Fall Roundup - Summing Up the Marching Season

Since I came on as a band director in this district two years ago, it has been my charge to help rebuild its somewhat beleaguered program. There have definitely been times in which I wondered if it was worth dealing with all the stress of moving and starting over. This year, the work has started to take root, and I can say with some confidence that the change has been positive, thanks in no small part to the success of the high school group.

As expected, when the new staff came on, there was no small amount of resistance to our new standards. The band shrunk, but the quality improved. This year, we have a fifty member band. Of those fifty, thirty of them are freshman, making the band generally young and inexperienced. If this wasn’t problematic enough, we decided to work up a socially conscious narrative for the show depicting themes of bullying and self-acceptance. Executing these themes had to be done carefully, else they be misinterpreted.

Despite our obstacles, the band exceeded all expectations.  This is not to say that the marching season was easy - there were many hardships and lots of frustration. In the end, however, they exhibited an impressive work ethic that allowed them to overcome their lack of experience - an investment that paid off. The band made a first division at Regionals, and went on to become Area finalists. Our district has a long history with many ups and downs for the music program, but this was a first. The students have much to be proud of, and I foresee a promising future for them as the program continues to mature.

As we were traveling to away games and contests, I was posted in the back of the bus with earphones in, keeping order and grading papers. This is what went through those earphones these past few months.


Death Grips - Year of the Snitch: Death Grips most recent record captures a lot of the experimentalism of their earliest work without dipping too far into the challenging abrasion of albums like Government Plates and No Love Deep Web. Maybe one of my favorites by the band.

Phoenix - Bankrupt!: It’s been well over five years since I discovered Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix, an album of which I thought so highly that I wavered in delving further into their catalog for fear of disappointment. I was recently invited to see them live, however, and decided to take the plunge with Bankrupt!, which, despite possibly not reaching the heights of its predecessor, certainly stands on its own right as a compelling synth-rock gem.

George Clanton - Slide: One could argue whether George Clanton’s distinctive vocal style is a stylistic choice, but the evidence of musical depth on Slide is, in my opinion, incontrovertible. Many critics categorize his work within the questionable “vaporwave” genre , but in my opinion his clear textural connections to My Bloody Valentine and M83 makes Slide the epitome of “synthgaze.”

C418 - Excursions: It seems that the open-world Minecraft environment is conducive to creativity beyond that required to create recursive dungeons and mazes. C418 got his start as a Minecraft soundtrack composer, but has stepped out into more free-standing musical experiments with this surprisingly linear and satisfying ambient project.

FM-84 - Atlas: I tried to swear off any nostalgically indulgent projects for awhile, but Atlas had been trolling my attention for months. I finally relented and and, true to the form of classic 80’s synth pop, it has some cliched moments but remains an entertaining listen overall.

Hans Zimmer and James Newton Howard - Batman Begins OST: I have long viewed The Dark Knight soundtrack as the first in a trilogy of soundtracks in which Zimmer was exploring possible and impossible sounds in relation to the orchestra. Batman Begins turned this idea on its head, as it contains ideas that expanded dramatically in the Nolan-directed Batman movies to follow.

Low - Double Negative: Double Negative gives the impression that it may, with all respect to Douglas Hofstadter, contain the sound that will result in the destruction of your CD player, but its jarring aspects quickly give way to uniquely crafted textures and beautiful melodies. It is so compelling that, despite being so late in the game, it has emerged as a contender for album of the year, challenging albums that I have had in that slot for months.

Four Fists: 6666: I was pretty excited to hear about this new collaboration featuring P.O.S., one of my favorite hip-hop artists. It is engaging, but doesn’t hold a candle to his now-classic Never Better.

Rabih Abou-Khalil - Arabian Waltz: Just discovered this cross-cultural innovator and based on this album, I look forward to delving further into his catalog. The presence of tuba to this eclectic mix brings to mind the work of Henry Threadgill, but on the Persian tip.

