Flashes of Panic

Back when my brother came to visit, he brought a CD with him. It was, oddly enough, mine. When my band from high school did our album, between graduation and dissolution, we ended up deciding on cassettes, for some reason; the only quasi-official digital version was a DAT the singer kept from the studio.

My mother has set up her Mac to take audio input from a turntable or cassette deck and record MP3s, so she could rip all her old LPs, and my brother ripped one of our cassettes and burned a CD for me. I finally got around to playing it last night; I was initially reluctant, but curiosity got the best of me. The quality isn’t the best, but that’s hardly the point.

The album as a whole is pretty uneven. The parts that are good give me chills: hey, we were on to something there. The parts that aren’t so good, and there are many of them, are more common. Listening to it made me think of a programmer’s second program, the one that comes after “Hello, world” and before they figure out how to write tighter, more efficient and elegant programs.

There’s some plain poor musicianship, a great deal of nervous rushing and over-playing. There’s some bad mixing of what might otherwise have been decent songs. In nearly all cases, the songs or lyrics just aren’t ready for prime time. No surprise, then, that our singer does a little revisionist history, calling the band by a different name in newspaper stories; I guess he’d rather not have this stuff dug up, and I don’t blame him. (I don’t even think there was a band by that name.)

I’m not disappointed or surprised, in hindsight, that what we created was really a bad album. We did the best we could with what we had and what we knew. I think I don’t like listening to it because I remember the dreams we were dreaming when we recorded it, and there’s discord between the dreams and the sounds.

Now Playing: The Ballad Of Peter Pumpkinhead from Nonsuch by XTC