The Lord God appointed a bush, and made it come up over Jonah, to give shade over his head, to save him from his discomfort; so Jonah was very happy about the bush.
For many years, I spent a large amount of my time sorting through and working in a local record store, The Record & Tape Exchange, in Fairfax, VA, where I grew into a music aficionado of sorts; even if there was a seemingly infinite amount I had to learn, I became relatively entrenched in the life of the album collector/listener. I was never very good at it, it turns out, & there are many people who are still going strong (most notably my friend and ex-coworker Math, whose album reviews & creative input into the music world – especially in the realm of free media & Plunderphonics – are really something special). Still, when all has been said & done (though hopefully not for good, hopefully not forever), I have amassed somewhere around 1,500 albums, & digging through them these days makes me spin; there is so much I have yet to listen to, so much education I’ve yet to take the time to care about.
At this point, I figure the best place for me to start in my music-time-capsule would be at the proverbial start. Thus, in the footprints of the illustrious Jim Groom, who has yet to start posting results from his own Formative Films project, I bring to you my Ten Formative Albums, a list that is pretty comprehensive (all things considered, though I am still very young & I still have hundreds of albums sitting on my shelf that I haven’t listened to yet), & as I myself have discovered, surprising in intervals. Most of the albums here I still rather like, but there are a couple that I can’t sit through all the way even if I really wanted to without skipping a handful of tracks. Also: at least one of them I would still consider one of my Top 5, so that’s got to say something about the power of music-memory. Anyway, I’m going to tackle this Day-by-Day style until they’ve all been covered in semi-detail, & of course we’re going Bio-chronologically – meaning it will follow the timeline of my own life, regardless of when the album itself came out.
So, let’s do this.
Silverchair – Freak Show (1997)
What I remember most about this album is a day in third grade, when my teacher left the door to the classroom closet hanging open, & I saw cardboard boxes full of CD’s. I don’t know why they were, & I can’t for the life of me think why my teacher would have delivered dozens of CD’s to her classroom instead of her home, but I do remember spotting from a good distance Silverchair’s Freak Show. My sisters, some of the most formative figures in my very early music life, had this album, the band’s second, on cassette tape & would play it in their room. I had heard the music, but only in snippets, & something about it was unbelievably unscrupulous to me; it would follow in a soft-loud-soft pattern, but it was never tired. Anyway, when I confronted my teacher about this stash I had discovered, she gave me some meaningless excuse & moved on, but to this day I’ve always wondered if maybe she loved that alt-rock no-name disc as much as I would grow to.
In sixth grade, “Freak” would become my favorite song, & I would listen to it up in my room on repeat. I can’t really remember why for the life of me, but it can’t be denied that Silverchair was definitely the first band that was THAT band for me, if that makes sense. I would go on to buy all their albums, even when they came out with new ones & I hadn’t heard a single song (for better or for worse, as I would find out with Diorama, which though I hated at first, I now consider the band’s inarguable masterpiece). All in all, the album still semi-holds-up to scrutiny. It’s a bit overproduced (typical of any Nirvana soundalike at this time period), but still there’s a lot of heart though. They were very young, talented, & just as intense as I needed my music to be at 9 years old (see also: not very).
[kml_flashembed movie="http://youtube.com/v/xZ9kBQrZXOI" width="425" height="350" wmode="transparent" /]
Later, I would find out that the remix of “Freak” on their Greatest Hits album was actually much better than the original. Whatever.