ON THE AVENUES: Some enchanted evening, you may see a stranger.

Dearest readers,

At the beginning of 2020, I resolved to play it completely straight and rededicate this weekly column to the proposition that it might be freed from reruns -- for the most part.

I might on occasion incorporate bits of previous writing, or quote myself, but no more cutting and pasting entire past columns -- however much I rationalize that you urgently need to be reading them for a second or third time.

I'm happy to report that I made it all the way from New Year's Day to June 4, and have produced 20-odd columns of fresh material. However, this week I'm struggling, and the block is odd given there is no shortage of available topics. But maybe abundance is the problem, and there's too much to sort through.

Speaking from the perspective of my polemical workbench, the first two months of the year were spent detoxing from daily doses of local political discourse -- or what passes for it in intellectually constipated New Gahania. A new study from the Pew Research Center suggests I've successfully stuck to the terms of the sabbatical 86.7% of the time. 

In March came our moment in medical history, the coronavirus pandemic -- and yes, it was real and remains so quite outside the denials so many of you have chosen to embrace. The attendant dislocations of COVID have been challenging, although the dictates of karma urge me to refrain from complaining when our household vantage point is one of good personal health.

The past two to three weeks have been about America's periodic avoidance of an honest reckoning with history as it pertains to Black Lives Matter(ing). I'll support just about any movement aimed at anti-racism, anti-fascism and anti-robberbaroncapitalism, but at the moment, as an old white guy myself, I'd hate to be lumped in with Bumbling Bill Hanson's elder hostel of white male newspaper columnists pontificating about race from their pulpits in Otisco.   

Oh, and I forgot that it's also an election year. Roughly 1,000 years ago, Bernie Sanders was still in the race and we had a modicum of choice to defeat The Donald. Now we have the sort of Democratic candidate that Squire Adam would fill buckets drooling over. So much for "hope."

Obviously I might be writing about any of these trends, but somewhat curiously there seems to be little for me to add to the ongoing discussion. Maybe the essence of this writer's bottled-up blockage is persistent anger -- at the ongoing and still unspeakably bizarre Gahan personality cult, at the science-denying narcissists unable to look past the tip of their noses, and at the unreconstructed racists reminding me of the prevalence of sheer American dumbassery.

Writing isn't easy when you're angry, or at least it isn't for me. A measure of detachment is necessary, and I haven't been able to manage it lately. Stream-of-consciousness rants are possible, and have been deployed before, but the older I get, the more hesitant I am to undertake them. They're like running a marathon, and absolutely wear me out.

Accordingly, there's is a sizable element of fatigue, and I need to push through it. Let's begin right here.

Knowing that writing more often for pay (a novel concept for me, indeed) would factor into the 2020 workload, I began in January by reducing NA Confidential blog's output (again), from three daily posts to two; probably owing to the six-month or more sabbatical from the rhetoric on behalf of the anti-Gahan resistance, this has resulted in a marked decline in reader interest.

So be it. 

I'm trying to write about beer as often as possible at the Pints&union blog in hopes of keeping a few balls (or beer bongs) hanging in the air until our likely reopening in July -- and don't quote me on what this return will look like, because it isn't yet clear. All I can say is that a new era will dawn, soon.

At Food & Dining Magazine, faced with no real possibility of publishing a summer print edition, we resolved instead to build up the web site and release as much original content as possible on that platform. A share of this surge falls to me, some to others in our stable of excellent writers; either way it takes time to implement, and my learning curve in terms of being a "digital editor" hasn't yet flattened.

I'm not breaking rocks or putting up hay, although at times this year my brain has needed a break.

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With the traditional restorative activity of travel taken off the table this year by the virus, relaxation has come through the Forever Nostalgia Project: digitizing slides, negatives and photos of past European journeys, of which there have been 40. Around 1995 I abandoned slide film for the most part and went to regular printed photos. By 2005, digital was the norm. Here are the year's results, some of which are being shared at my Facebook page.

1985, the first trip to Europe
1991-92, the Slovak teaching sojourn
1993, Germany, Denmark, points east, etc
1994, Switzerland, Albania and Pamplona (Spain)
1997, Czech Republic and Germany
2003, Main/Tauber/Altmuhl/Danube (rivers) bicycling, Frankfurt to Vienna

In addition, there were a few odds and ends stateside. At any rate, quite a lot of images are left to scan (at least 14 European visits), and they will take years to finish ... but hey, we all need hobbies.

One real-world manifestation of nostalgia about the 2003 bicycling trip is a determination to get our bikes back in working condition. They're at the shop now. Soon, after seven years out of the saddle, there'll be a comeback. It will not resemble the halcyon days of the 2000 - 2008; commuting and the occasional Greenway should be enough.

Reading is a good diversion, too. Here are the year's books to date, in reverse chronological order. My favorites are marked with an asterisk.

*Only Yesterday: An Informal History of the 1920s, by Frederick Lewis Allen
Which Fork Do I Use with My Bourbon? by Peggy Noe Stevens and Susan Reigler
How We Eat with Our Eyes and Think with Our Stomachs, by Melanie Mühl and Diana von Kopp
*Bliss Was It in Bohemia, a novel by Michel Viewegh
An Omelette and a Glass of Wine, by Elizabeth David
Russian Cosmism, edited by Boris Groys
*The Botanist and the Vintner: How Wine Was Saved for the World, by Christy Campbell
Bluebeard, a novel by Kurt Vonnegut
The Ghosts of My Life, by Mark Fisher
Capitalist Realism, by Mark Fisher
Mysteries of the Middle Ages: And the Beginnings of the Modern World, by Thomas Cahill
*The Prague Cemetery, a novel by Umberto Eco
Bavarian Helles, by Horst Dornbusch
Strong Towns, by Charles Marohn
The Tragedy of Liberation, by Frank Dikkotter

Awaiting its tenure on the night stand is the annual blockbuster summertime novel, as calculated to simmer my brain in its own juices. I've never made it all the way through Ulysses, by James Joyce. Is this finally the year?

Musically, it hasn't been a great six months for The Kind of Music Roger Likes. I'm buying fewer CDs of new music, but listening to each of them more closely than before. If you can't go wide, go deep. Here they are, organized in two-month increments. Why? I can't remember.

Album releases 2020, May and June
Blossoms … Foolish Loving Spaces
Ocean Alley … Lonely Diamond
Rolling Blackouts Coastal Fever … Sideways to New Italy
*Sleaford Mods … All That Glue
Sparks … A Steady Drip, Drip, Drip
*The 1975 … Notes on a Conditional Form
The Used … Heartwork

Album releases 2020, March and April
Grouplove … Healer
*Rookie … Rookie

Album releases 2020, January and February
*Courteeners … More. Again. Forever.
*Titus Andronicus … An Obelisk (2019)
*White Reaper … You Deserve Love (2019)
Wussy … What Heaven Is Like (2018)

Movies and television?

C'mon, regulars readers should know better. However, we've been working our way through the ageless Rumpole of the Bailey canon and a few other British dramas. My memory is shaky, and I may have watched the Downton Abbey movie. If so, I plead excessive gin.

Ah, yes. Drinking, another of my self-defense mechanisms.

It has been strange in this regard, and no one is likely to believe me, but as a guesstimate, I've consumed perhaps half the alcohol in 2020 as I would have swallowed normally.

It isn't clear to me why, although one possible explanation is that I dislike being constantly self-incapacitated during an unprecedented public health crisis, all the while surrounded by sniveling racists, reckless drivers, Trump-co-vidiots, masturbatory nihilists and various other bad actors.

Facing up to my deep-seated anger while keeping relatively sober? Now THAT'S a tall order, and yet I've tried every other way. Maybe playing against type really is best. Fools give you reasons ... wise men never try.

R

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Recent columns:

June 4: ON THE AVENUES: There, there. People are dying, so you may have to wait until 2021 for your pork chop sandwich.

May 28: ON THE AVENUES: The late, great Lee Kelly -- by Matt Nash.

May 21: ON THE AVENUES: Godlessness in defense of heathens, infidels, idolaters, atheists, non-theists, irreligious people, agnostics, skeptics, heretics and apostates.

