Playin' in a Traveling Band: Thoughts in the Key of B

Some Transmission Lines Require a Little Work

Mr. B — Sun, 14 Jun 2026 23:34:51 GMT

There is a difference between a gatekeeper and a guide, and we have spent the better part of the algorithmic age confusing the two.

A gatekeeper hoards. A gatekeeper decides who gets in and who doesn’t, who deserves access and who should wait outside. Gatekeeping in music is real and it is corrosive — the velvet rope mentality that turns taste into a weapon and enthusiasm into a qualifier. Nobody should have to pass a test to love a record. Nobody should feel stupid for not knowing who produced it or what label pressed the first run. Music belongs to whoever needs it.

But a curator is something else entirely. A curator has done the work — the obsessive, unglamorous, deeply personal work of spending time with music that most people will never sit still long enough to hear. They’ve read the books, seen the biopics, followed the threads back to their sources. They know things not because they want to hold those things over you, but because they couldn’t help themselves. They fell in. And having fallen in, they reach back a hand.

We need curators. We need them more than ever, actually, in an age when algorithms have become the default recommendation engine for most people’s musical lives. Spotify knows what you’ve listened to. It does not know what you need to hear. It cannot feel the difference between a song that confirms your existing taste and a song that cracks something open in you. It has no heartbeat. And music — real music, music that matters — should always have a heartbeat. So should the recommendations behind it.

One of the threads that runs through nearly everything published here at Playin’ in a Traveling Band is the idea of transmission. Whether it’s a mixtape passed hand to hand, a dubbed cassette, a burned CD riding shotgun on a long road trip with your best friend, or a playlist published for the world to see — music exists to be shared. It has always relied on a grassroots exchange, that ancient and essential hey, you need to hear this, it’ll change your world moment passing from the hardcore devotee to the second-tier fan to the casual listener and back again.

This is the unseen infrastructure of music. For an artist to travel from garage band heroes to selling out stadiums, for the world to fall in love with the people on that stage, a dedicated corps of music lovers must exist in the undergirding, unwittingly ensuring the continued flow of discovery. They are not famous for this. They are rarely thanked for it. But without them the whole thing collapses.

I consider myself one of those people.

To be a music geek means more than a casual listen. It means reading the biographical books and going to the biopic and obsessively knowing the details that most people will never care about. I knew what halos were before most people knew who Nine Inch Nails was. That is not a brag. That is the passion and the vocation of a fan far left of the casual.

Vocation comes with obligations. The obligation, in this case, is to keep doing the homework. To keep listening with intention. To resist the comfortable groove of returning to the same records you already love and to remain open to being surprised, challenged, even uncomfortable.

So I have decided to embark on a journey.

The fine folks at the 1001 Albums Project have built something quietly remarkable. The premise traces back to 1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die, edited and curated by Robert Dimery, a freelance writer and editor who has contributed to numerous music publications. You sign up at their website. They serve you a random album from the list. You listen — maybe once, maybe two or three times. Four listens is my personal rule before I render a verdict. Then you write a short review and rate it, and only then does the next album unlock. You cannot skip. You cannot cherry-pick. You surrender the choice to the node and you stay until you have something true to say.

That last part matters more than it sounds. The generator is not just a randomizer. It is an accountability mechanism. It is saying: prove you were here.

I will be working through this list and sharing short reviews — a few hundred words, a star rating, an honest account of what happened when I actually listened. Some of these records I will love. Some will challenge me. Some may not land at all, and I will say so. What I will not do is phone it in.

I would love to hear your thoughts as we go — on the albums, on the project, on whatever the music dredges up for you.

Keep Listening,

Mr. B

The Road to Kerouac

Mr. B — Wed, 10 Jun 2026 12:37:10 GMT

I used to think Iraq was the edge of the world. Seventeen or so miles north of Baghdad, Camp Taji felt like the last outpost on your way to Hell. Then I deployed to Guantanamo Bay. I know it seems counterintuitive but there’s something far more isolating about seeing the city lights, hearing the rich, vibrant thrum of life just outside your reach that is far more isolating than anything the Sunni Triangle threw at me. When you’re dying of thirst, is it better to have no water in sight or an oasis just beyond your grasp?

