Guessed by
@avecigrec!
The album of the month for August is The Notwist - Superheroes, Ghostvillians+Stuff
I'll put a write up in the coming days!
For now here's the Bandcamp link
You know those recipe posts where they write a long essay about their life and you’re like get to the damn recipe already…this is that, sorry
I’ll save you all the gory details that led to an incredibly depressed and angry teenaged
@Hemotep trying to find his way in the world in 1998, but I had just moved back to the United States, had graduated high school a couple years early, and started working two full time jobs (one during the days and one nights and weekends). We relocated to Colorado with this move, I didn’t know anyone, and my family had imploded that summer (thus why we moved back to the US). I wasn’t old enough to move out yet, but I barely said more than a few words to my religious zealot of a mother and her abusive husband until I moved out on my 18th birthday. So, it was a pretty isolated existence.
On the rare day that I wasn’t working I would drive to Boulder and go to two places. The first was called Cheapo Discs, which sadly is no more but was the best place a music nut like me in the CD age could have asked for, and the other is called Albums on the Hill which is thankfully still rocking. The owner of Albums on the Hill, Andy, is a real mensch and would talk to me regularly and suggest bands I might like. I bought a lot of CDs and would frequently snag random discs out of the $1 bargain bin which was often populated with promos and radio demos. One album I snagged out of that bin that winter was The Notwist’s
Shrink, which had come out in Europe in May of that year. It was one of the better random albums I grabbed and stayed in my cd player for a couple weeks on repeat.
A couple of years later, still depressed but able to move out on my 18th birthday, I was living in someone’s storage room and sleeping on the floor between stacks of their boxes. One morning I woke up to news that a plane had hit the WTC, and I watched as the second plane hit the second tower. A few days later, because no one was flying so the airlines were doing some crazy good sales, I was hanging out at Albums on the Hill and popped into the travel agent next door to ask how much a ticket to Ireland was. British Airways was having a one-day sale for $300 so I bought it on the spot and called my boss to ask if I could either take a month off in two weeks, or this call would be my two-week notice. He was a great boss (RIP Phil) and gave me the time off.
While in Ireland I heard the first single off of
Neon Golden, Trashing Days, and knew that this album was going to be even better than
Shrink. I wanted to buy a copy, but it wasn’t out yet before I had to return home. I asked Andy to let me know when it came out, but he did me one better and a few months later when I stopped in he handed me a promo copy of the CD. I couldn’t get enough of the album and burned copies for several of my friends since none of them had heard of the band before.
I needed to get the hell out of Colorado and my dismal storage room existence so I found a job in Oregon, loaded up my car with my crap and drove out there. The album was the soundtrack for most of my drive and I started to formulate a story in my head based on the song Consequence. In between my crazy 60-80 hour weeks I started to write a screenplay based on a modern day rewrite of Alice in Wonderland that emerged from a scene that song conjured in my mind. Life got in the way, and then a call from my old boss Phil encouraged me to stop wasting my time and go to college. He wrote me a letter of recommendation and I got into the few places I applied, including Stanford. But without any money to pay for it, the only place I could afford was University of Colorado since I could still get in-state tuition. So after my year in Portland I packed up my car again, Neon Golden back in the CD player, and drove back. The next few years were rough—because of being geographically close to a bad family situation—and awesome—because college was the first place I felt like I was around peers and met others who had lived through crappy childhoods and were making something of their lives on their own too.
The best part was being close to the Fox Theater. It became like a second home, and I probably went to two or more shows every week there for at least three years. Bless student loans. Live music always hit harder for me than studio albums because there is something raw in it that hasn’t been lost in production. It has all the little warts and exists in a single space and time. It’s art of the moment. Even though live albums aren’t quite the same, they still hit on something for me that scratches an itch and transports me to the sweaty crowd lost in the temporal rhythm of sound.
Despite all my shows, I was never able to see The Notwist live, even though I’ve listened to them regularly throughout the years. So I picked this album for a few reasons. It’s one of my favorite bands and I always thought it was a shame more people don’t know them. It’s a live album which is my favorite style of album. And The Notwist have gone through a lot of transformation and evolution with their sound, which is a lot like me in my life. Getting that degree and going to all of those concerts shaped me as a person into someone better than I ever thought I could be. It took me from someone who was depressed all of the time to someone who is only depressed some of the time, and happy for a lot of the other time. I still go back to that song Consequence and think of my unfinished screen play, of my version of Alice, sitting in the snow one night outside of the Bluebird Theater in Denver looking for a Rabbit to take her away.
Kind of silly, but we have a poverty of imagination in our world these days and I hope that this album takes you on some trips in your imagination too. To new spaces and new times.
With lots of love,
@Hemotep