May 14: ON THE AVENUES: Food is my friend, but please, I'm no foodie.

Sunday school, or "The Tao of Lemmy: 18 Great Quotes From the Motörhead frontman."

“Apparently people don’t like the truth, but I do like it; I like it because it upsets a lot of people. If you show them enough times that their arguments are bullshit, then maybe just once, one of them will say, ‘Oh! Wait a minute — I was wrong.’ I live for that happening. Rare, I assure you.”
-- Lemmy

A friend posted this quote, and I went searching for more.

The Tao of Lemmy: 18 Great Quotes From the Motorhead Frontman (Rolling Stone)

Lemmy was rock and roll music personified, and I'll always remember 2019 as the year when I finally "got" Motörhead's music. It can take a while for music, art or literature to sink in, even when you're familiar with it.

I'd like to call a moratorium on the various other discussions about the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame -- all except the one confirming without a shadow of a doubt that any such institution without Lemmy and Motörhead in it fails to fathom what rock and roll means.

Here's a piece from 2016.

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January 2, 2016

I approach the sad topic of Lemmy's recent death as one of his many admirers, if not an outright fan.

Motörhead isn't my daily musical taste, and yet as someone immersed for decades in the variant of "Englishness" when it comes to rock and roll, the band's importance is something fixed and beyond denial.

Of course, Lemmy was the band. As for Ian Kilmister, one preview sentence says it all.

Lemmy: the contrarian hell-raiser who rejected adoration, by Alexis Petridis (The Guardian)

Motörhead’s inimitable frontman, who disowned his genre and disregarded his band’s totemic status, will remain loved for his articulate grit and realism.

As it happens, "hope I die before I get old" was a lame cop-out. Lemmy merely lived his art until he died, which probably was the point all along. In 2009, Dave Grohl summarized: "Lemmy's a living, breathing, drinking and snorting fucking legend. No one else comes close."

Obviously, Lemmy is gone, but his legend remains fully intact in a temporal world now lacking his presence.

Long live rock and roll.

Lemmy may have resided in Los Angeles for the past 25 years, but he remains a distinctly English cultural icon. This partly owes to rock and roll's special place in the British Isles, and not only England itself; the same is true in Scotland, Wales and Ireland.

These were stratified and regimented societies prior to World War II, and after the war came a prolonged era of privation and austerity. American rock and roll was a liberating tsunami for the baby boomers there, with the added benefit of being spoken in a shared language. Lemmy came of age in this milieu, though I believe his iconic stature reflects more than music alone.

While it may have faded a bit during more recent multi-cultural times, there always has been a specifically English love of eccentrics, of those who refuse to conform to the societal molds binding the citizenry. In some ways, America was founded on non-conformity; not so much in Stoke-on-Trent, Brighton or Sheffield.

As early as 1866, entire books were devoted to English eccentricity. The comedian Dave Allen mounted a search for the great English eccentric, and a man named Henry Hemming authored a newer book devoted to the same quest.

Call it eccentricity or simple human dignity; Lemmy resolutely lived his own life and pursued his own muse. Like Keith Moon, Viv Stanshall or Oliver Reed before him, Lemmy's middle finger remained stubbornly held aloft.

And this probably was the point all along -- for Lemmy, and for us.

In our own time of suburban New Gahanian social decline, it's an ideal worth remembering, and perhaps even emulating -- with or without a Rickenbacker bass.

I'm guessing Lemmy would approve if we switched to spray paint.

ON THE AVENUES: Elusive sounds of silence.

Disappointment is a sort of bankruptcy - the bankruptcy of a soul that expends too much in hope and expectation.
-- Eric Hoffer

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Meet the new year; same as the old year. Then as now, most of my days begin with an earnest question.

What can I learn today that wouldn’t occur in a million years to the dullards who fancy themselves pillars of the community in New Albany, a place that Sinclair Lewis so scathingly documented almost a century ago?

Okay, so Lewis called the city Zenith, as located in the state of Winnemac, but his fiction is our daily reality in New Gahania.

Of course the act of reading anything -- books, fortune cookies, even Susan Duncan’s editorials -- would be enough to give almost anyone hereabouts a leg up on the high priests of low common denominators, and so the work I’ve chosen to begin the year is Charles Marohn’s long-awaited book, Strong Towns, which explains how to build healthy communities sustainably and incrementally, the old-fashioned way.

Marohn is a civil engineer who has dared question his profession’s hidebound premises, thus elevating a small-town Minnesotan into something of a church-door-nailing, Martin Luther-like annoyance to the encrusted inhabitants of engineering’s long corrupted “Vatican” of so-called best practices.

At this precise moment, the most entertaining thing I can imagine is the head of New Albany’s city engineering exploding into HWC-infused confetti after ten minutes over coffee with Marohn.

Surely Jeff Speck experienced the same thrill of witnessing sheer, unadulterated civic incomprehension when he met with city officials about the merits of a comprehensive street grid refit -- which they rejected in all but the barest of minimally propagandistic measures.

Rumor has it that when the River Heritage Conservancy got together with Mayor Jeff Gahan’s political patronage team to describe genuinely exciting plans for a world-class park unit astride the Greenway in Clarksville, the session didn’t go very well.

“It was like trying to talk to second-grade students,” one of the presenters is said to have commented afterward.

In other news, second-grade students are feeling mightily insulted these days.

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Automobile supremacy surely is the most pervasive form of imperialism in human history, to the extent that most Americans never so much as consider the ubiquitous grip cars have on our lives.

In New Albany, we’re about to learn a hard lesson about automobile-centrism come spring of 2021, when the Sherman Minton undergoes repairs, to be rendered quite limited in terms of usefulness for as long as four years.

Ironically, 2021 also will be the tenth anniversary of the bridge’s first epileptic fit. Readers with long memories will recall the afternoon in 2011 when INDOT closed the Sherman Minton for emergency repairs, which lasted several months and thrust the insufferably trite term “Shermageddon” into the already stunted local commuter’s vocabulary.

But you may have forgotten the immediate, instantaneous effect of the bridge’s closure on downtown New Albany’s quality of life, a single auditory facet of which was enhanced immeasurably by car-centrism’s required surgical procedure.

Suddenly downtown became pervasively and somewhat eerily quiet.

Granted, local vehicular traffic still moved; planes still flew and boom cars spewed. Drunks bellowed and children shrieked, but the bridge’s shutdown removed a backing track of white noise, to which we'd all grown accustomed. All these "on the ground" sounds could be heard more clearly because the incessant daily hum emanating from the bridge abruptly disappeared.

Considering the realities of our addiction to cars, I can’t say the ensuing chaos was a good thing, although it bears repeating that people adapted rather quickly; humans can do this when there’s no other choice. As for me, walking and bicycling, I enjoyed the peacefulness, at least in relative terms.

When I see an image like this one, I can’t help wondering what daily life was like before the species became so damn noisy.

When New Albany really WAS a strong town.

Regular readers know how much I adore music, but even so there are portions of each day when I cherish silence just as much, whether reading, writing, walking or just resting. Less noise and clamor, just the relative serenity of one's own thoughts.

Is there a place for silence in the contemporary world? Sometimes I fear it's becoming extinct.

I seldom if ever “call out” local food and drink operators, seeing as I did my own bit in the biz as an owner, and continue to program beer (at Pints&union), and yet I’ll make an exception today, because I've come to loathe the modern trend of playing intrusive music OUTSIDE an establishment.

Look, you can do as you please inside even if I disagree, and continue to pine for the days when bars were places to have conversation, not witness floor shows. Display idiotic sports ball match-ups, book bands, belt out the karaoke -- whatever, it's all good -- but can’t you spare those of us merely walking past, dodging sandwich boards wrongly placed in the middle of the sidewalk, who enjoy the way things sound in the city without forcing your choice of tunes on the rest of us?

(By the way, whomever coined the idea of installing sound systems for motorcycles should be shot without trial. Think Trump could do just this one small service for us?)

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As you can see, big changes take some getting used to, and so it is with my sabbatical from local affairs.