Remember back in the day when you could call into a radio station, speak to a live DJ and request a song? Maybe it was someone’s birthday, an anniversary, whatever – you called, somehow you got through, you nervously talked to that famous voice on the other side and then you waited.

Coleman was sitting at his desk across from me, my deputy there in Guantanamo. We were arguing about something inane as Soldiers and Sailors are want to do when we got on the subject of music. My routine in the morning, once I got into the office, was to connect to Seattle’s KEXP and let the calming voice of John Richards and his incredible The Morning Show fill my late morning and early afternoon.

“You’ll never get through,” Coleman said as he shot a look of smug assuredness pointed in my direction.

“Fuck you,” I shot back “Watch me.”

Picking up the phone, knowing I was about to violate several federal laws as well as play a game Russian roulette with our notoriously bad phone service, I dialed the code to get an outside line, I dialed the number – busy signal.

“Told you.”

Daggers.

I tried again, this time a tone.

“KEXP, this is John with the Morning Show, whadda wanna hear?”

A smile slowly made its way across my face as I turned to face Coleman.

“Hey John, good morning,” I stammered. “Listen, this is Ben, I’m calling from Guantanamo Bay, Cuba and I was hoping you could play “Dry the Rain” by the Beta Band for all of us here in GTMO, maybe sell a record or two.”

“Cuba?” the voice replied. “Wow, ok – we’ll see what we can do, thanks for calling.”

And I waited.

About an hour or so later, we’re all getting ready to head to the chow hall for lunch. I think I hear the unmistakable shuffle drum beat and the slow guitar strumming and then the words “This is the definition of my life/ Lying in bed in the sunlight” I glance over at Coleman, a shit eating grin spreading over my face, give him a friendly smack on the arm and we make our way out the door.

For better or worse, radio has always been a huge part of my life. Growing up in rural Alaska, our mornings were filled with the news and country music sounds of 970 AM, KIAK. As soon as I was old enough to have a preference, my love became KSUA – the quirky and off-beat college station broadcasting from the University of Alaska Fairbanks. Here was where I heard Rocky Horror for the first time and learned of Sweet Transvestites and would stay up into the wee hours of a Friday night listening to the station’s three-hour metal program that kicked off sometime around midnight.

The Marine Corps was my ticket out of the frozen hinterlands and the culture shock going from Fairbanks to San Diego in late January of 1993 is hard to overstate. Marine Corps bootcamp has undergone major changes since I stepped foot on those golden footprints but back then your final week before graduation was spent in what they called service week. Essentially it was free labor for the Recruit Depot as recruits worked in the chow halls, mowed lawns and cleaned common areas of the barracks. I was assigned the barracks detail.

For the last 80 or so days I had been completely cut off from any culture so when I heard music coming from someone’s room it was like a moth being called to the flame. The song was magic, crushing and ear splitting at the same time delicate and all I would remember for the next few weeks was “But I’m a creep.” And the words “Equis tay erre ah efe eme Baja California Mexico – 91X.”

Back from boot leave and on to my first duty station, Camp Pendleton, I had a mission – find that song, find that radio station. Neither was hard, Radiohead’s “Creep” was blowing up across the nation and 91X was a San Diego institution going toe-to-toe with Los Angeles’ KROQ. In the early 90s San Diego was still pretty proud of its anti-LA character and hadn’t fully embraced it’s “America’s Finest City” identity. Los Angeles was spit and polish, San Diego was scrappy and edgy, Los Angeles had Richard Blade, San Diego had Michael “Hooligan” Halloran. Sandwiched between the two metros areas, I had them both.

In my car and in my office, the radio dial lived on 91x. And yet, a friend of mine from LA and I would, most nights, find ourselves parked on the beaches of San Clemente in Richard’s Dodge Neon, the better to hear Dr. Drew and Riki Rachtman give sex advice to an eager and young KROQ audience. For four glorious years, those two stations were the soundtrack and social calendar of my life. Concerts hosted by both consumed my free days and the in-between moments were filled with DJs electrifying my ears.

