I’ve already talked about how different pre-Fergie BEP are from the band people know, and I’m not sure I have a second thing to observe about this record. So read that. Or don’t! Doesn’t matter to me!
Best tune off their second record, this is just a total banger. If I can recommend it, just listen to this twice and skip the BEP track. Why not?
[Read More]Daaaaaaaamn. The mid-70s Ohio Players albums were all ridiculously good.
I have a hard time picking my favorite album from the Karl Hendricks Trio. I often lean towards the first couple records from them because it felt special I was listening to them that early, and I saw them so often in those early days. But the later albums probably on-balance have better songs? I think the sweet spot might actually be this record, A Gesture of Kindness. Pre-Merge Records, but Karl’s songwriting had advanced from his earliest stuff.
[Read More]The first Wedding Present album is a perfect gem, full of the best kind of frantic jangle pop. And, of course, David Gedge’s heart breaking about every two minutes.
Looks like this is the first time we’ve had Emperor on here, so we get to go over the history of yet another important and deeply shitty bunch of Norwegians. The lineup that produced In The Nightside Eclipse featured Ihsahn and three dudes who wound up in prison, for burglary, arson (of a historic church), and murder respectively. The album reflects a lot of that ugliness, reveling in horrible sounds and dark lyrical themes. But, for all that, it’s maybe the most influential black metal album of all time. Maybe because of all that. Many following bands cribbed their style from this record, with its chilly darkness and bleak relentlessness.
[Read More]Is This Desire? is the album that really completed PJ Harvey’s transition from kickass rock artist to just plain ol’ kickass artist. Yeah, broadly, this is still a rock record, but she started doing so much more. The arrangements incorporate so much more beyond just stardard rock instrumentation, the songs range much wider, and the whole thing is so much more sophisticated. That’s not to say that the first couple records aren’t brilliant, they are, but this is just a different beast.
[Read More]Before he was a tv host, before he was an ubiquitous (and now old) meme, before he was a famous rapper who appeared in video games, Xzibit was a promising young rapper who put out a couple albums that were pretty good. This is from the first of those records, from 1996, sounding every inch like it was from 1996.
I kind of poke fun at the Blue Meanies here quite a bit, because, well, they just doesn’t appeal to me much any more. But the horns sound pretty good here!
[Read More]Escovedo is one of those artists that has had a long recording career, and someone whose name I’d seen in a bunch of places, but I didn’t really know anything about him. I picked up what was, at the time, his latest record…and still don’t really know much about him. It’s good, but didn’t really grab me all that much either.
Ode to Joy is the latest Wilco album, from 2019. It comes after two solo Jeff Tweedy records, which I thought were better than the previous couple Wilco records. So, is it more like Warm (good) or Star Wars (bad)? More good than bad, I think? It’s not top-tier, but it’s a solid record.
[Read More]The Busters were something of a transitional band, firmly rooted in two-tone and sounding an awful lot like Madness, but on Moon Ska and chronologically more a part of the third wave. So they kind of bridge the gap, especially in things like the production here, which is extremely 80s. This hasn’t aged particularly well, and the production is at least a pretty big part of it.
[Read More]This kind of sounds like a Death From Above 1979 track, a demonstration of the range that Boris have displayed over their long and incredible career.
I’m not going to rehash my schtick with the Shins here (you can read it here), but I’ll instead note: I could have sworn I had a copy of Chutes Too Narrow (which is not this record), and I do not appear to have it in the library. Did I not rip it? Did I lose it? It’s the sort of question that kind of haunts me a little. How many records failed to make their way into my library or got lost during its peripatetic journey to its current home. Was I going to listen to it? Not the point!
[Read More]One of Redding’s iconic hits, this is actually a much older song, more than thirty years old when he recorded what is by now the definitive version. The very slow build up throughout the song is such a delight, a masterclass in pacing.
After a couple albums of relatively accessible music in The Hunter and Once More ‘Round The Sun, where Mastodon kind of stepped away from their most elaborate tendencies, they made something of a return to the style with Emperor of Sand. Part of that is the return of the same producer who helped them make Crack the Skye, part of that is the desire to make a concept album again, but whatever it is, it’s my favorite of the latter-day Mastodon albums. Although I haven’t really fully digested the most recent one, so I don’t know about that record yet.
[Read More]I’ve sung the praises of this record, but the STS and RJD2 colab from 2015 is such a gas. RJD2 is in great form, and STS is able to really bring it home on that platform. A really delightful record.
Hell yeah!
Lambchop’s Nixon was something of a breakthrough, gaining a lot of press attention and elevating the profile of the band. Their arrangements had been getting more and more elaborate, and Nixon is pretty busy (as Lambchop goes). So the question was, on their followup, would they keep going in that direction? No, as it turns out. Is A Woman is something of a retrenchment. The songs are pretty languid, and it’s clear at this point that Lambchop was going to just blaze their own path through music, being impossible to categorize but recognizable as just being themselves. From this album forward, Lambchop albums pretty much just always sound like Lambchop albums, and not a whole lot else.
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