So I went to the judo club today, for a two-hour review of my blue belt and brown belt throws (at some point I’ll be grad­ing for my brown belt; I’m not sure if it’ll be this spring or next fall), and then after that I went and did some shop­ping. I bought a short-sleeve white dress shirt, which I’ll need for ref­er­ee­ing in judo (refs wear black socks, charcoal-grey pants, a white shirt, navy tie, and a navy sportcoat–very natty), and then I ducked into a music store. Cruised the aisles, not look­ing for any­thing in par­tic­u­lar, just… look­ing. Browsing.

In the used CDs sec­tion, my eyes lit upon it: 13 Engines’ Per­pet­ual Motion Machine. I had the tape (I still do, some­where, though I’d be hard pressed to find it), and it’s one of the very few albums where I like every sin­gle song. There are the straight-ahead rock­ers, like “Bred in the Bone” and “Smoke and Ashes”, and there are a fair num­ber of moody, slower num­bers, like “Moment of Clar­ity” and one of my favourites, “The Golden Age”:

So the Golden Age passed away to Sil­ver
But that was long ago
There were swim­ming holes and the Vaude­ville
They gave way to this
Bronze turned itself slowly into iron
And here we are today

If what you say has the grain of truth
The Age of Rust is soon…

The instru­ments are just the way I like ‘em–the bass is a cen­tral part of the music, not just a back­ground rhythm engine, and the gui­tar is well-played. They can do the fuzz-out wall of sound just as well as the soft melan­choly sway of a down-tempo tune.

(Aside: “The Golden Age” just started play­ing on my CD changer’s Ran­dom. Good timing!)

Four­teen tunes, and not a one of them a miss.

Oh, and because it was in the second-hand shelf, and prob­a­bly had been there a while (it’s an album from 1993), the price was right: $4.99 plus taxes.

Ah, smi­ley times…