I’ve started to see every album that has an element of ambience or abstraction as an opportunity to approach an emerging goal of this newsletter, which is to “get” ambient music. This isn’t ambient by any stretch, but it does have that shoegaze sound that employs lots of droning riffs and noises that hypnotize you into letting the music float you along. My ADHD struggles with that, especially with the noisy interjections sprinkled through this album that jar you out of any dream-state you might achieve. I found “Big Day Coming” the most funny in that it expresses the band’s excitement for what’s to come, that they can hardly wait, while the music meanders along like a dreamer with nowhere to go at all and no urgency to get there.

I don’t mean this in a negative way, but this is boredom music. It’s the feeling of sitting in your room before the internet and scratching the cool “S” into the wood of your bedroom wall, then hiding it behind the curtains so your parents don’t see. It’s a kid doing the rubber pencil thing, or giving themself an “injection” with a mechanical pencil, or sticking their fingers in their ears and going “la la la la la” just to fill the silence. Was the 90’s a boring time? Was all this pent up boredom the reason all the technology that was about to come hit us all over the head like a ton of bricks?

In the end, there’s a fine line between boredom and meditation. It’s all about your intentions. My capitalism-conditioned brain struggles with the idea of letting go and just being bored and in the moment for a while, but this album seems designed around that very idea, and a little purposeful boredom is good for us from time to time.

Jams

“Nowhere Near”
“Sudden Organ”

From the roundup Jamwise #43 - Best Albums of 1993, pt. 2.