Echo Beach Radio: A Zine Playlist
9 songs for the Always Ending Now
Welcome to Echo Beach Radio.
What follows are notes to a “radio show” I recorded live on YouTube. Essentially the only way to do a “radio show” these days without getting a show on SiriusXM or NTS or a big radio platform is to string YouTube playlists. It works very well, just hop over and skip the ad or ads when it plays (welcome to modern music licensing). Try it. Unedited and live, just like the old days.
Like all radio, you should just put it on and listen to it but if you must Read & Watch instead of listen to me talk, scroll down and you can do that.
The last time I hosted an hour of college radio was something like 1986. I had this older, incalculably hip friend named Peter Lee who did *the* radio show at WMUA at UMass Amherst, “Non-Sequitor Theater.” Hanging out in the studio while he spun actual vinyl and told stories about Kate Bush and XTC was peak teen-Dave, and I grabbed one or two “empty” bits of schedule trying to ape his effortless cool. It was awful of course. But in that spirit, here’s the playlist I put together for a Zine project I shipped last week. While the Zine is physical, it’s apparently illegal to post MP3s of music still, so here’s a hybrid “show.”
First Tracks! New music!
Faye Webster - Feeling Good Today
I’m late to the Faye Webster Party. She made Obama’s 2020 list, largely as a modern southern crooner. Not my usual Jam. But her latest album is deeply subversive and weird and much more in the vein of Bo Burnham than Lana Del Rey. It’s full of wild arrangements, surprising twists both lyrically and musically. “Feeling Good Today” feels like a reaction to the meaning crisis — unearnedly upbeat while lamenting the vapidity of modern life, replete with unnecessary hyperpop style “autotune as instrument” — but if you listen carefully, only on the harmonies I believe. I’m a Barthes guy, so no interest in teasing out intent, but for me, it’s brilliant layering of meaning and toolset.
Also she’s childhood friends with Lil Yachty and loves YoYos so what’s not to love.
Mk.Gee - Alesis
I’ve personally been in a multi-year bucket of figuring out what goes inside the black box of my solipsistic brain. This album, “Two Star and the Dream Police,” dropped a track at a time over the past few months, mostly from Gorilla vs. Bear, and this track in particular is just stuck in my head. To me the lyrics … kicking off with “I’m in another body who’s in somebody else, both of them headless and heartless” … are right down the middle of the existential crises of the age.
But also, the musicianship on the whole album is over the top. It’s so carefully sparse and deeply human. I don’t think AI is going to be singing and playing guitar quite so emotionally anytime soon, and if it does, we have bigger problems.
Martha and the Muffins - Echo Beach
Flashback time for a few tracks:
1981 was the year MTV launched, and “Echo Beach” became an anthem of my young adult life. A one-hit from an otherwise largely unknown band, I first heard this on vinyl when my much-cooler-and-older “girlfriend” at the age of 14 put this on her parents Stereo in Brooklyn and then *left me alone* while she went to an 18+ show they were doing at the Peppermint Lounge in NYC. I was devastated. I did finally see them, if I recall, at the Roxy a few years later. Alone.
The relationship didn’t last, but I was obsessed with this song for ages, and have stolen the name at every chance since. The song itself is ultimately a light anti-capitalist-workaday idle, an ode to future escapism. Echo Beach is far away in time, indeed.
Rise Above - Black Flag
Sam Year, Same Vibes, Different Music.
I don’t know if there’s some kind of anti-internet, anti-tech, anti-AI thing actually going on culturally or not. I can’t, because my only view on “what’s going on in the world” is either deep and narrow (my lived non-digital experience) or massively intermediated by an internet I honestly no longer trust like I once did.
In the early 1980s I had nothing to really complain about — I was male, white, lived in New England, and was smart enough to manipulate being smart and privileged into getting a bad college education and subsequent employment. But the rage was real, whether a function of testosterone or public policy, and Henry Rollins might have well been Ram Das. For years I had this Henry Rollins quote written inside every journal I kept in the front page:
Go without a coat when it's cold; find out what cold is. Go hungry; keep your existence lean. Wear away the fat, get down to the lean tissue and see what it's all about. The only time you define your character is when you go without. In times of hardship, you find out what you're made of and what you're capable of. If you're never tested, you'll never define you character.
