Nightswimming #10: 08/15/24-08/22/24
Acoustic Fall vibes! Baltimore Punk! Earplugs! And MORE!
Highly Recommend! (best of the week)
Long Way Home - Ray LaMontagne (Liula/Thirty Tigers)
Some artists are inextricable from certain seasons. Smash Mouth sounds like 1pm at a municipal water park in July. Frank Sinatra sounds like sitting by a fireplace on a Sunday evening in that time between Thanksgiving and Christmas. Washed Out sounds like rolling your windows down on the first warm Saturday in April after a long, brutal Winter.
Ray LaMontagne is squarely a Fall musician. His signature sultry graveled-up vocals fit warmly over both upbeat soul tracks and wistful acoustic tracks. His distinct sonic blend sounds like sitting blanket-lapped on a back porch, overlooking a sea of red and orange with a bonfire burning in the distance. Maybe it’s because Gossip in the Grain came out Homecoming weekend of my Freshman year of high school, but to me a gentle croon from Ray LaMontagne is like a quilted plaid hooded jacket.
And he’s been knocking on that door for a long time. Long Way Home is LaMontagne’s 9th album in his 20 year career. While not much of a departure from his beloved sound, the influences feel stronger. In the liner notes, LaMontagne references Townes Van Zandt’s “To Live is To Fly” and the line “When where you’ve been is good and gone, all you keep is the getting there”. Not only is Long Way Home a thematic homage to that idea, it’s a sonic hat-tip to a misty 70’s singer-songwriter sound. Track 4 is a Neil Young track, with all the harmonica to prove it. Track 6 sounds like a demo from Van Morrison’s Tupelo Honey. Track 7 could really be a lost Stephen Stills B-side. The musical references are obvious but delivered in a way that only LaMontagne can.
That Long Way Home came out during the Midwest’s “False Fall”, where temps drop and humidity melts away momentarily before returning to scorching 90’s, is apropos and lucky for me. It gives me time to recover from the sadness of LaMontagne’s lyrics and the melancholy of the music before True Fall begins.
Highlights: I Wouldn’t Change a Thing, My Lady Fair, The Way Things Are
Stay Golden - Combat (Counter Intuitive)
Combat’s Stay Golden is the most urgent record of the year. It’s urgent both because of its ambition, and the sheer energy with which the music runs full speed into you. It’s an out-and-out punk album—none of this mucking about with sub-genres like post-punk or hardcore or whatever the hell egg punk is. It’s conceptually adventurous, lyrically bursting at the seams, and whip fast. With intros, interludes, thematic reprisals, and two colossal 8+ minute tracks replete with a string section, it’s a concept album in a genre that has been sorely missing concept albums. Or concepts at all.
Stay Golden is Baltimore’s Infinity on High.
In Ian Cohen’s great and thorough profile of Combat’s 20-year-old frontman, Holden Wolf for Stereogum, Wolf name-checks a half-dozen pop-punk/emo influences that verify his bona fides. It’s clear Stay Golden is where intentional songwriting meets fucking around with friends. From offering to record and master bands’ records on a tape deck at age 15 to assembling a 12-piece pop-punk show in a church basement with 2 drummers and 4 bassists, Holden Wolf is a Head in the truest sense. It comes out in the eclecticism of the music and the maturity of the lyrics.
Sonically, Stay Golden is a force and a true wonder. The guitars are meticulous while still having fun. Wolf’s vocals, double and even quadruple-tracked at times, are delivered with a distinct yelpy urgency that slides right into the punk ethos. And the drums. My god, the drums. Militaristic and machine-gun fast, like a Motorhead record in skinny jeans. On top of the airtight punk instrumentals, there are strings, piano, and glockenspiel that expand the sound.
Lyrically, the songs border on Thiessen-esque (or Stump-ian, depending on your flavor) just by the sheer amount of words that fit snugly into every line. From real, raw couplets about knowing nothing and feeling less, to goofy little jaunts about ordering too much fast food with your friends, the themes of Stay Golden evoke the coming-of-age hallmarks of a great punk record.
Highlights: Weird Ending Explained Pt. 1 and 2, Epic Season Finale
Worth a Listen! (good to very good)
Triple Seven - Wishy (Winspear)
In their debut album, Indianapolis rock band Wishy serves up classic Midwest emo through the lens of late-90’s adult alternative. In 2024, if you’re not calling yourself a shoegaze band you’re missing the moment. Wishy delivers on the foundation they built with their first 2 EPs—big crunchy, fuzzy guitars and dreamy textural sounds—but they do it with the melodic focus of a 1998 two-hit wonder. The vocals are Gin Blossoms. The riffs are Collective Soul. The drums are Fastball. The bass is Better Than Ezra.
The feel of the music is wearing 90’s like a costume, but the music is not derivative. It stays true to Midwest emo in tempo and lyrical theme, and it’s heavier than anything New Radicals ever made.
Triple Seven is a perfect feel-good album, and an inflection point in this young band’s career!
Highlights: Little While, Triple Seven
Hot Singles in Your Area!
Here are some great singles that dropped in the last week:
Casual Drug Use - Katie Gavin (said it before, will say it again—one of the best voices in Pop music. MUNA’s frontwoman with her own solo album, out Oct. 25th.)
