Alphabet Soup Week 42: The U Tracks

Writing from London this week as I take a brief sabbatical from 3+ months of hiking to give myself a rest and my body a chance to heal from a nagging injury.

Welcome to week 42 of Alphabet Soup! Hard to believe Halloween is just around the corner and Christmas decorations are already springing up all over the place (is it me or is that happening earlier every year?). I'm currently ensconced in an Airbnb in central London where I'll be holing up for the week. I'm supposed to be 645 miles north of here with my wife Tina, enjoying a group walking tour of Argyll and The Isles, but have instead decided it's time to give my body a rest. An old back injury started flaring up about six weeks ago and, while for much of that time it's been manageable, for the last couple weeks it's become more acute.

Last week's amazing walking tour of Orkney was brilliant, but somewhat overshadowed by intermittent but painful muscle spasms in my lower back. It’s an injury I’ve weathered before and it does usually subside with rest and time. While spending a couple days in Inverness between trips, I made the tough decision that I really needed to give my body the much-needed time to relax and heal. Yesterday, shortly after Tina took an early morning transfer down to Oban, I took a flight to London. I'll relax here while still getting some gentle walking in (museums, galleries and other sights Tina doesn't enjoy so much) and we'll  meet up in Edinburgh on Friday to continue our adventures together.

I'm doing my best not to sulk, but it's certainly a big adjustment after having shared Tina's company 24/7 since we left Bermuda on June 23rd. There's plenty to see and do in London and hopefully a week away from a more intense walking schedule will make our next hiking trip in the Scottish Borders, our last of the year, more enjoyable.

While nowhere near as challenging as the U Artists, the list of U Tracks from my CD collection was pretty sparse. There were a couple hundred tracks to choose from, which sounds like a lot but is the smallest universe of tracks since the letter Q. Funnily enough, there were a couple dozen tracks named Untitled and I briefly contemplated creating a playlist comprised solely of untitled tracks. I've ended up with a fairly diverse set of tracks that I think I've managed to sequence in a somewhat sensible way — a journey from French Electropop to a depressing Smiths track by way of the Grateful Dead certainly wasn't the easiest!

As always, please drop me a comment, let me know what tracks you liked. Was there anything new for you here? Any old favorites? What are some of your favorite U Tracks?

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ALPHABET SOUP WEEK 42: The U Tracks

This week’s selections:

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TRACK: "Une Heure” from Sexuality (2008)

ARTIST: Sébastien Tellier

We open this week's playlist with Une Heure from Sexuality, Sébastien Tellier's third studio album, 2008's Heaven or Las Vegas. The claim to fame for the album, which was produced by Daft Punk's Guy-Manuel de Homer-Christo, is the track Divine being selected to represent France in the 2008 Eurovision Song Contest. This was the only Tellier album I physically owned as I was slowly moving in the direction of digital music by that point. I'm a little hot and cold on his overall catalog but 2013's Confection and 2015's L'Aventura both made the back half of my AOTY list for those years. Sexuality, which has quite a different feel from his other albums given the more electronic focus, remains my favorite of his albums by a comfortable margin.

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TRACK: "Underwater Love" from Flying Away (1997)

ARTIST: Smoke City

The first time I ever heard Underwater Love was on the sixth installment of the wonderful acid jazz/trip hop/downtempo compilation The Rebirth of Cool. I sought out and purchased Smoke City's debut album Flying Away off the back of this single track. Sadly, the remainder of the album didn't live up to that fantastic single and I don't recall playing it very often.

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TRACK: "Until the Morning" from The Richest Man in Babylon (2003)

ARTIST: Thievery Corporation

I've long been a fan of the American electronic duo Thievery Corporation, comprised of Rob Garza and Eric Hilton and a host of supremely talented studio and touring musicians. The musical outfit was born out of Garza and Hilton's collaboration at the Washington D.C. club Eighteenth Street Lounge. The pair's mutual love of dub, bossa nova and jazz records led to their marvelous 1996 debut LP Sounds from the Thievery Hi-Fi. Until the Morning, featuring the enchanting vocals of Icelandic singer Emilíana Torrini, appeared on the band's third album, 2002's The Richest Man in Babylon. This remains my favorite of their ten studio LPs and is an album I go back to fairly regularly.

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As you make your way through this week’s playlist, I’d love to hear your thoughts. Do any of these tracks really stand out for you? What do you like? What don’t you like?

Please click the button below to leave a comment.

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TRACK: "Undertow" from Long Distance (2000)

ARTIST: Ivy

Yet another track by the New York band Ivy, their fourth appearance in Alphabet Soup, making them one of the more frequently featured artists in the entire series. Ivy's third album, 2000's Long Distance, found the band moving away from the dreamy, breezy pop of Apartment Life; while Dominque Durand's ethereal vocals remain, the music itself is leaning a little more towards indie rock. Despite not being released as a single, Undertow is the highlight of the album for me.

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TRACK: "Uncle John's Band" from Workingman's Dead (1970)

ARTIST: Grateful Dead

As I wrote way back in week 13 when discussing Friend of the Devil, "...while I was by no means a deadhead, the music of the Grateful Dead definitely played a part in that period of my life. Summer holiday weekends spent out camping on one of the islands in the sound, dropping acid and spending the late afternoon and the entirety of the evening tripping out, drinking, smoking dope, and dancing around a roaring bonfire to the sweet music of the Dead are treasured hallmarks of that time."