Near the end of my Marine Corps tenure, Congress passed the Telecommunications Act of 1996. While I was busy preparing to separate from a life of military service, Congress was busy separating radio stations from the local communities they served. Was this what they intended to do? I’m just jaded and cynical enough when it comes to national politics to believe that, at least at some level, enough of those casting votes knew exactly what the score was and how this would all go down. How else does one explain a law having the exact opposite effect of its stated goals? As stated, the act’s purpose was to promote competition by deregulating the telecommunications industry throwing off the yoke of ownership limitations and allowing anyone to enter any communications business.

In 1996 the two largest radio groups owned fewer than 65 stations each. Six years later Clear Channel alone owned 1,200. One third of all independent radio owners disappeared in that same window. In a short 25 years, KROQ went from a single-owner independent to a corporate asset inside a company owning hundreds of stations nationally – I heart radio, indeed. The station that knew your name, that played Creep before you knew what Creep was, that soundtracked your years was now being centrally programmed out of a warehouse studio thousands of miles away.

Thousands of miles away from my son, Kerouac, was where I found myself many years later – he in California, myself in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba the last long-term deployment of my military career. Kerry, as we called him, was a veteran of my deployments but this one was particularly hard – his mother and I were engaged in a nasty divorce.

As the senior enlisted member of my unit, I tried to make a point of staying out of sight from my troops during the off hours. In their infinite wisdom the Navy saw fit to stack nearly everyone in the same barracks area, so senior enlisted was living directly next door to junior enlisted – no one felt comfortable relaxing. So, I stayed behind closed doors as much as possible and listened to the radio streaming in over purchased internet connection. More often than not, my little computer speakers were pushing KEXP.

Unlike KROQ, KEXP forged a different path, one that made them functionally invisible to the buyers following the passage of the Telecom act. The station that is the heartbeat of Seattle started life as a plucky little college radio station with the call letters KCMU – 10 whole wats broadcasting from atop McMahon Hall at the University of Washington. What followed is a series of “they never gave up” type scenarios, any one of them could have been the stations death knell.

In ‘81 budgets forced them into a community supported, listener powered model. By 2001 KCMU had been through a decade of internal conflict and institutional drift that had left it in an awkward position. Somehow Microsoft becomes the hero in this story?! Well, not Microsoft but Paul Allen, a Microsoft co-founder.

Allen was a huge fan and didn’t want to see the station disappear. He worked with station employees to help navigate the process of leaving the university and becoming an independent station. The call letters were changed to KEXP in 2001 following the launch of a ten-year partnership with Paul Allen’s Experience Music Project. Ten years later, they’re keeping a lonely Soldier in Gitmo company.

Then the final, structural move that made KEXP permanently unconquerable? In 2014 the UW Board of Regents voted to formally transfer ownership of KEXP 90.3 FM’s broadcast license to the Friends of KEXP 501(c)3 nonprofit arts organization.

While Clear Channel and Infinity were busy buying anything with an audience and a broadcast license, I was busy keeping to my Guantanamo room looking for ways to connect with my son while keeping a low profile with my Soldiers. My mom would have said I should write letters and I did some of that but that never felt right – what eight-year-old kid wants to read a letter? Maybe a postcard with something quick and snappy, but a full-on letter? Sorry, Mom.

When we lived in Ohio, most days I would take him to kindergarten about 15 miles away from the house. I used this time to amp my little man up, get him in the right headspace for school and to me, amp up meant music! We’d kick the drive off with the Dropkick Murphys’ Cadence to Arms, a smattering of the Ramones and, assuming time allowed something current, whatever that may be. Fist pumping, steering wheel tapping, making the car dance between the lanes amp up. There may have been one or two mornings where he got to school slightly disheveled, shirt askance, hair needing a comb - looking like he’d just left a concert.

Darek Mazzone, KEXP’s evening DJ at the time was saying something through the speakers but it barely registered as I thought through some way to stay connected to my son so far away. My brain squirreled for a second and landed on how cool it was, that all the way here in GTMO, I could hear a Seattle DJ talking to me, damn technology is amazing. Wait a minute, holy fuck! This DJ is talking to me … I can talk to my son like this. WKRY was born.

While I was in Cuba, I somehow adopted a feral cat and her kittens …

The Suggestion of Menace

Mr. B — Tue, 19 May 2026 06:38:36 GMT

Something is in the air.