ON THE AVENUES: On patience, grieving, puzzles and a necessary sabbatical.

Of course, my comments here, as well as a continued preference for the brilliantly descriptive, albeit satiric “New Gahania” instead of the geographically correct “New Albany,” serve as confirmation that I probably can’t ever let go of opinionation entirely, if only at a sort of maintenance level.

However, what I’m seeking are revisions to the broad terms of engagement with The Resistance. My writing time is being successfully reapportioned, with a big allotment going toward my web site duties (since last July) at Food & Dining Magazine. Another chunk will be devoted to writing about beer at the Pints&union website now that the site is active.

None of this is to be construed as implying that suddenly, magically, my thoughts will be neutered. I’m on sabbatical from involvement in public affairs insofar as participating as I’ve done in the past takes time I no longer have. This weekly column is one exception to any time-based abstinence I might otherwise observe.

Long-form writing once each week keeps the polemical muscles toned, you know.

However, if you want to chat about the prevailing New Gahanian lunacy over beers that I probably would have been drinking anyway, conversation’s not on the clock, is it?

And, if you feed me straight lines on Twitter, I'll toss off one-liners all day long; not only is this activity barbed, brief and factual, but it's great fun. The same goes for a few shots across the bow now and then at NA Confidential, although only if the time it takes to fire them is short.

Know that the blog remains at the disposal of those wishing to expound for an audience different from the one they normally address on social media.

The Green Mouse still wants to hear from you, and your submissions will be published here so long as they’re predominantly ready for prime time, with my contribution limited to light editing and an index finger primed to press the “publish” tab.

As for my middle finger, well, we’ll save it for truly special occasions.

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Recent columns:

January 2: ON THE AVENUES: On patience, grieving, puzzles and a necessary sabbatical.

December 26: ON THE AVENUES: Four more years? Heaven help us all, but there are five reasons to be optimistic.

December 21: ON THE AVENUES HOLIDAY SPECIAL: Truth, lies, music, and a trick of the Christmas tale (2019 Remix).

December 19: ON THE AVENUES: These parents oppose their children's exposure to the PURE Initiative as part of the NA-FC Schools curriculum. Here's why.

Begin your sunny Harvest Homecoming Saturday with Sardinian throat singing.

Not to be confused with mute nostril agony, which is a condition indigenous to Tricky Dickey.

The Many Pleasures of Sardinian Throat Singing, by Dan Nosowitz (Atlas Obscura)

A fiercely unusual musical style from a fiercely independent island.

ON AN ISLAND IN THE Mediterranean, there is an incredible musical style unknown to the vast majority of the world. Because describing music often ends up as a series of references to other music, here’s what that style, cantu a tenòre, evokes: one part barbershop quartet, one part traditional Mongolian drone, one part political punk, and one part bar band. It’s also one example of an unusual vocal strategy, one that almost doubles as a wild anatomical experiment, that appears in scattered places around the globe.

Cantu a tenòre is Sardinian throat singing, and it’s very, very cool ...

Free concert at the Ogle Center on Sunday, August 4 by the New Albany Community Orchestra and Choir.

Read about the New Albany Community Orchestra here. Thanks to Myra for making me aware; alas, the Pints&union staff birthday party is Sunday afternoon, but I'll be keeping my eyes open from here.


Free concert by the community, for the community

Hosted by Kentuckiana Association of Musicians and Singers

Sunday, August 4 (3:00 p.m. - 4:0 p.m.)
Ogle Center, 4201 Grant Line Rd, New Albany, Indiana 47150

In this free concert, the New Albany Community Orchestra and Choir are joined by New Albany tenor Kenji Tashiro and Louisville vocalist Joann De Jesus in a varied concert featuring works by Tchaikovsky, Bizet, Puccini, Elgar and more.

New Albany has a Klingon composer.

I'm not a science fiction kind of guy, but languages fascinate me even if I've never managed proficiency in any of them apart from English.

Surely somewhere there's an Esperanto beer.

Music’s Final Frontier: Meet New Albany’s Klingon Composer, by Ashlie Stevens (WFPL)

New Albany-based cellist and composer Jon Silpayamanant wrote his first opera several years ago. Like many of the great classics, it’s not sung in English.

But instead of German or Italian, Silpayamanant’s work is written in Klingon.

Yes, Klingon — the bloodthirsty aliens from Star Trek with bumpy foreheads, whose language of the same name is perhaps not the most musical (when asked if he needed to warm up before singing, Silpayamanant laughed and said ‘Oh, that doesn’t matter for Klingon). There are a lot of consonants placed back-to-back, and some guttural sounds.

But Silpayamant is not the first person to find the beauty in an alien language.

There is a whole subset of sci-fi and fantasy fans — and linguists — who are interested in constructed languages; things like Tolkien’s Elvish languages, the dialogue in the Star Wars universe, and of course, Klingon.

And there are societies based around learning these languages.

Last weekend, the Klingon Language Institute held its annual q’uepa — that’s Klingon for ‘big meeting’ — in Indianapolis. Most of the attendees were there to listen and learn about the nuts and bolts of the language, like syntax and proper grammar. It’s a pretty robust language with synonyms, swear words and a full dictionary ...

The long awaited and much belated account of Roger's Year in Music, 2017.

Never before has it taken me so long to list my musical favorites for a calendar year -- in this case, dear departed 2017.

Let's begin with the usual explanation of parameters. I dimly recall a quote by Ray Charles to the effect that if he couldn’t whistle a song while he was walking down the street, the music simply didn’t register with him.

Broadly speaking, this describes my relationship with music, too. It isn’t to imply that avant garde chamber music and free jazz are lost to me. I enjoy them. But as it pertains to the admittedly expansive realm of pop and rock music, favorites tend to be those bits I can whistle, hum, or sing (mostly badly these days).

It’s how I judge music, and musical years.

I'm two months and a dozen new CDs into 2018, and the best way to explain the delay in categorizing 2017 is that it proved to be one of the best musical years in recent music according the only musical metric that really matters: there was lots of the sort of music that Roger tends to like.

Oddly, at the beginning of 2017 it seemed as though there’d be very little of note in my personal wheelhouse, and yet by year’s end, the bench ran so deep that my every effort to select a "best of" list kept hitting the rocks. In fact, there were numerous bits to like on just about every album I acquired by hook or crook in 2017, and while the pedant in me remains baffled, I’m feeling enriched as a result.

Know also that I don’t do play lists, downloads, Spotify, music on phones or various other newfangled bastardizations of The Way Things Ought To Be. Apart from listening to the classical music genre on WUOL-FM, I research music on YouTube and social media, and base album acquisitions on the results. Much to the dismay of the cats, most listening takes place on the home audio system, or via my laptop with headphones. On those rare occasions when I’m driving somewhere, I pack CDs for the trip.

It is my yearly aim to listen to what’s new from the artists who perform music I like. It’s a fairly broad spectrum and includes classical, jazz and world music, although admittedly the ever-shrinking center of my target is rock and selected pop. To repeat, I’m an unabashed fan of melody and songcraft.

My tastes seldom run to country, rap, hip-hop and contemporary AutoTune muddle pop (watch the introductory video for commiseration), but I differ from most listeners of my advanced age group in having learned over time to respect these genres for what they are. I like ALL music. I just don’t LISTEN to all of it, because there are types I like better than others.

Special mention goes to Louisville Orchestra for its first release in decades, All In. We've become hooked on the LO's shows at the Ogle Center on the campus of Indiana University Southeast.

My year in pop/rock concert viewing included U2's Joshua Tree reprise in Louisville; a classic rock lineup of Edgar Winter, Alice Cooper and Deep Purple in Indy; and Lindsey Buckingham and Christine McVie at the Louisville Palace. Riffing on Edgar's biggest selling album, I seldom go out at night, and as a result, my "live" music days are mostly in the past.

So be it; the drinks are cheaper this way. 

