Saturday night music

It’s been a quiet weekend so far. A lot of people are off to visit parents and relatives out of state for the Easter weekend. J. and I are sitting around listening to some music this evening. We just finished listening to a recent vinyl acquisition of mine:

Public Image Limited - The Flowers of Romance (1981)
PiL is of course Johnny (Rotten) Lydon’s band after the Sex Pistols broke up. The first few PiL albums were really interesting — lots of drums and fairly experimental. Another good PiL album to check out from that time frame is Second Edition. I have both of these on vinyl, but if you click on the links you can see the CD’s are still available over at Amazon.

Another recent aquisition on the turntable tonight:

Neutral Milk Hotel - On Avery Island (1995)
I keep hearing comparisons of Neutral Milk Hotel to other bands that I like, and finally recently I picked up this album new over at the Record Collector. To their credit, I think I’m not going to write a review on first listen (which was tonight). Instead, I’ll give this one some more time on the turntable and see what I think of it. It stikes me as interesting but sort of wimpy, but I’ll give it some time and come back to it in a later blog entry.

And finally, J. and I started out the evening with some high school music that I still have on vinyl:

Erasure - The Innocents (1988)
This is a fun little album with some, of course, great singing by Andy Bell. His feminine voice was always a hit with my gay friends. Erasure reminds me of driving down to Milwaukee on the weekends with Wes. Wes, who isn’t gay, had the best car stereo of anybody I knew, and listening to the ‘shock and awe’ of his subwoofers always put me in the mood for a night of dancing at Club Marilyn.

M. made the observation the other night that I tend to have an 80’s preference for music. She wondered why. I’ll state that that is probably true. It’s mostly because I first really got tuned into music in the mid-to-late 80’s during junior high and high school. The music from that time period has really stayed with me. My musical tastes have evolved over the years, and these days I listen to a lot of 20th century classical. But put on Siouxsie & The Banshees or Joy Division, and I’m a happy man.