Aaron and I circled Harlow’s in Sacramento looking for parking, having just made the two-hour trek to see this show. I had convinced Aaron to make this trip with me, he wasn’t overly familiar with the night’s lineup of Faetooth, Iress and Nightosphere but we’ve learned to trust each other’s taste in music and he’s become my de facto concert companion.

We gave ourselves plenty of time to make the two-hour drive so of course we were extremely early. And that was when I first felt it. At 615 or so on a show that didn’t even begin until 830 there was already a line forming outside the venue.

“That’s odd,” I commented to Aaron “wouldn’t have expected that.” He agreed. I chalked it up to the warm spring evening. We found somewhere to park and made our way around the block, ostensibly looking for something to eat, mostly to just stretch our legs after the car ride.

Somewhere along Highway 99 just before we exited for surface streets, we’d started talking about the current state of music – the conversation picked back up as we ambled through Midtown – I pointed across the street to the park where one of my twins and I had spent hours playing while the other was in surgery just up the road.

“That was an interesting day,” I said as a moment of real fear washed back over me – I held it for just a second and moved on.

“Think about it,” I said to Aaron “they killed their golden goose and now they don’t know what to do about it.”

Our conversation had taken a turn toward the corporate greed of the music industry that ran headfirst into the streaming model at the expense of the artists. Did you know the average band on Spotify makes .003 per stream? Somewhere around the late 2000’s bands realized the only way to make a living was to hit the road.

“Yep,” Aaron replied. “Concerts became the go to and now no one can afford the damn ticket.”

We’re not breaking any new ground here — anyone who’s gone to a show in the last few years has uttered some version of those exact words. It all seemed to reach some kind of peak with Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour. That tour burned so brightly it blinded us to everything happening in its shadow. When a star that large finally burns out, you start to see what else is in the sky.

Do you think the kids watching the Sex Pistols at the Lesser Free Trade Hall in June of ’76 had any idea they were witnessing history? When you’re busy being in the midst of something that notion doesn’t really occur to you. We all have visions of grandeur from time to time but there’s no way Bernard Sumner had any idea he and his friends would go on to form one of the most influential post-punk bands.

Let’s not get ahead of ourselves -- as at this point the history is still to be written. Over the years I’ve found myself at the forefront of plenty a monumental occasion, so I will say at some level, I’ve got a gut for these things. There’s a revolution underfoot in the music scene and it’s being led by women.

But the parallels.

In 1973 economies the world over were crippled when the Arab members of OPEC imposed an oil embargo on the United States and other nations that supported Israel in the Yom Kippur War. This isn’t a history lesson, but we need something of a framing to see history rhyming. This oil crisis caused crippling stagflation across the western world as a nearly 300 percent price hike trickled into all sectors of the western economy. Historians call this the lost decade for the British economy and on this side of the pond, the consequences were much the same. Any of this sounding vaguely familiar?

Social unrest caused by widespread unemployment fleeced what little remained in people’s pockets. And what was the establishment’s response? Doubling down in the form of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher who came to power with a conservative outlook and an austerity gameplan. The economic misery of the mid-70s didn’t just create hardship — it created a generation with nothing to lose and nothing to believe in. The counterresponse was inevitable. You can only tell people there’s no future so many times before they start building their own.

The music industry didn’t need a conglomerate of oil producing nations implementing an embargo for its economic woes - this was a self-inflicted wound. The funny thing about making a deal with the devil is you always walk away thinking you got what you wanted. It’s always the devil who wins – Lucifer Morningstar is undefeated. Streaming was the devil’s bargain but deep in that contract was the algorithmic commoditization of art, the collapse of a fan driven support infrastructure, generative AI, and platform fatigue. The working musician didn’t just struggle — they nearly ceased to exist.

But no one told the underground musicians or the music lovers that such a diabolical deal had been struck. The message began reverberating out; the infrastructure is gone, your livelihood in jeopardy -- save yourself. Many a calamity facing our world today can be laid at the feet of the Covid pandemic but there is an interesting footnote – physical media sales began increasing and with it, the desire for something real, something beyond the algorithm. The message heard, scenes began reacting, coalescing, consolidating. Some version of this argument had been playing in a loop in conversations between Aaron and me -- tonight was no different.