Honorable mention for 2017:

Alice Cooper … Paranormal
Arcade Fire … Everything Now
Dan Auerbach … Waiting on a Song
Tom Chaplin … The Wave
Cold War Kids … La Divine
Richard Dawson … Peasant
Doing It in Lagos: Boogie, Pop & Disco in 1980s Nigeria
Downtown Boys … Cost of Living
Father John Misty … Pure Comedy
Neil Finn … Out of Silence
Flaming Lips … Oczy Mlody
Future Islands … “The Far Field”
Goldfrapp … Silver Eye
Robyn Hitchcock … Robyn Hitchcock
The Killers … Wonderful Wonderful
Maroon 5 … Red Pill Blues
JD McPherson … Undivided Heart & Soul
John Mellencamp … Sad Clowns & Hillbillies
Van Morrison … Roll with the Punches
Morrissey … Low in High School
Lukas Nelson & Promise of the Real
Robert Plant and the Sensational Space Shifters … Carry Fire
Nathanial Rateliff & the Night Sweats
Sheer Mag … Need to Feel Your Love
Roger Waters … Is This the Life We Really Want?
Paul Weller … A Kind Revolution
Wolf Alice … Visions of a Life
Yusuf/Cat Stevens … The Laughing Apple

It’s important to note the many joys of the preceding: Sheer Mag channeling ACDC and Thin Lizzy with a powerhouse female vocalist; the sheer weirdness of English folky Dawson; Father John Misty’s lyrics; the roots brilliance of late period Mellencamp; Weller's routine excellence; the Downtown Boys’ anthems for street protest marches; and even the Arcade Fire disco album.

But these albums didn't plant themselves in my head in quite the same way as the Top 30 for 2017.

30 The Cribs … 24-7 Rock Star Shit
29 Matthew Sweet … Tomorrow Forever
28 Paramore … After Laughter
27 Phoenix … Ti Amo
26 Afghan Whigs … In Spades

25 Depeche Mode … Spirit
24 Ride … Weather Diaries
23 War on Drugs … A Deeper Understanding
22 White Reaper … The World’s Best American Band
21 Fastball … Step Into Light

20 The XX … I See You
19 Cheap Trick … We’re Alright!
18 Kasabian … For Crying Out Loud
17 New Pornographers … Whiteout Conditions
16 U2 … Songs of Experience

15 Rainer Maria … S/T
14 Liam Gallagher … As You Were
13 British Sea Power … Let the Dancers Inherit the Party
12 Alvvays … Antisocialities
11 Sleaford Mods … English Tapas

10 Sparks … Hippopotamus
09 Elbow … Little Fictions
08 Lindsey Buckingham Christine McVie … Buckingham McVie
07 Foo Fighters … Concrete and Gold
06 Michael McDonald … Wide Open

05 Squeeze … The Knowledge
04 The Amazons
03 Noel Gallagher’s High Flying Birds … Who Built the Moon
02 Temples … Volcano
01 Deep Purple … inFinite

No reviews, just my inner reality. It was a fine year in 2017, and already there are emerging ear worms among the 2018 releases from Shame, Simple Minds and Django Django, to name just three.

And, I've also been catching up with CDs from previous years by Travis, the Charlatans and the Len Price 3.

The best news of all for 2018: there'll be a new Manic Street Preachers album in April. How can it possibly top 2014's Futurology?

We'll know, soon enough. Listening to music happily channels the junior high school kid in me, and as age 58 approaches, that's more important than ever.

Focus on Portugal: Learn about the music called Fado.

In 2000 on my only previous trip to Portugal, I visited the Museu do Fado in Lisbon. I remember little, but a half-dozen CDs from the home selection go into the disc changer on occasion to offer a reminder of the music.

I like the overall ambiance of Fado, although specific tunes elude my untrained ears.

The video (above) is an excellent, short introduction to the genre. Perhaps the most truthful and succinct comment about the state of the musical art is provided by Raquel at Sara Riobom's Portoalities blog, in her installment about Fado in Porto.

Best places for Fado in Porto

Even though almost no Portuguese listens to Fado regularly (we’re sorry to break the myths!), we totally understand that you want to watch a live Fado show once in Porto. Therefore, we made a list of the best places for Fado in Porto. We hope you enjoy it!

Just in case you're wondering what Katie Toupin's been doing.

Jeeebus, that voice.

She's in LA, and you can find her here:

Twitter
Facebook

Growing up in southern Indiana, Katie Toupin wasn't exposed to a lot of music early on outside of her father playing blues guitar. He had quit the bar band scene when she was young, but the pentatonic scale often rang through the house. But at 18, she fell in love with making music, playing guitar snd singing and writing songs. When she was 21, she formed the band Houndmouth with some friends. Houndmouth was noticed internationally and things moved quickly. Houndmouth signed with Rough Trade Records and Katie found herself playing notable festivals such as Bonnaroo, Austin City Limits Festival, Lollapalooza as well as playing late night slots on David Letterman and Conan. Houndmouth's song Sedona reached number 1 on Billboards AAA chart. Katie released two records with Houndmouth and toured internationally up until her departure from the band in March 2016. Upon moving to Los Angeles in February 2017, she found clarity and honesty after many rigorous years on the road. After a year and half of writing, she now embarks on her solo career, finding more soulfulness and freedom in her music than ever before.

Ten more songs for 2017, through August.

In no particular order. There'll be more, I'm sure.





















As 2017 has pertained to the sort of music Roger likes, it's been a better year than expected.

ON THE AVENUES: Irish history with a musical chaser.

ON THE AVENUES: Irish history with a musical chaser.

A weekly column by Roger A. Baylor.

Previously in the travelogue: A ferry ride from France to Ireland, with the help of Super Valstar and Guinness.

Next in the travelogue: Stouts galore in Cork, Kinsale and the Hibernian Bar, but in Ballinspittle, not so much.

Regular blog readers recently have been burdened by accounts of my 1987 summer idling on the European continent, as occasioned by the long overdue digitalization of slide film from the period. As an example, this randomly selected image never before seen on the internet.

Not exactly breathtaking, though it brings back memories of the coast near Cork.

The year 1987 marked the second time I'd spent my savings on post-graduate educational wanderings. The first came in 1985, and it is no exaggeration to say that this experience profoundly changed my life. 32 years later, I'm still trying to make sense of it.

Beginning in 2015, I wrote about the 1985 journey, with the series running to 34 installments at Potable Curmudgeon. For those who are interested, the final 1985 trip summary includes links to the 33 episodes preceding it.

Prior to the initial excursion in 1985, my cousin Donald Barry showed me the ropes, and we were able to meet in Italy and Germany once "over there."

In 1987, I was able to repay Don's favor with my old friends Barrie Ottersbach and Bob Gunn, introducing them to places I'd seen in 1985 -- Munich beer halls, a Rhine River cruise, Jim Morrison's grave in Paris, and the D-Day beaches on the coast of France.

Barrie and I then proceeded to from France to Ireland by ferry, replicating my 1985 route apart from a different channel port (Cherbourg, not Le Havre), and arriving on Irish soil 30 years ago today.

Ironically, it had not been my original intent to visit Ireland in 1987, but we were having such a great time that I junked the "official" itinerary and went with my gut. It was the right decision, if for no other reason than seeing U2 perform in Cork during the mid-point of the band's lengthy Joshua Tree tour.

Today's column previously appeared as part of the 1985 series: The PC: Euro ’85, Part 18 … Irish history with a musical chaser. It serves as a useful background for both landfalls, and is reprinted with only light topical updating.

---

As I sit at my desk in the year 2017, writing this account of travel in far-off 1985, roughly 4,000 compact discs surround me, arranged in shelving units of varying sizes and shapes. I’m told they’re obsolete, but then again, so were the LPs packed into my tiny bedroom back when Ronnie Raygun was President, and I was planning my first trip to Europe.

Nowadays vinyl once again is sought-after, although not cassette tapes, which also took up storage space in the cramped living quarters of my youth. At least I never bought into the ethos of the 8-track tape, a fact of which I’m inordinately proud.

At the age of 55, I’ve yet to learn how to play a musical instrument, and if I so much as tried to carry a tune across the street, the likeliest result would be two broken legs – or the wailing enmity of every dog in the neighborhood. Still, my earliest childhood memories are about music, and it is impossible to overstate the role music continues to play in my everyday world.

