Having (finally) forsaken micro-blogging in all its forms, it’s back to posting snippets such as this on a blog again. Nearly two decades ago, the artist now known as Good Swim played a set for me at a mini-festival hosted in our hayshed. Like everyone else involved, I still owe him.
His new single, Paper Tiger, is out today. Already looking forward to the album when it comes. It’s on Spotify here, and Bandcamp below.
40×40 is a forty-week project, recapping forty tracks from the last forty years in no particular order to tell a few stories. The whole lot – plus many, many footnoted extras – are available on this Spotify Playlist (unless, like this week’s, they’re not!)
So-called ‘lost media’ has been a bugbear for many, many years (and a reason I still, like a broken record, regularly cite Jeremy Keith’s 2011 talk All Our Yesterdays to anyone who will listen).1 I imagine the TV show Ed will crop up in a later entry in this series, a peak example of the medium – a show essentially kept off streaming because of the huge headache of transferring rights to a broadcast medium no-one envisioned when playlisting a whole host of great indie artists for the soundtrack.
Stuck in such hell are a great many film soundtracks of the early digital era, amongst them 2004’s Spider-Man 2 – which contains a handful of great, unique tracks,2 foremost of which is Yellowcard’s Gifts and Curses.3
Some say the music you are listening to in your later teens will be the music you carry through life: I was 18 when I got this OST CD, at peak pop-rock-transitioning-to-shoegaze, and Yellowcard were absolutely one of the bands regularly appearing on Kerrang! or MTV2 or whatever it was I was turning up and trying to play along with on the telly. But soundtrack albums are not where people’s best work end up: soundtrack albums are supposed to have a couple of big singles, and the rest is typically filler. There are exceptions, of course. But that this band chose to pour a significant amount of talent and creativity into a mid-track that, and this is crucial, really is actually based on and/or inspired by Spider-Man 2, is just fantastic. Production is razor-sharp; the mix is brilliant, with soaring violin; and the breakdown, though perhaps overindulgent, fits the product description as a soundtrack track. I believe it’s a fan favourite; and that, and only that, has saved it from the mists of time.
Yellowcard had hits before and long after this,4 but I’m not sure it ever got better.