I suppose now angry young men have any number of weird subcultures to attach themselves to in a search for meaning and impact, but for me, the mid ‘80s punk scene was it. I wasn’t *actually* a punk. I was a normal nerd most of the time. But I would hop in my Pontiac Phoenix (alone, generally) and drive to crappy venues and house parties to see Black Flag and others, who for reasons I still don’t get, all played a surprising number of gigs within a 90 minute drive of Amherst MA. (I posted the live clip, because Punk should always be live, and Black Flag was *exceptional* — in a dozen gigs, I think the mix was good enough to hear the vocals every time. Someone in the band cared. I suspect Rollins.)
While punk has survived — thrived even — it’s no longer the counter-culture it once was, it’s just … a culture. I’m not sure what “counter culture” is these days other than being offline.
Dead Kennedys - Nazi Punks Fuck Off
Another 1981 Rage anthem from early punk and the second hardcore track anchoring the angry middle of this set, Nazi Punks is to me the quintessential DKs song and I love this studio version, if for no other reason that you can tell HOW SERIOUS the band was taking what is a 1 minute riot. I think Jello Biafra is a genius on every song, but by the mid 1980s, he was the one getting dragged into court in LA for being obscene, the second occurrence of Satanic Panic Prudery I’d had to weather (the first was having the temerity to play Dungeons and Dragons!) It seems quaint now, but we had campus protests about censoring music back then. I don’t think any of us thought we were going to CHANGE anything by loving loud angry music with anti-establishment messages. But at least we were loud. I got to see the DKs only once, as I recall, opening for Mission of Burma. MoB was great. I can’t even recall the DKs coherently, they likely sucked. A lot of punk bands did. Sometimes that was the point.
New Dawn Fades - Joy Division
Technically from the 1970s, I didn’t hear this until maybe 1984-1985 ... I was late to them, but Peter Lee set me straight. “Love Will Tear Us Apart” gets the Karaoke plays (hand up) but I think this is the very very best Joy Division song. I once did a spoken word piece about it which is lost to the ether, but in a nutshell — this is the song that has played in my head essentially anytime I have felt that deep nugget of despair and regret that lives behind my sternum. Mostly vanquished, as a younger man the recriminations of “Different colors different shapes, over each mistakes were made, I took the blame” just echoed and echoed. As a parent, decades later, as I stood over small children utterly unprepared, it became a bit of a hype song — “we’ll give you everything and more, the strain’s too much, can’t take much more” is something I think every parent has felt.
It also feels like it’s part and parcel of the theme of this list, which is internal criticism and how to *be* in the face of seemingly unsurmountable bullshit. “Me, seeing me this time, Hoping for something else.”
The Clean - Anything Can Happen
Before we leave 1981 for the now, let’s listen to the best song from the world’s first indie-pop band. The Clean. Again, I don’t think I found them till a few years later in one of Peter’s sets, but to me the sound of The Clean is the sound of almost every indie garage band to follow, up too and including the Strokes by way of the Replacements and all the steps in between. The story is as simple as every blues song before it - someones feeling low, and someone gives them advice they don’t take: “Anything could happen and it could be right now, and the choice is yours to make it worthwile.”
Indeed.
St. Vincent - Broken Man
I love Annie Clark so much it’s hard for me to have any objectivity. I’ve liked her poppier stuff, her weird David Byrne stuff and her slinky stuff and her Minions soundtrack. Not selected for any massive lyrical connection to our broken age, rather this whole new album from her is an exploration of anger and despair and grief and all the extremes of human emotion. I think she remains one of the most interesting songwriters and performers making music and this one is pretty irresistible, and a few days old.
Waxahatchee & M.J. Lenderman - Right Back To It
There are some songs that just anchor a moment in time, and the people you’re with. This song dropped on January 9th this year — essentially the day I left gainful employment, jumping off a cliff without a parachute in the hope someone shows up with some wings before I hit the ground.
My wife is, obviously, an incredible woman who has had to navigate the countless storms and shoals of a neurodiverse husband, and our relationship is inarguably the adamantium anchor for my grip on reality and connection to the divine. On a long walk, this song came on for the first time and on the lyric “Your love’s written on blank check, wear it around your neck, I was at a loss” and I just immediately burst into tears of gratitude and joy.
I don’t know how to fix the world. But unconditional love has clearly gotta be part of it.
Cheers.