During the years prior to the summer of 1985, my musical consciousness was filled with the usual markers of a male in his early twenties, with rock, pop and MTV the dominant influences. Perhaps unusually, my parents had raised me on swing and jazz, and these were viable complements. Just after college, formal composition began to please me, and I was a regular listener of WUOL, the University of Louisville’s classical FM station.

As genres go, “world music” wasn’t on heavy rotation in metropolitan Louisville at the time, and this is where Don Barry’s tutelage re-enters the narrative.

My cousin always brought albums of Irish music with him whenever he’d drive back from Florida to visit his mother (my aunt). I’d copy these albums onto cassettes: The Dubliners, Wolfe Tones, Tommy Makem, Clancy Brothers and other Irish folk bands, mostly from original pressings Don had purchased during his previous journeys to Ireland.

Of course, music wasn’t the only cultural touchstone in my informal education about all things Irish. As a pedagogue in the finest of constructive senses, Don provided ample homework, with reading assignments that extended far past our summer interludes: James Joyce ("Ulysses" is one thing; "Finnegan's Wake" quite another), Seamus Heaney, John Synge, W.B. Yeats, and "The Green Flag," Robert Kee's masterful history of Ireland.

Irish music helped tell Irish history, and it all became interwoven. Don and I listened to bawdy tunes, weepy ballads and riotous calls to action. We also drank gallons of beer while doing so, and these were the best seminars ever.

My family background is almost entirely sharecropper German from the Pomeranian plains, with a smidgen of English tossed into the mix, but once I'd experienced Irish culture from these secondary sources, it always seemed there must have been at least one stray shot of Irish DNA somewhere -- a rogue, a wanderer, an outcast from the great Irish displacement, who’d contributed to the family tree and then disappeared into the mists.

Musically, Ireland felt very comfortable to me, even if discomfort was the source of so many of the more overtly political songs, given that in terms of history, Ireland hasn’t always been such a happy or peaceful place.

---

By 600 AD, the island’s original Celtic inhabitants had been converted to Catholicism. During the Dark Ages, Viking and Norman incursions were disruptive, but the visitors generally assimilated. A far more portentous invasion began in the 16th century, as launched by the bigger island to the east.

In 1534, King Henry VIII broke with the Roman Catholic Church, and established his own Church of England. In 1541, he added the Irish throne to his list of royal titles, and thus commenced more than 150 years of “plantation,” a policy wherein Protestants (primarily from England and Scotland) were settled in Ireland and afforded rights disproportionate to those of the indigenous Catholics, who steadily were disenfranchised.

The area of heaviest Protestant settlement was Ulster, a cluster of six counties to the north. Today, this is Northern Ireland, which remains joined to the United Kingdom. Ireland’s other 26 counties were subject to the same Protestant favoritism, but retained Catholic majorities. These make up the contemporary Republic of Ireland.

In the early 1800s, sectarian strife grew amid the institutionalized disparities, with seemingly endless patterns of revolt and subjugation, culminating with a wild card blithely tossed by Mother Nature: A potato blight in the late 1840s, which deprived huge numbers of impoverished Irish Catholics of their sole source of sustenance.

The tragic ensuing famine either killed or caused to emigrate more than 2,000,000 people, or one of four Irish men and women, and yet throughout the crisis, farms controlled by outsiders (most of them English) continued to export food, even though people nearby were starving.

Not for the last time, London’s inept performance during the famine reignited a slow, smoldering movement for greater Irish autonomy. Through the remainder of the 1800s, this movement for “Home Rule” grew stronger, but because of its Catholic orientation, Protestant-dominated Ulster threatened counter-measures of its own to remain under British sway, and little changed.

Just before the outbreak of WWI, it seemed as though Home Rule might at last come to pass, but the conflict intervened. It was broadly agreed that domestic considerations would be placed on hold for the duration. Spotting an opportunity to force the issue while the British were preoccupied with the war, radical Irish nationalists struck.

On April 24, 1916 (Easter Monday), rebels seized key buildings and installations of importance in Dublin, including the post office, and declared a free Ireland. It was called the Easter Rising; however, the Irish nation did not “rise up” as the rebels expected, and the revolt was mercilessly crushed by British troops.

Yet again, London completely misread the situation, responding with calculated harshness toward a populace that for the most part had not heeded the revolutionary call. All but a handful of the rebels were executed, and the brutality managed finally to turn Irish public opinion against British rule, at least among Catholics outside Ulster. The stage was set for ugliness, which dutifully followed.

From 1916 through 1923, the contemporary configuration of Ireland was determined through a series of parliamentary maneuvers accompanied first by a triumphant war of independence against the British, and then a divisive civil war among the Irish themselves. By the early 1920s, the exhausted island was divided, and a template of periodic violence established for the ensuing decades.

It has been more than a century since the Easter Rising, and just about everything else in Ireland has changed save for the division of the island into two entities. In theory only, “The Troubles” in Northern Ireland ended with a brokered settlement in 1998.

Meanwhile, the Irish Republic has weathered a burst real estate bubble following its “Celtic Tiger” period of modernization, and a new chapter (the UK's Brexit effects, real or imagined) is being written as you read these previous ones.

---

My major point with respect to this upheaval-laden travel narrative is that when I first stepped onto Irish soil in 1985, quite a few of the elderly men and women seen reposing on park benches in Dublin had active memories of the tumultuous 20th century.

They had lived through the infancy of the Free Irish State, and at the time, as I prepared to board the train from Dublin to Sligo and a planned 5-day jaunt in the countryside, emigration remained the norm almost 150 years after the famine. Their country still was reckoned among the poorer relations of the European Union.

Perhaps their experiences, and those of their kinfolk abroad, explain the powerful longing for home that surfaces in so many of the classic Irish folk songs, as in my favorite, “Carrickfergus,” as performed by my favorite group, the Dubliners, with vocals by the late Jim McCann.

These excerpted stanzas speak to the melancholy of this incredible traditional song.

I wish I was in Carrickfergus
Only for nights in Ballygran
I would swim over the deepest ocean
Only for nights in Ballygran
But the sea is wide and I can not swim over
And neither have I the wings to fly
I wish I had a handsome boatman
To ferry me over, my love and I

My childhood days bring back sad reflections
Of happy times we spent so long ago
My boyhood friends and my own relations
Have all passed on like the melting snow
And I spent my days in ceaseless roving
Soft is the grass and my bed is free
Oh to be back now in Carrickfergus
On that long winding road down to the sea

Now in Kilkenny it is recorded
On marble stones there as black as ink
With gold and silver I would support her
But I'll sing no more now till I get a drink
'Cause I'm drunk today and I'm seldom sober
A handsome rover from town to town
Ah but I'm sick now, my days are numbered
Come all you young men and lay me down

As a final note, Carrickfergus is in Northern Ireland. In terms of the Irish diaspora, it isn’t at all clear whether this fact is ironic.

---

Recent columns:

July 20: ON THE AVENUES DOUBLEHEADER (2): A book about Bunny Berigan, his life and times.

July 20: ON THE AVENUES DOUBLEHEADER (1): Listening to "Dixieland" jazz, and thinking about drinking a beer.

July 13: ON THE AVENUES: Using Deaf Gahan’s dullest razor, we race straight to the bottom of his hurried NAHA putsch launch.

July 6: ON THE AVENUES: Beercycling with or without Le Tour.

Ten songs for 2017, through June.

In no particular order. There'll be more, I'm sure.





















Honorable mention to songs by White Reaper, Goldfrapp, Kasabian, Phoenix, John Mellencamp, Ride, Cheap Trick and British Sea Power. As 2017 has pertained to the sort of music Roger likes, it's been a better year than expected.

Krautrock: "A forward-looking desire to transcend Germany's gruesome past."

Okay, okay. It's been a bit of an obsession lately.

"Yes, Krautrock. Can. Jaki Liebezeit. Rock without the radio god telling it to bow down and behave."

What fascinates me is the shared and overt aim of otherwise unconnected musicians to consciously turn away from foreign influences, producing distinct music designed to simultaneously refute the past and re-establish an ethos anchored in the German experience.

