This week – the last /Tuesday Ten in March, or thereabouts – I reach nineteen years of the /Tuesday Ten series, and post number 628. As I mentioned at the beginning of the year, I’m pretty much counting down to the end of /amodelofcontrol.com now, and this week marks a year until posting ends on the site, as the last post on the site will be the /Tuesday Ten that marks the twentieth anniversary of the series in March 2027.

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/amodelofcontrol.com now has a Patreon page, at this stage purely as a potential way of helping to cover the running costs of the site. There is absolutely no compulsion to do so: if you feel you can chuck a small amount to the site each month, that would be appreciated.

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But I’m not done yet, and I still have a variety of subjects to cover over the next year. This week, I’m taking a perhaps bleaker turn, what with the utter fucking chaos and idiocy of the world right now, as I look at the subject of oblivion. I’ve looked at something similar before – particularly apocalypse – but this is a different take, with very, very different songs.

Thanks, as always, to everyone that suggests songs. This one had less suggestions, but then, it turned out to be a difficult subject to nail down.

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A quick explanation for new readers (hi there!): my Tuesday Ten series has been running since March 2007, and each month features at least ten new songs you should hear – and in between those monthly posts, I feature songs on a variety of subjects, with some of the songs featured coming from suggestion threads on Facebook.

Feel free to get involved with these – the more the merrier, and the breadth of suggestions that I get continues to astound me. Otherwise, as usual, if you’ve got something you want me to hear, something I should be writing about, or even a gig I should be attending, e-mail me or drop me a line on Facebook (details below).

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/Terrorvision
/Oblivion
/How To Make Friends and Influence People

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Keighley rockers Terrorvision are much-loved in this house – as they are by many of my friends, as it turns out – and their knack with a catchy hook made them chart regulars for many years, and just as their popularity was waning in 1999, Mint Royale remixed Tequila, and they hit Number Two in the charts. That said, the band reputedly hate the song these days, and don’t play it live…

One of their earlier breakthrough hits was Oblivion, a song with an almighty sing-along hook that’s impossible to deny (and will live rent-free in your head for days again now, sorry about that). A slyly political song that appears to be digging at middle-class rebellion and a desire to obliterate your opponents, rightly or wrongly, let’s just say that this is about as happy as this week gets…

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/Killing Joke
/Millenium
/Pandemonium

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I’m kinda surprised, as we’re watching the world collapse around us in real time, that Jaz Coleman hasn’t popped up to tell us “told you so”. He was some way ahead of the times: he moved to Iceland in 1982 to escape an apparently impending apocalypse, and while Killing Joke’s music was never actually bright and pop-oriented, their 1985 album Night Time (still their best to these ears) somehow crashed the mainstream with the searing Love Like Blood, a song that compares love with the passion of a warrior (or something like that).

By the mid-90s, Killing Joke weren’t maybe the force they were. Or so we thought, as the album Pandemonium was stellar. Millenium has a monstrous groove, as if the gods themselves had got involved (the vocals were famously recorded within the Great Pyramid of Giza), and Coleman’s lyrics appear to be commentary by gods or a saviour watching over the world, and willing oblivion to come after all.

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/Screaming Trees
/Shadow of the Season
/Sweet Oblivion

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At points, Mark Lanegan seemed to be on a fast track to oblivion. A teenage alcoholic and drug addict, and a man that sang like he’d seen the worst of life and lived to tell the tale, his rich voice added something to every project he worked on, but my first love of his work remains the Screaming Trees. What’s interesting, too, is that while Dust is universally lauded as the band’s move toward rootsier, more thoughtful sounds, just one listen to Shadow of the Season reminds that the hints of the sound of Dust were present some years before.

A rolling, powerful song that sees Lanegan wishing to escape the shadow of failures past, but even when he prays to the Lord, all he’s promised is “pain and misery“: so aiming instead for oblivion, presumably to drink it all away, is the answer.

