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Mixtape Mondays: Thinly Veiled Crisis

April 17, 2022May 31, 2021 by Belghast

Hey Friends! It seems that I have gone from being one of the most prolific bloggers to one of the least prolific in record time. I am still more or less trudging through hell on the work front, and as a result it has sapped any energy that I once had for creative endeavors. I miss you all greatly and this time I carved out of my life to talk to you. I need to figure out a way to return to some semblance of normality and maybe attempting to blog again is a good method to get there. The prolific era of this blog was actually spawned as a counter reaction to one of the worst periods of my life up to that point. Part of me is hoping that after I get on the far side of this current phase… I will have a similar upwelling of creative desires.

For those who are not used to this construct, the idea is simple. I create a mixtape and share it with you. For me however the act of creating a mixtape is way more than just throwing a bunch of songs together. I am old school in that nature in that I am trying to build an experience that is enjoyable to listen to in its whole. Back in the day I used to refer to albums that were built in this manner as “listen throughs” which I admit isn’t terribly creative, but they were albums I could just throw on and let play without feeling the desire to skip tracks. My goal with this project is to share with you tiny bits of myself in musical form. I was a creator of mixtapes then and I find the process more or less translates smoothly to an online playlist.

Thinly Veiled Crisis

A lot of the tracks that I have been sharing with you are fairly old at this point dating from the 80s, 90s and early 2000s. With Thinly Veiled Crisis I am cherry picking from some of my favorites in modern rotation but even then there is a bit of a theme. A lot of these tracks remind me of an earlier era, namely in many cases they have this throwback flair to the “New Wave” era of the 80s. Others just sorta felt like they fit into missing pieces. I have been working on this list for a month, adding and removing songs here and there until it reached a point where I thought it was ready for listening.

Hard Times – Paramore
Once in a Lifetime – All Time Low
Blinding Lights – The Weeknd
Such Great Heights – The Postal Service
Oh My My – Blue October
Comeback Kid – Sleigh Bells
Ain’t No Rest for the Wicked – Cage the Elephant
Kiss This – The Struts
Deadline – Grouplove
Level of Concern – Twenty One Pilots
Serotonin – Girl in Red
Soul Meets Body – Death Cab for Cutie
Are You Bored Yet? – Wallows feat. Clairo

Listen on Spotify

Listen On YouTube

Listen On Tidal

This one is a bit different than most of what I have been sharing, but still very much represents a slice of my musical tastes. I have to admit one of my favorite parts of this experiment has been the comments I have received. Even if I can’t do other posts right now, I am hoping to keep this going because I enjoy the process greatly.

Mixtape Mondays: Flannel and Chain Wallet

April 17, 2022May 17, 2021 by Belghast

Good Morning Friends. It has been quite a long time at this point since we last spoke. My world more or less turned upside down on on the 6th of May and I still have yet to really recover from it. This is one of those work crisis sort of situations, but the longer it grinds on the more of my personal sanity it takes with it. As of this morning I will be on fifteen days without a break other than coming home and crashing before getting up and starting it all over again. During this time I have just not been taking any time to sit down and write to you all, and that means last week I missed my first Mixtape Monday in this series. It was at that point that I decided that even if I make no other posts during the week I am going to do this one because the whole act of creating and fine tuning mixtapes is important to me for reasons I can’t fully explain.

For those who are not used to this construct yet, the idea is that I create a Mixtape through Spotify and YouTube playlists and approach it like I would have approached creating a physical Mixtape or burning a physical CD for someone back in the day. Various ideas come about that incubate their way into a musical track list. If you view them collectively you can glean a lot of information about my particular musical tastes, but more likely the specific time period they were shaped by. Once upon a time I was a flannel adorned, baggy jeans wearing, chain wallet having kid that was fully enthralled by the grunge music scene. This more or less hit during late high school and early college and shaped who I thought I wanted to be. While not entirely chronologically accurate, this mixtape is somewhat of a lovesong to the way that music felt.

Flannel and Chain Wallet

Like I said above, these are not all of the songs you are going to instantly associate with the grunge era. There is no Smells like Teen Spirit on this list for example and no Even Flow, but what you do have instead are some songs that were favorites of mine that got significantly less air play. The thing for me is that the grunge feel of music continued far longer than those few years when it was in vogue. So you have The Flys which not traditionally a grunge band is drift compatible with the sound. I was listening to Primus long before I adorned my first flannel, but it still mentally gets wrapped up in this same environment for me. So again this is an interpretation of my feelings about that era of music and less an attempt at a greatest hits collection. I mean there are already plenty of those playlists out there.

