“I’m calling both games” is also the rationale I gave to my professors on why I skipped both of my classes on Tuesday, February 17th.

I blame the baseball team.

See, it was only supposed to be basketball. Iowa vs Nebraska, 8 pm. Well after both classes would have ended for the day.

The baseball home opener was supposed to be a week later on February 24th, but they saw an opportunity to fit a game in between their season opening tournament in Arizona and their first weekend series against Florida Atlantic. That’s how Division III UW-Platteville found themselves in Iowa City for what would turn out to be a historic beatdown.

Of course, we didn’t know that going in. The Hawkeyes lost three midweek games last season and had just allowed 13 runs to Northeastern on Sunday, so we figured the final score might end up something like 13-5 Iowa.

With first pitch at 3:00 pm, five hours before tip-off for basketball, we jumped at the opportunity to be there and were rewarded with 50 degree weather.

That’s important because all KRUI baseball games are called outdoors. Color commentator Logan Melia and I were planning to call the February 24th game regardless of the weather, so we really lucked out.

“God, the pop of the mitt, Ryan. I’m tickled to be back,” Logan said after the first pitch.

Four innings later, with the score 17-0 in favor of Iowa, his enthusiasm had dampened, as had his nose, which was running relentlessly. 

“Once your team scores the 22nd run, you start thinking: ‘let’s wrap it up’. It gets to a point where you pretty much know what team’s going to win and that point was reached probably about three hours before the end of the game,” Logan said later that day.

Morale dropped to mutinous levels after the seventh inning concluded and Iowa was up 27-3, when the usual 10 run mercy rule was not applied.

At that point, the sky had undergone a transition from light gray to baby blue to orange and pink and purple before the sun finally disappeared for good. Without it, the wind that had been chilly all game became a polar vortex.

When I turned to Logan and said “sounds like we’re playing two more”, his agonized response was a sign that we had seen enough and should head across the street to Carver-Hawkeye Arena.

Overall impressions from the baseball team: don’t go to a game if you have something else to do later in the day. There will be a lot of runs scored at the Banks this year.

Next, we met up with Cole Krueger, who I would be calling basketball with. 

At the start of the season, nobody thought never-won-a-march-madness-game Nebraska would be ranked top 10 in the country in late February. But as the Huskers kept winning and Iowa hung around in the standings, it quickly shaped up to become the biggest game of the year so far for the Hawkeyes.

And man did they need this one. We’d been saying they were going to get one of the two home games against Purdue and Nebraska, though last Saturday’s demoralizing 78-57 loss to the Boilermakers cast some doubt on that theory.

Where Nebraska had wins over highly ranked Illinois and Michigan State teams, Iowa was a team without a signature result on the season. They’d had chances, like having halftime leads against Iowa State and Purdue on the road, but had never capitalized. Worse, they had been struggling recently, with a bad road loss to Maryland and the aforementioned blowout at home to Purdue. 

Their most impressive game this season might have been outlasting a fiery USC team at the end of January, which was a game they were always supposed to win anyway.

But something flipped in this one, as the Hawks defensive intensity, coupled with a vicious crowd, frustrated the Huskers all night.

Head coach Ben McCollum has made a point to thank the fans after every game and let them know how important they are to the team. Although attendance has been up this year compared to last, I had yet to see a student section as packed as it was for this one. Filled in from top to bottom, clad in black. A healthy amount of Nebraska fans in red and white were scattered throughout the stands as well.

Pretty quickly, it became apparent that this was going to be the opposite of the baseball game earlier. Blowout vs nailbiter. Scoring at will vs a defensive slog. Can you believe that Iowa baseball scored more runs than either basketball team had at halftime?

Cole kept saying how it felt like Iowa could have been up 10, but both teams struggled from three all night. And in the second half, things began to get chippy. Multiple players went down away from the play, always without a whistle.

Down the stretch, as had been the case all year, Bennett Stirtz made the difference. With six minutes to go, he went down hard after contacting Brayden Frager on a layup. Then after a break that gave him a chance to walk it off, Stirtz hit a sidestep three in Frayger’s face to give the Hawks a 50-45 lead.

With Iowa up two scores and under a minute to go, the fans began to make their way to the staircases.

Not to go up and beat traffic. Down to rush the court.

Iowa fans have been starving for a storming opportunity. Twice during the football season they lined up against Indiana and Oregon, and twice they were sent home empty handed, watching their team lose the lead in the final two minutes.

Some icy free throws from Cooper Koch and Tavion Banks made it official. An outpouring of black engulfed the court to celebrate the Hawks’ first signature win in the Ben McCollum era.

Then, we quickly signed off the air and went down to join in on the celebrations.

“I just feel so lucky to have been there to see that game,” Logan said.

“It was just like a monkey off the back feeling,” Cole added.

Even though the team’s March fate still hangs in the balance, this one will go a long way to help them realize it.

The post I’m Calling Both Games appeared first on KRUI Radio.

What is your favorite genre of music to listen to?

“I would say I mostly listen to lo-fi indie. I’ve been listening to a lot of sensitive indie recently, kind of on the grungy side of things.”

What is “lo-fi” indie?

“I would say an example of lo-fi indie would be Neutral Milk Hotel, but a lot of music from the 90s-earlier 2000s would also fall under this genre, like LCD Soundsystem, Modest Mouse, Slowdive, bands like that. I’ve found that there has been a huge resurgence of lo-fi recently! I mean, you might even think of a band like Beach House as being kind of lo-fi. The best way to think about it is like on old radios, how you can turn the dial from lo-fi to hi-fi. Lo-fi gives you more of that buzzy, high static-y sound, whereas hi-fi gives a super clear sound. I guess contemporary examples of lo-fi are Broken Social Scene, Angel Olsen or Mothers, which is a pretty new band.”