“So what are you drinking tonight,” I asked Aaron as we stood at the bar. I had initially confused the line for Faetooth’s merch table for the bar line and had to ask a young man which was which. Directions received, I disengaged from the one to step into the other.

“Are you seeing this,” I asked Aaron as I handed him his drink. The merch line was across the bar. I spotted the man who had clarified things for me, in front of him was a young girl, she couldn’t have been more than 11 or 12. I walked back to him.

“Excuse me, is this your daughter?” I asked.

A hesitant look in his eye he gave me a nod and an affirmation.

“Dude, you are the coolest fucking dad in the world,” I said and walked back to Aaron.

By seven or so the place was mostly full as bodies jockeyed for stage position – Aaron and I had found a table and were sitting down for a minute somewhat in disbelief at what we were seeing as people continued to flow in. The spell was broken when a waitress came over and asked us if we’d like to purchase the table – um, no, so sorry, we’ll be moving along now.

By eight, moving from one side of the venue to the other had become a series of starts, stops, excuse me’s and finger gestures.

“How did you discover music when you were a kid,” I ask Aaron leaning in close to his ear the better to be heard over the din.

He thinks about it for a minute and while we’re twenty years apart in age, the answer is strikingly similar for the both of us.

The coolest friends were the ones who always had something amazing you needed to hear or you caught them lost in the music and you interrupted just long enough to ask them what they were listening to. After they got past their annoyance at the disturbance they would typically tell you with more detail than you could possibly imagine. Around my sophomore year of high school, I received a package from a friend of mine living in Seattle at the time - it was a TDK cassette tape with a note that read simply - LISTEN TO THIS. Scratched across the cassette tape were the words BLEACH. The closest we have today is the music we chose to accompany a social media post most notably on Instagram or TikTok. I was scrolling along one night and was stopped by an entry from my friend, Niki. We had recently become friends working together with the Sierra Mutual Aid network, a loosely formed group of like-minded individuals working to support each other in damn-the-man type stuff. I don’t even remember what Niki’s post was about, what I remember was being stopped cold when I heard the sounds of “October” by Faetooth coming from my phone.

The next morning I went to the bands webpage and ordered the vinyl of Labyrinthine. A few days and many streams of the album later I was looking up their upcoming shows – Sacramento, May 16. I immediately texted Aaron – whatcha doing on the 16^th? Wanna go see a fairy doom metal show? In Aaron’s typical deadpan the response was “Um, sure…”

Nightosphere was wrapping up. The three piece from Kansas City plays an interesting sleight of hand on the audience — members Claire Delaney and Brittany Sawtelle trade bass and guitar throughout the set, and the rule is simple: she who holds the guitar wrote the song. As the opener I came in, like many others I suspect, not knowing who they were. I went home with one of their CDs.

I am of the mind that concerts are best experienced with just a bit of intoxication – not stumbling drunk, not even slurred words drunk, just a slight letting down of one’s guard to better appreciate what is often new. I slide into the end of the bar, order another drink and watch as the band disassembles their set.

I am somehow both surprised and completely unsurprised when I look over and see Niki. She recognizes me as well and we both hug each other in something akin to deep recognition. She utters her disbelief in me being here – why do the cool kids never realize they’re cool? We talk for a few minutes, she introduces me to her partner and we separate, melting into the crowd.

Iress took to the stage.

Michelle Malley, Iress’ lead-singer and guitarist, is often cited as the Adele of Doom and the comparison holds. Commanding in presence and demanding in delivery, Malley forces you to hear her going from lilting and delicate to confrontational and powerful within a few breaths of each other. This was a band that had spent 16 years building their chops together. That cohesion and familiarity wrapped the crowd in a spell, drawing them closer with Malley’s delicacy before exploding them backward in a sonic assault.

Iress done, Faetooth in the wings, I made my way through the crowd to the bathroom. Maybe it’s cause I’m 52 and kind of just don’t care all that much anymore but coming back from the bathroom I spotted a concert poster of the night’s show on the wall. Quick look left then right, pulled it down, rolled it up, stuck it in my pocket and made my way back to the side of the stage.

All three of the acts on that Friday night stage at Harlow’s were amazing. Every single one of them deserves your time. They deserve your money so they can keep doing this.