Big Empty – Stone Temple Pilots
Come As You Are – Nirvana
Winter Song – Screaming Trees
Got You – The Flys
Backwater – Meat Puppets
Rearviewmirror – Pearl Jam
Would? – Alice in Chains
Jesus Built My Hotrod – Ministry
Jerry Was a Race Car Driver – Primus
Cherub Rock – Smashing Pumpkins
Work for Food – Dramarama
Low – Cracker
December – Collective Soul
Jane Says – Jane’s Addiction

Spotify

YouTube

Tidal

I hope my life settles down a bit and I can maybe just maybe return to regular blogging. In the meantime however since these posts are largely ready to go… I am going to keep doing this thing for now. That is I guess until I run out of playlists to talk about. I hope you are all doing okay out there. I am doing mostly okay but starting to be less okay as this drags on.

Mixtape Mondays: Push Me Punch You

April 17, 2022May 3, 2021 by Belghast

Hey Friends! It is that time again, time for another MixTape. I have managed to do this three weeks in a row which is pretty great for me. I have this bad habit of starting a series and then just wandering away like a bored toddler. For anyone who might be tuning in for the first time to this spectacle, I missed the era of building custom mixtapes for friends. Since you are all my friends I am now building custom mixtapes for you my audience. The idea is to put a number of songs together in a way that the combination is more than any of the constituent parts. The challenge however is how to make this actually work for the digital age.

The answer to that is that I am doing this largely on Spotify and also including a YouTube Playlist as a backup. I greatly favor Spotify however because it allows me to make some nonsense custom artwork, but I guess you are going to see that anyway if you are reading this blog post. I also try and come up with a good name for the mix to sort of set the tone. Occasionally these are pretentious nonsense and others like this morning are just pretty straight forward.

Push Me Punch You

One of the things that I love is a music that has a cohesive nature but no real cohesive name. This music is referred to as punk, post-hardcore, indie rock, garage rock, alternative or just the very boring and generic “rock”. Whatever the case it is music with a slight edge but that isn’t super hard about it. This is probably the mixtape of the series that I probably listen to the most because it most represents the general state of what I want to hear in a song. I attempt to parade some b side cuts and maybe some bands doing things that you might not expect from them. This is technically the second mixtape that I created in this sequence but I wanted to try and space things out a bit since the first one also had a little bit of an edge to it.

Bull In The Heather – Sonic Youth
Mistaken for Strangers – The National
Bulldog Front – Fugazi
Somebody to Shove – Soul Asylum
Head Injury – Soundgarden
Been Caught Stealing – Jane’s Addiction
Backwoods – Red Hot Chili Peppers
Relatin’ Dudes To Jazz – fIREHOSE
Out There – Dinosaur Jr.
Cut – The Cure
Jessie – Paw
Nearly Lost You – Screaming Trees
Ana Ng – They Might Be Giants
Hey Now – The Regrettes
Sunday Morning Coming Down – Me First and the Gimme Gimmes

Spotify

YouTube

Tidal

I hope you enjoy it and drop me a line below with your thoughts. Also what the hell do YOU call this brand of music? I mostly just call it Punk even though it isn’t the sort of Johnny Rotten/Exploited/Safety pin as a nose ring era that the term generally evokes.

Mixtape Mondays: Mellowcore Cantriping

April 17, 2022April 26, 2021 by Belghast

Hey Friends! It is once again time for a Mixtape Monday where I dive into some of my favorite songs and blend them together into a custom made mix just for you my friends. As a quintessential GenXer I was a producer and consumer of the artform known as the Mixtape. It was so much more than just putting a number of your favorite songs on a single tape for convenience. I dug more into the flow of a mix and how the songs blended together to produce something greater than any of the parts.

Now I am doing this same process but instead presenting it in Spotify and YouTube Playlist forms for your pleasure. I am also creating custom album art for each mixtape, which is super pretentious and nonsensical but would you expect anything else? This is the second edition of this feature so here is hoping I don’t get distracted and can keep this up!

Mellowcore Cantriping

I have to be honest, I am not entirely certain I would explain the inspiration here. Effectively I built this entire mix for the sole purpose of building up to the last song. Everything leading up to that is just there more or less to prime the pump for the optimal delivery of what is bittersweet musical perfection. There will always be mystery shrouding the death of Jeff Buckley, but Grace the album released shortly before his death is sublime and I wish we would have had enough time to get more from him. The problem is that Last Goodbye is a weird genre bending song that took a very special mix tape to do it justice. I hope that I did at that.