This Could Be An Opportunity

Image by Pete Duffield

I reckon I haven't been very good at this whole "blogging" thing since I started back in October.

Thing is, I love music. Of that I am in no doubt. Naive though it is to assume that it would follow that I'd be any good at writing about it - that's basically exactly what I did. With results that have been mixed, at best.

I got into music when I started taking guitar lessons, back when I was thirteen. At the time I didn't have any taste in music to speak of. When my teacher asked me what I listened to, I mentioned a mix of classic rock and whatever was popular at the time that my friends were listening to. At the end of my first half-year of lessons, right before summer break, he took a class to basically just chill out, jam a bit, and play some songs from his iTunes library on his laptop.

One of those was "Helicopter" by Bloc Party. I had never heard anything like it before. I hadn't realized before then that music could be that raw, that beautiful, that emotional, that fucking exciting. I loved it. He played me a few other songs, something by Rise Against from Siren Song of the Counter Culture and "Hands Down" by Dashboard Confessional from A Mark, A Mission, A Brand, A Scar.

I bought all those records that summer and they changed my life. Dashboard soundtracked my early teenage years, the hopeless romanticism of Hands Down having been seemingly tailor-made to fit my every turbulent emotion. Siren Song was loud, angry, articulate punk music, and Swing Life Away remains one of the most breath-takingly perfect songs I've ever witnessed.

Mixed in with some Slipknot, some Foo Fighters and some U2 (and I know I'm forgetting plenty of others), those were the artists and albums that shaped my early music-listening habits. I discovered them through friends, through commercials, through videos on MuchMusic (the Canadian version of MTV), through compilations and movie soundtracks (Shrek 2 and the first two Spider-man movies were big ones), and every time felt like something magical.

It was a year later, when I got an iPod, that I discovered The Album That Changed My Life. It was called Silent Alarm, it was by Bloc Party, it had the coolest cover art I'd ever seen and, on one long car journey somewhere in British Columbia, I listened through its entirety for the first time.

I don't need to tell you how it affected me (but that probably won't stop me from doing so, in a future post) since, after all, I named my blog after something bassist Gordon Moakes said and will easily cite BP as my favourite band ever (Tegan & Sara would, on a technicality, be my favourite "musical artists" ever, since they don't write together and their band line-up changes from album to album). Simply, that first listen through Silent Alarm marked the beginning of my change from someone who accepted music as it came at him, to someone who actively sought it out.

I should mention that the catalyst for me taking a step back and writing this is a post I came across on To Die By Your Side about the 15 albums that changed his (the author's) life. It made me think, I couldn't really list 15 albums that changed my life. In this day and age of leaks six months before release and dowloading individual tracks from blogs and fifty thousand remixes of every popular track on The Hype Machine and labels crumbling under their own weight, things are different. Not worse, though.

When I decided to start a blog, I knew exactly what I was going to call it. "Hate the past regret the future" isn't the pessimistic mantra that you may think it is. To me, it means you can't rely on anything that's happened or that might happen. The only thing that's real is the moment. And that's kind of beautiful.

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Here're two songs that I meant to post with this but was too lazy to upload last night. Something new and something old, as it were.

Tulips was originally released pre-Silent Alarm as a non-album single; this version is the b-side to the Banquet 7-inch. The performance is a little raw and unpolished (as radio performances are wont to be), at least compared to the studio version, but suffers nothing for it. If anything, the performance lends the song in general and Kele's yelps in particular a greater sense of explosive urgency (and nobody does "explosive urgency" like early Bloc Party), showcasing just how good a song it is.

The acoustic version of Gimme Sympathy is one of the bonus download-only tracks that come with the pre-order of Fantasies. I've been listening to it constantly on repeat and enjoying it more and more each time. The guitar sounds, dare I say it, Dylan-esque, while Emily's vocals are as vulnerabley weary as they've ever been on a Metric song and James delivers one of his rare-but-always-fantastic back-up vocal performances.

Bloc Party - Tulips (Peel Session) (zShare)
Metric - Gimme Sympathy (Acoustic) (zShare)

Bloc Party official site / Buy
Metric official site / Pre-order Fantasies