Spooning

Let's see now, what happened in 2005?  He visited his sister in San Francisco and came down with a case of the flu that he thought was going to kill him (it didn't).  He led several hikes up to the North Georgia mountains for the Zen Center and he spent a lot of that summer working at a large petroleum refinery in Pascagoula, Mississippi until Hurricane Katrina came along and pretty much shut that whole project down. 

He finally ended - for good this time - the on-again, off-again relationship with the girlfriend he had traveled with and feuded with back in 2003 and 2004, and by that point he had came to consider his lovers not as life partners or potential life partners but more as pleasant companions for whatever particular incarnation he was experiencing at that time.

He had spent a lot of 2005 downloading box sets of Miles Davis and John Coltrane. He had amassed the complete discographies of The Orb, Orbital, and Underworld, as well as the bizarre avant-garde music of The Residents. He was collecting electronica by prolific German composer Pete Namlook and the numerous Buddha Bar chill-out CDs by French producer Claude Challe.

The most significant musical event of 2005 happened for him late in the year. One winter morning, he saw an on-line post titled "Best Albums of 1995" and to his surprise realized that he didn't recognize the names of any of the bands. Spoon? Bloc Party? Black Mountain? Metric? Who were these guys? He hadn't heard of any of them, and yet the poster was saying these were the best albums of the year.

Caught up in downloading all of that increasingly obscure or vintage music from the internet and listening to whatever KCRW happened to be playing that week, had he really fallen so out of touch with current music that he had zero name recognition with the best new bands of the year?

It was a wake-up call, what an alcoholic might call a moment of clarity.  He downloaded all four albums and found that he really liked them all, a lot, but especially Spoon, who's Gimme Fiction stands out to to him now as the best of that bunch of the best.

But more importantly, he realized that even though it was readily available for free downloading on the internet, he needed to stop focusing so much on obscure, collector's item records, and start listening to contemporary music again.  There was a lot going on, and it was sounding pretty good.

He got busy looking for earlier recordings by those particular bands and simultaneously started seeking out new sources of new music.  It didn't take him long to rediscover his old forgotten friend, WRAS Album 88, who were playing this new indie rock on a regular basis. 

Speaking of Spoon, here's their latest song, from their forthcoming They Want My Soul: