I have always loved this song and Serial Experiments Lain, which it’s the opening theme for.
Josh Miller aka “Ramen Junkie”. I write about my various hobbies here. Mostly coding, photography, and music. Sometimes I just write about life in general. I also post sometimes about toy collecting and video games at Lameazoid.com.
Taylor Swift’s 1989, an album so nice I bought it twice. I may actually go in on buying it a third time later with a digital copy. Arguably her best album, though fans will of course argue over that until the end of time, it’s certainly my favorite Taylor Swift Album. I have them all, and I’ve listened to them all, quite a lot. Taylor Swift ranks quite high on my Last.fm all-time scrobbles (#4 I believe). The original version of this album, 1989, is carrying a lot of the blame for that.
The recent release of 1989 (Taylor’s Version) is the 4th re-release of this style. In case you’re not aware of the whole situation, the general gist is that after her 6th album, Reputation, Taylor left her original record label, Big Machine. For whatever reason, they refused to sell her the rights to the masters of her songs. She still owned the rights to the songs, just, not the original recordings. Rights are weird man. So a few years ago, on the new label, she started effectively re-releasing those albums, each subtitled, “(Taylor’s Version)”. Previously, we have gotten, Fearless, Speak Now, and Red. I can’t imagine Reputation and the original self-titled album Taylor Swift, can’t be that far behind.
These are not straight re-releases though. Due to the nature of it all, it’s all been freshly re-recorded. This is actually a lot more obvious with albums like Fearless and Speak Now, which are quite a bit less “twangy” in the (Taylor’s Version) releases. There is definitely a cleaner sound for the 1989 Re-recording, but it’s much closer to the original. Another aspect of all of these releases however is the inclusion of additional tracks, or “From the Vault”. 1989 is a bit lighter on these tracks than the previous albums with only 5 Vault Tracks, but it does include the three tracks originally only on the Deluxe edition of the original release (which is what I had previously, on CD).
I don’t plan to rack up Taylor Swift Vinyls like other artists I like, but as 1989 is my favorite Swift album, I’ve opted for the Vinyl release on this one, specifically the green edition. I’ll probably pick up the digital FLAC version eventually like I’ve done for the previous Taylor’s Version albums, (everything else is on CD), but for now, Spotify works for regular listening.
The album itself is nice, the records themselves on this edition are a nice light green color. When opened there is a nice spread of photos, with a record on each half inside. Each of the sleeves has the song lyrics scrawled across them. The box also contained a few small paper stars for some reason. Like large confetti pieces. Part of the reason I picked this version was also because I like the front image on this cover better than the normal edition release (which I think has blue records).
There are way too many tracks to cover all of them, and frankly, I’m not a super fan of doing that style of write-up anyway. I’ll just say that I do enjoy pretty much every track though, which shouldn’t be surprising since I’ve essentially heavily implied it’s kind of a top-tier album on my list of favorite albums. Instead I’ll touch on some of my favorites. I’ll just start off and throw out there that probably the most popular tracks on the album, Shake it Off, and Bad Blood, are probably my least favorites on the album. I like both, but they are kind of low on my list.
Probably my favorite track on the album is Style. I really love the low-key even flow of this track. It has a really nice running beat going through it. I also really like its follow up Out of the Woods. The little story it tells along the way is fun, I’m a sucker for that sort of thing, and it has some really fun builds and falls through its run.
Another one that’s high on my list is Wildest Dreams. I love the airy feel of this one, and it also has a good feel that reminds me of Style. One of the Vault Tracks I can see becoming a favorite as well for this reason, Is it Over Now? really reminds me of Style as well. I have no idea of the writing process behind these, but I could actually see Style and Is It Over Now? as having the same root, and it was maybe decided to only keep one on the original release.
The last track I want to mention on my list is New Romantics. It was originally only on the Deluxe release of the album, I really love the theme and build-ups on this track. The little break moments with the “Ahhh ah ahhh ahh”s. It’s also frankly, kind of a better anthem of “Don’t sweat the small stuff” than “Shake it Off” is.
For the sake of mentioning another of the Vault Tracks, I’ll mention “Slut!” I suppose, which seemed to be sort of getting pushed as a release signal. It’s an alright track, but it’s a bit slow for my tastes these days. It’s definitely a slower, almost plodding track than a lot of the others, though the overall feel does fit with the other tracks of 1989.
All in all, the album is still great. It doesn’t add quite as much as the previous Taylor’s Versions, but it was already such a strong album it would be kind of hard to add much.
Josh Miller aka “Ramen Junkie”. I write about my various hobbies here. Mostly coding, photography, and music. Sometimes I just write about life in general. I also post sometimes about toy collecting and video games at Lameazoid.com.
