#8 - Stratosphere

#8
Artist: Duster
Album: Stratosphere
Year of Release: 1998
Label: Up

This is the most recent "discovery" of mine on this countdown.  The YouTube algorithm of all things recommended it to me back in January.  Because of this, it has been the standout part of my personal soundtrack for the past few months.  It's a really good combination of shoegaze and space rock that checks all of my boxes.  Simple enough, right?

But there's a catch.  Something that's really stuck out to me as I've gone through this list is just how much I associate a lot of these records with the time and place when they were new to me.  This process of recollection is not just limited to the obvious either - some re-listens are digging up memories I haven't retrieved perhaps ever.  Luckily, uncovering these associations has been a largely pleasant experience.  My past is not all sunshine and roses, but I do a good enough job living in the moment and finding the small pleasures such that even memories of relatively difficult times point towards those good aspects.

So what memories will this album draw to mind?  The combined weight of the pandemic, the election, and other things have precipitated the closest thing to an existential crisis I have ever experienced.  I am lucky in many ways and am getting by fine, but still my brain is understandably very weird right now!  When things return to some semblance of normal and I hit play on "Gold Dust," what memories will awaken?  Will this tendency of mine limit this great music to the here and now?  This is obviously of extremely small concern compared to...everything else.  Still I wonder what the sum of such small concerns will amount to and what toll that will have on our collective psyche.

There's a second more individualized aspect to this, too.  It has to do with the rest of Duster's discography, specifically their 2000 follow-up Contemporary Movement.  The album has a similar rating to Stratosphere on Allmusic and Discogs which leads me to think that I may like it as much or even more than their debut.  But I haven't listened to it yet.  While it's pretty common for me to let individual albums breathe before digging into the next one, this feels different than that.  I sense that part of my reluctance is related to my fears that this will become the next "pandemic record."  I seem to have developed a new defense mechanism where I wall myself off from any avoidable disappointment, no matter how inconsequential it may be.

Why is this the form my anxiety has taken?  If I'm being honest it probably has something to do with the parallel development in my relationship with anxiety's good friend, depression.  I've had struggles with this over the years, but had found a way to live with it largely through a) staying busy, and b) placing emphasis on looking forward to things like sports, TV, and going places.  This strategy is obviously less tenable now.  On the staying busy front, I am indeed busy right now what with the kids being home all of the time.  But it's a much different and formless kind of busy that actually has the opposite effect on my brain.  And on the looking forward front, most of my prior totems are now either non-existent or fraught with peril.

The resulting pivot has looked...eerily similar to the other one.  I've made a list of stuff to catch up on now that I have some free evenings, and just like with Duster I'm putting off some of the good stuff (the new season of Bosch, my Leftovers re-watch that's way overdue).  Part of the reason for this is the same avoidance, but I also think it's a way to artificially extend the remaining stuff that I do actually look forward to.  And I'm finding new ways to stay busy, most notably by writing all these dumb blog posts.  So in the end I'm still avoiding my anxiety and deflecting my depression, but at least I am doing so in new and creative ways.  Calamity Jane from the Deadwood series said it best: "Every day takes figuring out all over again how to fucking live."

To tie this back around to the putative subject of the post, here's some lyrics from the second track "Heading for the Door" that sums all of this up in many fewer words.  Should have just done this.  Oops.

Stumbling through the crowd
I was heading for the door
Remembering a cooler party
Angels started in song
There was something in their eyes
The time was standing still