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]Somehow, Pussy Galore manages to sound greasy. Some of that is the trashy production - the clattering drums, the bullhorn vocals, the squalling guitars. But even beyond that, there’s a feel to things that kind of make you feel like you need a bath after listening to it. It’s great!
There’s nothing more reliable in this world than Killdozer grimly pounding away. It’s always going to sound like power equipment being used improperly, and leave you feeling like perhaps you shouldn’t have listened to it.
[Read More]Psalm 69 represents the last time Ministry was fun and not just a repetitive mess. “Jesus Built My Hotrod” is the highlight, but the album is chock full of similarly punishing industrial metal. I think the way to approach Ministry is to probably start with this album and then work your way backwards until it stops appealing, and just pretend that this is their last album.
[Read More]Your first instinct might be to think that Rob “Bucket” Hingley’s accent here is a terrible put-on. But no, Rob was born in England, so he earned this. At any rate, this is from the first Toasters album, and it captures a band still developing their sound.
One of the centerpieces of Flow, an album where J.G. Thirlwell ramped up the cinematic nature of his music to another level, while making sure that the perversion of that sound was also present. The noise, the disturbing sounds, the strange interludes - it all combines to a disorienting song that really takes you on a journey. To somewhere. This is one of his very best albums.
[Read More]I was at Shut Up & Sit Down Expo over the weekend, and it was fun, although I think that that was mostly because it was a getaway weekend for Megan and I. But, it was a good pretext to get out of town! Also, somebody asked me for my autograph. Super cool!
We’ve now gone back in Ministry’s catalog far enough to reach their first good album. The flaccid synth-pop of With Sympathy and stilted semi-aggro synths of Twitch had finally metastasized into the aggressive Land of Rape and Honey. This, arguably, is the most industrial of their albums, with less of the metallic riffing of their later stuff but all of the mechanical pounding you might want. I haven’t listend to this in ages, I should give it a spin.
[Read More]Some bonus tunes today!
We’ve had several trip-hop acts around here in the past, and here’s one of the lesser known bands from that scene. Morcheeba, like all of the trip-hop bands that hung around for a while, pretty quickly expanded beyond just straight trip-hop. For example, beyond the drums and a little bit of scratching, this is more jazz than trip-hop. At any rate, this album (Big Calm) is very good.
[Read More]This song is so stripped down that there aren’t even any keyboards on it. Unless you count them putting “dumb” into a sampler and using that. It’s proof that the alchemy of a drum machine and rapping really didn’t require anything else.
Sludge metal in the vein of Mastodon or Baroness, Black Tusk do a nice job on their second album of keeping up the energy and making sure the tunes are appropriately propulsive. While maybe not as memorable as the heights of those bands, it’s still fun stuff.
[Read More]I was just making fun of the fact that Ministry just released a new record called AmeriKKKant with the Statue of Liberty doing a facepalm on the cover. That’ll teach me! Anyway, as I’ve mentioned in the past, I was big into Ministry in high school. In-your-face attitude! Super fast crunchy guitars! Edgy vocal samples! It pretty much hit 15-year-old Josh square where he lived. The thing is, I grew up. Ministry didn’t. The window in which I loved Ministry was only a few years.
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