This is a super cool mega mix of the early versions of Mother We Share culminating in the final release.
#CHVRCHES #SoundCloud #Music
Josh Miller aka “Ramen Junkie”. I write about my various hobbies here. Mostly coding, photography, and music. Sometimes I just write about life in general. I also post sometimes about toy collecting and video games at Lameazoid.com.
I am bad at selfies. I added one last week to these little journal posts and I wanted one for this week but they are kind of bad. Or maybe I am just bad at looking excited.
Anyway, I’m not late, I am intentionally not on time, because I was busy yesterday. I spent almost all day in Champaign (Urbana technically) at the Pygmalion event at the Rose Bowl Tavern. I’m actually not sure if there is one of these or more of them per year, but it’s apparently the 19th year. It’s a little craft vendor fair alongside a bunch of musical acts both indoor and outdoor. I primarily went to see Lauren Mayberry’s first solo tour. But I also like music, so I went early to see all of the outdoor shows. There was swap flip-flopping between in and out on the schedule, I didn’t want to lose my spot up front, so I just stayed outside. There were other Lauren/CHVRCHES fans there doing the same, which isn’t surprising.
Overall I saw 6 acts total, one of the scheduled outdoor acts, ggwendolyn, had to cancel. This also meant the schedule got compacted up and while it was originally supposed to start at 1:45, things didn’t start until 2:45. So I got there early, and then got to wait a bit longer than expected. Not a huge deal. I got to watch them doing the soundcheck, which, at least for me, was super interesting. This guy, we’ll call him Bob, because that was his name, everyone on stage called him that, would go around checking mics and making sure things work then he’d head into the “crowd” and have band members do tests to balance things out. Then they would all adjust their little personal directional speakers for levels on the various tracks (vocals, drums, guitars, etc.) on a personalized basis. All from a little portable wireless pad. It was neat.
Also, I say “crowd” because at this stage of the day, there were, maybe 20-30 people mingling around the small parking lot area where the shows took place. As the day went on, the bands became clearly more and more professional about how they operated, and basically just, produced better and better sound. As as that progressed, the crowd size grew and grew. It was fun to watch actually. From fairly basic setups to more and more complex setups, from using the house speakers for the feedback audio to using in-ear headsets. From just, checking the watch after every song to see how much time there was to play, to having a full-on set list, ready and set up and available. From random comments about writing up songs because of “X”, to having full-on fun little stories.
Anyway, I saw, in order:
Anyway, I’ll probably make a gallery of my photos at some point, though they aren’t real amazing, my phone’s camera isn’t super great. I had asked them about bringing my proper camera and it was in the car but I decided it was too much of a hassle.
I did have a fun good sign moment before the show. I had stopped in a few stores over in Champaign before the show, and when I walked into Five Below, there was a familiar voice on the radio, with the CHVRCHES/Marshmallow collab track Here With Me. It took me a minute to place the song because I don’t really listen to it, basically ever. I keep forgetting it exists, which is funny because in some ways it may be the most popular CHVRCHES track due to the Marshmello exposure.
The rest of the week was relatively uneventful aside from Friday evening. I went and met up with my parents and brother and a couple of my nieces and we went to watch the Route 66 Carshow parade in Springfield. I didn’t end up taking any photos, but it was fun. Basically, a lot of the classic cars that are in the show itself all just, drive to downtown. They go a pretty good distance, as they start down near Dirksen and Stevenson Drive and go downtown. I realize this is meaningless to most people but this means they go 3 miles or so up Stevenson and then 3 miles or so up 6th Street to downtown Springfield. It’s a good distance on some main throughways in the city, especially for a bunch of classic show cars. Also, there is a police presence, but they also don’t block the roads, so there are just, regular cars driving around them.
I’m sure I’ll write up on it eventually, but I also kind of spur of the moment updated my PC from Windows 10 to Windows 11. It’s mostly the same honestly. I hate how I can’t dock the taskbar to the side though and I immediately changed is the centering on it though because the centered icons is functionally garbage and it’s ugly as shit. I also found a cheap price to update it to the Pro version from Windows Home. There are a few virtualization things that are only in Pro, but also only Pro allows for Remote Desktop access. It’s actually something I have been wanting to do even in Windows 10, for the same reasons. Also, in theory, I think Pro has fewer ads stuck in it, because well, you’re paying for it.
On Friday before going to Springfield I had the day off so we also put out the fall decorations around the outside of the house, though they aren’t completely finished. Also a few indoor ones but my wife does all that, I just haul totes around for that.
Activity Log
I’m not going to go into it all, but one of the stores I went to was Ollie’s. Which I’ve been to elsewhere years ago when traveling, but this one opened up recently, closer to where I live. It’s basically a closeout store, lots of stuff for like, 75% less than what it would have been originally. They had a ton of Marvel Legends I didn’t care much about, and a few Star Wars Black Series I didn’t care about. What I did pick up was a pile of Fortnite stuff. Also, they had a bunch of Eternals Marvel Legends, which I have most of from previous markdowns, but I picked up Ajak, which was the only one I didn’t have. I kind of really like the design of the Eternals, but I they are also all very samey looking, with almost no accessories, which made the figures a huge turn-off at the standard ML pricing. I’ve managed to collect them all at like half price or below, which is just fine for me.
Not much else otherwise this week.
Josh Miller aka “Ramen Junkie”. I write about my various hobbies here. Mostly coding, photography, and music. Sometimes I just write about life in general. I also post sometimes about toy collecting and video games at Lameazoid.com.
I feel like at some point I should get around to covering the rest of the CHVRCHES album lineup aside from Screen Violence. In proper fashion, I’m going to roll it back to their first album, The Bones of What You Believe. It’s appropriate because it’s the 10th anniversary of the album. I actually can’t say accurately when I first listened to CHVRCHES, though I can say I only recently started caring about them. I know that when I started to care, I realized that I already had at least one album I had bought on Amazon. So at some point, they showed up in a $5 album sale, and I decided I liked the sound and impulse bought it.
It’s probably worth mentioning that the album also recently celebrated its ten-year anniversary.
I also know that for a while I was aware somewhere of a band called “Churches” because for some reason I thought maybe they did that song Take Me to Church, which is actually by Hozier. This is based entirely on the whole Church/CHVRCH thing.
Whatever the case, while I probably heard their more popular tracks starting from this album, I didn’t really start listening until much later, though before the Screen Violence era. Anyway, after I started listening, shortly before Screen Violence, probably at the recommendation of folks in the Sigrid Discord, they quickly shot up to the top tier of my favorite artists. They are currently 2nd on my Last.fm scrobbles. I imagine that another influence was my obsession with Forza Horizon 4, which features Never Say Die, from Love is Dead.
I would say it’s hard to pick a favorite song from the album, except the track Gun is on this one, and it’s my favorite CHVRCHES track, so that’s pretty easy to pick. I just really love the metaphor of the hook. You fucked up, and you’re going to pay for it.
Maybe my second favorite track on this album is Tether, though it wasn’t always. It’s sort of grown into that place. I just absolutely love the build from calm and slow to the break at the peak. I also really enjoy the vocal effects and overlapping sounds of this one.
There are plenty of fan favorites and other notable tracks though. Their first big single, Mother We Share is such a good opener to the album with the echoing vocals. I particularly like the up-and-down background rhythms and the slappy fake clap beat that runs throughout. I want to say Lies, was the first track they actually performed during live sets, and while it’s popular, it’s probably one of my least favorite tracks on the album, because it’s very repetitive and flat in it’s overall presentation.
A few more of the more popular tracks are Night Sky, which I believe took 2nd place for most popular in the CHVRCHES Discord tournament (behind Clearest Blue). Science/Visions goes incredibly hard, and is pretty amazing live as well. Recover was the second single from Bones and has some following but it reminds me a lot of lies in that it’s a bit repetitive and it’s lower on my list of songs I enjoy. Another really good one is We Sink, which drives pretty hard and really shows off the CHVRCHES sound well.
Also notable is how many Martin lead songs are on this album. What I understand reading the history of the band, is that Martin was going to be the lead vocals before Lauren came along. There are two tracks from Martin on the base version of this album, Under the Tide and You Caught the Light. The Deluxe version adds the previously released track Zvvl, and the 10th-anniversary release adds in the previously unreleased Manhattan and Talking in My Sleep. That’s quite a few Martin tracks from the early era of CHVRCHES. It certainly would have been a different band without Lauren.
Another that I’ve started enjoying a lot more lately, though it seems contradictory since I dislike the repetition of Lies and Recover is Tightrope, though it’s only on certain bonus versions, and is a cover of Janelle Monáe. I just rather like the “T-t-tightrope” stutter lyrics and the varying vocals in the “high or low” bits.
All in all, like most of CHVRCHES music, it’s pretty much all good. I’ve been listening to this album for a while, and I’m looking forward to the upcoming 10th-anniversary re-release and all it entails.
Josh Miller aka “Ramen Junkie”. I write about my various hobbies here. Mostly coding, photography, and music. Sometimes I just write about life in general. I also post sometimes about toy collecting and video games at Lameazoid.com.
Ramen Junkie