Fuck yeah, Neko Case doing a convincing June Carter impression here, great stuff.
This is from a split LP with Janitors Against Apartheid, the final track, and it’s…look, it’s not good. I mean, even if you skip all the silence from the CD fuckery, this is still just fuckin’ around. This record also got Dill Records flattened in a lawsuit over the cover art, so it’s just a bad scene all around.
[Read More]A collision of early grunge elements here! This is from the second Soundgarden EP, Fopp, from 1988. It’s a time when Soundgarden was still figuring out who they were, and their sound was still mostly a melding of hard rock and garage rock and wasn’t yet what would be recognizable as grunge. But it goes further than that! This song is actually a cover of Green River, the proto-grunge band from the mid-80s that would spawn both Mudhoney (Mark Arm and Steve Turner) and Pearl Jam (Stone Gossard and Jeff Ament). The elements that would make up grunge were starting to come in to focus even in 1985, when Green River recorded this song, with Steve Turner’s filthy riffs in particular being a building block of the genre. The music made by these bands wasn’t quite yet divorced enough from hard rock, didn’t have quite enough of the grime or the muscular confidence that would allow them to break into something new. But it was coalescing.
[Read More]In a fine concept for an album, Death Don’t Wait (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack) is a soundtrack for a non-existent spy movie. I’m already a sucker for spy music, so I enjoy this quite a bit.
There are definitely moments on Houdini where the idea of the Melvins breaking big in the wake of Nirvana and Soundgarden didn’t seem quite so crazy. This song, for instance, would seem to me to be perfectly palatable to the grunge crowd. The record didn’t really break big, because even its most marketable moments are pushing the boundaries for a mainstream crowd, but at least you can kind of see the outline of an idea here.
[Read More]We’ve had this one before.
One of the more memorable tunes from 69 Love Songs, probably due to the vocals, but I do like the guitar part on it as well.
Ah, Mammoth Weed Wizard Bastard. Say it soft, and it’s almost like praying. Say it loud, and there’s stoner metal playing. Anyway, here’s ten minutes of fuzz, enjoy!
[Read More]While I really like their later work, Rising Down is probably the last record I consider a truly great Roots record. It’s hard to say it’s their best, given how much I love Things Fall Apart and Game Theory (and Phrenology), but if it’s not quite there, it’s very, very close. It’s super focused and the band knows exactly what they’re doing. It feels like it didn’t get a ton of attention, but it should have, it’s awesome.
[Read More]Here’s a rarity: Dasher is led by Kylee Kimbrough, who sings and plays drums. Pretty neat! It’s sorta post-hardcore, sorta noise, and is a fun record.
So, this little song leads into the centerpiece of double-album The Seer, the 32-minute epic “The Seer”. Michael Gira manages to capture drama in a way very, very few people manage in music. He doesn’t sound cheesy or overwrought, because his music can carry the weight he places on it. This stuff is best experienced in album form, but it’s an amazing record.
[Read More]Beyond the disorienting pluderphonics thing being totally in Five Songs’ wheelhouse, anything which calls Jim Morrison a moron is A-OK with us here.
The Melvins’ 2021 release, Five Legged Dog, is an all-acoustic exploration of their sound. It features songs from across their entire catalog, alongside some assorted covers of other bands. This tune comes from their major label breakthrough (?) Houdini, and it’s fun to hear an alternate take on it like this. It’s impressive how heavy they can get this to sound without the usual roaring amps. This is an inessential record, but any Melvins weirdo needs to hear it.
[Read More]Now, see, if you remember that Iskra track from yesterday, you might say that this sounds like the same shit. But if you listen to enough of this garbage, you’ll hear differences: the vocals sound like they are yelled through a bullhorn instead of strangled, and this is just relentless blasts. So, grindcore, not something else. If it’s just focused on speed and aggression, you’ve got yourself some grindcore.
[Read More]You know, I think the zone is actually bathypelagic, not bathyalpelagic. Come on The Ocean, get your shit together!
Jon Wahl really has one of the unique voices in rock, and certainly in underground rock. He sounds like he was transported out of a cartoon or something to front a blues-flecked rock band. Very strange! This was Claw Hammer’s third album, but the immediate prior one was a full-album cover of Devo’s debut record, and nobody heard the first one. Well, I certainly haven’t, and I’ve listened to a lot of this band. At any rate, coming off that cover record, this showed that they could really light it up with originals.
[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.
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