This will never fail to make me laugh. It’s just so absurd! Demented prog/grindcore fusion, complete with brutal vocals, come on, how could you not love this! I listened to this three times in a row before moving on.
Palm Reader got together with Conjurer for a split covers EP. That’s a pretty inessential premise, but it’s a fun release. This, of course, is a Rage Against the Machine track, and they do a nice job with it.
[Read More]Did you know that you needed hyperpop covers of They Might Be Giants songs? I didn’t, until I heard this this EP. And I realized, yes, I very much needed hyperpop covers of TMBG songs.
I was just saying Nitzer Ebb hadn’t aged particularly well to a buddy yesterday! And, you know, it hasn’t particularly. But again, this is part of the whole thing where industrial dance also was just endlessly remixed and re-released, which didn’t help anything. Although there is one remix of “Lightning Man” (on ONE of the multiple singles for that song) that I remember as absolutely ripping. However, I lost that EP, and I haven’t listened to it in ages and had kind of forgotten it until now. I could still pull up the riff from it in my head though.
[Read More]Canadian pop punk band Doc Hopper is really following in the footsteps of many other bands, especially Screeching Weasel here. Ask Your Mom is a really solid record, but this one (Zigs, Yaws and Zags) is just fine.
This record, the 1992 self-titled release from Lawrence, Kansas rock band Zoom, was one of my white whales for a long time. I used to play the album on my radio show pretty often, but never picked up a copy for myself. By the time I realized that I hadn’t gotten around to it, they were almost impossible to find. I just got in the habit of checking the “Z” section of every record store I went in, in the hopes that maybe a copy of this album would show up. Their followup record, Helium Octopede, was not too hard to track down, but this one eluded me. Eventually, Megan finally found a copy of it, and I was reunited. In the intervening years, the stature of the record had built up in my mind. Could it live up to those memories?
[Read More]This comes from very late in the Stax run, from 1975, just before the label’s bankruptcy brought things to a close.
Aceyalone was one of the founders of the Freestyle Fellowship, which we just had the other day. He went solo and had a string of albums ranging from solid to excellent. This comes from his 2001 album Accepted Electric, which is probably my favorite solo album of his.
[Read More]Finished a big thing at work, so let’s celebrate Five Songs style! (sitting in a basement, drinking, listening to music through one headphone) HIT IT PLEXASAURUS REX!
One day, I’m gonna put together “Screeching Weasel or Not Screeching Weasel?” as a quiz, and it’s gonna be fuckin’ hard.
Violent Femmes is one of the grand treasures in all of modern rock, the purest distilled essence of teenage frustration, captured and frozen in amber for all time. “Kiss Off” is, of course, one of the highlights of that record (an album composed almost entirely of highlights), with its instantly memorable count-up section that everybody loves singing along to. It sincerely gives me chills.
[Read More]A slow start today, but it picks up.
Yes, it’s a reading of the Lewis Carroll poem, complete with pitch shifting.
Another track from Lese Majesty, although this is kind of a throwaway. Not a great start to today.
Our second visit from my favorite band. Here we find a track from Steady Diet of Nothing, their second full album (13 Songs was originally released as two EPs). On Steady Diet, they took yet another big step away from the hardcore of Minor Threat, and a further step towards the angular art-rock that would define the post-hardcore sound. The songs on Steady Diet are slower and more deliberate than those on Repeater, and the album is just less direct overall. That makes this a little bit of a transitional album, with Fugazi learning some new tools, tools they’d master with In On The Kill Taker. That album would find them synthesizing the fury of Repeater with the more elliptical sound of Steady Diet.
[Read More]We’re majority rap today, which is totally ok with me. Hopefully it happens more often!
Here we find Devin in a rare contemplative mood, examining the sociopolitical origins of…naw, he’s rapping about women and weed. HIGHway, geddit?
Some seriously old De La Soul here, but still somehow sounding fresh. This was the proper album closer, although most versions of 3 Fee High And Rising have a second version of “Plug Tunin’” after it in the track list.
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