Yardsigns and Music: Dr. Spin's Summer 2018 Roundup

My time in Austin coincided quite neatly with the Obama administration. Not only did left-leaning policies prevail during this time, I viewed them from within the relatively liberal bubble of Austin culture. A Trump win seemed inconceivable, so I was shocked when I began teaching in a relatively small North Texas town. The street to my campus was surprisingly littered with Trump yard signs, and I incredulously cautioned by Austin friends to get the vote out, just in case. The rest, of course, is sad history.

I am happy to say that the same stretch of road now features no less than seven yard signs supporting progressive Beto O’Rourke, four more than his conservative opponent Ted Cruz. Of course, yard signs don’t vote, but it is encouraging to see this longshot Democratic candidate gaining a foothold in a relatively right-leaning area. It makes me feel more hopeful than I have since the election.

My increased presence in this area indicates that summer is over and school is in session, and predictably. I am struggling to juggle time with my family with the demands of marching season. Before time slips away, I need to log the music that was in rotation during the summer months. Many of these albums were vetted on the road, while others became new music for the family to enjoy over dinner or at bedtime. I will not parse them out as per their function as I did earlier this year, but I instead lump them all together to represent the Summer of 2018.



Don Caballero - Punkgasm: I actually ordered this in my holiday stash, but it took nearly six months for hardcopy to arrive. The presence of occasional vocals were cause for concern, but don’t distract nearly as much as I had anticipated.

Vulfpeck - Fugue State: Fugue State might be more properly categorized as an EP due to its short length. Despite this, it has evolved into a favorite soundtrack for after-school family dance parties.

Seabuckthorn - A House With Too Much Fire: This follow-up to last year’s album of the year feels much more open-ended and improvised than its predecessor. It retains, however, the engulfing resonance and atmospherics that made Turns so compelling.

Brian Eno - Taking Tiger mountain (by Strategy): This early album by Eno shows how his sonic thumbprint was stamped across a broad spectrum of 70’s art-rock. Listening to it, I often wonder what might have happened if Syd Barrett had stayed in the game long enough to develop a partnership with Eno.

Venetian Snares - Traditional Synthesizer Music: A disarming but ultimately lyrical display of modular synthesizer potential. The potential for exhaustion is very real by album’s end, but the ride is engaging enough to keep listener interest high.

Soen - Lykaia: Soen is often criticized for sounding like Tool, which, in my opinion, is hardly a criticism if it is well-deserved. There are some tonal similarities, but I would throw a heaping dash of Opeth’s liminal prog-metal as a distinguishing characteristic.

Soup - The Beauty of Our Youth: For some reason, I received a promotional copy of The Beauty of Our Youth when I ordered Remedies earlier this year. It is quite an album in its own right, but it will stand in the shadow of Remedies for quite a while.

Spock’s Beard - Noise Floor: I have been a proponent of the current incarnation of Spock’s Beard since Ted Leonard came on board as lead vocalist. Despite the return of Nik D’Virgilio of drums, however, this has been the first release from this iteration of the band that I have had trouble getting behind.

Legends of Et Cetera - Coyote: An acceptably good but sometimes bland collection of jazzy jangle-rock that I mostly like but don’t love. Really attracted to the album art, though.

The Wagakki Band - Vocaloid Sanmai: Well-crafted J-Rock with the added twist of incorporating traditional Japanese instruments and vocal styles. I finally have an album that really satisfies my secret desire to jam to anime theme songs and a justification for liking them.

Boards of Canada - Music Has the Right to Children: This is a classic piece of 90s electronica that I have circled for years. It’s an immediately accessible and distinctive work that lives up to its reputation.

Cayucas - Bigfoot: An easily digestible slice of sunny pop music goodness. Bigfoot brings the intimate cleverness of Peter, Bjorn, and John alongside the cheery ambience of the Beach Boys to immediate and consistent effect.

Van Halen - Women and Children First: The last album in the Van Halen back catalog that has eluded capture all these years. Certainly, the band’s initial steam had begun to wane slightly by this third release, but Women and Children First still features several of the band’s defining moments (not the least of which was featured in the stop-motion hamburger animation in the classic 80s movie Better Off Dead).

