Noise Pollution #16: Songs of Summer Pt. 1: 1995
I’m sure I’ve said it before and will continue to say it when I’m in the corner of whatever nursing home my daughter abandons me in: I’ve got a complicated view on nostalgia. I think it’s a symptom of growing up in the ’80s/’90s and watching people my age being relentlessly targeted by marketing companies to play on our memories of fading youth mixed with the fact that Gen-X is the first generation where people build and maintain their entire identities based around what they consumed in their youths. This has progressively gotten more and more predatory with each successive generation. I’d love to go deeper into this sometime, but it’s not necessarily a conversation for this platform.
Then, on the other hand, the crux of this entire column is my relationship with old records and the time surrounding them. In that sense I’m part of the overall problem I just outlined. My philosophical workaround for this quagmire is that, in a way, this is a continually growing memoir of my life, which probably limits the overall audience interest but helps me feel like I’m contributing something beyond little stories about records that truly have nothing to do with the bands I’m writing about.
Anyway, it’s summer! Summer brings a few specific times to my mind and with that comes their soundtracks alongside a complete negation of the first two paragraphs you just read. You see? We wasted our time together.
Summer when I was younger generally meant some shitty part time job, generally at some touristy diner washing dishing or bussing tables, followed by weekly trips to ACRAT or one of the other indie record shops that peppered the southern New Jersey landscape, armed with a list of shit I’d heard on “The Hours of Desolation.” The older I got that would turn into a two hour drive north to Vintage Vinyl with whatever poor woman thought she liked me before she got to know me.
My life is all about repeating themes.
The first year I truly learned the power of disposable income was 1995, oddly enough the same year I helped form two bands. I was bussing tables and washing dishes at Augie’s Airport Diner, which was attached to the Ocean City Airport. It was an uneventful job, outside of old guys thinking they were funny by asking if I was “Augie.” While writing this piece, it struck me that everyone who made that shitty joke is thankfully dead and Google tells me the Airport Diner closed thanks to Covid. Two pieces of good news for a Monday isn’t a bad way to start the week.
Before we go any further, this being the internet and comments sections being rife with assholes I wanted to say that yes, I know most of these records did not come out in 1995, it’s just the year where I either heard them or they clicked. So save your pedantic nonsense, for now anyway.
The year 1995 was probably the most obsessed with music that I had been up to that point in my life, I based my entire life around it. From my Walkman to the tape player at work to the boombox I took with me every night to the boardwalk where I would sit at the Pavilion, a family seating area on 12th Street that, once the sun went down, would morph into an enclave of the city’s ne’er-do-wells–mostly street punks and other assorted fuck ups that would gather nightly (even in the winter) and do whatever approximated antisocial counter cultural shit a small town could expect to approximate. I don’t know when this tradition began but I was around long enough to see it end, with the help of the Ocean City PD and some city officials, sometime in the late ’90s. At that point, I was at shows or in bars being an asshole, so the passing of what was my introduction to outsider culture didn’t give me any pause. There’s probably dozens of stories to mine from it and, with 25 years gone, does make me somewhat wistful.
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One band I was obsessed with was Morbid Angel. I used to take a tape of Blessed are the Sick with Covenant dubbed on the other side to every dish washing shift I had and play it over and over. The diner had no dish washing machine so everything was done by hand. We were given gloves but they barely covered past your wrist and the fucking brackish water went at least to your elbow, so the gloves just gave the shitty old coffee and pancake syrup water a place to gestate into gangreen. But having Morbid Angel somehow gave me a rhythm to how I worked and kept the early part of the season going. Until I discovered what would be a bible for me and my friends: “Death is Just The Beginning, Vol. 3.”
Released back when Relapse and Nuclear Blast had a partnership, this compilation was the best way to check out a ton of bands for a decent price. I guarantee this is where a lot of Americans got their first listens of Cradle of Filth and Dissection as well as some killer exclusive tracks like Pungent Stench‘s “Tony.”
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I ordered this and Amorphis‘ Black Winter Day EP at the same time. It was one of the many blueprints into a new world of underground music, alongside the Stockton College radio station and “Rubberneck” zine. It introduced me to several bands, most of which I still listen to now, nearly thirty years later. Bands like Convulse, Incantation, and Dismember. It also contained one of my favorite death/doom tracks ever, Celestial Season‘s “Above Azure Oceans.”
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I mention my purchase of the Black Winter Day EP because it led to picking up Tales From the Thousand Lakes, which somehow became a quintessential summer album for me and one of a handful of records that I consider perfect from beginning to end.
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I was also introduced to Samael’s Ceremony of Opposites through my friend Ralph, which has always acted as a complimentary record to Tales From the Thousand Lakes for me. They both give me the same sense of nostalgia, that same atmosphere of hot summer days where the only concerns I had were getting a hold of new records and trying to find a girlfriend. I had greater success at one of those two. You can guess which.
I did end up meeting someone online that summer and traveled to New York City for the first time to meet her. What do you think my first priority was when I got there? Keep in mind I was nearing 17, with hormones coursing through my body and a mastery of a sense of judgment akin to the Supreme Court. So of course right off the bus I asked her to take me to some record stores. I came home with at least a dozen CDs but the one that left the biggest impression on me as a memory of that trip was Winter‘s Eternal Frost MCD.
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It’s strange that Winter was my first exposure to this style of metal, before Hellhammer and Amebix would become obsessions for me years later. As for the girl I went to visit? She told me no one could kiss her because her face was “sacred.” Things sort of fizzled out there and it was years before I had a proper relationship. But Eternal Frost? I still have that.
There are so many records that made an impact on me during the summer of 1995 that I could keep going just on that one year, but instead I’ll leave you with another one of those “perfect records” I talked about earlier and one of the consummate albums of the season; Tiamat‘s Wildhoney.
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I’ll see you again in two for another picture of a different summer. Until then, fuck SCOTUS and evangelical theocracy.