One of the few Dead albums I physically owned was 1970's Workingman's Dead, the bands fourth studio album. This album represented a stylistic shift away from the psychedelic sound of their earlier albums and leaning into a blend of folk and Americana. Uncle John’s Band was the first Dead single to appear on the Billboard Hot 100, where it peaked at number 69. The track is one of the band’s best known and is included in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame’s 500 Songs That Shaped Rock and Roll.

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TRACK: "Underground" from Business As Usual (1981)

ARTIST: Men at Work

Men at Work's 1981 debut Business As Usual is one of my eight Desert Island Discs. It's an album that’s absolutely chock a block with new wave gems, the most commercially successful of which actually tend to be some of my least favorite songs. Down Under and Who Can it Be Now? were huge hits, particularly in the US, pushing the album to the top of the Billboard 200 Albums Chart where it spent 15 weeks at number one. But some of my favorite tracks are the lesser known ones, including Underground (and my personal favorite Down By The Sea).

Sadly, the band, which won the Grammy for Best New Artist in 1983, would only produce one more album with the original lineup. After 1983's Cargo, which produced the hit singles Overkill and It's a Mistake, the band would be down to two original members including lead singer Colin Hay. An updated lineup of the band released Two Hearts in 1985 but by then the magic, along with most of the original band, was gone.

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TRACK: "Us and Them (Live)" from Delicate Sound of Thunder (1988)

ARTIST: Pink Floyd

The first time I ever heard Us and Them was when a friend lent me the double-CD live album Delicate Sound of Thunder in the summer of 1989. That album, also the first time I ever heard Shine On You Crazy Diamond, shifted my world and widened my musical universe. Although I'd purchased A Momentary Lapse of Reason on vinyl two years prior, and very much enjoyed it, I was yet to own what would become my two favorite Pink Floyd albums, The Wall and The Final Cut.

Listening to the album again this week, for the first time in decades, I was immediately transported back to the summer of 1988. For whatever reason, I have an incredibly vivid memory of sitting on the porch of my parents' house in Bermuda with the album blasting on my dad's stereo and having my mind slowly rearranged.

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TRACK: "Unforgiven" from Morning Phase (2014)

ARTIST: Beck

This is the fifth appearance in the Alphabet Soup series from Beck, and the second from 2014's Morning Phase. The album has been described as a companion piece to 2002's Sea Change, my favorite Beck album and a Desert Island Disc. Almost every credited musician from Sea Change returned for the 2014 record, which was nominated for five Grammy awards, winning three, including Album of the Year.

With twelve years between Sea Change and Morning Phase, I'm hoping that Beck graces us with a third installment in 2026; we shall see.

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TRACK: "Untouchable Face" from Dilate (1996)

ARTIST: Ani DiFranco

Dilate was the first Ani DiFranco album I ever owned, purchased on the back of this track, Untouchable Face, which appeared on the CD sampler included with the March 1997 edition of CMJ New Music Monthly. I'd long been aware of DiFranco as an artist, but I'm not sure I'd ever listened to her music before this track. I fell in love with the album and within short order I'd filled in my collection with all of her previous releases.

For about five years I couldn't get enough of Ani's music and rabidly devoured anything she released. I was lucky enough to see her in concert at the Palace Theater in Albany, NY in 1998, an amazing show. Slowly, as her music and my tastes diverged, I lost touch with her after 2005's Knuckle Down.

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TRACK: "Unloveable" from Louder Than Bombs (1987)

ARTIST: The Smiths

My public love affair with Louder Than Bombs continues. I've found myself writing about this double album quite frequently this year as it soundtracked a turbulent period in my adolescence. Looking back now I can see how much I was struggling mentally and emotionally to cope with life in life's terms. By the age of sixteen I was already abusing alcohol and drugs to numb myself, my self-esteem had cratered, despite my confident (read: arrogant) outward appearance, and I'd entered what turned out to be a mercifully brief period of self-harming.

At the time it felt that the last two songs on the album, Unloveable and Asleep had been written solely for my ears. While much of that feeling is par for the course for a moody and angst-filled teen, I certainly felt unlovable and worthless. The closing track, Asleep, while not quite romanticizing death by suicide nonetheless made a permanent escape appear attractive. Little did I know then that much darker days and years were to come. I'm so grateful I survived that period of my life and stuck around long enough to find sobriety.

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Orkney: A Day on Hoy

On Tuesday we took a ferry to the island of Hoy for about six miles of stunning coastal walking. The Old Man of Hoy, the UK’s largest sea stack at 449 feet, was our objective for the out and back walk along the coastline. The weather was gorgeous and the scenery even better; the Old Man of Hoy didn’t disappoint. Here are a handful of photos from the day:

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Here’s the link to the running playlist which is updated on a weekly basis as each new installment is published:

ALPHABET SOUP RUNNING PLAYLIST

Tracks missing from the Spotify playlist:

• Allegory by Murray Attaway (Week 02)

• Face Me and Smile by The Lover Speaks (Week 12)

• From Your Mouth by God Lives Underwater (Week 13)

• This Can’t Go On! by The Lover Speaks (Week 23)

• Two for the Show by Trooper (Week 40)

• Twenty One by Marry Me Jane (Week 40)

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