Midlake - The Trials of Van Occupanther: Fans of early Radiohead, Jethro Tull and the more arcane aspects of Fleetwood Mac will have a very hard time finding anything to complain about with this album. Although it shares a thread with The Amazing, a favorite from last year, Midlake is immediately distinctive and nuanced, with engaging lyrics to boot.

Various Artists - African Scream Contest V.2: Although as a rule, I avoid compilations, carefully curated collections of ethnic pop from yesteryear often find their way into my listening and can make a clear and intriguing statement. This particular collection fits that description well, featuring a variety of psychedelic pop from the 70s in West Africa.

Spring Roundup Part 4: Good Car

People's taste in music is often shaped by the distinctive ways in which it is consumed and used.  Take my father, for instance. For most of my adult life, my father has had an explicit preference for instrumental music that he listens to in the car.  As I have stated elsewhere, the automobile as a listening site has its advantages and limitations. One such limitation arises due to the significant amount of background noise that we take for granted while driving, making it more difficult to appreciate music’s quieter aspects.

The problematically labelled “new age” music that my father likes capitalizes on dynamic contrasts, and he would often get annoyed at having to turn his volume up and down to follow the details of softer passages. When he found an album that stayed within a dynamic range that he would not have to adjust, it would receive a label designating it as “GOOD CAR.”

Although I used to tease my dad relentlessly about choosing music based on the narrowness of its dynamic range, there is merit to the designation. Only in recent years have I realized how much I limited myself by making the car my primary listening site. Even now, the majority of my music begins in the car and gets distributed into different settings as the need arises.  Still, there are some kinds of music whose darkness, angularity, dissonance, or general intended volume are best suited for the private setting of my car. These albums are my version of Good Car.


John Williams - The Last Jedi OST: while this may not be John Williams most memorable Star Wars score, just might be his most masterful. The way that he interweaves themes from throughout the franchise is incredible in this soundtrack, and is best appreciated at max volume.

LITE - Cubic: A few years ago, I would have cited LITE as one of my favorite bands. They have steadily moved away from the aggressive intensity of their earlier work, however, towards a more jazzy fusion approach that lacks the same emotional impact.

Mouse on the Keys - The Flowers of Romance: When I first discovered Mouse on the Keys, they were strictly a piano duo with a drummer. They have significantly expanded their sonic palette since then, but in the process may have lost some of the essence of what made them interesting.

Alcest - Kodama: it's hard to resist an album that cites Deafheaven, Tool, and Princess Mononoke as equal influences. Kodama balances light and dark, beauty and ugliness, hope and despair in ways that convincingly reflect these somewhat diverse inspirations.

The Who - Who Are You?: I'm a big fan of The Who, and I've slowly been putting their albums in my collection for the past 30 years. Despite a couple of really compelling high points, this is the first one I really thought was a big jumbled up mess on the whole.

Andrew W.K. - You Are Not Alone: I got this on the suggestion of several friends, and quickly found that there was more to Andrew W.K. than a comically optimistic attitude and theatrical riff-rock. Once I let go of my cynicism and embraced the idea the he might be genuine, I came to really appreciate his mission statement.

Wei Zhongle - The Operators: A songwriter and an eccentric clarinet player walk into a Chinese opera and start covering the Talking Heads. This isn’t beginning of a joke - its Wei Zhongle

Piniol - Bran Coucou: Piniol is, apparently, a mashup of two separate mathty French noise bands, Piol and Ni. In this incarnation, with two bass players and two drummers, they blast through Bran Coucou with the precision of Battles and the Zorn-esque zaniness of Mr. Bungle.

John Powell - Solo: A Star Wars Story OST: To me, the most important aspect of continuity in the Star Wars universe is John Williams' scores, and there has been no small amount of anxiety to find someone to pass the baton to before he retires. John Powell’s approach is noticeably more polyrhythmic and driving than Williams, but his melodic sense is completely compatible with the franchise’s already established musical canon.

Kite Base - Latent Whispers: This album came too late to make the Dinner Music post, but its Bjork-meets-Nine Inch Nails-meets-The XX would probably fit in that category as well. It is just a bit dark in tone (not content), but it abounds with memorable tunes and smart arrangements.

