“I forgot how good they were” | When you re-discover music you’d forgotten or dismissed

One of the wonderful things about being into awesome music is how it’s possible to ‘rediscover’ a band that you’d either forgotten about, or otherwise thought you knew well enough to have dismissed.

While I can only speak for myself, I suspect many others may have experienced this same phenomenon. It usually occurs years after you became familiar with an artist — and inevitably, the rediscovery manifests in a random or unexpected way.

Do any of these sound familiar?

Maybe you re-assessed a band after you saw them at a gig or festival?

I had this precise experience after seeing Rammstein at their final Big Day Out appearance in Australia, all the way back in 2011. I love much of the Rammstein discography but at the time I’d dismissed 2009’s Liebe Ist Für Alle as mediocre — that was, until I saw much of it played live.

That show changed my perspective about this album. I can, with full confidence, say that I got back into Liebe Ist Für Alle with a whole new level of appreciation post-concert, precisely because I saw half of it played live in all its fiery glory (tragically, almost 10 years have elapsed since the last full-length Rammstein studio album, so until then we at least have the wholesomely glorious cheese of Lindemann).

Similarly, a good friend saw Gary Numan and subsequently had an even more electric experience. It began when she went to one of his gigs even though she was not familiar with his discography. Having elected to see Gary Numan with no preconceived expectations, she emerged as a true believer. Now she's the proud owner of vinyl test pressings and hand-written lyric sheets.

I never gave Sabaton much thought until I saw them live on the 70000 Tons Of Metal cruise. What they lack in technical wizardry they make up for with the right attitude. And songs exclusively about military history.

Maybe a friend or acquaintance got you into a new group?

Those who are into fantastic music tend to gravitate towards others who are also into fantastic music. To ask someone “are you into so-and-so artist” or “have you heard the latest this-and-that?” is not so much a conversation starter as a way of life. On the other hand, when you've figuratively heard it all, and when you’re so deeply and heavily into your music that you rarely get surprised by new sounds, it’s inevitable that new and old things occasionally get tuned out.
One way to filter out the noise is to have a trusted source, such as a respected friend, invoke your full attention and articulate a new perspective.

Indeed, I would struggle to list the vast number of artists and tracks that I’ve gotten into as a direct consequence of one-on-one conversations and recommendations from good friends.

In fact, one of my all-time favourite activities with one of my best mates involved him bringing over a bag of CDs (yes, physical media), whereupon we would have a few beers while chilling out to and talking about tunes. While on almost every occasion the evening’s proceedings would close with’90s Eurotrance YouTube videos, I rate it as one of the very best ways imaginable to discover new music.

Maybe you forgot how good an artist was until you heard track played in your randomised shuffle playlist?

My shuffled playlist, more than any other factor, brings me back to music I’d tuned out, dismissed, mentally put aside, or otherwise forgotten about for months or years. I have facts to back this up: my playlist logs the Last played date next to each track, so when I see albums and artists that I know and love, I’m often surprised by how many years have passed since I last played them.

By that I mean track six from an album I’d long forgotten about suddenly grabs my attention in ways it never had previously, and for no other reason but that it came on unannounced in that shuffled playlist.

Left to run its natural course, this phenomenon often concludes with words that might best be paraphrased as “I forgot how good they were” and “I never really paid much attention to them until...”

This once more got me listening to Hocico. Pic: Discogs.

My Hocico ‘re-discovery’

This very thought occurred to me after I’d ‘re-discovered’ Mexican EBM electro-industrial champions Hocico the other day.

I was going through some photos on my hard drive of old music purchases (I’m just that kind of person) and I came across this single from EBM industrial outfit Hocico, purchased a few years back. The single is Dog Eat Dog, released in 2010.

Many months had passed since I’d last listened to big blocks of Hocico, and two things happened after I re-listened — or ‘re-discovered’ — this single.

Firstly, it immediately reminded me of how fantastic the Hocico discography is. Indeed, I’ll concede that, in this instance, it wasn’t a case of appreciation for a band that I’d dismissed but rather a case of “I forgot how good they were”.

To the point: I’d never dismissed Hocico. They are superb. It’s just that, for whatever reason, Hocico are a group I regularly revisit, but probably not regularly enough because there remains an unimaginably vast volume of awesome music still waiting to be discovered or revisited. Indeed, my hardrive playlist, consisting almost exclusively of music copied from my physical music collection, lists 55 continuous days’ worth of music.

