Have you ever had one of those songs that gets stuck in your head for days…weeks…years? Sure you have. These are the songs that always make the cut. The songs on repeat. We all have them. I have a ton. Welcome back to Endless Loop.
“Shadow” by Chromatics
Eyes blurred and head foggy, this year went by in a flurry. There was just so much to take in…everywhere…everyday, scores of great albums, great movies, great TV shows, great books, great comics, great beer, and more, more, more! So this year, rather than do a run through of my favorite records, songs, etc., I picked ten different things from pop culture that made my 2015 awesome. Though, if you are interested, you can and should check out my year-end album list, song list, and movie list. There’s some good stuff in there, I swear.
More and more frequently I find myself wondering whether the world has always been this despicable or if I’m just becoming more conscious of it. Concurrent with this feeling is a realisation that our generation is being increasingly more spoilt with a Pop Culture smorgasbord: the Heroes of our youth dominate the Box Office, favourite bands of the past reform and tour, the best TV show of all time revived after a 25 year hiatus, Comic-Con has gone supernova. One of the few gifts of being a dentally challenged, pallid skinned Brit is an ever healthy cynicism possibly attributable to being of an island nation still living on a pension from a highly questionable Imperial legacy, which during the best of times enables many of us to take a dim view of anything that on the surface seems too good to be true. Back in my teens when I thought ‘The X Files’ was giving me a window into the clandestine machinations of the world’s superpowers my dad calmly and succinctly cut through my teenage distrust of his adulthood by putting it to me ‘hypothetically’ that THEY would love it if we were ‘watching the skies’ rather than paying attention to what was going on in front of our noses.
“Oh God. I was just a boy.
I saw him in my dream.
He said he wanted to play.
He opened me and I invited him and he came inside me.”
~ Leland Palmer
image courtesy of allmusic.com
For some of you who may be unfamiliar with Bohren & Der Club of Gore I know what you think this record is going to sound like and I can assure you that you could not be more wrong. So seriously, don’t skip this! When the sun goes down fire up a gin martini and find a place where you can settle in to a late night accessible mind frame uninterrupted for a while, because this is the perfect vibe for a Friday night. In fact, I don’t know why I’m posting this as early in the day as I am, but I guess this way you’ll at least get a heads up for this evening. Because when I say that, to me, there is a lot of music I consider day time music and a lot I consider night time music I should also clarify that some music can be both. However Sunset Mission – and Bohren in general – is pretty specifically night time music.
image courtesy of wikipedia.org
I remember reading about Strangehaven back in the mid-nineties. Probably in Wrapped In Plastic magazine, as it very easily would have/will appeal to fans of David Lynch and Mark Frost’s landmark television series Twin Peaks. Somehow, despite my rabid Twin Peaks obsession I never managed to pick up even a single copy of Strangehaven. If I had – picked up even a single copy that is – I would have read the series start to finish as I’m planning to do now after stumbling ass-backwards into a copy of the first trade, “Arcadia”.
During the initial success of the television show Twin Peaks, circa the spring/fall of 1990, some pretty interesting fringe marketing popped up. I was fortunate enough to see the pilot episode the night it aired on ABC and – as unlikely as it would seem for a freshman in high school at the time – become completely infatuated with it. At the time I’d fallen into a bit of a bonding experience with my father while watching another weekly drama, CBS’s Wiseguy, which featured Ken Wahl in the lead but more interestingly a young Jonathan Banks and an even younger Kevin Spacey. The show might or might not hold up in retrospect – it’s impossible to find in tact on DVD because of some music rights that hover around the Moody Blues – but by nature of the cast alone you can see it was influential. And at the time I guess it was what my household needed. My father is an amazing man and we’re close, however close in my house probably doesn’t mean exactly what it means in other people’s homes. We’ve always had very separate lives and interests – he’s into cars and all things mechanical while for myself it’s music, literature, movies and comics. Still, we seemed to connect with serialized fiction. Maybe because early on my Dad fostered my love of the visual medium by taking me to the movies as a kid – we shared amazing theatrical experiences with Star Wars, Indiana Jones, Ghostbusters*. All this changed though, when I entered Junior High.