For the uninitiated doom metal carries a significant amount of weight and most of it wrong. What comes to your mind? For many, it brings forth images of Phil Anselmo – esque guys, shirtless, sweating, guitars screaming in an unabashed display of testosterone. In the hands of the women, it becomes something else entirely. To be sure Faetooth is heavy, they can grind with the best of them but if the boys bring the obvious, the girls bring the suggestion – the suggestion of menace, of an atmosphere that will transport you to the land of nightmares. The play here is not to intimidate you with a vulgar display of power but instead to merely whisper something in your ear and let your imagination do the rest.

Aaron and I make our way toward the front of the stage. At the edge of my awareness I feel a presence and turn to see Niki’s partner next to me, Niki next to him. We all embrace, talking over each other about Iress, about what’s coming. My triangle is complete — to my right the one who brought me, to my left the one I passed it to. A woman, Niki, started this as we all marvel at the women on stage. Nascent though it may be — the gauntlet has undeniably been thrown down — it’s our turn.

Faetooth took to the stage opening the set with the album’s initial entry – Iron Gate. As strong a show opener as it is on the album, the song begins with a slow, chugging bassline and a meditative drum rhythm that establishes a hypnotic and chant-like energy. From this very moment you feel it in your bones — these three women are channeling something ancient, something ritualistic. Whatever misgivings you had when you walked through the door slip away as you come under the band’s charm. For more than an hour they lead you on the journey they want you to take, let us pray you have Charon’s obol in your pocket.

While the team of Ari May and Jenna Garcia are both credited with vocals on the album, it was Jenna who drew me in – her voice was the scream of a fae scorned and hell was in her wake. This is a doom metal outfit after all and doom metal is anchored by the bass guitar. Rah Kanan drove the whole thing from behind the kit, buried behind the amps and stacks the way drummers in small venues always are — felt more than seen, the invisible architecture everything else is built on. Holding her Dunable Gnarwhal Jenna’s presence feels almost impossible, this tiny, petite woman screaming with a fury that summons demons while driving the band forward with an instrument nearly as long as she is tall. If I hadn’t seen it with my own eyes, I wouldn’t believe that such a person could bring forth such Valkyrie like power.

The set ends and I feel I’ve been released from a trance. Exhausted Aaron and I make our way back to his car. In an ultimate, embarrassing call back to my younger days through a series of events for the both of us, we’re taking Aaron’s Mom’s car. Aaron unlocks the door and I turn, stretching one last time before the journey home. About 50 feet in front of me I see the young father and daughter walking away. I don’t know what to yell out but an impulse is pulling me so I yell out DAD and he stops and turns. I run up to him, pull the slightly crumpled poster from my pocket – I look at him, I look at her.

“For your daughter, man – have a good night.”

The Wonder Simply Is

Mr. B — Fri, 15 May 2026 00:54:23 GMT

Is there a direct connection between quality and satisfaction? I think if one is to honestly engage in the vinyl versus CD conversation then this framing must be considered. Compact Discs reproduce sound at a higher fidelity than vinyl records – that fact is indisputable.

I’m the type of person who likes to gaze upon a sunset and still have my breath taken from me by the sublime natural beauty. I have an understanding of how the properties of light refraction impact the hues performing their symphony as colors blend into each other, the sun slipping beneath the horizon. That knowledge neither adds to nor subtracts from the wonder. The wonder simply is. I think vinyl records are of higher quality. Let’s get into it.

The vinyl versus CD debate is just the latest iteration of a conversation that has been happening since humans first tried to reconcile what they could measure with what they could feel. Nietzsche framed it as Dionysian versus Apollonian, Pirsig shifted things around slightly and developed the romantic versus classical. In our more common vernacular, we might think of art versus science — you and me, we see it as vinyl versus CD.

Pirsig’s argument probably serves us the best in this conversation, but this is a landscape we must tread through carefully. Pirsig wrote what is arguably one of the most important, accidentally philosophical, novels with Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry into Values. Published in 1974 (coincidentally, the same year I was born), Pirsig’s novel was deeply polarizing, initially drawing extravagant praise from literary heavyweights before facing academic backlash and mixed reception from later readers — where have I heard this song before? Over the course of more than 400 pages Pirsig guides us through a conversation that focuses on the pursuit of quality through his alter ego, Phaedrus. Named after a figure in Plato’s dialogues, Phaedrus was a ruthlessly logical philosophy professor whose obsessive pursuit of the definition of quality drove him to insanity. As Phaedrus, Pirsig lost his mind — as the book’s author he found his way back.