How long have you been listening to this genre of music?

“I feel like I started delving into indie in my later years of high school. I entered the scene around 2008/2009, which was a prime time for indie music. I feel like this time period was the peak of when bands like Feist and Vampire Weekend started emerging. It was also during the hipster revolution, where everyone wanted to be a hipster, so it was super easy to access that kind of music.”

What do you think you would categorize your music taste as?

“I think, for me, when organizing the characteristics of my music taste, it’s easiest to think in terms of decades, so things that have a 50s flare, or a 70s flare, or a 90s flare. I guess it’s all of the odd-numbered decades in a way. I love 50s music because of jazz like I love Chet Baker, and because of true country, which was the genre of Johnny Cash and Patsy Cline. I like things that are rough around the edges but have a real emotional core. I guess as far as the 70s goes, I’ve been listening to a lot of Fleetwood Mac and Steely Dan for some reason this year. I don’t know why, but it’s kept me so solid. There’s so much of a revival of the 70s right now with bands like Tennis. And the 90s of course, we are just living in the 90s all over again right now.”

What are you recommending that I review in my column?

“I picked an album called ‘Tender Buttons’, by a band called Broadcast. It’s a cool, kind of moody girl band from the early 2000s. I think the album came out in 2004. It’s kind of experimental and it didn’t quite get the acclaim that I feel like it deserves. It’s got super weird lyrics. It reminds me of a band that’s currently out right now called Melody’s Echo Chamber, which is produced by Tame Impala. It’s a super cool album and I hope you like it.”

How long have you been listening to Broadcast?

“I found them like three or four years ago. It’s just been a staple album for me. To me, there’s a sense of refinement to it, like they never get too over the top, but they build such an emotional core through really strange lyrics and minimalist sound, and there’s also that lo-fi, grungy sort of element at the base of it.”

Broadcast was an English indie band that was founded in 1995 by Trish Keenan and James Cargill. The band released a total of three albums. Throughout the majority of the band’s career, they had other members who played instruments for various periods of time, but Trish and James stuck together until 2011 when Trish suddenly died from the swine flu.

“Tender Buttons” was the third and final album by Broadcast, which was released in 2005. There are a total of fourteen tracks on it, making the album 40 minutes and 34 seconds long. I listened to all of the songs and decided that I would review the album in its entirety, the song with the namesake of the album, my favorite and my least favorite. Let’s start with the namesake.

So the title of the album, as you know, is “Tender Buttons”, and there is a song with that title as well. I really, really like the intro to this song. It mixes the strumming of a guitar with the strokes of a cello. It’s really cool. You kind of move your body along to it…until the words start. I say “words” and not “lyrics” because Trish keeps a monotone throughout the entire song and just repeats random words. I noticed that she says words that being with the letter C nearly 30 times. I don’t know what the significance of the words are…they don’t make any sense together. The last few phrases she says are “Die. Cut. Die. Cut”, over and over again. It’s kind of scary if you listen to the words…so don’t. Here’s the link.

My favorite song on this album is “Tears in the Typing Pool”. I think it’s because it has a Lana Del Rey sound to it. Lana does try to have a lo-fi sound to her music, now that I think about it. She idolizes music from the 60s, so it makes sense. I noticed that this song is the only one out of out of the entire album that is acoustic and clear enough for me to understand the lyrics, which make more sense than in the previous song! I think it’s about an oncoming break-up. That’s just how I interpreted it, though. Give it a listen and see what you think.

My least favorite song on this album was “Arc of a Journey”. I hate to say that I disliked it because the first four minutes of it were fine, but the final minute of the song just really hurt my ears. Honestly. It was miserable to listen to. I don’t know what is happening but it sounds absolutely horrible. You’ve been warned! The instruments used in the good part of the song kind of remind me of a Postal Service song, who I like! I just didn’t like the ending! I can’t understand the lyrics in here, so I had to look them up. They don’t make sense, but they’re all about space and constellations so I guess they’re supposed to go together…I’m just not deep enough to interpret them. If you choose to listen to this, beware! After four minutes, your ears may or may not start to bleed.

After learning about lo-fi, I can confidently say that “Tender Buttons” falls into that category. It has a really grainy and static-y sound to it. Trish’s vocals are so muffled that I can’t really understand the lyrics, but I guess that’s the point of the genre. I appreciate the unique use of instruments throughout the album and the clashing of notes found in nearly every song. The sound is really unique; it’s not eerie but it’s not comforting either. As a side-note, there are a couple of songs that are completely instrumental in this album. No vocals at all! I wasn’t expecting that, but I liked it. This is the perfect album to listen to when hanging out with your best friend on a Friday night, doing absolutely nothing. Here is a link to the entire album if you want to give it a go

So…yeah. That was an interesting ride. I think that Broadcast has a really interesting sound, but I don’t think I’m as into lo-fi as I hoped I would be. For me, to get connected to a song, I have to understand the lyrics and they have to have meaning, but in this case, it was hard for me to understand what Trish was singing so I couldn’t feel as many emotions as I had hoped. That may not be the case for other people, it’s just what I found. On the other hand, the more I listen to this album, the more I like it. Also, just putting this out there: I am not liable for anything that may or may not have happened to you after that last song ended. Just saying.

If you want to read more about Trish Keenan’s legacy she left behind, read this article published by Pitchfork.

James Cargill recently dropped an album with his new band, Children of Alice, which is in memoriam of Trish, so if you want to listen to more music that is associated with this band, click here.

And, as always, if you want to follow me on Instagram, give me a follow here!

The post The Rolling Bean Promo: “Tender Buttons” by Broadcast appeared first on KRUI Radio.