason to love Star Wars again, that's a bonus.  Like it or not, this last group of Star Wars fans might track the progress of future films religiously, but they will likely not be monogamous.  There are too many other franchises that pursue them just as relentlessly.

By breaking down Star Wars fans by generation and by willingness to love it unconditionally, it may seem like I'm attempting to anoint the one subset that contains the best Star Wars fans.  It would be easy to state outright that I and people like me are the best fans because we demand the thrilling sensation we received from the oldest movies and will settle for nothing less.  I'm being obtuse.  There is no sense in defining our feelings in such simple terms.  We as adults cannot be thrilled in nearly the same way as we were back then.  I've seen movies as an adult that were just as entertaining, more so even, but nothing has ever rewired my imaginative engine like A New Hope did.  I'm not sure a human brain gets more than one of those EUREKA! moments that ignites a love of movies.  I don't want to proclaim any Star Wars fans as the best, the smartest, the ones whose devotion has paid off the most.  One feature of fandom that I can speak about definitively is that fandom is always personal.  Yours is not mine, and neither of ours is better than the other's.  I may use mine more frugally, like I've only dressed as Empire Fitness Suit Luke for Halloween once and would never do it at a convention or movie premiere, but I don't hate you for still sleeping on Star Wars sheets.  Those are some sturdy sheets.

And because everything relates back to food here:

In the late 1990's, Cheetos brand cheese puffs introduced a nacho cheese flavor variety.  I'm no expert, but to me the difference between regular cheese and nacho cheese is like the difference between low quality well whiskey and the cream of the crop aged stuff.  The advancement in flavor is undeniable to anyone willing to think about the difference.  Nacho cheese is probably just plain cheese powder with some tomato and garlic powder added in, but so what?.  Whatever it is, it is better.  During the short time these Cheetos were available, I ate more Cheetos than I had before or than I have since.  They were delicious, and they changed my thinking about cheese puffs forever.  When Frito Lay discontinued them, I continued to look for them for a few years after that, hoping maybe they weren't discontinued but that the stores I visited just didn't carry them.  Not many people even remember that Cheetos had a nacho cheese variety. But I remember them because they were great, and any variation of the same product released since then have not been as good, or even worth my snacking time.  Do I score any karmic/coolness points for having rigid standards about Cheetos?  No.  But, as with anything I like, the memory of that great thing that existed at the right place and time for me to find it minus any pressure to "Just consume it damnit!" makes it special in my memory.  If I never eat another Cheeto, I'll be okay.  I loved them once, and that was enough.

I have loved Star Wars, but the flavor I want most will likely never return.

Why Microwave Pies Are As Good As Cancer™

Deflated fruit haggis bomb of complacency.

I'm shamelessly setting a dour mood by putting cancer in the title, and making it commercial.  Sorry about that, and no offense to cancer victims everywhere, I can't compare anything in my life to what you experience.  Also, learn to take a joke.  But the issue I want to discuss is very serious in its own way:

Microwave pies are such a bad idea.  Period.  Cancer end of sentence.

I'm not even going to use nostalgia to explain why people like frozen pot pies.  They are a thing we were made to eat as kids even though they were terrible and in a culture that makes kids feed themselves a lot more often because parents are also terrible, every food product that must be served hot is now primarily intended for the microwave instead of the conventional oven.  Why is this a bad thing?  Because an oven makes food taste better than a microwave ever could.  There is also an important feature of an oven that a microwave was never designed to do: an oven browns food using science instead of chemistry.  Anything that says it will brown in a microwave is artificially constructed to produce a browned effect, but it's far, far from the normal browning process that occurs when food is put into a very hot and dry heating device and naturally carmelizes (which just sounds delicious).

I have this true theory that processed frozen foods are designed to give parents and other lazy people a break from creating fresh meals now and again, and the sheer volume of frozen or otherwise pre-processed convenience foods exists because people get more and more careless about cooking (maybe because we live with toxic levels of additives from processed foods) and just go with the easiest option.  That rule about only shopping around the outer sections of a grocery store to stay healthy?  That cuts out 70% of the store's contents.  We are all terrible.