Easy - Waiiist (St. Louis indie sweethearts who put on a hell of a live show. Hazy dreampop with slinky vocals and some gorgeous keyboard tones.)
You’ll Get Nothing and Like It - Ben Quad (melodic scream-forward HC from Oklahoma. Touring with Microwave.)
Friend - Trace Mountains (a VERY pleasant jaunty little acoustic guy. Hell of a voice and delivery. Solo project of lo-fi band LVL UP’s Dave Benton. Album out Sept. 27th.)
An Unpaid Unsponsored product review!
Let me say this first: You HAVE to start protecting your ears. YOU. Literally you reading this. Point at yourself? Yes. You.
I started way too late and I know I’ve done damage to my ears, but the second best time to start is right now.
I would say I go to more live shows than most. A couple times a month at least. And for the last few years that I’ve tried to be thoughtful about my hearing protection, I’ve just been cramming those orange foam cylinders into my ears. They’re fine but they basically just muffle everything, and they’re super great at scooping piles of earwax out of my ears and embarrassing me in front of the art baddies.
Advertisements for Loop’s Switch earplugs were being served to me like hotcakes, and I thought what the hell I need to level up. So they were in fact $80, which many would balk at. But my thinking was if they work the way they’re advertised it’s well worth the pricetag.
They do and they are.
The Loop Switches have 3 modes of noise control. You can go to their website for the full Bill Nye, but basically there’s a chamber in each one that fills a little bit more with each mode. The first mode is good for leveling out like a noisy party, the second is pretty perfect for most live shows, and the 3rd is just a step above that. They don’t muffle the high ends and low ends, so the quality of the music survives, but they help level out the harmful ends of the spectrum.
My favorite thing about the Loop Switches so far is that they seem to block out what is known in the jamband world as “Chompers”. You know, the Chads behind you that get way too drunk and have scream conversations about work while your favorite band is shredding? I have worn these to 2 Phish shows, 2 local shows, and 1 loud-ass Smashing Pumpkins concert, and I noticed a marked decline in Chompers.
My chief complaint is that they are pretty fiddly and easy to mishandle. They come with 4 ear size attachments (and I think I need to size up) but the packaging is literally slippery and the plugs themselves feel like they want to get dropped. I ordered the extra connector dongle (pictured above) to wear them around my neck when I take them out, but I hated it. So for now I’m just being super careful.
Maybe if Loop sees this, they could give Nightswimming some money to spread the word further and wider about how their product WORKS and is GREAT! ;)
Music Moment of the Week
Live music is the best because you are guaranteed a unique experience. Bands may play similar setlists night to night, but they’re never going to play each song *exactly* the same way.
And in some cases the frontman plays your favorite song so hard that he blows up his entire rig and has to spend the next 15 minutes vamping with his rhythm guitarist while the roadies scramble.
As my work day was winding down on August 22nd 2024, I was offered a free ticket to see Smashing Pumpkins by my buddy Michael (Big Ups, Mike! Thanks again!). I had been watching ticket prices all for weeks and told myself if they dropped below a point, I’d act. They never did, and I kind of just went on thinking “oh well. I miss a band I like every week.”
But when a free ticket falls in your lap, you jump.
It was a cool, crispy evening and I drove myself to Riverport (a.k.a. Hollywood Casino Amphitheatre, a.k.a. Verizon Wireless Amphitheatre, a.k.a. UMB Bank Pavilion) with my windows down, thinking.
I hadn’t really crystallized this thought until recently, since I’ve started thinking critically about music and my relationship to it, but Smashing Pumpkins have sneakily been one of my favorite bands since childhood.
I wore out my mom’s CD copy of Siamese Dream. I checked out Mellon Collie and Adore from the Windsor Branch Jeffco library and immediately ripped them to the Family Hewlett-Packard. I’ve known these songs by heart since before I could drive, but for whatever reason I would never name Smashing Pumpkins when asked for my favorite bands.
So it hit me like a ton of bricks and sucked the air out of me when Billy Corgan, James Iha, and Jimmy Chamberlin walked onstage with the rest of their band. I was like, “oh yeah holy shit, I LOVE these guys!”
And with each new song the emotional waves used me as their breaker.
You can see the whole setlist here and see that they played all of their beloved tracks, and many of the great deeper ones, but the highlight came when they launched into my all-time favorite Smashing Pumpkins song: Mayonaise.
Corgan apparently went so hard (understandably) on that song that he blew apart his entire guitar rig. For the next 12-15 minutes, he and James Iha traded awkward jokes in an attempt to vamp. These are not guys who are known for their crowd banter! Corgan launched into an acapella version of Landslide, the Fleetwood Mac cover they did on Pisces Iscariot, and then an improvised partially-acoustic version of Rocket from Siamese Dream.
The set ended with a long, jammed-out Gossamer, where Corgan showed his chops as a guitar player, followed by Cherub Rock and Zero as encores.
Age has softened ol’ Bill Corgan, and I’m still relishing in the moments.
Nightswimming 2024 Sp*tify Playlist
Here you go, you vondrukes
I love song titles like Weird Ending Explained and Epic Season Finale because they tell me exactly who the songwriter is: age, demo, vibe.