By Mike Faloon
Last summer Black Wine released their second album, Summer of Indifference. I listened to it a lot and kept a journal. It’s part of a zine called Learning to Surf. Here is day eight.
I went poking around for Black Wine videos and I found a dozen or so. I also found a number of places where I can buy the record. These are good things. What I really wanted, though, was to read a longer piece about the record. I trust that a lot of other people are spending time with Summer of Indifference and I'm curious to know what they're thinking. It's been out for several weeks and no one's written about it, not at length.
I looked up Black Wine's first album, too. It's been out for nearly two years old and the longest write up I found was a five-paragraph review on PunkNews.org. I'm not dismissing it—it was an even-handed review, and at 400 words it exceeded the review I wrote for the Go Metric website —but where are the longer pieces about intriguing albums? Writing at length about older albums is a worthy pursuit but we've got great records coming out today. They deserve some ink and pixels, too.
Beyond that, I didn't want to think about Summer of Indifference today. I just wanted to enjoy it, which I did, twice. Then, about halfway through the new Harry Potter movie, which Allie and I went to see, I found myself wishing I'd brought a notebook. There are three reasons why. I've forgotten the first. The second was a Jad Fair quote about how there are two types of songs: songs about girls and songs about monsters. I love quotes like this that arbitrarily carve up large chunks of culture, like songs, for example, and force them into categories. A couple of years ago I started working on a piece about all of the songs titled "Hold On" or "Holding On." It stalled out when I realized I'd wind up spending weeks listening to songs titled "Hold On" or "Holding On." But it got me thinking about how most pop songs are about holding on or letting go.
I think Black Wine is a "holding on" band, though, thankfully, they never use the phrase. The closest they come is on "Favorites": "So grab onto every tiny thing you can and clutch it to your chest until you can't."
The third idea has nothing to do with Black Wine. It's this: Lord Voldemort sounds just like Garrison Keillor. Come with me, Harry, to Lake Wobegon. Do you like Tom Rush? How about Leon Redbone?
From Learning to Surf, a one-shot music zine by Mike Faloon.
Read past installments of We Should Talk More – Ten Days with the Black Wine’s Summer of Indifference.
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