But reality is reality, parents take short cuts or simply train their kids to heat up their own food when work or other adult nightmare activities get in the way.  So why do parents trust their kids with the microwave more often than the oven?  On paper, a microwave seems like the safer cooking device for a child to operate.  There is less chance of burning either the child or the house to the ground with a microwave because it doesn't conduct heat in a mechanical way that must be later cooled down.  It transmits energy waves inside a closed container through the food but leaves all surfaces of the appliance relatively unaffected by the heat that is produced in the food.

But is that really safer?  Kids and boiling hot foods don't mix too well, and there's always a chance the kid will put a metal utensil in the microwave with the food which tends to piss off the microwave and cause a fire just as easily as a misused oven.  An oven is hot and dangerous, to be sure, but so is a cell phone at times.  The heat is contained in a contraption designed to contain heat, and as long as the kid is taught how to insert and remove the food safely, there's not much risk.  Leaving an oven turned on is only going to hurt your electric bill (unless you have a gas oven, then forget what I just wrote).

By the way - don't let a child operate a stove top ever in a million years of ever.  Kids are the most terrible at that.

So let's return to the idea of food quality.  Aside from cooking that involves boiling food from the inside out, which an oven is no good at, a microwave does not cook anything better than an oven can.  There is no meat that prefers to be cooked in a microwave.  And there is also no other food that browns in a dry heating environment that will naturally brown in a microwave.  Pot pies, and a couple of food brands have frozen fruit pies as well (as pictured at the top) taste pretty good when baked in an oven.  This doesn't mean they are good, just that the food science is successful at getting you to like it.  They still don't taste homemade and are full of chemicals and unnatural thickeners and preservatives that make them look more enticing at the end of cooking.

But there is a range of pot pie quality that peaks at "just about worth the $4".  I won't bother to mention the brands because it is easy to tell which ones are better by how much they cost.  The cheap ones have very cheap filling that is just above wet cat food, and the higher priced ones have irregularly cut, identifiable meats and veggies to make them seem like homemade.  The crust is never above average on any of them because it is like a frozen sheet of oil held together by a few molecules of flour.  You won't find butter in a frozen dinner crust.  Nor will you find that incredible flaky texture that comes from the proper use of shortening or margarine, both oil products that are also popular with the best pie chefs.  So to me, the crust of a frozen dinner pie always tastes more oily than doughy, and the darkness of the crust does not improve the flavor.  Now take this oil drenched crust and retrofit it into the quick-fix microwave food market and you end up with a Frankenstein's monster version of something nature wouldn't recognize (like modern TV comedies).

Most frozen pie containers are designed to simulate an oven, sort of.  The food is usually cooked in the opened box and there is a sheet of some kind of magical browning paper stuck to the top that acts as the amplifier of the heat energy caused by the boiling of the inside of the pie and directs it at the top side of the pie to burn a brown-like effect into the crust. It's very likely that you could lay this pie crust on a smoking hot sidewalk in July and get a similar effect, but would you want to eat it?  It smells more like science fiction than food; similar to oily, burned plastic.  The crust color is uneven because the design of the box to cook it in is not perfect and the paper is some flimsy, single use crap that should probably be filed away by history like asbestos.  The paper pie tray is also made with that shiny conductive surface and also works only half as well as intended.  See the above picture again.  You are guaranteed to have some dark burned areas and some totally uncooked soft areas on your pie.  If you mash it all together and close your eyes, it still tastes the same, right?  Right.

Also consider that the main cooking technique is boiling the inside of the pie until it is hot enough to kill all the manufacturing bacteria inside, and there are holes on the top of the pie and always a damaged open part from the pie's handling by careless grocery store stockers.  Both things mean that the boiling contents inside will inevitably find a way to escape to the outside, where they will pool up inside the cooking box and/or run out and make a mess of the microwave.  This filling is wasted because it boils dry and gums up everything it touches, so you don't want to eat that part.  What's left is a half deflated pie with at least one side of unbrowned wet crust.  The Pie Gods are not smile (I usually like the congealed, runaway drips on a fresh pie.  They add a new level of dark sugar flavor to the sweet insides and salty crust.  Gotta have salty crust and lots of it with a real pie.  To me a pie is a fancy oven sandwich with some gravy innards.  The wet stuff is just there to make the delicious crust go down easier.  Also why pie is always better than cake, but I'll save that for another entry).

