A day later, a dollar short
Beeef – Airplanes
Genre: indie rock
Feeling: a porch, 6:45pm, mid-to-late summer
The Boston neighborhood of Allston, once known as Rock City, nurturing heavy metal and glam rockers like Aerosmith, has come a long way since its punk days. Harvard and Boston University have slowly colonized the medium-density blocks and river-fronts sandwiched between the Charles and Commonwealth Avenue. New Balance has spawned a mini-downtown based around the newly-dubbed “Boston Landing.” College students compete with immigrants for a housing stock that is in desperate need of updating.
Thus sets the scene for Beeef. These post-collegiate rockers emerged in 2017 from Allston’s DIY house party scene with an eponymous debut-album that is a great listen from start to finish. It’s a summer album, but not in the beach party sense, more in the you “slept in too long now you’re going for a bike ride so it feels like you didn’t waste the day” sense. If you liked the ethereal basslines and laid-back vocals of “Airplanes” check out the more driven tunes “Tree” and “Firework.”
Lyric sample:
“Gettin’ even with the man,
Doin’ things you think
Will end up having some sort of impact,
If an impact’s what you want”
The Moondoggies – Black Shoe
Genre: woodsy Americana
Feeling: looking up at a redwood
Everett, Washington rockers The Moondoggies have been on my heavy rotation every since I heard “Black Shoe.” It’s an accessible song that serves as a great launching point into the band’s four albums, spanning 8 years. The ‘doggies manage to combine a lot of my favorite genres into a coherent and cruising stream of soulful rock. Plus, they rip the organ like no other–always a bonus in my book.
The Moondoggies Spotify band page describes them as “Northwest Rock and Roll with one foot in Grunge and one foot in some sort of Floydian Crazy Horse type Americana thang.” If a tear comes to your eye reading that sentence, then you’ve got a friend in me.
Bruce Cockburn – If I Had a Rocket Launcher
Genre: electric folk-rock, in the key of 80s
Feeling: fight the power
Bruce Cockburn, a born-again Canadian Christian folk singer-songwriter, is a seemingly unlikely candidate to have produced an MTV hit centering on civil strife in Central America. Cockburn’s Christian influences shine through much of his work, but he toned down the Bible-thumping in the 80s to distance himself from America’s increasingly fanatical far-right evangelicals. A trip to Guatemalan refugee camps in Mexico in the early 80s inspired “Rocket Launcher”: “Observing the horrors of refugee camps along the Guatemalan-Mexican border, [Cockburn] went back to his hotel room and cried and wrote” this song.
Though the song has violent overtones, Bruce went to lengths to clarify the hit’s meaning: “there are people in [the helicopters], you know?… [T]he thing is, the weird thing about it is they stop looking like people because of what they’re doing. I guess that’s what makes it so easy to want to shoot them down because they … they make you feel like they forfeited their humanity somehow. But they’re pawns in it. Anyway, this song is all about that. The one thing I must stress… is that this is not a call to arms. This is, this is a cry…”
Lyric Sample:
“On the Rio Lacantun, one hundred thousand wait
To fall down from starvation — or some less humane fate
Cry for Guatemala, with a corpse in every gate
If I had a rocket launcher… I would not hesitate”
Info from the The Cockburn Project: http://cockburnproject.net/songs&music/iiharl.html
Wiki article on the Guatemalan Civil War: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guatemalan_Civil_War
Modest Mouse – Dramamine
Genre: indie rock
Feeling: calm on the open road
Another Washington state product, Modest Mouse is a legendary band in the indie/alternative world. Birthed from the punk and grunge scenes of Olympia, WA, Modest Mouse went from cult following in the late 90s to mainstream success in the 2000s (you may have heard “Float on” or “Dashboard”). But before they were festival headliners, Isaac Brock and company were noisey rockers prone to screaming into the mic and and prolonged percussion instrumentals.
“Dramamine,” the first song on their debut album Long Drive, features none of the screamo present in other tunes on the album, but is almost two-thirds drum solo. If that’s not your thing, still listen for the beautifully haunting open riffs, the forlorn lyrics, and you know what, they worked hard on that drum solo so the least you could do is listen.
Lyrics:
“I think I know my geography pretty damn well”
Honestly, I think I do my geography pretty damn well. In fact, in sixth grade I won my middle school’s geography bee and went to the state geography bee. Yeah, I lost in the first round in states, but only because I had a bum knee.
