It has only been going a few weeks but already we have had some cracking contributions from some amazing artists to our Tracks Of My Teens feature. We are ever grateful for the willingness of these lovely people to offer up such intimate details and secrets of their youth and how music affected them. This week we get to feature another one of our favourite acts, and friends of the Blog, Conveyor. As we have supported them, Conveyor have supported us and we love them for it.
Not only did they give us a track by track insight to their masterful debut album (which featured in our Top 10 albums of 2012), but they also kindly provided the prize for our very first competition. Now, they have agreed to let us look deep into their past, well the past of T. J. Masters at least, and find out what music made him tick as a younger man in our latest Tracks Of My Teens.
XTC – “Humble Daisy”
I’m still trying to figure out how my parents were indoctrinated into the weird sort of fervent underground that comprises American XTC fans. They’re (my parents) not that cool, and neither was this band, but the music that they made mysteriously transcends most of us. This record in particular came out when I was a kid; so much of my pre-adolescent development is scored to these tunes. This song in particular stands up to repeated adult scrutiny; I’m still not sure that any other matches the quirky complexity and beauty of this one in its arrangement or lyricism.
The Flaming Lips – “Lightning Strikes the Postman”
This entire record sits like an LSD-soaked rock in the pit of your stomach with a kind of alt-rock-pop heaviness that makes Weezer’s “Pinkerton” blush. I have yet to discover a record that is simultaneously as thoroughly melodic and noisy as this one; classic I-IV-V is repeatedly deployed but obscured under layers of distorted filth that shimmer underneath woozy slide guitars. It’s almost too much for my adolescent head to handle, having been weaned off of 90s alternative rock radio and left wondering where the Beatles really fit into any of this.
Warren Zevon – “The French Inhaler”
“And now here is a guy who is really doing it,” I’m thinking at 17 or 18 years old. The marriage of wit, sarcasm, and honesty tucked into strong, major-key piano songwriting provides an outlet for the deranged kids for whom Elton John just isn’t enough. Alternately puerile and smarter than you or I, Zevon flips through a Rolodex of fucked up, washed up, dried up L.A. slobs. The stories are retroactively Lynchian, full of weird characters that you have to pity because we’ve all seemingly been there at one point or another: “Your pretty face / you look so wasted.”
Conveyor‘s eponymous debut album, Conveyor, is out now on Paper Garden records. You can order the album here on clear vinyl, CD or digitally. Below is their latest video, for “Woolgatherer”.
Alphabet Bands 
my teenage soundtrack was certainly mundane in comparison