6.02.2019

Forget Your Self Esteem

Simon with a timely reminder to listen to Mercury Rev again.

Also want to publicly thank him for quoting the best bit of my recent drunken rant at the top of the above-linked page. 

I only discovered Yerself Is Steam a few years ago, but it made quite an impression. I think I had written off that whole psych side of early 90s US indie inadvertently. I was never really a huge Flaming Lips fan, and the ubiquity of "that sound" at "that time" nudged me almost towards active revulsion, so hearing Rev was, erm, revelatory as that album, and Boces, seemed to really somehow address my unexamined prejudice, a prejudice I still can't really define. 

Maybe it's just the touch of chaos, the feeling that the psych was actually that, not just a reference, but a state of mind and possibility. The guitars sounded sometimes as if they were not being made to scream by human intervention, but, were, in actual fact, screaming themselves.

The best kinds of people are the ones who just say yes. A few years ago, an October night, I was thrashing about my old apartment in Providence, listening to Steam, and I texted someone, kindly requesting that we set an appointment for the following spring. I had a plan, a plan that, on the first warm day, the one that reinvests the world with possibility, that we drive to some small and beautiful town in Massachusetts and take mushrooms and not leave until we had made friends with all the squirrels. Of course it never happened, wasn't even a good idea, but somehow, that yes would have made all the difference, and, in some ways, I'm glad I never got it.

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