 So what do we do about this pie crisis?  For one thing, if you can't get real pie cooked in an oven, don't eat pie.  Nobody wants steak cooked on a car engine just to have convenient steak, right?  Some things are special because they aren't universally available.  Kids will appreciate the specialness of home baked pie, savory or sweet, and come to ignore pie when the microwave is the only source of their daily food. I'm sure kids are hard to parent when it comes to food, but one thing a kid won't do is develop a craving for something he/she has never tried.  So make pie important and rare like food diamonds.  Second, if you simply have to introduce frozen pies to your kids, spread them out with lots of real pie in between or save them for cold winter months when the whole family is home to enjoy them baked in the oven.  I won't rant about the use of processed frozen foods because reality trumps logic at times, and there are those lazy, pajama days we all enjoy when worrying about made-from-scratch dinner is not more important than a soft chair and a blanket and a TV show or two.  Eating right takes effort, and nobody is that disciplined all the time.

To sum up: pie is more than that geometry number nobody can remember.  So much more.  Cancer more.

A beautiful pie I did not make.  Sorry, I've been lazy.

Best Albums of 2014, Ignoring A Bunch of Albums I Didn't Hear

I'm starting to think my music preferences don't matter anymore, if they ever did.  They've never mattered in the larger realm of music opinion.  Even if I drowned myself in an ocean of music every day of the year and documented piles of lists of the greatest works of every genre imaginable in 2014, my opinions would still be buried in a galaxy of other opinions.  That's the magical data rich world we live in.  There are some reliable opinions that float above the typical internet garbage, but I'll never be among them.  I'm not doing this as a career.  I write as a hobby, a very infrequent hobby driven by boredom and restlessness and that secret itch that creative people sometimes die from.

But even in the small space I inhabit globally, I'm not sure my music choices matter to ME anymore.  I take new music in very haphazardly, either in large gulps or nearly invisible trickles.  I don't live for music, or think much about it daily.  If I have headphones on it's usually to play podcasts or some other talk radio download.  Most years I'm lucky to buy 10 albums, and maybe sample 10-15 more.  That's a good year.  2014 was a good year.  I spent MP3 money frugally.  I tried before I buyed [sic].  I played catch up at the end like I sometimes always do.  When a hobby requires research, well that's...gotta stop this thought train.  I'm boring myself.  Never mind, just read please.

My Favorite Albums of 2014 - in no order whatsoever:

St. Vincent - St. Vincent

This is the first time St. Vincent has grabbed me and held on for an entire album.  The pop quality and homages to David Bowie are endearing, while the quirkiness is less off-putting compared to previous albums.  Or maybe it seems to lead in a direction I’m able to grasp this time.  Her engaging interview with WTF’s Marc Maron recently helped me relate to her a little bit too.  Whatever it was that clicked, I’m finally on board.

Royal Blood - Royal Blood

Discard what I don’t like about Jack White (his voice/sense of entitlement) and include what I love about Thickfreakness-era Black Keys (their balls) and you have a decent description of Royal Blood’s power duo debut album.  But, as with any comparison/contrast of singular bands, Royal Blood does enough right to stand apart from either of those two.  “Ten Tonne Skeleton” is this year’s “Seven Nation Army” or “Your Touch”.  I hope it gets as much airplay (or is currently getting as much; who listens to radio anymore?).

Prince - Art Official Age

Regardless of my lifelong devotion to Prince’s lengthy, prolific musical journey (which had several dead spots after Graffiti Bridge), this album is really good. The lyrics don’t reach too desperately to be “with the times”, the overall concept isn’t distracting (though I’ve always disliked spoken segues in between songs) and more than one or two of these songs sounds altogether different than anything he’s ever done before.  For a guy in his mid-50’s, Prince seems to be interested in avoiding the veteran musician coasting on his catalog thing that keeps a lot of aging artists hanging around in the mainstream.  And there’s that whole other original album that came out at the same time and isn’t like this one at all.  Name another artist of Prince’s generation that is capable of that much product (shut up Elvis Costello).

FKA Twigs - LP1 

She’s toured with Prince (a ringing endorsement) and combines a lot of my favorite things in one package (agile voice, good rhythms, avoidance of pop formula, soul/electronica hybrid…).  This is the voice that could power a thousand dance mixes.  Don’t make me analyze it too much.  I’m still enjoying it a lot.

