![]() ![]() Every single song is good… I would say it is a “no-skipper.”Īfter hearing the 2004 version of SMiLE, I found some bootlegs of the original sessions, as well as digging into Smiley Smile. On Accelerator, they really struck a remarkable balance between structure and chaos. From all the times I’ve seen them live and all the records I’ve bought, Royal Trux never struck me as having put a ton of planning into maybe anything they did, but it seems to me like Accelerator’s excellence is due at least in part to some planning or preliminary structure of songwriting. When it came out, I already knew the band and had been listening to Cats & Dogs since high school, but Accelerator brought a brand new crazy-wild sound (see “Juicy, Juicy, Juice”) that came out of absolutely nowhere.īut more importantly to me, the songs held together as individual songs rather than devolving into the noise that I tended to find pretty boring. Back then (pre-internet really), records had more than a 10-minute shelf-life, so the brightly colored Accelerator disc carouseled around my five-disc CD changer for at least the next six years. ![]() That may have to do with when it was released-in 1998, I moved to New York City as a 19-year-old, wide-eyed college student-or maybe it’s just because it is a fantastic record. Looking back through all of the fantastic records that have been made in the last 25 years, I find the one that has probably influenced me most (and maybe I’ve heard the most), is Accelerator by Royal Trux. Never wanting to be copycats, we just hoped we could make something as personal and special. It gleamed in so many of the ways we wanted to present AC: mysterious characters from another world who would infect the current trends with our own personalities and something a bit different. It was transportive and alien but also grounded and familiar in the traditions of jazz, rap, and psychedelic music that it adhered to. We felt a kinship with the record-digger personality who could easily sample Alice Coltrane’s free piano and place it beside the soundtrack to La Planète Sauvage, making it all groove while still being a bit unhinged. (Rumors circulated that Madlib mixed the whole thing while tripping.) ![]() It was lo-fi, it was mysterious, it was part sound collage, part hook-ridden hip-hop, and part mushroom trip. It seems almost serendipitous that The Unseen appeared just before the summer kicked into full gear and became our soundtrack. Creatively, we were at the start of what would become our most free and exploratory era and on the cusp of a journey that continues today. The summer of 2000 was a high point for AC. You can feel the birds on the line, the people on the street, the time of day, the phone rings, a cough, a dog bark. You can hear the room on this album, the city. It taught me that truth put to melody is all you need. It taught me to live first and then document. It taught me how to whistle and about the power of rhythm guitar (Jolie is a train). About necessity, about mythology’s role in survival. Catalpa was the first album that really taught me why we write songs. I first heard it during my last year of high school and knew immediately that it was a cipher, encrypting everything that I would come to love most about music. Though I can say that Jolie Holland’s Catalpa had the biggest impact on me of any album in the last 25 years. ![]() It's impossible for me to define my favorite album of the last 25 years-that is a fluid thing, changing all the time. ![]()
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