I'll make no claims to understanding any of this when I was 14 years old, and Kraftwerk's Autobahn broke in America. The song was played on WLRS, and I scraped together money earned baling hay to buy the vinyl.

I told you before; the stork made a serious error.

Documentary which looks at how a radical generation of musicians created a new German musical identity out of the cultural ruins of war.

Between 1968 and 1977 bands like Neu!, Can, Faust and Kraftwerk would look beyond western rock and roll to create some of the most original and uncompromising music ever heard. They shared one common goal - a forward-looking desire to transcend Germany's gruesome past - but that didn't stop the music press in war-obsessed Britain from calling them Krautrock.

Roger's Year in Music, 2016.

Music does something to me, and I’ve never been able to explain exactly why. It just happens. Sometimes I walk into a supermarket, hear a song on the sound system, and my attention wanders into space. I stop dead and forget the shopping list. My wife becomes understandably exasperated.

I can't not listen.

My earliest childhood memories have melodic accompaniment. When very young, I’d go to sleep to the cracklings of an ancient AM radio, and perhaps that’s why absolutely nothing about being five years old remains intact except for hearing "(I Can't Get No) Satisfaction."

The grooves on a LP collection of children’s music subsequently were worn and frayed. I recall two cuts in particular: An American folk song called “One More Day,” and Mozart’s “Turkish Rondo.”

The anecdotes are both endless and tedious, but the point is this: Music plays inside my noggin at all times, and has done so for as long as I can remember. It is central to my being. And yet, for all the ways that music is the soundtrack of my life, I possess no musical skills. None.

Instruments are a mystery to me, and my voice, once capable of decently carrying a tune for the legendary Mick Neely, has digressed through decades of misuse and abuse to the point of shower stall braying alone, safely away from the ears of humans, if not terrified cats. I listen, drum fingers, hum, whistle and participate as best I can.

It’s enough.

My conclusion? If there is a music gene, I have a variant of it. Music has spoken to me from the beginning. Had my formative years been spent with musicians as role models as opposed to athletes, perhaps it all would have turned out differently. As it stands, I’ve no complaints.

The innate pleasure to be derived from listening to music is more of an essential heartbeat than an optional amusement, and I can’t imagine life otherwise. If the music in my head ever stops playing, it will be the unmistakable sign of imminent death -- and as all atheists know, death is a symphony without encores.

---

A musician like J. S. Bach certainly thought differently, regarding his considerable musical skills as gifts from God, intended to be used to glorify and exalt Him. The simplistic vision of angels cleverly arranged on cloud banks, deploying a phalanx of harps to while away eternity, surely derives from this idea of music and holiness intertwined.

That doesn’t resonate with me. Music may well “have” its own gene, but its manifestation in a tangible, real world is a human construct. Liturgical music would strike that tuneful genetic chord no matter what, but the mysteries and meanings we read into it result from eons of conditioning, not a deity’s intervention.

Of course, if given the chance to choreograph my final departure, Samuel Barber’s "Adagio for Strings" would be a fine choice for greeting eternity. The music would play, it would end, and on the very next beat, so would I. There would be the final silence, and life would continue without me.

Though "Won't Get Fooled Again" would work, too.

Having established that music is vital, I generally prefer listening in the present tense, not the past. This does not stem from a desire to be hip and trendy. Rather, it’s an expression of evolution as an individual, and feeding fresh data into the system to see what comes out the other side. What interests me is the way I hear music, and how this process changes along with my own growth over time.

My simple goal is to keep abreast of what’s new in music insofar as it pertains to whatever styles of music make me happiest. As an example, while rock and roll may be “dead” as a genre, the world still manages to disgorge a few youthful rockers, and some of them are damned entertaining (see Yak, Spring King and Twin Peaks, below).

I customarily allow myself to listen to “oldies,” but only in a controlled and rationed context. The ghosts of my consciousness are profuse and insistent, and they cannot be allowed to frame the present via the past, especially since in musical terms, the reactions engendered are so very personal. The idea is to interpret one’s past through music, not relive it.

When my father was a much older man, the way he heard Glenn Miller’s songs owed directly to his first experiences with them, as a Marine in the Pacific Theater during World War II. My dad played these songs for me, and to this very day, I hear them differently, as a boy in the milieu of the 1970s.

Same tunes, radically different worlds – and yet a common language of enjoyment for both of us.

---

This brings me to the recently concluded year in music, 2016, and while not reaching the lofty heights of 2014, it was better than average.

I saw Jericho Woods, Morrissey, Bob Rutherford, Pinchas Zukerman & the Royal Philharmonic, Sativa Gumbo and Bob Mould perform live, in concert.

There was some jazz …

Artie Shaw & His Gramercy 5 … Six Star Treats - The Complete Commercially Released Recordings
Bunny Berigan … Swingin’ and Jumpin’
Hines, Armstrong and Bechet: A conjoined pop song, and other thoughts about jazz.
Cultural education: Documentary films about Charlie Parker, John Coltrane and Eric Dolphy.

… and some classical and world music.

The controversial and enigmatic Herbert von Karajan, rock star of the classics.
Lincoln Trio … Trios from our Homelands
Lynched … Cold Old Fire (2015)
Venezuela 70
Zmei3 … Rough Romanian Soul

The usual disclaimers apply: I'm an old, straight, white guy, and I like what I like. There's no effort at lofty detachment here, just the music that wormed its way into my head – and the nearer the album to my personal Number One, the more stubbornly memorable it was.

No, there isn't much in the way of country, western, rap or or hip hop. They're not customarily in my sweet spot, but to each his or her own, and you won't hear me slagging them. Finally, I do a dismally horrid job of supporting local music by my presence when it's being played. Each year I resolve to do better, so we'll see.

To begin the survey of 2016 album releases, here are ten of what might be termed “honorable mention”

Bloc Party … Hymns
Neil Finn and Paul Kelly … Goin’ Your Way (2015)
The Goon Sax… Up to Anything
The Jayhawks … Paging Mr. Proust
Lucius … Good Grief
Paul Simon … Stranger to Stranger
Red Hot Chili Peppers … The Getaway
The Rolling Stones … Blue & Lonesome
Santana … IV
Teenage Fanclub … Here

There are fine moments to be found in each of these releases, but for various reasons, they have fallen outside my eccentric “year’s end” boundaries. The long overdue reunion of Santana’s original lineup and the unexpected blues album by the Rolling Stones both are first rate, except I’m not a true fan of either Latin rock rhythms or blues covers. A little of them goes a long way with me.

Finn’s and Kelly’s collaboration is beautiful, filled with tunes you know (from Finn) and comparably crafted songs you’ve never heard (from Kelly, who is unknown outside Australia). However, it was recorded in 2013 and released in 2015, not 2016. I really want to like Lucius and The Goon Sax, but the songs don’t stick in my cranium… and so it goes.

EPs

Sleaford Mods … TCR
Just five songs; it seems too scant to include among albums, so I’ll leave it right here and return in 2017 when a full CD is released. In the meantime, the wonderful bile slightly de-escalates and the minimalist sound is shifting. I’m intrigued, and looking forward to next.

25 - 21

25 The Last Shadow Puppets … Everything You’ve Come to Expect
According to Pitchfork: “It's the perfect music for the Daniel Craig-era James Bond films: sophisticated, tortured—and with a weakness for temptation.” The song sample here reveals something else, almost akin to crooning.

24 Catfish and the Bottlemen … The Ride
I’m reminded of the tradition of the sophomore jinx. There’s an element of stadium-anthem-consciousness that seems too forced, with lyrics generally concerned with what it's like to be a rock star. I'd guess the same as in 1976, but with smart phones and social media.

23 James … Girl at the End of the World
Much in the vein of 2014’s release La Petite Mort, to such an extent that henceforth I’ll probably regard them together, as a two-year, two-disc set.

22 Glass Animals … How to Be A Human Being
The album opener and single “Life Itself” is one of my favorite songs of the year. The album title is a nod to the unifying concept, with the songs reflecting people crossing paths during the band's touring.