Pirsig writes: “A person who sees Quality and feels it as he works is a person who cares. A person who cares about what he sees and does is a person who’s bound to have some characteristics of Quality.”

And here is where a motorcycle becomes relevant to our conversation. Pirsig’s novel unfolds as the story of two characters — one, our narrator who lovingly maintains his bike through a cross-country journey, the other, Phaedrus, who loses his mind chasing an idea. I don’t know about you, but before I drop the needle, I wipe down my record removing the dust, visually inspecting it for anything that could impede playback. The vinyl listener is the narrator. The audiophile chasing ever higher resolution digital formats is Phaedrus. Compact Discs are just one milepost on Phaedrus’ march toward insanity. If we continue down this road then we must consider high-resolution digital audio — demonstrably superior to the CD — thus leaving vinyl in the dust. The pursuit for quality, for perfection consumes us and we keep marching as technical advancement improves quality while ultimately subtracting from what got us here in the first place — the music.

We fool ourselves in the impossible pursuit of perfection — our humanity is found in those moments where we embrace those imperfections and more fully become them.

Pirsig eventually found his way to the ancient Greeks but may have arrived too late — had he encountered H.D.F. Kitto’s concept of aretē earlier, he might have saved himself considerable anguish. Pirsig can be forgiven for not coming to Kitto sooner — renown in academic circles does not always equate to cultural relevancy, a consideration we deep lovers of music are all too familiar with. Throbbing Gristle, anyone?

According to Kitto, aretē implies a respect for the wholeness or oneness of life, and a consequent dislike of specialization. It implies a contempt for efficiency... or rather a much higher idea of efficiency, an efficiency which exists not in one department of life but in life itself.

Compact discs are man in service of the machines chasing a zero-sum game of an ever-dwindling, quantifiable definition of quality where 1s and 0s capturing dynamic frequency ranges become the singular defining characteristic. Vinyl is machines in the service of man that in its own imperfect reproduction of a moment in the studio is quintessentially more human. Who doesn’t have flaws? We fool ourselves in the impossible pursuit of perfection — our humanity is found in those moments where we embrace those imperfections and more fully become them.

The house is impossibly quiet, only the hum of the HVAC system and the shuffling of my feet disrupt the silence. My feral monkeys are with the love of my life, their mother, on a road trip to Wyoming, so it’s just me. Flipping through my records, I land on my father’s copy of L.A. Woman by The Doors. Pulling it from the dust jacket, I can’t help but wince slightly as the light, surface scratch caused by my brother and me many, many years ago comes into focus — I know from experience it won’t affect the record but it’s a reminder. I wipe the record down, slip it onto the turntable and drop the needle. The crack and pop, even after the deep cleaning, fill the speakers before ‘The Changeling’ breaks on through. I know I could sit down at my computer, open Amazon or something similar and tomorrow have a brand-new CD of this recording. Not a doubt in my mind the quality would be better but as I slip into my chair and let the music surround me, I am deeply satisfied.

Finding the Morbid Dolls

Mr. B — Thu, 14 May 2026 04:28:18 GMT

Ever wondered what Radiohead might sound like if they’d grown up playing in Dublin pub sessions and the music was four hundred years old? Let me introduce you to Lankum. More specifically, let me introduce you to 2023’s False Lankum.

But like Radiohead, the version of Lankum that made False Lankum had to be earned. The four piece band consisting of brothers Ian and Daragh Lynch, Radie Peat and Cormac MacDiarmada, began in 2014 as Lynched — named after the brothers’ surname until the word’s darker associations made the name untenable — releasing Cold Old Fire before becoming Lankum proper in 2017 with Between the Earth and Sky -- each record darker, heavier and more ambitious than the last.

Pathways mean something here. How can they not? At their core, Lankum is an Irish folk band breathing new life into music handed down from generation to generation. There are rules involved here and Lankum works to break every one of them -- how else do you make an album that aspires to heavenly beauty while reveling in devilish cacophony? If you’re thinking happy-go-lucky Irish jigs, disabuse yourself of that notion immediately. The band holds kinship closer to the likes of Sunn O))) than The Dubliners.