Spring Roundup Part 3: The Prog Stuff

To continue catching up on this series that admittedly was meant to catch me up a month ago, I am addressing the albums that ended up getting lumped into a category I loosely designated as Prog Stuff.

Before I continue, the argument over what progressive rock is and is not is a huge and divisive topic that I am unwilling to engage here. The albums that follow don’t necessarily fall into the neat characteristics of traditional progressive rock music. Instead, these are all albums that I discovered through progressive rock avenues - either from websites dedicated to the style or from rhizomatic connections to other progressive rock groups.
Functionally, a lot of this music floats between the car and the house, although it feels a little indulgent to subject the whole family to some of this stuff. Still, as is often the case, I have found much of my favorite music this year by searching in progressive rock circles.



Wobbler - From Silence to Somewhere: Wobbler’s most recent release is another example of retro prog that transcends mere imitation. Their distinctive sound delves into heavier realms on From Silence to Somewhere than in the past, bringing to mind the riff-driven work of Rush in the mid-70’s.

Barock Project - Skyline: This album's clean, bright approach to late Neo-Progressive rock did not initially appeal to me at all.  Its strong songwriting and clever musicianship, however, has really grown on me, revealing depths that continue to deliver.

Bent Knee - Say So: Bent Knee seems like a band full of great musicians with just too many ideas. There are times when the concept pops into focus with dramatic results, but overall Say So feels too uneven to rise above mere moments.

Big Big Train - Folklore: Although occasionally marred by goofy lyrics, the positive critical responses to Folklore are largely deserved.  Fans of progressive rock in the vein of Genesis will likely connect with this album, especially if a sprinkling of Celtic overtones in the mix sounds appealing.

The Knells - Knells II: With a guitar player who seems to have broken off the the knob off somewhere between Jimmy Page and Hemispheres-era Alex Lifeson, I find a whole lot of like about this album from an instrumental perspective.  Even more interesting is the classically trained women's trio that collectively function as the lead voice.

Cheer- Accident - Putting off Death:  This is another album that is almost derailed by its own eccentricity, but is grounded by the obvious technical prowess of the band’s members.  The album has a certain sonic relationship to Bill Bruford’s 70’s solo work, which I have a longstanding relationship with.

Soup - Remedies: Remedies is my early contender for album of the year.  It's distinctive balance between Pink Floyd, post-rock, and pan-Nordic bleakness makes everything that I've been listening to pop into sharper focus.

Spring Roundup Part 2: Evening Music

I have a longstanding interest in music that is "soothing but not boring," but this area of my listening is often eclipsed by more energetic styles. This is probably because the primary site of listening has traditionally been my car, and active music more readily overlays the experience of driving. The increased access provided by the Plex app, however, has opened up new spaces in my everyday routine.

For example, Seabuckthorn’s Turns is a masterful, atmospheric yet emotionally moving album that worked in the car well enough, but its status as the 2017 Album of the Year is a result of its pervasive presence in the evenings after the kids went to sleep. Towards the end of last year, I became increasingly interested in finding more music that could fill this space, giving rise to the second category that has arisen in the past few months - Evening Music.

There are many albums that I put in this category, and virtually all of them are engaging, but very few of them actually ended up working as well as I had hoped. With only a couple of exceptions, most of them balanced ambient aspects with at least a few moments of explosive noise. I find this musically interesting, but from a functional standpoint, Evening Music can’t wake up the kids or cause study room doors to slam in irritated disgust.



Pejman Hadadi - Epiphany: It's hard to believe that I never wrote about this, but last semester we had a housemate from Iran (via Belgium) who was auditing the PhD program that my wife is in. She gave me this CD as a Christmas/parting gift, and it has served very well as my “non-Western” listening at the beginning of this year.

Tangerine Dream - Zeit: I walked into Zeit hoping to investigate retro-synth source material, only to find that Zeit is hardly the place to start this kind of research. As it turns out, however, it is a surprisingly captivating proto-ambient album that shares more common ground with Pink Floyd’s Ummagumma than Jean-Michel Jarre’s Oxygene.