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/Manic Street Preachers
/This Is Yesterday
/The Holy Bible

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In some respects, this song is the reason that this subject was considered for a /Tuesday Ten: as a little while ago, my wife challenged me to include every song from The Holy Bible in the series, and featuring This Is Yesterday is the last one. It is a song that stands apart from the white-heat and fury of much of the album, being more measured and reflective, and despite the connotations of the song, it is generally agreed that this was a song Nicky Wire wrote the lyrics for rather than Richey Edwards.

Which is interesting, as it seems to be about a person staring oblivion, or at least an end of something, directly in the face while they consider their past and the mistakes that may have brought them there. Maybe it needed someone watching on to truly nail the state that Edwards was in at this point – he of course vanished just months after the release of the album.

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/Emma Ruth Rundle
/Blooms of Oblivion
/Engine of Hell

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Emma Ruth Rundle’s music has always felt like it is teetering on the edge of oblivion, and indeed her life is another that has been peppered with drug and alcohol issues, and her songs reflect a deep, uncomfortable darkness. Her last album Engine of Hell was little more than her voice with sparse piano and guitar accompaniment, and this scorching song sees her investigating how she has managed to survive the most testing of circumstances, how she avoids oblivion and finds ways to keep on going.

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/Swans
/The Great Annihilator
/The Great Annihilator

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Swans, no matter which era of the band you listen to, are another that seem to circle the abyss and open their arms to oblivion. But particularly in their late-80s/early-90s era, which took in (very) dark folk influences and a more melodic sound, there was also an occasional sense of hope that any such end could be avoided. The astonishing album The Great Annihilator was perhaps the best exemplar of that, and the tumultuous title track seems to link the microquasar and black hole of the same name with the concept of transcendence after the end of the world and life as we know it. As always, it’s happiness and smiles when you’re listening to Michael Gira’s booming baritone, right?

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/Assemblage 23
/Let The Wind Erase Me
/Storm

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Probably one of the most beloved A23 songs – and a rousing fan favourite live, too – is, like most of Tom Shear’s songs, rather darker in tone than the synth hooks that dominate the song and bring it into the light. I’ve always considered it to be a song about trying to put on a brave face to the world while you are dealing with the weight of everything, just wishing the pain would stop in any way possible, and oblivion in some form is often one option. Having dealt with exactly this, often the challenge is to understand who you can open up to: mental health struggles are a bitch.

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/This Is Radio Silence
/Aphelion
/Crux EP

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A rare track suggested by the artist themselves, and being exactly the kind of song I was looking for. An unusually spare song from TIRS: their songs are often pieces of almost infinite depth, such is the density of the mix, but here Aphelion keeps things on a tight leash, with Ben McLees’ vocals given much more prominence than I’ve come to expect. And there’s one line that sums everything up, and that needs no further comment: “Free-falling head-first into oblivion still feels less like burning out and more like giving in”

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/Franz Ferdinand
/Walk Away
/You Could Have It So Much Better

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Oblivion doesn’t necessarily need to be the end of everything – sometimes, that oblivion can be the events that affect just a small number of people, or indeed one person. And this bleak song by Franz Ferdinand – a reminder that they weren’t always a band that had an oblique take on blowing up dancefloors with remarkably catchy, intelligent songs – reminds that personal oblivion can just be dealing with the utter wreckage of the end of a relationship that has upended the lives of two people.

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/Loma
/Unbraiding
/How Will I Live Without a Body?

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US group Loma – a band new to me, as it happens, and an offshoot of sorts from Shearwater – are dealing with a similar subject, it seems, on the stark beauty of Unbraiding. Emily Cross’s desolate, pitched-down vocals give the sound of someone at the end of their tether, and Unbraiding gives voice to that very emotion, as they resolve to walk away from a situation that will likely take them both down under the surface. Frankly it’s such a bleak song that it makes some of the other heavy-hitters here feel like uplifting music…