This newsletter is an extension of the 2022 Summer Album Guide, and will evolve to include writing about the community, the city and the world in areas other than hot vinyl and vital music. But for now consider it a gesture to continue the art of the album review, forever disappearing from our print newspapers. - Dave Bidini
I turned 60 on Monday, and as we sat around the table in the small hours of a cloudy, rainless evening the previous Saturday, a friend asked me to inventory the best of six decades. Best sandwich? The Cubano at Bar Italia in the 90s. Best pizza? Post-gig Pizza Gigi tied with the snap-crust from whatever they pulled from the oven in Nettuno’s Borgo. Best movie experience? “Planet of the Apes” at the Albion Mall; “Apocalypse Now” at the Cinesphere; “Rock and Roll Highschool” at the Fairlawn. Best concert? Obviously the Ramones at the World Music Festival at the Ex in 1979, but that show was more important (to me) than it was good (they pulled their plugs after five songs once the rain of garbage proved too much to continue). To that end, I loved the Gang of Four at the Palais Royale and Ry Cooder in Dublin’s National Stadium. Also, Fishbone at the Diamond and Echo and the Bunnymen at The Edge; maybe Scissor Sisters under an umbrella in Gorky Park. We saw Sinead in Stockholm, too. Our host, Kalle, asked us if we liked champagne and did we want to go up the street to see the show? We said we did. Two nights later, Daniel Johnson played in an old theatre in Sodermalm. Once upon a time, our lives were measured in scrapbook-flattened ticket stubs before this thing was also lost.
Being 60 is both a curse (Hell, that hurts) and a blessing (Hell, I’m alive). Applied to music, it’s hard not to hear something new without hearing it against everything else I've heard. This pre-empts joy while not entirely diffusing it, but I like to think that even though these ears have been filled with countless songs, sounds and bands, I can still be swept away in the immediate without being reminded of 1982 or 2001 or 1973. The beauty of humans making music means there’s always something coming around the corner or something you’ve missed or a form of music or instrumentation you never knew existed. A few of the vinyl birthdays gifts that people needlessly, but lovingly, bestowed upon me were records by Fela Kuti and the Mighty Sparrow plus 45s by Toby Swann. They were all entirely new to me. Another blessing, another curse: taking in different music when all you want to do is listen on repeat to “The Joker” by the Steve Miller Band. Maybe being 60 means I can manage to do both. I hope I can.
The new Slowdive record, Everything Is Alive, has an “Oh the 80’s!” impression to it, and while there’s no doubt that they, along with Blonde Redhead and Beach House et al, look to the Ultravoxes and Magazines for inspiration, there’s less of a self-conscious need to be recognized in the way those first synth-wave bands did, crawling out of Punk’s wreckage to show the world that there was still effort and guile in the stretch to be new and different. Slowdive, like those other bands, can afford to be cool, measured, mature and confident without necessarily worrying about not being loved, followed or accepted, which was the fate of so many British keyboard bands. Today, “different” is an H&M brand, a movie trailer, an aisle at Fiesta Farms, a TikTok book club. Maybe being 60 means feeling both hopeful and cynical at the same time.
Everything Is Alive is spacey, melodic and moody, and, at its best — try “alife” and “kisses” — it finds a place where analogue and digital meet, reminding one of how a lot of early early Electro-Pop bands employed drummers despite their banks of Korgs. There’s also a delicious melancholy to the songs-- it’s arrival in autumn sways perfectly with the reflection of summer ending and the dying sun-- and if being 60 doesn’t entirely mean being nostalgic, it’s easy to get pulled into the emotional nature of time, and time passed, and here, Slowdive are superb essayists. It’s deliciously ironic that a modern keyboard band has sculpted a sound as reflective as, say, traditional folk music, and their lyrics remind us that: “Living for the new thing/Sometimes the new wont do.” Often, the only thing that older music lovers want is to be given permission by young people to like whatever they like. Slowdive suggest that, when I put on “The Joker,” they’ll probably be listening too.
Sixty four this year, welcome to the club!