Category: Towards the Within

  • And… Billy Bragg is with us, too

    Now, Billy Bragg is a folk musician I do listen to. He wrote a classic tune for Minneapolis in the past few days as well. If you haven’t listened to Billy Bragg before, I recommend you remedy with that below.

    When they came for the immigrants
    I got in their face
    When they came for the refugees
    I got in their face
    When they came for the five-year-olds
    I got in their face
    When they came to my neighborhood
    I just got in their face.

    I will bear witness to terror
    I will bear witness to tyranny
    I will bear witness to murder
    I will bear witness to fascism.

    For reference, a five-year-old was used for bait by ICE to arrest his father. They wouldn’t let the young boy go into the house, and then they took him to Texas with his father against judge’s orders.

  • Towards the Within — Citizen I.C.E., Dropkick Murphys

    Too scared to join the military
    Too dumb to be a cop
    Citizen I.C.E.

    This is an old song of theirs, formerly called “Citizen C.I.A”, and lyrically reworked to reflect current events. The rest of the lyrics are in-video.

    I have to admit, I should probably listen to more Dropkick Murphys than I do, and that will probably change in the coming weeks. Every time I encounter news about the band, I see them in an increasingly positive light. I don’t have to like every song a band writes to know them to be stand-up folks that deserve my support.

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  • Towards the Within — Sólstöður, Kælan Mikla

    A little Icelandic darkwave in honor of the upcoming solstice, perhaps?

    Á sólstöðum í svartnætti tunglið geislum grætur
    Vetrarnótt; við erum þínar sönnu svörtu dætur

    Winter solstice in the black night
    the moon cries its beams
    Winter night; we are your true dark daughters

    Of course you may have some, my darkling dearies. Enjoy.

  • Towards the Within — Succulence by Foetus

    J.G. Thirlwell, also known as Clint Ruin, Frank Want, and Foetus (multiple variants of the name), among other pseudonyms is an Aussie musician that has been putting out albums of an experimental nature since the early 80s.

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  • Towards the Within — Vicious Thorn, Rose Chronicles

    It’s been a spell since I added a song to the series of posts that was originally intended to look backwards to look forwards for music discovery.

    I was disappointed with the discovery process, which either sent me to bands I already knew full well or directed me to bands that sounded nothing at all like my “seed” music.

    Rose Chronicles, copyright status unknown

    After yesterday’s post quoting an opinion piece writer who has essentially declared that we have settled for the enshittification of our culture via the monetization of everything artistic thanks to the internet, I was left thinking about the last time I really enjoyed most of the music I was discovering. I can safely say that started to wane at some point near the end of the 90s.

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  • Towards the Within | Dominion (cover) by Heartworms

    While not aways the case, I do like myself a good cover song now and again, just to see how a band reinterprets a song and tries to own it. I’ve never seen much point in a band that tries to make something sound exactly like the original — I mean, what’s the point? And there are a few songs and bands that just don’t translate well into a new sound (Doors, Zeppelin, post-Barrett Pink Floyd). But, on the balance, it is fun to see how a band tries to reimagine a song and make it their own.

    I’ve not made it any secret that I am a Sisters of Mercy fan (for the first two albums and early singles, anyway). And I’ve grown to really like the neo-gothic Heartworms after Chris Nelson introduced me to them at the beginning of summer. So, when I saw that JoJo and band performed a Sisters song in-studio, I definitely had to check it out.

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  • Revisiting Syd

    Since last week, I’m been very much in a Barrett mood.

    It’s been a while since I last listened to Madcap Laughs and Barrett, and I was only slightly surprised to see that they had been pulled from my streaming service. It seems like albums are chronically coming and going, especially when they are from acts “across the pond” [Syd Barrett joins Jesus and Mary Chain for albums I can’t listen to… at the moment]. Without super-simple access to Syd’s solo albums, I opted for Pink Floyd’s Piper at the Gates of Dawn album to tide me me over until I could either pull up my MP3s or find time to find a quality upload of the complete albums up on YouTube for me.

    Listening with “fresh ears”, it strikes me just how much Syd indirectly and directly influenced some of my tastes in music.

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  • Towards the Within — New Bible

    Confession time.

    Back in the 90s, I had completely fallen in love with Ani DiFranco based on a single album, Out of Range. If I were to be completely honest, I actually fell in love with her over a single song, The Diner, and I did so while I was sipping over-roasted coffee in some bohemian-styled converted warehouse with the brick walls and exposed support timbers in the Lowertown neighborhood of downtown Saint Paul. I fell hard for her before the song was even over.

    Ani DiFranco; Image source: Rolling Stone

    My conversation partner had gone off to take a piss, as you are prone to needing to while drinking far too many over-roasted cups of black coffee over an afternoon spent doing largely nothing in a very bohemian manner, chain-smoking cigarettes in a very artistic way in the artist quarter of a revived downtown area.

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  • Towards the Within — Hi Ren

    I’ve slowed down a bit on my listening to music, trying to find something that fits this nebulous definition I have of “different like the 80s post-punk era, but newer” music. Of course, while I am watching videos of nerdy girls building out their rooms on YouTube, the site is more than happy to continue providing me with music ideas to listen to, including Falco’s “Rock Me, Amadeus” (has there been anyone more absurd and apparently oblivious to their absurdity than Falco? Perhaps Boy George? Right Said Fred?).

    Of course, there is only so much Viking-inspired music I can listen to, and Falco is not really someone I want to listen to on a regular basis — nor is that terribly “new”. So, I end up watching my videogame hype videos and largely ignore the offerings on deck.

    That is, until the algorithm reminded me of a song that Chris Nelson introduced me to a couple of years back by a chap named Ren. Watching and listening to the song again (and this is a case where the song is best as a multimedia experience), I am still really, really impressed with this song. It does a lot of things that I wish I could do as a musician, but lack the talent to be able to do — both in the guitar playing and the presentation. The song itself is reminiscent of a manic Arlo Guthrie singing about a restaurant owned by Alice. Except not done for laughs and glitched on the part where they are jumping up and down yelling, “Kill! Kill!”

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  • Towards the Within — Ulvetime (Hour of the Wolf)

    Interestingly enough, the YouTube algorithm brought me back full circle on a music listening binge and decided that I probably had enough of that fancy and schmancy post-punk modern stuff in English and decided to point me back at something more along the lines of modern non-English folk with real instruments and minimal production on the overall sound.

    Trigger warning: Song contains Northern European folk sounds that feel old enough to be tribal in essence. May contain ethnic instruments and little to no electronic music to sooth the transition.

    Upon listening, I figured, who am I to argue with such a suggestion? Which brings me to Sonleikr’s Ulvetime. If you look at the song title with crossed eyes and think really hard to the Old Norse language course you started but never finished, you can pick out a translation: ulve (Danish) from ulfr (Old Norse) which obviously means “wolf”. And time (Danish) is equally obvious as “hour”.

    I always knew you were clever.

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