Old Enough to Forget

Boniface is another of my Marco Polo Platters . The cover was intriguing and pretty much screamed nostalgia to me. It doesn't get much cooler than an '80s Fiero on a prairie back road. I had never heard of Boniface before, but considering the kid sitting on the hood of that Fiero probably wasn't even alive when the car rolled off the assembly line, it's safe to say I'm not exactly keeping up with what's new. Then again, I don't really pretend to be in tune with the latest trends. I like music, and if the music likes me, we'll get along. It's hard to tell whether Boniface is a band, or a musical identity. A glance through the credits and I get the sense the core musicians are Micah Visser, vocals, keyboard, guitars, Joseph Visser, guitars and Michael Dunn, drums. The songs were all written by Micah, with a couple being co-written by Eg White (best name ever) and one by Steph Marsiano. I suspect this is Micah's vehicle. I was looking forward to hea...

Always Tomorrow is another of my beloved Marco Polo Platters. The first thing that caught my eye was the cover. Okay, that was the second thing. The first thing was the clearance sticker, but dang the cover gave me a good chuckle. The cover for Always Tomorrow  is a weirdly wonderful juxtaposition of perspective on a familiar image. It's a picture taken from inside the Hotel California looking out into the world. Some will get it, some won't ... most won't care. It's the font in the bottom right that pulls it all together. Dagnabbit that album was twenty years when Bethany Cosentino was born, so I'm guessing her parents had a decent record collection. Of course I could just be seeing things, and this is all a giant load of horseshit. I don't think so. Best Coast is a dreamy pop band who likes to incorporate jingle jangle guitars into their music. The music is weirdly nostalgic for me. It may be new but structurally this is what I grew up with. Ah, the more thi...

Hard to believe it's been a decade since I first heard My Morning Jacket's The Waterfall . I don't remember how I found it in the first place ... but I did. I honestly don't remember much other than the first cut "Believe (Nobody Knows)" was hypnotic. Such a great song. I'm going to have to listen to that one again ... but first I have a few things to jot down about the band's 2020 follow-up  The Waterfall II . I managed to snag a crisp new vinyl copy for under ten bucks. One of the many Marco Polo * bargains I've secured over the last year. I'll admit initially I was a wee bit perplexed by the title, but I also suspected there was a reason. My Morning Jacket is one of those bands I really don't know a lot about, they've been around a while. Their debut came out in 1999 and every couple of years a new album would get released. When Waterfall came out in 2015 it would be another five years before the outtakes were assembled into an al...

I bought this one sight unseen and unheard when it popped up on the auction site I like to frequent. I submitted the minimum bid and forgot about it until I got an e.mail telling me I'd won. This was a few months ago now and it's been sitting in a pile waiting for me to give it a spin. One of the reasons I waited for a while was I honestly wasn't all that interested in hearing a couple of remix tracks. Then why buy it? Like I said, I bought it mainly because I thought it was a Manic Street Preachers album, and it wasn't until later that I discovered it was a record store day deal that only contained a couple of remix tracks. Apparently there are only 2,000 pressings and the packaging wasn't much more than an afterthought ... a plain white jacket with a sticker saying M.S.P. done & dusted. It was in a really thick PVC outer sleeve that also had a couple of hype stickers. Still, it was a band I liked and I was curious. Their 1996 masterpiece Everything Must Go is...