Cloud Nothings - Here and Nowhere Else

As a guy who never understood the appeal of The Strokes, I gave this album a chance in a way that I probably never could have done for The Strokes.  And yet, I get a similar vibe from each, minus the shameless Stones cloning by the latter.  Cloud Nothings have obviously consumed the entire catalogs of Green Day and Jimmy Eat World.  Still: the guitars and drums are tight, the vocals are sloppy/sappy, there is a little bit of Cheap Trick peaking in at the seams.  It’s my frayed pair of American Eagle Jeans kind of garage band this year.  Is that 100 words, Teacher?  This album is very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very decent.  There.

Broods - Evergreen

Synth pop for the unloved.  Smooth vocals, not-too-pushy dubstep-y instrumentals, catchy hooks.  This whole album could be the creation of a sentient computer, but it smells sweet and has a beating heart: two things computers haven’t figured out how to manifest yet.  I actually don’t know why I like this album.  Yes I do: the song “Never Gonna Change”.  That’s enough of a reason.

The New Basement Tapes - Lost on the River

Smelly old Bob Dylan may have never intended these smelly old basement tapes to hit the mass market, but it seems like they are talked about in his career history more than anything else he did that wasn’t Blonde on Blonde or Blood on the Tracks.  As with “All Along The Watchtower”, I like all Dylan songs better when they are performed by someone else.  This New Basement Tapes project is pretty cool too, but I’m probably more interested in the process that went into creating the songs than I am with most of the songs themselves.  The HBO documentary covering the whole thing is very special.  I’m curiously attracted to the art that goes into music production.  That’s probably the only reason I like ONCE and its soundtrack so much (LOL no it’s not).

Sharon Van Etten - Are We There

Album as heart-rending confessional catharsis machine (See those Dylan essentials mentioned above).  I really hope Sharon Van Etten feels better after making this album.  I hope it lifted whatever crushing weight that helped create the bones of it.  Of course it’s amazingly depressing to listen to and should come with a bottle of whiskey and self-cleaning hanky.  Is it possible to cry yourself to sleep and still listen to an entire album in a conscious way?  In other words, it’s great music for solo listening by empathetic lovelorn fools.

Opeth - Pale Communion

You got me good this time, Nils Lofgrensensten or whatever your name is (I know it’s Mikael Akerfeldt, damn it.  I’m watching Vikings Season 2 right now and just wanted to push the Sveeeedish name joke one time).  Seriously though, this band will surprise anyone familiar with their metal roots or their gradual conversion to alt-rock, but will be a welcome surprise to fans of the band's chameleon tendencies.  Whatever genre this album belongs to (I won’t bother trying to categorize for fear of sounding stupid to myself) is bound to piss off their hardline metal fans because it rejects almost everything that metal does for those fans.  This is the equivalent of Slayer putting out an album of 1960’s country standards.  And guess what?  It’s fantastic.

London Grammar - If You Wait

There’s nothing especially groundbreaking about this London Grammar album.  It’s intensely understated at times and jangly and over-programmed at others.  Yep, kind of like Eurythmics.  Also like Eurythmics: the other blokes in the band are only there to support the incredible voice of the female lead, in this case Hannah Reid instead of Annie Lennox.  I don’t think I’ve heard a voice this powerful and full of potential since Lennox.  Prediction: by album two or three, Reid will be going solo too.  There’s just too much budding greatness going on there to hide behind a band name for long.

***

Other new stuff I liked this year (some not from 2014 but recent anyway)

Angel Olsen - Burn Your Fire For No Witness, Devin Townsend - Casualties, Flying Lotus - You’re Dead, Honeyblood - Honeyblood, Spoon - They Want My Soul, Strand of Oaks - Heal, Mastodon - Once More ‘Round, Prince and 3rdEyeGirl - Plectrumelectrum, Tedeschi Trucks Band - Made Up Mind, Fantasia - Side Effects of You, Bastille - Bad Blood, Birdy - Fire Within, Disclosure - Settle, Gabrielle Aplin - English Rain, Inside Llewyn Davis - Original Soundtrack, Jessie Ware - Devotion, Lost in the Trees - Past Life, Volcano - Repave

--BN