Listens: very familiar
I didn't really know what rebellion was in fourth grade (or honestly really at any point in my childhood), so it's kind of funny to look back and see what this meant to so many other kids my age or slightly older. Granted, I had liberal parents, so the liberal attitudes expressed by this album (Bush bad, war bad) didn't feel rebellious so much as simply righteous, even if I had no idea why Bush was bad or what we were supposed to be doing in Iraq or Afghanistan anyway. (I was nine!) The album offered plenty of edginess besides, from denouncing the tv-watching masses (thus allowing me to feel superior to my classmates) to calling Americans idiots (weren't my parents always saying that?). Of course, the majority of the edginess—and much of it is that, just edginess—was lost on my tiny brain. Kids being fed too much "ritalin"? Must be some sort of junk food. "Kill all the 'fags' that don't agree"? Just a mean word to call someone. Saint Jimmy "blew his brains out into the bay"? I was terrified to blow my nose after that, lest my own brains be blown out.
That all aside, I was obsessed with this album. It maintained rotation on my little discman for years, and though much of its charm has worn off for me at this point in my life, several of its songs are still huge favorites of mine, "Holiday" and "Boulevard of Broken Dreams" especially. To me, the joy of this album was less in its (honestly fairly shallow) political commentary than its many twists and turns, its perfect production, and its *coherence* as an album. All the track segues excited me so much as a kid, especially the two nine-minute song suites, which expertly weaved tiny punk song ideas into tight, polished entrees. In a time before I'd discovered Nine Inch Nails' The Fragile, it showed me what an album could do, what it could be.
In general I detest pop-punk, but though there are definitely cheesy moments, this album never felt like the whining, cynically teenager-aimed music of Blink-182 and their ilk. Sure, it's a concept album built around the teenage "Jesus of Suburbia", but even today it feels more like an expression of concern for the youth rather than an attempt to court them.
Green Day (already legendary by that point, of course) went on to continue to flirt with vapid radical symbolism, talking about "revolution" like it's nothing more than a metaphor, or a fun plot point in an RPG game. Anything they had to say, they said on this album. Sure, 2004 was a very different time politically, but even so it was not exactly a hot take that the Iraq War was unjustified. Nonetheless, the album's role as a rallying cry for liberals was culturally significant, even if it didn't help defeat Bush (alas), even if the messages stunningly went above many conservatives' heads as well.
Listens: 3
I had heard of Wire, but this is not what I thought Wire was. My only point of reference was their later song "The 15th", a song I knew from its Fischerspooner and Kill Hannah covers (thanks Alan!), and whose original version on Wire's third album 154 (1979) is a sweeping, restrained, almost proto-shoegaze track. So I was not expecting them to be the progenitors of post-punk (and noise rock?) that they are.
It's crazy that this came out in 1977—almost fifty years ago, and yet sounding nearly modern to my ears. Their punk roots are clearest in the vocals, the short outbursts, the chords; but the sound, the timbre, the angular guitar and abrasive bass tones themselves, form the main components of so much music that I love today. Not all the songs hit for me personally, and I wouldn't say I love any of them, but it's still a good (and fascinating) listen.
(I will say, I'm enjoying their later album 154 a lot more so far!)
Listens: 2 (with original CD bonus tracks)
I don't know much about shoegaze, mostly because I've largely written it off on account of the rather unimpressive contemporary releases I've heard in the genre. It's not that I don't like the *sound* of shoegaze; I love me some tasteful washed-out reverb. But it's often felt to me like the wall of sound is only there to cover up the lack of songwriting ability at its foundation. That said, I was excited when this album came up to educate myself with a foundational record in the genre (by a band I'd never heard of!).
Alas, it turns out this album doesn't do that much for me. The far majority of it sounds, to me, like bland twinkly 90s soft rock—nothing wrong with it, but lacking in anything that elicits any emotion in me besides an impersonal feeling of "nostalgia". The only exceptions to this are the first song, "Seagull", whose heaviness and bassline immediately gripped me with high hopes for the album, and the songs "Here and Now" (with its haunting harmonica) and "Nowhere", which close out the 11-track CD version of the album (which appends the three additional songs from their Fall EP, released the month before this LP, to the vinyl's 8-track run). There are other pleasantudes throughout the record, like some fantastic drum sounds (particularly in "Dreams Burn Down") and the Martin Gore-like croon of Andy Bell (a different Andy Bell from the one who formed Erasure with Gore's former bandmate, of course). But otherwise... it's alright.
