I don’t want to profane this with my witless scribbling.
From a split release with Panopticon and Waldgeflüster, where the bands each contributed a long black metal song and a folk cover of a song from the other band. This is Panopticon’s cover, and I’m not familiar with the original, so I can’t really comment on how it differs. But it’s a nice listen, anyway.
[Read More]HELL YEAH MAN TIME TO GO BREAK STUFF FUCKIN’ LET’S GO GET DRUNK FUCK SHIT UP
Tha Alkaholiks stood out from out other rap groups in the mid-90s in California by being mostly playful, in contrast to the dominant G-funk aesthetic at the time. E-Swift’s production also presented a different approach than the dense, deep funk jams of the time. This is from their second record, 1995’s Coast II Coast, which featured a whole bunch of fun guests (Madlib, Q-Tip, Xzibit, others), and is just a solid album.
[Read More]This is one of the three epic (10+ minute) songs on Kentucky, where Panopticon really lets the black metal blast out. But even among the fury, he takes the time to have that interlude in the middle. It’s just a super interesting fusion. Listen to the…flutes? pipes?…on the outro. Just good stuff.
I knew exactly zip about Ezra Furman when his 2018 album Transangelic Exodus showed up on some end of year lists. I know slightly more than zip now, with the thing I’ve learned: this album rips. Listen to this, this is basically a Cars song but with cello, which is bitchin'.
[Read More]The world is divided into two groups: those who think Mothership Connection is P-Funk’s finest moment, and those who think One Nation Under A Groove is. (I’m ignoring Maggot Brain perverts.) My opinion largely rests on whichever one I’ve listened to most recently.
No, but seriously, it’s Mothership Connection.
Official Version is the first good Front 242 album, the one where the menacing synths and icy vocals really came together. And I have to say, this stuff has largely aged better than a lot of their peers. There are elements of it that kind of presage the *wave bands of today.
[Read More]After the enormous success of “Right Here, Right Now” carried Doubt everywhere, Jesus Jones was faced with the prospect of following up a massive hit, a task which has broken many bands. The followup came a couple years later, and Perverse achieved nowhere the same level of success. Partly, those two years hurt. Partly, it was due to the pop music world having moved on to other shiny objects. It certainly didn’t help when one of the biggest bands associated with the scene, the Stone Roses, remained adamantly MIA. But for the last part, it was due to Perverse being not a terribly likable album. The shiny, crowd-pleasing stuff just wasn’t there. It’s very electronics focused, an emphasis on only one half of the Madchester formula, but it winds up feeling imbalanced. It’s really almost trending towards industrial dance, but kind of falls into an uncanny valley.
[Read More]Panopticon, the band that is actually just Austin Lunn, gained attention with Kentucky, where Lunn merged his love of Appalachian folk music with his love of black metal and produced an amalagam of the two, creating one of the most distinctive and interesting black metal albums ever. A couple albums down the road from his breakthrough, and he was still playing both of his loves. The Scars of Man on the Once Nameless Wilderness is a double album, and unlike Kentucky, it’s more two halves rather than a melding of the two styles. There’s a midpoint in the double album where it switches from the black metal to the folk. Lunn is an expert at both, so as long as you’re OK with both styles, it’s a great record. This, uh, is from the black metal half.
[Read More]Badmotorfinger was the big leap forward for Soundgarden, where they married the murky hard rock homage of their early stuff to clean enough productions and songs to really appeal to a broader audience. And, carried forward by the contemporaneous releases of Nevermind and Ten, that broader audience found them. Soundgarden had always had potential to be a big band, as the core of that Sabbath/Zeppelin sound had a built-in appeal to a bunch of folks, and they would be one of the breakout acts of the grunge scene.
[Read More]I’ve complained about the total lack of quality control on Pavements non-album material. For every “Texas Never Whispers” or “Unseen Power of the Picket Fence”, there were a dozen songs like this one lurking in the wings. But hey, at least we’ve got basically every studio dropping ever put on tape by the band lovingly preserved in deluxe editions! That way you can listen to that junk once and never again!
[Read More]Finally, we get some peak Beautiful South! This is the first song from their debut album, and my god, it’s such a good song. Paul Heaton’s sardonic lyrics are delivered so perfectly, the piano is gorgeous, I just adore it. This was a regular part of my high school rotation, and it just made perfect sense to play this right after the Dead Kennedys.
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