SOUNDTRACK: THE RADIO DEPT.-Clinging to a Scheme (2010).
In this final book, Karl Ove mentions buying a record on a whim by The Radio Dept. Given the timing of the book, I assume it’s this record. So I’m going to give it a listen too.
I really enjoyed this record which has a feeling of a delicate My Bloody Valentine fronted by The Stone Roses. The key word in all of this is delicate. It’s a very soft and gentle record (except for one song). It hits all the buttons of 90s Britpop and to me is just infectious.
“Domestic Scene” opens the disc with pretty guitars intertwining with an electronic thumping. After the first listen I was sure the whole record was synthy, but this track has no synths at all, just like five or six guitar lines overdubbing–each opener just as pretty as the others. The voice sound a lot the guys from The Stone Roses on the more delicate tracks.
“Heaven’s on Fire” opens with bouncy synths and a sampled (from where?) exchange:
People see rock n roll as youth culture. When youth culture becomes monopolized by big business what are the youth to do. Do you have any idea?
I think we should destroy the bogus capitalist process that is destroying youth culture.
Then come the jangling guitars and the introduction of synths.
“This Time Around” has a cool high bass line (and what sounds like a second bass line). I love the overlapping instruments on this record. I couldn’t decide if it was a solo album or a huge group, so I was surprised to find it’s a trio.
“Never Follow Suit” continues this style but in the middle it adds a recorded voice of someone speaking about writing.
“A Token of Gratitude” has some lovely guitars swirling around and a percussion that sounds like a ping-pong ball or a tap dancer. The last half of the song is a soothing gentle My Bloody Valentine-sque series of washes and melody.
“The Video Dept.” is full of jangly guitars and gentle blurry vocals while “Memory Loss” has some muted guitar notes pizzicatoing along and then what sounds like a muted melodica.
David is the one song that sounds different from the rest. It has strings and synth stabs and drums that are way too loud. Most of the songs don’t have drums at all, but these are deliberately recorded too loud and are almost painful.
The final two songs include “Four Months in the Shade” which is an instrumental. It is just under 2 minutes of pulsing electronics that segues into the delicate album closer “You Stopped Making Sense.” This song continues with the melody and gentleness of the previous songs and concludes the album perfectly.
I really enjoyed this record a lot. It’s not groundbreaking at all, but it melds some genres and styles into a remarkably enjoyable collection.
[READ: September and October 2018] My Struggle Book Six
Here is the final book in this massive series. It was funny to think that it was anticlimactic because it’s not like anything else was climactic in the series either. But just like the other books, I absolutely could not put this down (possibly because I knew it was due back at the library soon).
I found this book to be very much like the others in that I really loved when he was talking conversationally, but I found his philosophical musings to be a bit slower going–and sometimes quite dull.
But the inexplicable center of this book is a 400 plus page musing on Hitler. I’ll mention that more later, but I found the whole section absolutely fascinating because he dared to actually read Mein Kampf and to talk about it at length. I’m sure this is because he named his series the same name in Norwegian. He tangentially compares Hitler to himself as well–but only in the way that a failed person could do unspeakable things.
But in this essay, he humanizes Hitler without making him any less of an evil man. His whole point is that in order to fully appreciate/understand Hitler’s evil, you have to realize that he was once an ordinary person. A teenager who had dreams about becoming an artist, a boy who was afraid of sex and germs. If you try to make him the inherent embodiment of evil, it’s easy to lose sight of the fact that he was a child, a teen, a young man who was not always evil.
Why Karl Ove does this is a bit of a mystery especially contextually, but it was still a fascinating read especially when you see how many things gibe with trump and how he acts and behaves–especially his use of propaganda. It’s easy to see how people could be swayed by evil ideas (and this was written before trump was even a candidate). (more…)
I Just Read About That... 