It’s been about a month since I dug deep into my musical memory banks, so let’s do another edition of that Record Club thing, yeah? To be honest, I’m not used to being this personal when I talk about music. Music has always been the perfect distance from me emotionally, close enough to relate to and enrapture me, but separate enough that I don’t have to share myself much when I share it with others. The idea of regaling the Internet with stories of me as a teenager lost in fantasy thinking of Pokemon OCs while listening to Silversun Pickups and Pixies records is both very fun and kinda embarrassing.
The other good thing about this series is that, because it’s effectively a very casual ramble about how I listen to music and the things I think about when I listen, it doesn’t take long at all to write. That’s good when you got three days to finish and publish it before the month’s out. :blobokhand:
Today’s record brings me right back to middle school, shortly before the world hit me for the first time. It’s a record I still enjoy quite a lot, the noisy, punky, gouged-and-warped pseudo-90s sampler tape that makes up Cage the Elephant’s second album Thank You Happy Birthday. It’s got a 7″ with it!
So many ways to listen
Even though we’re supposed to be keyed in to vinyl on this series, and I will discuss my pressing and some more general vinyl-y thoughts from recent as we go on, this album to me belongs on an iPod. Part of the reason I got so attached to CDs was because of how snugly they fit into the ways I listened to music–in media players on computers, in disc drives of consoles, and ripped to portable devices of various stripes. I got my first iPod in 2007 or so, the first-gen Shuffle back when Apple were still on their polycarbonate kick. I played around a lot with my mom’s iPod before then, a first-gen Nano filled to the brim with Limewire classics (sometimes even named correctly!), but when I got my own, it was suddenly a space to explore exactly what I and myself alone liked.
My usual method for trying music now involves using Pandora Premium (I used to use Spotify, but Pandora has way better recommendations) and then buying CDs of the albums that prove sticky, but funnily enough, I remember doing the same thing back in the day with the earliest wave of YouTube-to-MP3 sites. Nowadays, I use yt-dlp and grab the cleanest copy I can if I really have to go this route (and actually, I prefer to use a Deezer ripping site and get a FLAC file outright), but back then, it was gonna sound like shit and you liked it. You think of it being some tenth-generation lossy file, perhaps from the original uploader’s CD but just as likely a P2P 96kbps MP3 copy that then got squashed to 64kbps mono for YouTube and then re-reencoded through the downloader site–agh, the aural equivalent of a shitpic, you gotta love it. I’m still not used to the feedback swell at the end of the Incesticide version of Nirvana’s “Aneurysm” because I spent so much time as a little kid listening to a YouTube copy that cut it off a few seconds too early.
Anyway, after a year of enjoying those, I’d ask my parents for a CD of whatever Nirvana or Cage the Elephant songs were most in my rotation, and my collection would grow.
Manifest Destiny is just a fancy word for murder
Cage the Elephant were a pretty early musical love of mine. They burst onto the scene in 2008, one of the last rock bands to become a staple of mainstream radio with a little twangy song about a prostitute, a mugger, and a preacher called “Ain’t No Rest for the Wicked”, and as an eight year old boy, I wanted more, I guess. Likely, it was “Back Against the Wall” that hooked me. Their debut album (which I have somehow been unable to keep in the collection, and don’t ask me where my multiple copies went) was this bluesy collection of ballsy, snotty odes to freethinking and the evils of the world, crooked politicians on “Judas”, bread and circuses mind control on “Tiny Little Robots”, and most rotten of them all, rock critics on “In One Ear”.
I loved it. I still do. There was a psychedelic streak through the thing where singer Matt Shultz had his moments of introspection which all became my favorites–“Back Against the Wall”, of course, but “Lotus”‘ swirling, colorful cynicism about holy wars and co-opted movements hit me so hard, I remember at 12 years old writing a story in my notebook at lunchtime about this guy who moves to the mountains with his two robot sons based on the song. Of course, leaving to the middle of nowhere is now a main plot point in Pennyverse, and I’ll be moving to another country in a couple years. Y’know, maybe being stuck in the Lehigh Valley my entire life has made me quietly fixated on the topic of going as far away as humanly possible. Hm.
It wasn’t just the lyrics that captivated me, though–it sounded wild. The guitars were bluesy and cutting, with solos that were more like rhythm parts with crazy tremolo picking and flourishes thrown in for good measure. Jared Champion’s drumming was unchained but groovy, hitting hard and occasionally quite fast but never losing control of his dynamics and musicality. I’ve still never heard singing like Matt Shultz’s, that gasping and wailing, completely untrained but highly emotive voice like only a Kentucky plumber moved to London could’ve had. Totally.
