Greetings all! As the brilliant and handsome
@Colonel_Angus masterfully deduced, the January 2020 Needles & Grooves AOTM is
Clarence Clarity - No Now
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A big thanks to everyone for contributing to the chaos and for coming along for the ride that's led up to this announcement! Special shout-out to thread runner
@Joe Mac for trying to make sense of the chaos in the face of real life adversity.
This write-up is probably very scatterbrained and I apologize if it devolves into word vomit, but I promise I tried to keep only relevant info in.
It's always daunting to try to write about music for me. Often it hits me in such a specific and indescribable way that I find it difficult to place what it is about a piece of music that I love. So obviously I'm not sure how exactly to go about this write-up; as I'm typing I'm pretty much improvising hoping some sort of magic will happen. But I guess the easiest way to explain my love for the album I've chosen is to share my background with it.
At some point in 2016, high school Gap was scrolling through YouTube aimlessly instead of doing homework (a trait she's never really grown out of), when suddenly this video pops up in the recommended section:
Something I've discovered since joining the forum is that, likely due to my age, my methods of discovering music differ quite a bit from my fellow forum friends. When I was younger, I would randomly come across songs through YouTube or through downloading it from some totally legal and legitimate MP3 site. Nowadays I obviously have much more at my disposal if I want to discover new music, but I sometimes forget how satisfying and nostalgic it is to find music I love the "old-fashioned" way: unexpectedly and with no guide.
I don't remember why I clicked on the video. Maybe I was intrigued by the surreal cover art or something. What I do remember is that once it ended, I knew I had just heard something that would stick with me for a long time.
At the time when I first heard
No Now, I felt like my musical tastes (among other things) made me an outcast. I liked music that I didn't quite understand and loved pop music - something I hid out of fear of being mocked. I spent several bus rides to and from school praying that I wouldn't have to answer for whatever was going on inside my earbuds. I can see now much of this fear was in my own head; everyone had more important shit to worry about than what kind of music I was listening to. But I didn't fit in anywhere in school; I kept to myself and felt alienated because I never knew how to express or explain myself and felt weird that I liked the things I did.
The reason I talk about this is that hearing Clarence Clarity's music was cathartic for the person I was then. The idea of pop music with an experimental edge wasn't completely novel to me; but I had never heard it done is such a succinctly weird way as
No Now. The album was bizarre and otherworldly and overwhelming. And I knew nothing about the person behind it at the time. It was a cryptic and mysterious hidden gem that I was in awe of.
In the years that would follow, though I never forgot about it or the experience, it did eventually get buried by all the other new music I was consuming. It happens with even the best albums; it comes and goes in spells. But rediscovering it was always a treat.
If I can get a bit darker for a moment, I will admit now that I, like many, many others on the forum, have suffered from depression at various points in my life. Depression is something that affects different people in different ways and one of the worst and most frustrating things it does to me is that renders me, for lack of a better word, unimpressed by most things. It leads to me being unable to properly appreciate some truly great music because my brain is shackled down by negativity to the point where everything just melts together into one big auditory meh. Whenever I feel like this, even listening to some of my favorite artists and albums of all time can't shake me out of it.
I bring this up because
No Now is one of the few albums to resist this curse. It's not that I never tire of hearing it or that it's something I want to hear every second of every day. But even after hundreds of listens, it never fails to completely floor me.
This is not an album that I expect everyone to love. And if you are repulsed by it and find it impenetrable, I completely understand. But for me, it's an album that blew my mind and made me find comfort in its strange, chaotic world. The idea that such an insane and abnormal album could exist made me extremely happy. It was like pop music turned up to eleven and then thrown in a blender. Clarence Clarity's songs clearly start somewhere human, but by the time they come out on the other side, they've become maximalist and glitchy ear candy that refuses categorization.
No Now seems like it would be any artist's magnum opus; the record they poured everything they had into to make. And I hope that if this album doesn't end up being something that appeals to you, that at the very least, you can recognize that for me an album like it doesn't come along very often.
Despite the concerns with availability and my more self-conscious thoughts about how I chose to conduct my month, when I reflect on what this album means to me, I don't regret picking it at all. Many months ago, when we were discussing the eventuality of having to choose our AOTMs,
@Alexander told me that one day, I'd be listening to an album and suddenly have the moment where I realized "this is the one." Lo and behold, he ended up being 100% correct. From the moment I heard it again and got the idea to choose it as my AOTM, I've been so, so excited to share it with all of you. I am forever thankful for the wonderful, supportive and accepting community that we have here, and the opportunity to share a little piece of myself with everyone. I may make another post later where I go more in depth on the music itself, but this was just something to share so that I had a write-up ready for my announcement; hope it was somewhat coherent!
Enjoy the record, everyone! I look forward to hearing feedback and reactions from all who listen to it. I'll see you next month when
@ChristoBee steps up to bat!
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