21 Elton John … Wonderful Crazy Night
It is reported that Elton John and Bernie Taupin went into the studio determined to make an up-tempo album, and they succeeded. It’s ebullient and fun, if a tad slight.

20 - 15

20 Nick Cave & Bad Seeds … Skeleton Tree
Nick Cave’s son tragically fell from a cliff and was killed, and while much of this brooding, pensive album already was finished, it is inevitably colored by the tragedy. Deeply compelling; at certain juncture hard to listen to.

19 The 1975 … I Like It When You Sleep, for You Are So Beautiful Yet So Unaware of It
The British music press has proclaimed The 1975 as the next greatest thing, although my own personal jury remains in deliberation. There is no sophomore jinx to this release, and the throwback flash of INXS in "Love Me" is enticing. Still, I’m not whistling any of these songs save one, and that’s a dead giveaway (in my world).

18 Wild Beasts … Boy King
I’m a longtime fan of this intense group with the falsetto-laden front man. Previously they’ve been pleasingly androgynous; lots of sex, and equal doses of ambiguity. This release is heavy on the masculinity, and to me, it comes off as misogyny. The mood suits, so long as I ignore the words.

17 Kaiser Chiefs … Stay Together
Midway through the album, there is an introductory loop of a band member’s confession: “This is pop music.” And so it is, and I like it. The sarcastic lyrical edge of the band’s hits a decade ago has been supplanted by more hooks, and that’s acceptable to me, too.

16 Radiohead … A Moon Shaped Pool
It never matters where a Radiohead album lands in terms of my rankings. Like a good book or an accomplished film, you know that subsequent visits over a period of years will keep disgorging things you missed the first couple dozen times.

15 - 10

15 Spring King … Tell Me If You Like To
They seek earnestly to rock, with a ragged garage edge and a few key vocal snarls, and this is important given its relative rarity these days. Songs need some tightening, but Spring King's a keeper.

14 White Lies … Friends
Hook, as in a bass-heavy sound reminiscent of New Order’s low-end Peter; hooks, as in plenty of attention-grabbing melodies. Lacking in lyrical content.

13 Lust for Youth … Compassion
Lust for Youth is the code name for Swedish musician Hannes Norrvide's solo work. Call it electronica or synth pop, although it plays like 1980s British New Wave.

12 The Coral … Distance Inbetween
Once upon a time, this was Noel Gallagher’s favorite group. They disappeared for a while, and have returned with a strong set of songs in a psychedelic style that reminds the listener of the late 1960s or early 1970s.

11 Blossoms … Blossoms
It’s the best-selling debut album of 2016 in the United Kingdom. NME says: “A heroic blend of radio-friendly guitar pop and bristling disco from the Stockport five-piece named after a pub.”

10 - 5

10 Cotton Mather … Death of the Cool
Once upon a time there was a gem of a pop album called Kontiki, by a band named for a famous 17th-century New England minister and pamphleteer. The resident genius is named Robert Harrison, and while Death of the Cool doesn’t reach the same heights as its predecessor, Harrison can fall out of bed and write a distinctive pop song in an array of motifs.

9 Twin Peaks … Down in Heaven
They’re Chicago garage rockers, and AllMusic says: “Twin Peaks hang on to their rough-and-raw disposition while drawing sonic inspiration from favorite albums of 1968, including, per press materials, works by the Rolling Stones, the Kinks, and the Beatles.” Ear worms all.

8 Parquet Courts … Human Performance
The Internet suggests comparisons with Pavement, though like the reviewer at Stereogum, I’ve never been much for Pavement, but quite enjoy the sound of Parquet Courts: “(Their) great subject might be the way living in big late-capitalist cities can turn existential stress into straight-up dread.”

7 Bastille … Wide World
Electronica, synth pop; whatever. Last year, it was Chvrches, and this year Bastille. The tunes are catchy. They nestled in my skull, and I can imagine them as more conventional rock 'n' roll, but the imaginative lyrics are what sends this album closer to the front of the queue.

6 David Bowie … Blackstar
What can I possibly add to probably the greatest closing act in pop/rock history, apart from the observation that it’s more jazz than either pop or rock, and that’s why it nabbed me on the first listen? The passing of Bowie's generation is the subject of much consternation, but to me, whether it's Lemmy touring almost until the day he died, the Stones reaching all the way back to the blues, or Bowie's creativity at the brink of eternity, the point is how the sentiment "hope I die before I get old" plays out in real life when it failed to occur way back when.

5 - 1

5 Cheap Trick … Bang, Zoom, Crazy … Hello
2016 brought the pride of Rockford, Illinois an album of new material for the first time in seven years, as played to the beat of a different drum (literally -- Bun E. is long gone), and then induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. The rock and roll quotient is high, and the quasi-Beatles pop predilection more subdued. Bless them.

4 Yak … Alas Salvation
They became infamous as the scene-stealing opening act for Arctic Monkeys, and debut with ample and glorious noise. It's a joyful cacophony, but not without melodies and hooks, and on more than one occasion, I've been startled by the thought that I've heard nothing like it since Nirvana.

The Guardian's passage is wonderful: "Everything’s in the red, the guitars sound as if they wondered what it would sound like if you layered 60s garage rock, Stooges-style noise, 70s punk and a couple of pneumatic drills on top of each other: it’s like being run over by a steamroller for 41 minutes, but in a good way. You’re unlikely to be writing critical analyses of the lyrics, but you don’t need to with a record that sounds as exciting as this."

3 Bob Mould … Patch the Sky

Like me, the musician Bob Mould was born in 1960. I have about two months of longevity on him. Hüsker Dü, the band that made Mould famous, was formed in 1979, roughly a year after my final high school English class. My teacher (and subsequently, my friend) was Bob Youngblood, who died on July 23. His funeral took place less than twelve hours after we saw Mould perform at Headliners, and naturally his set was heavy on songs from the 2016 release.

The volume of Mould's show may have fractured my skull, but it was a wonderful injury. The Youngblood visitation was sad, and yet redemptive in its own way.

Rolling Stone adds: "Mould (conjures) the ecstatic rage of his earlier bands for a grim new era, apparently still convinced that the best way to meet crushing hopelessness is by barreling head first through it with a throat-shredding howl and all amps cranked."

2 Suede … Night Thoughts
Suede's last album, Bloodsports, was #3 on my 2013 album countdown. Night Thoughts is even better, and while I'm not sure what you have scheduled tonight, I'll be taking time to watch (again) Suede's set from Glastonbury, 2015, and following it with Night Thoughts. Guitarist Richard Oakes famously replaced founding band member Bernard Butler in 1994 at the age of 17, and listening to his distinctive rhythmic work and beautifully composed leads just never gets old.
It's how you forget about New Albany -- well, that and lots of beer.

In a review at Spin: "New-ish father Brett Anderson has said that Night Thoughts is about being a parent and revisiting your own childhood, and sings of the stuff that literally keeps a fortysomething up at night: facing your inadequacy and losing people you love — or, more specifically, losing your children."

1 The Jezabels … Synthia
A very long time ago, Pete Townshend wrote these wise words: "I know what I mean, but I can’t explain.” Perhaps we feel this way more often when we're young, and arguably less so with a few decades under our belts, and yet there is ample room for exceptions. The Jezabels are one. I can't explain why listening to the group's 2014 release The Brink invariably ends with tears in my eyes. it wasn't intended to be a concept album, but it functions like an extended story to me. Quite likely I'm the only 56-year-old male fan this group has (apart from the band members's fathers), and if so, that's a compliment.

Synthia already works the same way, and I know what's going to happen when I listen again in a year or two, although the next listen probably will come long before then.

Our favorite bands should be like our choice of doctor: Younger than us.

Happy listening in 2017.

"Eat That Question: Frank Zappa in His Own Words."

Not only that, but a second documentary about Frank Zappa is in production. Thanks to D for the cue.

