Okay, okay… It’s not a record, nor is it 10 year old, but the mustachioed plumber’s latest adventure is ridiculously nostalgic. It’s like Nintendo took the best parts of Super Mario Bros. 3 and Super Mario World, updated the graphics, and added 4-player simultaneous play. No fancy new game mechanics, just a classic side-scroller that’ll instantly put you back in your parents’ living room.
It’s a simple, easy-to-play game that the whole family can enjoy… And on that note, I’ll let a gameplay video do the rest of the talking while I go back to stomping Goombas.
Now here’s an album I haven’t listened to in years. I hated Dave Matthews Band when I bought it back in ’98, but a chick I liked was a huge DMB fan, and teenager hormones make strange things happen…
I don’t remember her name, but whoever she was, I owe her some thanks: Crash’s eclectic sound was a total 180 from what I normally listened to, and opened the door for a ton of new music. Counting Crows, Jaco Pastorius’ body of work, Allman Brothers, Grateful Dead, Blues Traveler, etc… I could go on all day.
I was never all the way in love with the album, but I enjoyed it. “Two Step” has one of my favorite song intros ever, “Tripping Billies” has a great bassline (hell, most of the album has a great bassline), and “Crash Into Me” reminds me of the James Taylor records I spent my childhood listening to with my mom, but I could never take the whole record in one sitting.
I can now. This is hands-down my favorite discovery so far in my little flashback journey. Maybe I’ve just “grown up” enough to appreciate the slower tracks, but I found myself wanting more when it was over. The only DMB songs on my iPod before today were “Two Step” and an assortment of live versions of “All Along The Watchtower”, but the whole album’s on there now, and I’m ripping Under The Table And Dreaming later tonight.
I’m cheating a little here, since I haven’t actually owned it for 10 years, but it occurred to me the other day that sticking to records I’ve actually owned for 10 years would eventually turn into week after week of punk EP’s…
Mattzors and I saw Flogging Molly last night, so while looking at my rack this morning my eyes kept being drawn to their albums… At first I was thinking they wouldn’t meet the 10 year guideline, but then I remembered that their debut was a live album called Alive Behind The Green Door, released in 1997.
The first thing you notice when you put it on is how unpolished it is… I’ve never particularly liked live records, because most of them just sound like studio recordings with crowd noise dubbed in, but not here… Alive Behind The Green Door has a very gritty and raw sound that puts you right there in the bar, and it’s ever-so-slightly muffled in a way that mimics the hearing loss one tends to suffer at loud shows.
Seeing them in person has definitely changed Alive for me… When I put it on today I closed my eyes and was right back in the crowd again. The unpolished sound didn’t bother me like it sometimes did, either. It’s probably not the best way to introduce yourself to Flogging Molly, but if you like any of their studio albums, then you’ll love the energy they bring to the live record. It doesn’t compare to the real deal, but it’s a reasonable alternative if they’re not playing anywhere near you.
I won this CD in a radio phone-in contest back in ’98. I loved “Stereo” back then, but never really listened to the rest of the album, so when I pulled it off the shelf this morning I was afraid it was going to be the same story as last week’s Third Eye Blind disaster.
Thankfully it’s not. For me, the late 90′s were dominated by the discovery of and immersion into west coast punk, so I really wasn’t an alt-rock kind of kid when I got this album. Listening to these Canadian rockers now, I hear a lot of the R.E.M. and Counting Crows I got into later in high school. I’ve since moved past my alternative phase, so there’s no big inspiration to write about, and there’s still nothing that really catches me the way “Stereo” did, but I’ll be putting a few more songs on my Touch to come up in random play.
Normally I write from the perspective that somebody out there must like it or it wouldn’t have been made, and I try not to slam music just because it doesn’t suit my own tastes. This pragmatic approach goes out the window for Friday Rewinds: You get my gut reactions, not analysis. My apologies to Third Eye Blind.
I stood in front of my CD rack, and a flash of red sandwiched between two white labels catches my eye. It’s Third Eye Blind’s self-titled debut album. I thought back, and realized I haven’t listened to it since early high school. I threw it on, sat back, and…
What the hell was I thinking? I blame American Pie and a Columbia House membership for this one, because the more I think about it, the more I realize that I didn’t really like this album then, and I like it even less now. When I got it back in ’99 I at least enjoyed Semi-Charmed Life, but I’ve been so oversaturated with generic pop-rock over the last 10 years that I don’t even like that anymore. I couldn’t even listen to the whole song… I tried, but they remind me too much of Oasis, another band I’ve always supremely disliked. I went through every track on the disc trying to find one I could get all the way through, but no joy.
I have a thing against selling albums (even ones I don’t like), but I really wouldn’t care if I moved and lost this CD. I probably wouldn’t notice anyway.
I’m cheating a little bit on this first one… I didn’t pull it off the shelf today, but I think it’s in the spirit of what I’m trying to do here.
I was 8 when The Barenaked Ladies put out Gordon. I was too young to get most of “If I Had $1000000″, but I loved Kraft Dinner, and to this day I can’t hear the song without imagining myself diving into a pool filled with a million bucks worth of cheesy deliciousness. With Dijon ketchup. I saved up allowance for weeks to buy Gordon, and I listened to it so much that the tape broke about 6 months later. When I bought it again, I dubbed it to a blank tape and kept the original safe and sound in my tape rack. It’s probably still there.
I don’t remember what replaced it (probably The Offspring’s Smash – that’s for another Friday Rewind), but I eventually stopped listening to it. Sure, it made its way into my Walkman a few times during high school, and I bought the CD used when I got a discman, but after that it was forgotten until my vacation this spring.
I’d rented a car that had a CD player but no tape deck or AUX input, so I found myself looking at my CD rack for the first time in years. That red and blue ball jumped out at me, and before I knew it I was on the highway to Cap Pele singing along to “Grade 9″ at the top of my lungs. I spent most of that week of vacation listening to it, and I think I like it more now than I did then. The lyrics are a little more personally relevant than they were when I was 10, and I found myself enjoying the less upbeat songs (like “The Flag” and “What a Good Boy”) I’d always skipped when I was a kid.
These days, the whole album’s on my iPod and gets pretty regular rotation. Who knows how long it would’ve sat, neglected on a dusty shelf, if I hadn’t rented that car…
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Now here’s an album I haven’t listened to in years. I hated Dave Matthews Band when I bought it back in ’98, but a chick I liked was a huge DMB fan, and teenager hormones make strange things happen…
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