Like so many in our current era, Covid lockdowns became a defining moment for Lankum. Preparing a performance to be livestreamed from Ireland’s historic Abbey Theatre titled A National Disgrace, the band hit upon an epiphany — weave all their songs together into a single continuous piece.

The band is saying directly to you, we didn’t create this darkness, but we refuse to bury it.

“Figuring out how to make a song slowly morph and grow into another, even if there was nothing matching it,” said guitarist Daragh Lynch.

That revelation became the cornerstone of False Lankum — twelve interconnected songs unfolding across an epic seventy-minute duration, less a collection of songs than a symphony imitating the sea: crashing waves punctuated by deceptive moments of tranquility.

And then there are the fugues – three short, abstract soundscapes serving as intermissions. Recorded as one continuous improvisation and then dissected, the fugue is allowed to serve double duty as musical interlude and that psychological state in which a person loses all sense of identity.

If the fugues dissociate you, then Radie Peat’s vocals ground you. The accolades laid at Peat’s doorstep almost certainly would make her blush. Otherworldly, fierce, like moonlight playing on swirling dust … the Irish Examiner called her one of the great modern voices in folk or any other music. While the cynical listener might scoff at this, the album’s opening track forces you to see the error of your ways. Peat’s voice stands alone for the song’s first sixty seconds demanding you follow her on a journey into the story of a young girl who died for love, four hundred years in the telling.

“Go Dig My Grave” arrives in Lankum’s songbook carrying centuries of grief. A traditional ballad that travelled from the British Isles to the Appalachian Mountains and into the hands of Jean Ritchie, who recorded it memorably with Doc Watson at Folk City in 1962. Peat, who learned the song by hearing Ritchie’s recording, carries that lineage forward into something altogether darker. Where Ritchie’s version is an Appalachian folk ballad, Peat and Lankum turn the song into a nine-minute, doom-folk dirge filled with Irish keening (a vocal lamentation for the dead) and a chilling mix of traditional instruments used in nontraditional methods to create a terrifying wall of sound. And just like that, the stage is set for everything that follows.

Of all the considerable baggage this album carries, perhaps none is more insidious than its method — the way Lankum excavates the darkness buried inside these songs and refuses to let you look away. In an interview with The Attic, Ian Lynch described what he feels as the band’s manifesto.

“In the past, Irish music was misrepresented in a way that it was all really happy, upbeat and frivolous. But there is another aspect to it — very dark and much grittier, which usually people don’t realize — so we really enjoy finding morbid dolls buried and bringing them back to show to people.”

Dark, foreboding, haunting -- not words most people reach for when describing Irish folk music. False Lankum is like a Rorschach test where the beautiful butterfly slowly turns into something horrific upon deeper reflection – it was always there -- you just missed it on casual observation. This album demands you sit with it -- and let me state this plainly – if you are one who prefers their music easy, accessible and radio friendly, this album is not for you. But if you are of the other sort, one who enjoys following the breadcrumbs a band leaves even when they lead to a witch’s house, then you will be rewarded handsomely. This is an album that will be talked about twenty and thirty years from now.

Lynch is unambiguous about the stakes involved: “We have a bit of a personal mission to try to redress the balance.”

The album’s liner notes tell the story of those morbid dolls’ excavation, as in the case of “On a Monday Morning” – “On a Monday Morning” was written by Cyril Tawney. We learned it from Beanie Entwistle of the Manchester based band Sallows. With the liner notes, Lynch and his bandmates are making an artistic declaration -- gone are the individual band member acknowledgements, in its place, the song’s lineage and pathway to the band. The band is saying directly to you, we didn’t create this darkness, but we refuse to bury it.

And so then the question – did they succeed? I have already made plain this album isn’t for everyone. But for me, it is a magnum opus, a musical achievement that anyone with more than a passing fancy for music should know. And so then the question can only be answered by you. In whatever way you choose to hear your music, give this album a listen, then listen again and realize you might need more than two or three listens to come to your conclusion. Understand this, False Lankum opens new pathways in your musical brain, and it may take several listens before the construction is complete.