As I said, it’s a bit too easy to filter out things when you’re so heavily into it. Other times, things just gather dust in the archive.

55.1 days of continuous music. If I played my entire collection 24 hours a day, I would get to listen to each track just 6.6 times per year.

The other thing to occur with the ‘re-discovery’ was that I was reminded of how privileged I was to have seen Hocico live in Australia. In 2012 I caught them at the Melbourne leg, a show that I thought was fantastic even though there were some technical difficulties throughout the gig. Despite sustaining a minor back injury — not from moshing-induced action, but merely from wearing a sombrero covered in gaffer tape — I had a fantastic time and you can see more about it in the above links.

Album art and association

In conclusion, a very small stimulus can be a powerful evoker, be it a track that stands out from the shuffle playlist, or actually picking up the *gasp* album art in your hands.

Not to denigrate digital and streaming (I am a heavy Spotify and Bandcamp user as I find both are excellent ways to discover artists that I then spend money on), but I feel the very nature of the physical presence of physical media is one edge it has over digital.

To get really metaphysical for a moment: the physical release is art that you’re holding, whereas the digital release is a representation of that art. Both are entirely valid and have advantages in that they’re equally capable of fulfilling whatever it is you’re hoping to get out of them.

Of course, for those of us who still love physical media, or who listen to their digital versions of legitimate purchases in the full format that they were created in, there’s still the dilemma of how to enjoy the historically maligned single.

Here’s how I get the most out of a release that consists of four remixes and a b-side: how to appreciate the much-maligned CD single.

How to re-appreciate the maligned CD single with four remixes and a b-side

I had a nice ‘re-discovery’ moment recently when I was unexpectedly reminded of how excellent electro-industrial and EBM music can be. As is so often the case with such things, it occurred by chance after I came across this 2010 Hocico single, Dog Eat Dog, that I’d purchased some years previously.

I love physical media but I still copy all my legitimate music purchases onto my hard drive in lossless format. So, when a track from this release got played at random from my playlist, I ensured that it in turn it in turn led to the rest of the release getting played, which in turn led to more of the Hocico discography getting played.

It was one of those moments where I could genuinely say that “I’d forgotten how good they were”. Yet for all the quality and brilliantly sinister depths in Hocico’s dark and nasty EBM electro-industrial, I was confronted with an ancient dilemma faced by people who still accumulate physical media: how does one enjoy and derive the most out of a single?

All these tracks are, individually, quite good.

Played back-to-back in this original format, though, they get a bit samey. Pic: Discogs.

The CD single in the digital streaming age

The single is an anachronism in the streaming age. It’s been that way for years, ever since the advent of digital music. Indeed, I recall how the biggest physical media music chain in my home country of Australia announced almost 10 years ago that it would cease stocking CD singles.

Yet for those of us who still love physical media, or are artist or label completists, the single represents a nice break from innumerable full-length albums.

This particular single is the CD version of Hocico’s Dog Eat Dog release from 2010. A ‘lead track’ (or rather, a fairly decent track) from the Tiempos De Furia album, it was released in two versions: the six-track version here in a digipak; and a two-track seven-inch, limited to 666 copies (of course). Incidentally, both are in formats that the label and distributor can conveniently refer to as limited edition.

As I said, the single in its traditional form is an anachronism.

Dog Eat Dog

Dog Eat Dog has six tracks: the lead track, four remixes, and what would in old-parlance be referred to as the b-side.

All the tracks on Dog Eat Dog are reasonable on their own merits. Since Hocico remain a high-profile electro-industrial harsh EBM act, it’s not surprising that comparable high-profile names contributed remixes: Solitary Experiments, Aesthetic Perfection and Arsch Dolls (the latter I know nothing about other than that they seem to be a Tamtrum-related project).

Of the remixes, the most interesting is by mysterious Japanese act Diabolic Art. While the remix itself is okay-ish, its most intriguing element is the way it is indicative of Diabolic Arts’ wider style. What original material I’ve heard of this artist — and there is extraordinarily little original material out there — is an incredibly dark and Satanic-sounding mix of dancey industrial and psy-trance. Maybe you’re best to check it out yourself…

As stated, all the tracks on this release are on their own merits quite decent. Yet one lead track, four remixes and a b-side easily makes one’s attention waver.

