MOG

Well, after an uncharacteristically snowy and cold Winter thus far, it looks as though things are finally returning to normal. "Normal" being day after day after day of rain. During a regular Winter, the sky seems to be about 5 feet over your head and you don't even see the mountains for weeks on end. I've compared it to living in a leaky submarine. Most locals don't disagree. Anyway, today is a great example of dark, dismal and rainy. There's no one on the street... even the city workers ,who are digging up the sidewalk across the street, have gone home. Two (2) people have come into the store in the last four hours. One of them wanted to use the phone. So it seems like I have some time to kill. I thought I'd start my mogblog (stupid though that sounds) with a list...

My 5 Favourite Rainy Day Albums

The Bughouse Five - Dark Days Passing (East Side) Coming from a world where Gene Vincent and Leonard Cohen share the same brain... Bughouse 5 produces some of the most melancholy Rockabilly to ever stay at home, smash up the furniture, and drink itself to sleep every night. Best Tracks: Move, Old Tom Mullen, Dark Days Passing, Colour Bearer, I Don't Want To Best Lyric: In the Winter of our discontent / I can face any jail

The Handsome Family - Through The Trees (Carrot Top) Goth Country that makes me want to lie down in a ditch until I drown. Slow, dark and minimal music that's really beautiful. Beautiful like a child that has been run over by a hearse. After listening to these songs about death and hopelessness, you'll find having to endure something as trivial as a rainy day (or week... or month) seem like child's play. Best Tracks: Weightless Again, Cathedrals, The Woman Downstairs, My Ghost Best Lyrics: I'm stuck in this fucking twin bed / and I won't get any cookies or tea / until I stop quoting Nietzsche / and brush my teeth and comb my hair.

The Stranglers - The Raven (EMI) This is my favourite era of The Stranglers... right between their noisy Punk Rock beginnings (which are pretty damn good) and their "we are capital M musicians" phase (which sucked). During this period they dropped of lots of LSD and became very weird and paranoid. It's like no one in the band had seen a ray of sunlight in years... hell, probably they had never even been above ground. Best Tracks: The Raven, Dead Loss Angeles, Baroque Bordello, Duchess, Nuclear Device Best Lyrics: The plastic peaches there / on concrete beaches there / you see the leeches there

The Organ - Grab That Gun (Mint) Here I am, trying to avoid going with the obvious choice and picking a Joy Division album... and I end up choosing an album by a some ladies that obviously drank a lot of cough syrup and listened to a whack of Joy Division in their day. Fuck it. These girls are from Vancouver and they know exactly what the Winter is like here. Grab That Gun is as familiar to me as my permanently soggy shoes. Best Tracks: Basement Band Song, No One Has Ever Looked So Dead, Memorize The City Best Lyrics: Sometimes I close my eyes / and you're not very pretty

Johnny Cash - Murder (Sony) Probably I'm cheating choosing this one. I mean, take an artist of Johnny Cash's stature, and put all his darkest, killing-est songs on one album... of course it's going to be great. Of course it's going to be one of the darkest collections of music ever committed to one CD. Well, it is. And if anyone says there is a better rainy day album out there, I call bullshit. Best Tracks: All of them Best Lyrics: I shot a man in Reno / just to watch him die

Posted on 01/22/2007

Tags: rain, dismal, dark, winter