It was right in the middle of sixth grade, my love affair with Cage’s first album still going loud and their debut played loud on school computers the world over, that 2011’s Thank You Happy Birthday fell into my lap. I remember when “Shake Me Down” took over the radio, this gently violent, 90s-style rock ballad about keeping strong in bleak times that felt like Cage had suddenly learned that you can get a lot louder if you go quiet first. It went so nicely with my burgeoning exploration into actual 90s rock, overcompressed sonics notwithstanding, that I wanted the whole thing and more.
I got it and it quickly became my favorite record for a very long time.
Thank You Happy Birthday: art, packaging, and songlist
This is the kind of album I use to demonstrate why I don’t like a lot of modern vinyl. It’s a very nothingy pressing and package job, not horrible, and you get exactly what they said you’d get, but not really a whole lot else.
For one thing, all the packaging feels very thin. “180g vinyl” is a common buzzterm in the vinyl world (this disc is not 180g), and it refers to the weight of the disc. Normally, discs are 120 grams, but a 180g pressing is, well, 180 grams. This is supposed to resist warpage better (subject to debate), but hot take, I would rather a standard weight disc in nicer, thicker packaging than a 180g disc in flimsy paper everything. You get a lyric sheet, but it’s once again just glossy paper. Paper sleeves for the discs themselves, not even a polycarbonate window to protect the labels. Very easy to damage, and just not very exciting. I get that vintage 70s vinyl also came in flimsy packaging, but those were commodity records, meant to be someone’s main way of listening to an album. This is the vinyl release of an existing CD/digital album, and given I’m paying more for the vinyl than the CD, I’d expect it to be a nicer package.
The master is also identical to the CD. I’ve long accepted that I’m going to be listening to loud, brickwalled mixes if I’m going to enjoy a 2000s/2010s rock album, but to have an album recorded digitally, brickwalled, and then put on vinyl, to me, is hilarious. I won’t be focusing as much on this point in the future because a lot of the albums I’m covering in this series have this same sticking point, but I do think it’s worth mentioning once while we’re on the topic. There is no sonic upgrade from listening to my old, childhood CD copy here. It’s not a downgrade, aside from the extra surface noise, and Thank You Happy Birthday is hardly the most offensively-mastered modern album I’ve ever heard, but again, given that a vinyl copy of this one will run you $25-$40 USD over the $6-8 the CD costs, where is the 5x improvement in the sonics?
The one nice thing about this package is the extra 7″ you get with it. Thank You Happy Birthday has a hidden track on the end of the CD, an early acoustic version of “Right Before My Eyes” called “Shiver”, and the vinyl puts it on a single-sided 7″ in its own sleeve instead. This is neat! The unused side is shiny–bet you’ve never seen a perfectly shiny record before, have you?
None of my griping about the format changes how excellent of a record Thank You Happy Birthday really is, though. Every song has Cage sounding both like a completely different band and like themselves. You get some really mechanically-touched tracks, like the Japanese spy thriller theme that opens the record “Always Something” or the strange synthy warbles that begin the energetic, tongue-in-cheek rave-ups “Indy Kidz” and “2024”. Other tracks, like “Aberdeen” (Scotland, not Washington), revel in just being huge tunes, straightforward, catchy, and performed with tons of gusto.
If anything, Thank You Happy Birthday is a record of pure dynamic exercises. Barreling, static-fried punk cacophonies like “Sell Yourself” are immediately followed by gentle, still, dreamy acoustic ballads like “Rubber Ball”. Every catchy, radio-ready anthem like “Around My Head” and the aforementioned “Shake Me Down” is balanced by a noticeable sadness that gives them a weighty depth without feeling forced or challenging for its own sake. “Flow” deserves its own mention; the album’s closer, this may be one of the most beautiful songs of the whole decade, this breezy, low-key escape into the treetops that feels like a prototype for what “Cigarette Daydreams” would do for Cage commercially on their next album. The video for it is simply drummer Jared, cigarette lazily between his fingers, gliding around on a skateboard at night from the vantage point of the board. It works perfectly.
Hanging on a sunset softly trampled by the rain
Onto the real reason this album brings to mind iPods for me–that was the main way I listened to this thing, over and over. By 2011, I had graduated to a green sixth gen Nano, the square one with the touchscreen. I was still too young to have an iPhone (I think I got my first iPod Touch a year later, which kept me happy until my senior year of high school), so having this funky iOS lookalike device as a budding Apple geek (don’t worry, we divorced circa the Fusion Drive crash) was so super cool. It became its own source of fascination, naturally. It could use your headphone wire as an FM radio antenna, so I listened to the radio a lot with it, and it was fixed to this Memorex iPod dock I was using as speakers for a long time (I have yet to find another unit for sale, but it sounded quite good and I want another). And the watch faces! I never had a band to use it as a watch, but they were still a ton of fun to play with.