Singles are a throwback to radio airplay days, when proper exposure for an artist meant attempting to capture as many ears as possible to lock onto one track via a medium controlled by third-parties.
Selling more singles was one way to achieve that aim. Consequently, not only did a CD single contain a track that was already available on the more expensive full-length, but it was often the only ‘good’ item on the release, with the ‘filler’ on singles notorious for consisting of forgettable remixes, acapellas, instrumentals, live versions and dubious b-sides.

Naturally that wasn’t always the case and this release is a good example of where that hadn’t occurred. However, the fact that it was such a routine occurrence goes a long way to explaining why the CD single was so maligned.

Getting the most out of the old CD single

So how do you get the most ‘satisfaction’ out of five variants of the same track and one probably-not-their-best-work b-side?

What works for me is this: get a single that isn’t inherently crap. I suggest that the best way to go about this is to embrace a simple solution. Namely, listen to good music.

No seriously, by not listening to rubbish music you’ll be pleasantly surprised by how rarely you encounter this problem.

So, assuming you are in possession of a decent release, how do you then beat the repetition while still retaining the enjoyment?

If you’re still into music the old way and have a multi-disc CD player, or if you’re actually a normal person and just streamed it or ripped it onto your device, take the single, then select an album from the same artist. Ideally, it’s not the same album from which the single originated.
For best results, pick an album with which you’re not super-familiar, or that you feel has been relegated to the not-their-best-work bin.

Then play them on shuffle.

You can now kick back and get more out of both the album and the single. The sum of their parts will be greater than their whole.

It works for me and it could work for you

There are some people who cannot abide by shuffling full albums. That’s perfectly fine. All I would say is: the combination of both, shuffled and mixed at random, spreads out the repetition of the single, while potentially providing a new perspective on a full-length album you might have otherwise dismissed.

I’ve mentioned how one of the greatest things about being into awesome music is how it’s possible to ‘rediscover’ a band that you otherwise thought you knew well enough to have dismissed.

The method of listening to singles described here does exactly that. We all have or know (or thought we know) albums that aren’t necessarily among our greatest and most beloved, but which we still know. It might be a lesser-known item from a long discography or it could be a newer album that didn’t meet expectations the first time round. Inevitably, said album does not get listened to for months or years because it presumably got dismissed long ago as not warranting further investigation.

Then a track from the second half of the album one day pops up in your playlist. In my experience, when this happens, I’ll often hear new elements and subtle things that I might have tuned out previously. At its most rewarding, when a track comes on unseen at random (because it’s hidden behind another window) my response will be “wow, that sounds amazing, what is it?” — followed by the realisation that it was an artist I’d dismissed long ago.

I could go on endlessly about why randomness and unexpectedness is such an effective way to re-appreciate music (at its most molecular, I believe it has a lot to do with deciding what our expectations will be). In practical terms, not having the half-hour block from the first half of the album to ‘desensitise’ or distract us from the second half can very much lead to a new-found appreciation for a track that I thought I knew.

That can in turn (hopefully!) lead to new-found appreciation for the previously-dismissed album as a whole and, if you’re really up for it, even further appreciation for the artist and their discography.
Personally, my ideal mix (where applicable) is a full album, a live album, and a single, all played at random and mixed in at unpredictable intervals.

Incidentally, this is one reason while I love EPs. Whereas singles are inherently short, EPs can be repeated far more often. Enough has elapsed — not just in terms of measurable, chronological time (the best kind of time), but also variety — for the first and final track on the attention-meter to reset.
An EP can be re-listened to multiple times throughout the day and it doesn’t feel like your brain is leaking out of your head from repetition.

Plus there’s a subtle kind of satisfaction to be had from completing an EP. Sort of.

Isn’t there?

As for that other much-maligned release, the full-length remix album. Well, the potential for both glory and failure is so much more pronounced there. That may require a different approach.

That time the speakers at the Hocico gig had blown up but it was still a great show

I was going through photos of music purchases the other day (I’m just that kind of person) and I came across this single from Mexican EBM industrial outfit Hocico that I’d purchased a few years back from Heartland Records — Dog Eat Dog, the first single off the 2010 Hocico album Tiempos De Furia.

The nice cover art — note the surprising lack of biohazard symbols, campy socialist realism and industrial wasteland landscapes — in turn gave my brain sufficient stimulus to motivate me to play a few tracks from it. That, in turn, reminded of when Hocico toured Australia in 2012. But before I get onto that, allow me to digress.

Hocico - Dog Eat Dog. A rare instance of the cover art on an industrial release not featuring biohazard symbols - or even an industrial wasteland. Also, Heartland Records is an amazing shop that's still going.

