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Horizontal HoldThis Heat

This Heat: Horizontal Hold (from This Heat, 1979)

A confession that will bewilder not only myself but anyone who knows me at all: I had never heard This Heat until this morning. They have perennially been on my “I should hear that” list—for decades!—but I did not get around to picking up one of their albums until, by chance, I saw it used at Amoeba on Saturday night.

There are a lot of bands or artists on that list of mine. And frankly I love that list, without shame and without reservation. I don’t feel guilty about that list of blind spots; I revel in that list. If someone made you a list and said “probably everything on here will blow your mind,” my advice is to take that list with patience—life is long, so have let beautiful and wonderful things stay in your future, you know? No rush. There still remains a lot of obvious stuff on that list—This Heat is hardly the most glaring blind spot in my musical knowledge—and that’s okay with me.

Okay, no rush. I stand by that. But. But! “Horizontal Hold,” wow. I mean, this is a template for almost everything I loved in the 90s. Whatever you want to call it - post-rock, math rock, emo, whatever. This is the prototype. Like, the prototype! This song makes me reevaluate everything I loved for at least a decade of my life, when my musical interests were a lot more narrow but in a lot of ways more intense, too. One listen to “Horizontal Hold” and I was nostalgic, baffled, and awed. One of those “this was made when?” moments. Wow.

The Peel Session is even better!