Here’s a funky concept for you all used to the Web being shitty and bloated: there was a time where I was able to use my DSi’s Web browser–that’s right, the embedded browser in the firmware of a DS–to comfortably browse mobile DeviantART at 1 in the morning while listening to Cage the Elephant on my iPod. My computer would lock me out at 10 thanks to the parental controls that would last approximately two years before I wound up with the keys to the entire kingdom, plus the router, but I was still able to look at all the furry art I wanted to, listening to music long past my bedtime all the while. Nowadays, I’m passed out by midnight, but when you’re a kid, you got boundless energy like that. It worked a lot better than you think, and frankly, better than DeviantART does these days on my infinitely more powerful phones.
Technologically, it was very cool, but it was what was on it that’s stuck with me the longest. This album and that iPod accompanied me to a summer camp I visited for three years in a row between 2009 and 2011 in upstate New York. It was this very nice and very expensive secluded hideaway for disabled kids, from the airheaded spergs like myself to low-functioning adult autistics to wheelchair-bound muscle-atrophied teenagers to everyone in between. I used to be a little embarrassed by having gone there, but I think it’s pretty obvious to anyone who knows me that I’m a little special needs, so fuck it, let’s just embrace the good memories.
And they were good memories! I can remember so many idyllic June sunsets spent wandering around the little middle area where all the camp events were held, big headphones on, sitting on the swings as the wistful fuzz of “Right Before My Eyes” bubbled all around me. As a kid fascinated with old tech from the beginning, just with no access, I remember having this music video idea for “Flow” of the singer (and by that, I mean me) kicking around this bedroom that slowly morphs through the eras, from typewriters to chunky Macs to tower desktops, the posters on the walls going from 70s to 90s, a misty rainstorm blowing along outside like the kinds I’d watch from the safety and dryness of the arts and crafts pavilion. I still associate the steps of the bunk I stayed in with specifically the aggressive run of “2024” into “Sell Yourself” and having to shut it off before the latter’s freaky, damaged “white noise and robot Matt” bridge came along and spooked 11 year old me once again.
Now, of course, I think it’s just cool. I think there’s something to be said for the things that scare you in childhood being your fascinations in adulthood.
Right before my eyes, I saw the whole world lose control
It was actually the ride back from that last year of camp that my mom broke the news to me and my sister that she’d separated from the woman she was seeing and that we had to find another place to live. It was a hard separation, not really unexpected looking back, but the first time any of the instability that powered my family really manifested right in front of me. I spent a little less than a year in a drafty apartment above a pizza place watching my sisters and my mom fight, and I was also suddenly very aware socially that I was the weird kid that people kept around to make fun of. I made who I consider to be my first real friends around the same time as well, falling into an abyss of multiplayer Minecraft, Brad Sucks, and increasingly abrasive, strange indie rock as I navigated being a teenager. It definitely wasn’t all bad, except for all the bad parts.
Cage the Elephant fell out of my rotation not long after. I liked Melophobia quite a bit, actually, but I never owned it, only listening to a copy Aaron had bought on iTunes. I remember the singles from Tell Me I’m Pretty on the radio, specifically “Trouble”, which I liked as the sad and dreamy ballad that it was–but I was too busy being enthralled by the back catalog of the Black Keys to want to listen to Cage be produced by a Black Key. From there, it all slipped by me, which is nothing new for bands I like, but still, for a band whose then-newest album took over my world once upon a time, maybe it’s a little sad.
I did pick up a brand new copy of Social Cues when FYE closed recently for a grand total of like $2. Maybe it’s time to dive back in.
The Cammy vinyl/casual listening update
Admittedly, February has been a very off month for me and music, and certainly for using my turntable as much as I wanted. As I just mentioned, I recently raided the now out-of-business FYE, which was a chain of music, movie, and “geek merch” stores, one of which was in our local mall, for CDs (all their vinyl was already gone). They were having a 90% off, everything must go, “we will literally sell you the shelves” type of fire sale–I think all of those are still sealed. I’m feeling better though, and I’m on a better routine, I think. I hope. We continue to dig.
I do have two notable vinyl pickups from the past month to share, though. There’s been a 20th anniversary reissue of the excellent Treble and Tremble by Earlimart on blueberry marbled vinyl, and you bet I picked it up it. The mastering sounds about on par with the CD, not amazing or anything, but a nice and clean quiet pressing with some really lovely packaging. Keeping with the Ship theme, I also snagged a near-mint 7″ from Pine Marten, two tracks trapped on wax, not available for listen anywhere online, also on nice colored blue vinyl.
These Pine Marten songs are a lot dronier and stranger than their stuff on their one album, but if that’s your thing, I’ve uploaded both sides, “Big Old Bull” and “Arroyos/Hinterlands”, to the marf Collection channel. I don’t have the world’s greatest transfer equipment, far from it, but any transfer is better than no transfer, and I’ll just enjoy these needle drops until I can properly preserve the 7″. Until next time, folks!
