Well, this is quite a time capsule, isn’t it? This whole early 90s thing of guitar dance music really didn’t age especially well, although at this point, there’s a certain goofy try-hard charm to this, with all the little samples and bits floating in and out.
Silly Swallowed. Black is for bile, not for phlegm! That’s colorless! Metal bands should really know medieval medicine better than this.
[Read More]Has anybody flipped Nancarrow into any beats? Seems like it would be a fun thing to hear.
What a lovely beat here. As someone who grew up listening to the radio in cars in the early 80s an awful lot, that late 70s vibe here just sparks something really primal in me.
Another of my breaks with music critic orthodoxy (although I don’t really feel like I’m a real critic) is that I think Tame Impala is kind of boring. I’m not sure why that is - I like other psychedelic stuff just fine, I don’t have any problems with any elements that go into this. It just glides past my brain and nothing finds any purchase. It’s pleasant, but it’s like taking a nap.
[Read More]I do enjoy poking fun at the Apples in Stereo around here, but this is a sweet tune. So, yeah, some of their stuff can be unambitious, but when the pop is dialed in, it’s pretty excellent.
2005 through 2008 has been Trent Reznor’s most productive period, with three full albums and an instrumental one coming out in less time than it usually takes him to make one album. The Slip is the final record of that sequence before he went back into hibernation, and it’s generally the most straightforward of the four. Uh, this track notwithstanding. While I think Year Zero is the best of that bunch, there’s a catharsis with this record that is satisfying. Again, this dry hump of a song aside.
[Read More]For their seventh album, Krallice brough in Dave Edwardson (Neurosis) to change things up. It’s still very much a Krallice record, with all the dizzying ideas that entails, so Edwardson mostly just kind of inflects the proceedings some. He gives the vocals a certain visceral grounding that gives this all a little bit more of a gutteral feel, as opposed to the sometimes purely cerebral feel of Krallice. The band is incredible as always, and this album rips.
[Read More]I think I’ve blathered on about The Fragile before, so you can hit up the tags over there and do some spelunking. Or not! But, the novel (?) observation I can make is that as time goes on, this album gets better to me relative to his other work, and at this point, I think it might be his best album. Or my favorite, anyway. Same thing!
[Read More]We’ve had the Good People on here before, and it’s always nice to hear them. The Summer EP absolutely nails its purpose, this is totally music to roll around bumping loud with the sun shining.
Rest in power, Gift of Gab.
We had the Crystalized Movements the other day, featuring a tune from their swan song, Revelations from Pandemonium. After that band broke up, Wayne Rogers hooked up with Damon Krukowski and Naomi Yang (Galaxie 500) to form Magic Hour…which kinda sounds like Crystalized Movements. The name of this record (No Excess Is Absurd) really speaks to Rogers’s tendency to just go over the top on fuzz. Fun record, though.
[Read More]Doom metal can sometimes just be code for “wants to be Black Sabbath”, and while that’s not such a bad thing, bands definitely have differing levels of skill at it. Sweden’s Witchcraft have been at it for a long time, and as a result, they’re pretty good at it. By the time they hit this album (2016’s Nucleus), the truth is that they’re actually channeling a whole lot of 70s rock and not just Sabbath. There are distinct notes of, say, Jethro Tull going on here.
[Read More]The third Hot Snakes album certainly announces itself with authority. “Braintrust” opens up my favorite record from them, with a song that would absolutely sit right at home on one of the legendary Drive Like Jehu records. Which is a high complement!
As with most industrial dance acts, there were a bunch of singles released with Nine Inch Nails’ early work, usually featuring a bunch of remixes and the occasional half-assed b-side. This is one of those half-assed b-sides, in this case from the “Sin” single (which included three pointless remixes of that tune). But, you know, high school Josh was nonetheless kinda intrigued by it.
[Read More]I’m of the opinion that the Pietasters really fell off hard after Oolooloo, driven among other things by Stephen Jackson’s vocals getting much more gruff and the band really starting to emphasize rock more and more. That said, there are still some fun tunes on their later records, such as this one from Awesome Mix Tape #6.
The Downward Spiral was a leap forward in complexity for Nine Inch Nails, as Trent Reznor really made use of a much broader set of tools. But I don’t think it’s his best record. I think that goes to The Fragile, the eventual follow-up that emerged as a double record and again makes another leap ahead. If nothing else, there’s more of it, and when the quality is this high, that matters. He wouldn’t ever quite hit these heights again, although there are plenty of excellent albums in the future.
[Read More]Another month in the books here! NOT BAD.
Straight-ahead rock from the most straight-ahead record Boss Hog made.
The third Krallice album, Diotima, was the last they did with Profound Lore before striking out on their own. It contains the usual elaborate black metal craziness, and while it’s good, it’s maybe the Krallice album that sticks with me the least.
Shuffle is in a metal mood these last couple days. This is from the 2020 album Providence, and if you were wondering what black metal vs. death metal was like, these two tracks might help. The pounding riffs here are very death metal, as opposed to the tremelo picking madness of the Krallice song. The vocals here are kind of black metal, though.
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