Seattle’s Gift to the World the Seventh: a mixtape of sorts
Among others, Berlin [#] and Vienna [#] have both tried to give electronic music; Montreal tried to pass off Celine Dion [#]; Philadelphia threw American Bandstand and Pink into the mix [#]; New York celebrated their music & theater [#]; DC handed off Sousa [#]; so we couldn’t let the 7 days of Metroblogging Gifts to the World pass without mentioning Seattle’s vibrant music scene, in this admittedly non-representative final entry in the series:
Everything All the Time from Band of Horses just might be the best album out of Seattle this year. Rising from the ashes of the incomparable chamber pop of Carissa’s Wierd, Ben Bridwell, Mat Brooke, and an ever changing cast of the usual suspects came up with a simultaneously new and retro americana. The album calls to mind driving along a dusty empty highway, conversations in crowded bars with impeccably curated jukeboxes, long summer days with baseball games in public parks that end with the sun hanging low on the horizon as its light bounces off the water and tumbles up the hills like gold. There is nostalgia for skipped days of school and tenuous stages of a budding romance. It has resilience of surviving a particularly rough half-decade. It wears its heart of its sleeve and includes lovely square postcards along with the liner notes.
Impossibly bright and fuzzy guitars explode out of nowhere [mp3], a tentative pedal steel melody allows itself to be devoured so the song can turn into something entirely different at the midpoint, and there is a quiet harmony about Florida. Mat isn’t in the band anymore and Ben and the rest of the gang are leaving us for one of the Carolinas. But even when it’s reminding me of something else, Everything All the Time will remind me of Seattle.
The reason that I mention all of this is that Band of Horses is just one of many signed to Sub Pop, our friendly neighborhood label that, for better or worse, brought you grunge and put Seattle on the map in the 1990s. Although they started in Olympia (which is also home to the state’s capitol as well as giftworthy record labels Kill Rock Stars and K Records. And Sleater-Kinney! But this is not oly.metblogs.com, is it?), they eventually moved and claimed Seattle as their home base for spreading the word about the music scene by way of a singles club. Imagine Netflix, but on limited edition seven inch discs made of vinyl that you got to keep. Now recall that the party started with a thousand copies of the first single from a little band out of Aberdeen called Nirvana. You probably know how things turned out from here. In case you’ve forgotten, recall that the interest in flannel snowballed to such rabid frevor that a sales rep (who still works at Sub Pop) was able to convince the New York Times that Seattle had its very own lingo called grunge speak [wiki] without much effort.
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