New Frank Zappa Doc Wows at Sundance 2016: 'Eat That Question' charts iconoclastic musician's entire career through archival clips and Zappa's own words, by David Fear (Rolling Stone)

It would be somewhat easy to do a straightforward documentary on Frank Zappa: zoom in on some grainy B&W pictures of him as an R&B-loving teen; chart his rise from Sixties avant-rock bandleader to symphonic composer, from antiestablishment iconoclast to anticensorship activist; interview some of the dozens, if not hundreds, of musicians inspired by him; drop in a few nuggets of We're Only In It for the Money or 200 Motels–era concert footage. Of course, Zappa was never one to do anything the easy, or easily comprehensible, way — we're talking about an artist who composed a concerto for two bicycles and railed against the norm at every opportunity. Better, then, to honor his life and work with a jagged, collage-like assembly of archival footage. And, given the eloquence and biting wit he displayed in his lyrics, Congressional testimonies and conversations, to let the man speak for himself.

In the throes of my malcontentment, these are the five albums I'm enjoying the most.

Yak: Alas Salvation.

Twin Peaks: Down in Heaven.

Lust for Youth: Compassion.

Parquet Courts: Human Performance.

Catfish and the Bottlemen: The Ride.

Five albums, and a song from each. That's right; new releases, in album format BECAUSE I'M OLD. I can only hope the artists get a few bucks for the trouble. A boy can dream, even in New Gahania.

ON THE AVENUES: Getting back, moving forward, drinking coffee.

ON THE AVENUES: Getting back, moving forward, drinking coffee.

A weekly column by Roger A. Baylor.

There’s a venerable joke, wherein a man dies and is transported to his permanent home on the other side – not high in the sky astride a cloud bank with a harp (the instrument, not the lager beer), but to the other place.

After ID checks and processing, the devil’s service associate shows the man his various options for eternal punishment, each worse than the last, until finally there is a seemingly benign alternative. In a room with pleasant classical tunes playing, people are standing knee-deep in raw sewage, sipping coffee.

The man takes his place in the coffee line, but before he’s even been handed a mug, the supervisor appears.

“Okay, coffee break’s over. Back on your heads.”

For reasons that remain obscure, this joke always resurfaces just as the taxi rolls to a stop in front of the departures terminal at (fill in name of the European airport), and I must sadly face the facts, because by the end of the day, the coffee break’s over -- and it’s back to NA.

Yes, the missus and I just returned from a week in Tallinn, Estonia. It was the first foreign excursion for us since my failed mayoral bid last year, and the concurrent period of my ongoing disassociation from the New Albanian Brewing Company.

This latest stint abroad wasn’t nearly long enough for me. Are they ever? However, a seven-day coffee break is better than none at all, and thankfully, in addition to the sightseeing and “continuing education” aspects of the journey, there was ample time for thinking and conversation while drinking.

This always pleases me.

In 2015, when I took a leave of absence from NABC in order to campaign for mayor as an independent, there wasn’t much time for reflection. I leaped from one treadmill to another, shifting overnight from devoting a disproportionate number of waking moments to beer and business, to embarking on a breakneck municipal affairs learning curve.

It was only after my final decision to leave NABC, and the subsequent thumbs-down electoral verdict from our voters, that strange things began popping in my noggin.

Not to put too grandiose a spin on it, but it just might be that I’m rediscovering the joy of pure discovery, or vice versa, many aspects of which were placed into cold storage during that quarter-century of involvement in the food and drink trade.

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Late last year, I commenced an obsession with YouTube documentaries, to which I’d previously been indifferent.

First came a wave of videos about Eastern European history during the Communist era. Then I shifted into current events in and around Estonia and Sicily, where we’ll be visiting later this year.

For decades, an interest in volcanoes had remained latent. With Mt. Etna in our future, it suddenly resurfaced. Besides that, I haven’t been to Italy since 1989.

After reading a biography of poet Ezra Pound, whose Italian sojourn yielded mixed results, my gaze shifted to documentaries about all sorts of writing and writers. First came Englishmen (Larkin, Burgess, Amis), then expatriated Americans in Europe (Hemingway and Fitzgerald), but also a few Americans remaining stateside (Philip Roth and John Steinbeck).

In turn, this yielded to visual artists, primarily painters: Kokoschka and Schiele from Austria; Englishmen Sickert, Bomberg and Nash; Magritte and de Lempicka in Paris (1928). There also was a fascinating BBC series on the origins and artistic uses of the colors gold, blue and white. It’s something that never occurred to me.

Admittedly, apart from a film about the Japanese writer Yukio Mishima, these various immersions have occurred within the familiar outline of the "Western" canon. There have been far too few diversions to topics that don’t feature white males like me, although one of two current reads, The Defender: How the Legendary Black Newspaper Changed America, has been nothing short of revelatory.

The same is true of the 14th-century Italian author Giovanni Boccaccio’s The Decameron. If you believe that writers of the Renaissance have nothing to say about sex, and in particular, about diverse female perspectives, it’s time for a reappraisal. 650 years on, the naturalness and candor of these vignettes are astonishing.

Being at loose ends is simultaneously daunting and liberating. Previously, I’ve likened it to awakening from a self-inflicted coma. Personal interests long submerged beneath the weight of My Life in Beer and Brewing are returning with a vengeance. Of course, they never went away. I scratched these various itches throughout the NABC era in my available time, but now there’s a window allowing better concentration, and while the coffee break lasts, I’m undeniably fortunate.

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It remains true that music is vital. In musical terms, I generally prefer listening in the present tense, not the past. This does not stem from a desire to be hip and trendy. Rather, it’s an expression of evolution as an individual, feeding fresh data into the system to see what comes out the other side. What interests me is the way I hear music, and how this process changes along with my own growth.

My simple goal is to keep abreast of what’s new in music insofar as it pertains to whatever styles of music make me happiest. As an example, while rock and roll may be “dead” as a genre, the world still manages to disgorge youthful rockers, and some of them are damned entertaining.

I customarily allow myself to listen to “oldies,” but only in a controlled and rationed context. The ghosts of my consciousness are profuse and insistent, and they cannot be allowed to frame the present via the past, especially since in musical terms, the reactions engendered are so very personal.

The idea is to interpret one’s past through music, not relive it.

When my father was a much older man, the way he heard Glenn Miller’s songs owed directly to his first experiences with them, as a Marine in the Pacific Theater during World War II. My dad played these songs for me, and to this very day, I hear them differently, as a boy in the milieu of the 1970s.

Same tunes, radically different worlds – and yet a common language of enjoyment for both of us.

It so happened that two weeks ago, it occurred to me to make a list of my favorite 1990s albums, because an oddity had become apparent and needed to be addressed.

Rock and pop releases from this decade are of inestimable and deeply affecting value to me, and yet I’d gotten to the point of excluding them entirely from the rotational retrospective, even past my own point of calculated limitation.

Why was I doing this?

Well, sometimes it takes a martini to sort through it. For me, the decade of the nineties was about building a pub and pizzeria business. It was a period of personal and professional inception in many senses, which led to other beginnings as well as a few ends, and these albums were absolutely integral to all of it.

They were the soundtrack, inexorably connected to those crazy times, but since the jury’s out with regard to many of those memories, the music becomes just as complicated.

In the present time, with an altered personal view of my relationship to the beer and pizza business – pride, disillusionment, appreciation, annoyance, and perhaps stages of mourning that I didn’t even realize were being suppressed – my ever-alert inner watchman seems to have filtered the playlist to protect me from possible discomfort.

Well, enough of that.

I believe it’s time to move past my mind’s weird and circuitous coping mechanisms, reclaim the music I cherish, and restore it to a place in the narrative. Once the 1990s album list is complete, there’ll be an exception to normal practice, and over a period of days, I’ll listen to them all.

Given that the list is close to 75 in number, perhaps it will take weeks, and that’s even better.

Because: If one serving of coffee is all that stands between upright bliss and deluge revisited, then we’d best make it a bottomless cup. There’s more time to learn things that way.

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April 28: ON THE AVENUES: You know, the two-way streets column I wrote -- 7 years ago, in 2009.

April 21: ON THE AVENUES: The Green Mouse tells all.

April 14: ON THE AVENUES: Forever NA, the wrong way ... from 2012, through 2014, to 2016 and beyond, forever more.

April 7: ON THE AVENUES: The Six Session Beers of Session Beer Day.