Here we are on a lazy Christmas Day afternoon, listening to music on the living room stereo. None of the selections are anything related to Christmas music, especially after being subjected to it over the last three months constantly in establishments frequented by the public — supermarkets, pubs, restaurants, public transport and even through loudspeakers in outdoor spaces. It seems to start earlier every year (seemingly September in current times) and with that creeping length it just seems more of a atmosphere of late stage capitalism psychosis more than anything else.
For last year’s “Christmas” entry I wrote some thoughts on Mick Karn‘s track “Lost Affections In A Room” from his début 1982 solo album Titles which is probably as close as I’ll get to a proper holiday entry here.
For this entry I dug up a draft for a track that was a few months a new discovery for me, this most recent album by Tara Jane O’Neil. It’s hazy how I came about it — I’ve been aware of her music for a number of decades now, if only passing fragments of not only her solo music but the numerous groups she’s played in over the years such as The Sonora Pine, The King Cobra, Retsin, etc. I’m most familiar with her music by way of the Louisville, Kentucky post-hardcore/post-rock band she was in for a few years in the early 1990s, and that being Rodan. Their one and only LP Rusty is a seminal release in that scene and I’ll tap into this a bit further down in this little entry.
I seem to remember just stumbling across this track and the album it’s released on through something as mundane and “modern” as a BandCamp recommendation. Maybe as I recognised the artist name from my being familiar with it for decades and likely due to the fact that I was having a quiet night and in an impressionable mood I decided to give Tara Jane O’Neil‘s latest album — 2024’s The Cool Cloud Of Okayness — a perusal and in turn checked out the video for the album’s main single, “Glass Island”.
The video itself is quite simple but also works well with the music, with casual shots of the artist and landscapes local to them, captured through what likely might be a digital camera or phone camera through some lo-hi processing to give the quality of older film stocks. It works though — and if anything the importance of video and what it’s meant to portray totally vary from artist to artist in this modern age, especially as budgets for videos tend to be low or non-existence, and in many cases shot by the artists (perhaps with the help of some friends) themselves.
There’s a shimmery film soundtrack quality to the music — for me bringing in echoes of any number European dramas of the 1970s (that’s just my filter though) — that easily brings my own pictures to the music. It’s slightly haunting with comfort — sparse and intimate as well as minimal, with instrumentation that puts in notes with economy and purpose. It has emotion but without pushing it too hard with the performances, allowing one to just take it for what it is and dive into it on their own terms I suppose. There’s a great selection of note choices and chords and there’s a tender yet ghostly quality to O’Neil‘s vocals that sits quite nicely for me — it can feel personal if you want it do without pressure, if that makes sense.. Throughout this track — and indeed the album — O’Neil‘s string work is done on guitar, bass as well as the Fender Bass VI, a six-stringed guitar with a tuning that’s an octave lower than a standard electric guitar and an octave higher than a bass guitar.
The third track from the album, “Seeing Glass” is another standout for me, and has a breezy quality grounded on an organically arpeggiating phrase of figures in a 3/4 time signature and brings to mind the sonic qualities of Stereolab or Broadcast. Overlaid are airy layers of O’Neil‘s overdubbed vocals which bring to mind a sun-drenched, nostalgic afternoon somewhere in summertime. In contrast a track like “Curling” (also with clip below) has a sound I would relate more with Nigerian music of the day — the most obvious example being Fela Kuti — with a warmed and mellow krautrock feel.
There’s probably any given number of classic artists from the golden days of classic rock and folk rock — and even cult artists from those days — that have provided inspiration for O’Neil’s likely vast array of influences that I’m probably not as clued into as others. I do like a good number of artists doing music in this sort of style, but it’s not a main genre that I listen to and with that I’m probably a bit more selective in which artists I listen to. If anything, artists that touch on this type of music pulling psychedelia, folk and perhaps even “country” that I tend to be more attracted to musically are generally ones that come to this music from another angle — an angle likely based in roots in more experimental, noisier music from other projects that artists might have been in or currently in. Perhaps that’s how I dive into unknown artists in other genres I’m less familiar in the first place, because I’m more familiar with where they come from.
O’Neil’s music first came onto my radar way back in the 1990s with a short lived post-hardcore group called Rodan who despite only being around for a couple of years or so left a large imprint on the consciousness of those listening to that music at the time. O’Neil played bass guitar in this band and shared vocal duties with guitarists Jeff Mueller and Jason Noble — the former who would go onto other projects such as June Of 44 (one of their tracks being the first entry in this Track Of The Day feature) and the latter unfortunately passing away from cancer in the early 2010s.
A Rodan track sung by O’Neil, called “Jungle Jim” from the band’s first (and only) album Rusty, is included below — a track that crashes between quiet, darkened organic minimalism to breakneck, jarring, noisy mathrock at any given moment.
With The Cool Cloud Of Okayness, its release sees a prolific artists likely now in their 50s still creating interesting music that’s singular to the artist and provides some interesting listening and great arrangements, even if the music isn’t the type I usually listen to.
Rodan and its members had also starred in the 1994 cult, DIY music/road film Half Cocked, playing the roles of members in a fictional band called Truckstop. The film — shot in a grainy and naturalistic black and white — was directed by Suki Hawley and featured some members of other bands, including the infamous Ian Svenonius of Nation Of Ulysses, The Make-Up and Escap-ism fame, playing the fictional egomanic brother to O’Neil’s character. A trailer for that is included below, and is worth checking out in full if you can — especially for a nice lo-fi slice of 90s indie. The soundtrack to the film itself is pretty stacked with some great underground bands from the day, including Helium, Unwound, Polvo, Slant 6 and more.
I thought I was going to write something longer and more in-depth for this but I suppose it already has gotten to that point here. Time to get back to a casual, low-key Christmas day and enjoy the quiet vibes!