Reminiscing, big time.
I spent Sunday afternoon doing some of my favourite things: reading, basking in sunshine, lazing in the newly-christened 'zen chair' (it's oh so zen) and listening to album after album after album of lovely, simple music. I unintentionally lurked around the start of the alphabet, enjoying the straightforwardness of: Ben Harper 'Both Sides of the Gun', Bic Runga 'Live with the Christchurch Symphony Orchestra' (very Mumsy but I thought appropriate since I couldn't be at the Christchurch charity cricket match), Anna Coddington's 'The Lake', and Bedouin Soundclash 'Sounding a Mosaic'. Sunday music. And it was the Bedouin Soundclash album that got me onto the nostalgia - I listened to that album incessantly and obsessively as I wrote the final stages of my honours research in Dunedin back in 2006. It was a very little happy time of my life: living and breathing for my research, just home from backpacking the former Yugoslavia, and in a fresh new and happy relationship. In hindsight I was just a baby, so in love with my work and living a lifestyle that I could now never hope to reclaim. But it was all sunshine and smiles, long days and longer nights of cheap beer and live music. Yes, this was the floaty dress stage; it was a beautiful stage of life, and Bedouin Soundclash was my soundtrack. So it was a refreshing little treat to dig that one out of the iPod yesterday.
It was a different kind of reminscing this morning, when my fancy took me to Chris Knox. Like The Chills, this album is one that just kind of sounds like home: Dunedin in the '80s - or, more accurately, the '90s by the time I caught up. (Contrary to popular belief, I was not cool enough to be listening to post-punk as a five year old.) But I definitely thought I was very cool as a teenager in the late '90s, when I would spend what felt like hours poring over albums in Records Records on Stuart Street as it was then, being simultaneously thrilled and intimidated that the guy behind the counter was Roi Colbert, the Roi Colbert, and ohmygod he was probably going to talk to me as I shelled out twelve bucks for a Toy Love EP. YIKES.
In all honesty it still feels like kind of a crap album to pick given the irony of the title in the aftermath of Chris Knox's stroke in 2009. But the album is an excellent one; loud, and low-fi in the extreme. It does always strike me that that song 'Not Given Lightly' was kind of an incongruous fit. It's a sweet, genuine ballad, a kiwi wedding staple, and fittingly understated - I love it, as does any self-respecting kiwi, but it does seem a little out of place with the rest of the album which is much more raw and noisy. It doesn't all fit, but then again I guess it's not meant to, and that's part of its beauty. The single is quintessentially kiwi, but the album is quitenssentially Dunedin - it sounds like home and that's what I like about it.
Nostalgia plus!
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