Tuesday, March 02, 2004
#50
Argh, stupid mindless day at work. What you too? And I'm fighting off a cold to boot.
And now for the most ambitiuous blog project ever tackled, and probably the most irrelevant.
To start off the countdown of my 50 favorite songs released during my college years, we have Neil Halstead with the song Seasons from his debut album Sleeping on Roads released in January of 2002.
This song's pure essence reminds me of Sundays, plain and simple. The parts of Sundays where you completely forget about the prospect of Monday and just survey the world around you, every element much more calmer than normal. A reviewer said it is a good sunset driving song, and I believe I would agree with that. The song has a danger of being consistently folksy and fluffy until the building synthesizers come in at the end, bringing a modern uncertainly forward moving feel to the sound that is resonant on the albums stronger tracks (including another one much higher in this top 50!).
Neil Halstead was a key member of two British "shoegazer" bands of the 90s,Slowdive, which disbanded in 1995, and the apparently still existing Mojave 3. I own albums from neither group, but instead discovered Neil Halstead through the Insound.com music playerthat popped up when I loaded the independent music selling site on faster modems. I did download a couple Mojave 3 songs and had them on my iPod for a while, but found them too dreamy and repetitive. Neil Halstead's solo work is more personalized and targetted. Whenever there is a person's name in front of the album title, I always imagine a singer-songwriter type sitting on a stool in a coffeeshop, regardless of how much instrumentation there is.
This Neil Halstead album is part of a series of albums I like to affectionately call the "DC discs" because I purchased them during my wonderful summer of 2002 in various music stores in the D.C. area during my internship. There was no TV and no A/C in my apartment that was subleased to me, so drinking a cold alcholic beverage and listening to a new CD was one cherished activity
Neil Halstead actually came through the D.C. area one weekend. He was playing the same day, but earlier, then blues guitarist Coco Montoya. I tried to be real ambitious and go to two concerts of artists that I knew and liked in one day (imagine pulling that of here in Iowa) but unfortunately was tied up at the laundry machine. Coco Montoya was incredible though, but alas I don't have any of his albums, just memories from concerts.
