Self Preservation
Notes on a year, and looking forward to a new one.
Happiest of new years to all my readers. Since finishing my year-end list and the honorable mentions post I have been taking time off from focusing on my Substack until it’s time to get back on the new music release train. I believe I will have enough stray thoughts on random releases, mostly older stuff, for a post soon though.
In the meantime, I’ve been focusing on a “little” Discover Tab related project that will probably take months and months to finalize. I’ll talk more about that in the future though.
For now, I wanted to do a quick summary post of 2024 and then look forward to what I can get up to with this newsletter in 2025.
As always, please reach out on the hellsite, the better site, or join the Rosy Overdrive Discord server where I can be found now and again. You can also find me in the corners of Rate Your Music scrounging for obscure emo, hardcore, indie rock and pop punk.
Don’t forget: if you’re reading this in your email it will be cut off. Read on the web for the full post!
Album of the Month Club
One thing I tried out in 2024 was two months of an “Album of the Month” club in the Substack chat functionality. It went well, and I will try to get a January edition up and running soon. You don’t have to be a paid subscriber or anything to join in either, you just need the app. If there are albums you’d like to be covered in the future you can let me know in the app, in Substack Notes, or by commenting on this post.
2024 Highlights
Year End List: 2024
Hey y’all. 2024 was a wild year for me. I moved cities - from a big one, to a much less big one, with a lot more internal hang-ups for me personally - got a home, and have generally been trying to nudge my life in directions that allow for a happier existence (like experiencing more nature, you know, touching grass and all that.)
My year end list came together easier than most I’ve done, all things considered. Keeping up with writing capsule reviews on-the-go throughout the year was a big help. Generally I can count on these year end posts to get a lot of engagement or whatever on social media, but since I interact less and less with Twitter/X than I used to, that wasn’t the case this year. But I like to think that means it just got in front of the right sets of eyes - less random RTs on social media and more people on Substack actually reading and engaging with it. That’s a win in my eyes.
Year End List: 2024's Honorable Mentions
In prior years, I’ve often added my honorable mentions at the bottom of my list as a near-afterthought. Here’s some albums to check out if those other 50 weren’t enough. But no descriptions or ways for that list to be useful.
This was the first year I’ve done a whole list for honorable mentions. It kind of spawned from the fact that I completely forgot to paste the list of names/albums onto my year end list and so I figured, hey why not? Did you enjoy this approach? Hate it? Don’t care? Let me know!
2 Albums for Every Year I've Been Alive (Part I)
A couple years back, over the course of a few weeks or so I made a playlist where I picked 6 albums from every year I have been alive. This was a sort-of tweaked version of a similar thing that had been happening on Twitter at the time, but I couldn’t resist cranking the number of albums up from like four to six.
These were a fun undertaking! I was happy how they turned out, even though it was a lot of work and there were many tough choices on narrowing each year down to just 2 albums. If I were to re-do it today, it would look a bit different, but that’s the fun I think.
Mock Orange’s indie-rock left-turn: "Mind Is Not Brain"
By definition, Mock Orange’s Mind Is Not Brain may not have been “ahead of its time,” but I do believe their 2004 record missed its time in the spotlight. Coming off of two fairly successful independent emo records (Nines & Sixes and The Record Play), Mock Orange took a complete left turn and released
This was a very old piece of mine, but re-posting some of these old articles was a nice way to revisit albums from my past and also share my thoughts and feelings about them. It reminds me that there was a time where I did consider myself someone who “writes” about music. These days, I feel less like a writer and more like a curator. I like finding music, and helping others find music, but I feel like my vocabulary as a “writer” is very limited. I enjoy trying to explain what something sounds like, what I like or don’t like about it, and hope that when people read about music on my Substack that they are able to decipher whether it’s something they’d like to investigate or not. That is part of the reason why in 2024 I also started to share capsule reviews of stuff approaching the area of negative reviews, because I’ve honestly found out about music I love from reviews that were on the negative side of things. I don’t generally write or share stuff I actively dislike but stuff I’m not so hot on I feel like still makes sense to share in case other people might dig it.
This was a post format I tried out in 2024, but never revisited. Is it something you’d be interested seeing more of? Or nah?
That’s it, that’s all. Be excellent to one other.