Skip to content

Standard Reader

Miscellany

@theangelremiel.bsky.social

5Readers

282Posts

2d agoLast active

October 21 - Song for Ted Sallis

So, we've had songs for dead blues singers, songs for wrestlers, songs for gods, songs for Ozzy Osborne, and now we have songs for comic book characters. I always had an attachment to Man-Thing, partly based on the sadly persistent status of him as a joke or a perceived inferior copy of Swamp Thing. He wasn't, by the way. A baffling act of parallel evolution meant that as Stan Lee and Roy Thomas were creating him for the May 1971 edition of Savage Tales, Len Wein was creating Swamp Thing for the...

October 20 - Almost Every Door

The previous EP was called Marsh Witch Visions, but this one feels the most magical. This is a soft, creepy, unsettling spell of a piece, sitting in a gentle but threatening spot that feels loaded with power. The lyrics are strongly about feeling trapped, about methods of escape, some of them self destructive, and there's a dangerous calm at their core. This is not a way out. The thing you are trying won't be that easy. And you can sit in that lack of security, or keep going into danger.

October 19 - The Video with Lita Ford

There is no video of The Video With Lita Ford. So instead here's a video with both of them. It's sadly only when you hear Ozzy sing with somewhere else that you have to contend with the fact that his voice... wasn't that good. It was memorable, and he was the only person who should sing his songs, but when he's in a sing with someone who actually can sing (and Lita Ford has a really pleasant alto) it becomes clear that as a vocalist Ozzy was bringing something other than vocals. However, the som...

October 18 - No More Tears

The Ozzy retrospective continues and we're looking at the memories of an old rock star, trying to remember how things were back when things were crazy. It has to be remembered that being tired and past it is honestly the best a rock star can hope for. If you become an old fart who used to be a legend, then you've got pretty much as close to the top as you can get. Even Ozzy, who did about as much as someone could do and then lived until his mid seventies, was as much a joke as a legend by the an...

October 17 - Mid Morning Florida

So this is online as Going Back To California, but I do think Mid Morning Florida is a better name. This is a sad song that is willing to be sad, and it's about one of the most horrifying moments in rock history. Randy Rhoads, the 25 year old genius guitarist in Ozzy Osborne's band was travelling with the rest of the band when their bus stopped for repairs by an airstrip. The driver of the bus, who was also a pilot, borrowed one of the small planes at the airstrip, reportedly without permission,...

October 16th - Passaic 1975

As a song, this is a beautifully sad tale of the damage of the road. It's part of the ongoing Ozzy project, but much like Song for Black Sabbath's Second North American Tour it isn't actually on the Marsh Witch Visions EP. Lyrically and overall as a piece it does the frequent Mountain Goats trick of sounding delightful and a little dreamy and then having lyrics that track someone's descent. There's a section in this qhere the narrative character is given a present by the tech crew: a teleprompte...

October 15 - California Jam

This is going to be a short one. This is a song about the weirdness of fame and the ways that money can move the world. It's very nice. I'm very tired. Top make up for it being short, I've included one of my favourite Black Sabbath covers: T-Pain covering War Pigs

October 14 - Song For Black Sabbath's Second North American Tour

These are late because ironically I was up in Manchester to see Mountain Goats. More about that when we get there. This is a small live guitar-only song, which is suitable for a meditation on fame. Small and simple and true to its subject. Ozzy Osbourne was a very unlikely person to become famous. He was apparently a wreck as a young person, a product of trauma and abuse who left school at 15 and worked in a slaughterhouse until the band took off. I always feel like people are just waiting for f...

October 13 - Shirtless in Hamburg

Continuing with the Ozzy songs, this one is about the grim business of trying to make it, having to be a version of yourself and smile through pain, pretending to have a better time. Which is something we're all doing right now, I think.

October 12 - Marsh Witch Vision

OK, so the font for Marsh Witch Visions fucks severely, let's start there. This song feels like a collection of the things that someone is doing while waiting to be alive. Starting with the small and mundane and then growing something. We're back to very traditional early Mountain Goats, both in terms of this being a guy with a guitar and a simple rhythm and in terms of this being a collection of songs around a particular life. In this case, that of Ozzy Osbourne. OK, weird connections time. I'v...

October 11th - Sicilian Crest

Tired again at the end of a long day. Per John, this rising 80s TV show anthem is a homage to those who would feels the comfort and warmth of support of fascism. And who am I to doubt him in a time when fear is so easy?

October 10th - Clemency for the Wizard King

fuckin' wizards again This song is a delight. A chorus number, both in performance and in action depicted, it's got the wonderful tension of the title and seeming action (the acolytes of the Wizard King come to beg for his release) and the actual acknowledged action (a large group of assassins come to free their master). Both work, and indeed both work together. Mountain Goats songs are sometimes at their best when their sound triggers elaborate colourful visuals, as they do in this case. I cann...