It's all about expectations

I recently posted how what we get out of a gig can very much depend on what we decide ahead of time we will make of it, and a lot less on what actually occurs while we’re there.

The genesis of that thought was my wholly unexpected and recent impromptu attendance at a gig by New Zealand thrashers Alien Weaponry. It was a performance on a weeknight in the middle of winter at a small venue for a band I knew almost nothing about, so I’d attended not so much with low expectations but rather with no expectations.

It turned out to be a marvelous evening, despite the fact that I wasn’t a massive fan of Alien Weaponry’s mid-tempo thrash-lite. The reasons why are amply described in the above link.

If you want the short explanation, though: essentially, those aspects that ultimately determine how we rate a gig — these being the things that are best articulated as quality and fulfilment and fun — are in many ways dependent on whether those aspects meet the expectations that we set ourselves in our mind, rather than what actually occurred.

I feel strongly about it because I am indeed privileged to live in a town that has a legitimately world-class live music scene. Seeing that photo, which in turn made me play some Hocico, which in turn made me think of the 2012 Hocico Melbourne gig, brought up some long-buried thoughts about that show.

For one thing, it was a divisive show.

It doesn't show that well in this shot but those were some sick visuals.

Hocico in Melbourne

Hocico is a big deal in EBM and industrial music. For years they've headlined or otherwise notched top-level billing across Europe. So when the first ever Hocico Australian tour was announced it was preceded by significant (and by all accounts, justifiable) hype. In particular, much was made of the energy and vigor of the live performance. Those who weren’t overly into Hocico were urged to check them out on that strength.

I will skip ahead and emphasise that I thought it was a brilliant performance. Except for a back injury which, I discovered the next morning, I’d acquired on the dancefloor as a result of my decision to wear a sombrero covered in industrial safety tape (seeing a Mexican industrial band naturally means wearing an industrial sombrero, right?), it was one of those memorable shows.

Here’s what I said about it in 2012:

“When you see live bands that you don’t avidly follow, it’s so often a case of getting into those songs you recognise and maybe even liking a few you don’t recognise. “They’re not bad,” is as absolutely stock-standard behaviour at a gig as is having a vaguely appreciative and not-very-responsive crowd for much of the time. But not so with these guys. I own a few Hocico releases and yet I can honestly say I recognised all of two songs that were played. Yet at every moment there was this powerful you-had-to-be-there energy, this awesome, dark, killer world complete with sensory-depriving lights and visuals. At the risk of running off an old cliché, it was much of a case of you could “feel” it rather than just see and hear it.”

When looking back at things I said or wrote more than half a decade ago, I sometimes get a slight cringey feeling, perhaps due to some long-passed naivety? But not this time. It really was a great show.

This was despite the fact that it was a show marred by a couple of mishaps and technical problems.

Throughout the evening, before I got there, at least one speaker had proverbially blown up. Consequently, bands started late. The Hocico show was eventually shortened — and throughout, the sound cut out more than once. On top of that, only one ‘official’ member of Hocico supposedly formed part of the show.

Years later, I was talking about that gig with a friend. A seasoned gig, festival and club goer, he said, much to my surprise, that he had not liked it and how he felt genuinely embarrassed by what transpired onstage (and presumably behind the sound console).

And yet I rate it as one of the best electronic shows I’d ever seen.

In my view, all the elements came together to form an atmosphere that was dark, heavy, foreboding and intense. This was the nightmare underworld of Hocico’s music in an audio-visual manifestation. It absolutely was, in every sense, a performance where it didn’t matter whether you knew any of their music. As I said, I have for years cultivated the view that I am exceedingly fortunate to live in a town where dark, heavy and nasty music is a regular occurrence.
Looking back at that show from years ago, it reminded me once again that what you make of a gig has a lot to do with what you tell yourself it will be, before

• As a gig-goer you cannot control what goes on with the sound. 
• You cannot prevent a speaker from blowing up. 
• You cannot make a gig start on time. On the other hand, you’re seeing (as was the case here) an international act.
• Nor can you make a missing band member materialize on stage. 

Did any of these things matter? Not to me they did. Not one little bit.

You can't control the sound or whether the band starts on time.

You can control how you feel about it.

A good gig is inherently about what you make of it, whether it’s an international electro-industrial act like or a group of teenage thrashers.

And incidentally, I’m reliably told that the correct pronunciation is hɔ-si-kho.