Kyle Dixon & Micheal Stein - Stranger Things 2 OST: Like its predecessor, Stranger Things 2 shows its intent in its structure. It is a collection of cues, rather than freestanding compositions, which opens up different creative freedoms for Dixon and Stein.

The Radiophonic Workshop - Burials on Several Earths: This is more in line with what I thought Zeit would be like, but it is also far more ambient than I had anticipated. In terms of authenticity, however, you really can't go wrong with three or four guys who worked in the BBC radiophonic Workshop during its heyday in the 70s.

Hans Zimmer & Benjamin Wallfisch - Blade Runner 2049 OST: This soundtrack doesn’t speak quite as clearly as a lot of Hans Zimmer’s work, but it matches the movie so well that it is hard not to appreciate. It falls prey to the unfortunate trend of closing with a painfully formulaic pop song.

Burial - Untrue: This album has received some attention recently due to its rhizomatic influence on several current electronic styles. Although it’s dark atmosphere has found a pretty regular spot in my evening music listening, its complexity and subtle energy allows it to spill beyond this setting with ease.

Park Jiha - Communion: I love Communion’s emotional cross-pollination of jazz, classical, and traditional Korean music. When it moves into more strident territory, however, other people in the house unfortunately start to plug their ears.

Air - Moon Safari: Moon Safari came up on a Pitchfork “best of the 90’s” playlist a week before I found it in a used bin, I have had Air on my playlist for years, mainly due to Jason Falkner’s involvement, and,despite knowing that Falkner was not involved, I got it on a whim.

Matt Chamberlain, Viktor Krauss, and Dan Phelps - Modular: This one is my favorite of the bunch by far. Its got an amazingly well-thought out concept that binds it together, fantastic playing, and enough mystery as to its overall construction that I simply can’t stop listening to it.

Spring Roundup Part 1: Dinner Music

It makes me incredibly happy to say that I received an obscene amount of music for Christmas and my birthday this year. So much, in fact, that getting acquainted with it all well enough to generate commentary with any kind of confidence has taken the better part of the past few months. Now, however, I am at the point at which addressing them all, even in a generalized roundup, would result in a prohibitively long post.  Additionally, the longer the lapse in the posting, the more unruly catching up seems. What to do?

After spending some time with all this music during my commute, I started to notice that loose categories began emerge. These categories were partially based on style, but also arose in the music’s everyday functionality. For example, some music seemed appropriate after the kids had gone to sleep, while others were far too abrasive to get much airplay in any other setting than the privacy of my car. To break down this overwhelming influx of music, I will post a series of roundups according to these categories.

For example, dinner time in our house is one of the rare occasions in the course of the day that the whole family has a chance to sit down and enjoy each other’s company. Thanks to the Netflix series Beat Bugs, my kids have grown to love the music of the Beatles, so I curated a playlist based on their favorite songs,  It has dominated dinner time for the majority of the year. This set the tone for a category I have come to call Dinner Music, which has evolved into a showcase for newly discovered power pop, relatively accessible songwriting-based music, and, of course, the Beatles.



Danny De La Matyr - Crybaby: Danny was the primary songwriter behind one of my favorite bands of the 90s Dallas scene, The Days, so I was very excited when I heard about his recent solo album. It is, however, disappointing in that it is marred by distractingly flat production.

Dawes - We’re All Gonna Die: Dedicated Dawes fans have raised a bit of commotion about the stylistic direction on the band’s most recent release. We’re All Gonna Die is decisively more rock-oriented than its predecessors, but it is not as jarringly different as reviewers might suggest.

Shugo Tokumaru - In Focus?: In Focus? is a super-eclectic take on pop-styled songwriting, occupying a unique place on the spectrum between Sean Lennon. and Frank Zappa. Despite its unapologetic eccentricity, the album holds together as a fun and and challenging listen.

Field Music - Open Here: Each of Field Music’s albums have become increasingly grand and sweeping in their scale. Open Here continues this trend, with liberal use of strings and other orchestral instruments sidling up beside some of their most accessible and political work.