Lately I've been realizing how much my listening habits change during periods of time when I'm frequently driving a car around. Since I generally find most of the music on the radio intolerable to say the least, that's usually not a viable option for me; this of course creates a situation in which I am at the mercy of whatever music hardware format a particular car's stereo face will accept. The best possibility is that the stereo will have an input into which I can plug my i-Pod (or at least that was the best possibility until my i-Pod was accidentally stolen by a very nice girl at a party, who despite the fact that it was plugged in and playing at the time, took it to prevent it from being stolen, then misplaced it while she was moving, in effect creating the exact same situation for me as if it were actually stolen). Otherwise, it's left up to either a tape deck or CD player to do the job. If I had a choice, I would always choose the tape deck. There are several reasons for this, not the least of which is that I own considerably more cassettes than CDs; But the main reason is that I really dislike CDs. Despite the luxury of being able to skip from track to track, which is the only upside to this over rated format in my opinion, these two cent pieces of plastic have been the scourge of my existence for quite sometime. Honestly, can anyone reading this say they own a CD from the early nineties that still plays through all the way without issue? I doubt it; I certainly cannot. That's because CDs deteriorate with time, whether you play them or not! CD-Rs, of course, are even worse; some of my favorite releases of the past decade have been on CD-R and several of them I may never hear again because they rot even faster. Just think of all the music made available only on CD that will be gone forever in fifty to a hundred more years! It bums me out....like a lot. So anyway, while my own motorized vehicle continues to rust disdainfully, fully visible from my kitchen window, I've lately been given somewhat steady access to two cars by people who are close to me. Suffice it to say, both have CD players in them. Despite my tangent in the last paragraph, I actually don't consider this to be that bad of a situation. I did after all grow up in the nineties, which means I have a shitload of CDs collecting dust in a box under my bed. Since I don't own a CD player (and since the i-Pod all my CDs were loaded onto is gone like so much wasted plastic) this has given me the opportunity to break out some old favorites from back in the day as well as spin some of the discs that reside in the cars I've been driving.
Without a doubt the album that's gotten more play in the car than any other is this stoner/doom rock classic from Sleep. Though this album was first released on Earache in 1992, I first came across Sleep sometime around the year 2000 after hearing their music in the film Gummo. After repeated viewings, a friend and I became obsessed with the movie's soundtrack, particularly the song in a scene towards the beginning in which two main characters ride their bikes down a street full of dilapidated houses in a fictionalized version of Xenia, Ohio (actually shot in the slums of north Nashville, I was on that street yesterday, and it still looks almost exactly the same). Eventually I ordered the Gummo soundtrack, and my friend and I discovered the identity of the mystery band and immediately ordered this album. Already a Melvins fan for half a decade, and quite familiar at that point in my life with Black Sabbath and the idea of hardcore and punk derived 'sludge' rock such as Grief and Noothgrush (the latter being a band which was founded by a former member of Asbestosdeath, the band that proceeded Sleep), this was obviously the next step. Sleep effortlessly combined the crunch pioneered by Sabbath and later reinterpreted by the Melvins with the intensity of hardcore and the stellar musicianship typical of most seventies classic rock; add in drugged out, psychedelic vocals and lyrical themes seemingly indebted to a fascination with D&D style role playing games, and you have this album which is practically perfect. My friend and I jammed it pretty much non-stop for at least a year, if not longer, and more than once attempted to attach meaning to the group's absurd, pot addled lyrics ("but really dude, where is the valley of the evil one?"). Ah, to be young and idiotic...
If you're curious, the members of Sleep went on to form the bands High on Fire (a similar sounding, but in my opinion much less engaging band), and Om (a not very similar sounding, but nonetheless quite engaging band). I assume that most people who would like this record already do, but then my mother once told me something about making assumptions....so go check it out here.
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