Albums for Eternity with Bottle, the Curmudgeon

What better album to enjoy on New Year's Eve than Once More 'Round the Sun? As a matter of fact, as far as i'm concerned, this was the decade of Mastodon. Some people claim they are the "saviours of metal," some people hate their proggy fusion of thrash, groove, and grunge with contemporary classical transitional material, some people get grumpy when they sing out of tune, but i think everybody forgets that they are one of the very few bands today who are actually doing whatever they want, making it up as they go, and actually making it work. 4 dudes from Atlanta being dudes from Atlanta, 3 of them take turns being lead vocalist, and the 4th screams in the backgriund on occasion. I finally got to see them live back in June with Coheed and Cambria, and they were awesome. The interesting thing to me is that they are fairly mainstream, but they sure don't act like it. They make gigantic concept albums, they take a definite "alternative" but literary s

After a long day at work, microwaving my dinner back to an edible 3-digit temperature, feeding animals, playing ponies with the josinator, and changing bed sheets, it's time to pour myself a drink from that big bottle of turpentine, and listen to Steppenwolf. Before you roll your eyes so hard your retinas detach, i know you know i love Steppenwolf. I don't have to defend it because i am one of those poor pathetic individuals who knows Hoyt Axton not for his great songs, but for his role as the dad in Gremlins. Maybe, just maybe, John Kay can make me forget that and instead teach me to appreciate good old fashioned rock and roll again. The kind of rock and roll that sounds like a Canadian motorcycle gang crossed the border illegaly, slept on Chuck Berry's couch for a couple nights, borrowed a couple of Willie Dixons old amps with busted speakers for their next gig, and beat up some Neil Young fans in the parking lot. That's not an insult, i'm pretty sure Neil You

I'll forgive you if you have the slightly skewed perception of Thomas Dolby as a "one hit wonder." It's certainly true that "She Blinded Me With Science" is his one massive hit, but he wasn't ever really trying to be an iconic superstar. By his own admission, he was a mediocre keyboard player who was most happy plinking out melodies on a monophonic synthesizer and bouncing tracks together to build wacky electronic doodles. He was a behind the scenes kind of guy, and one of the few people to really sit down and learn how to program the early models of computer based (rather than modular/analog) synthesizers. It's one thing to have access to a million dollars worth of brand new audio technology, but somebody has to know how make it do something other than fart out square waves. So, while you might only know one or two of his own songs, you've heard him collaborate with pretty much every famous artist of the 70s and 80s. I'm not a super fanb

We are Sex Bob-omb, and we're here to talk about ZZ Top and make you get confused and stuff! I'm not interested in the pre ZZ Top story about Dusty Hill and Frank Beard pretending to be The Zombies. I'm not interested in their first 7 "boogie-woogie" albums, as critics like to call them. I'm interested in Billy Gibbons's drum-machine/bass-synth experiment that turned them from a solid and popular blues band into the iconic cultural megastars of the 1980s. You know the hot-rodded '33 Ford, you know the Legs, it's Eliminator. I'm not making light of feminism, equal rights, or misogyny, and neither is Billy Gibbons. I've always been fascinated by how ZZ Top got away with it. On paper, they are dirty old men who sing songs about sex. Sex, sex, sex (and sometimes cars and drugs). They aren't beating around the bush either, the heart of their songs IS the euphamism. How do they do it? Is it because they are generally humorous and their

I managed to get out of today's record collecting adventure with 5 albums for a little under $40. Believe me, if i had actual money to burn, i wouldn't anymore. It did, however, start me thinking about how i actually decide what to buy, and my weird criteria might be of interest to someone. Some people collect records as an investment. I do not. Some people want audiophile mint rare import bootlegs. Not me. I want things that I like, or things that intrigue me. I'm going to listen to them, get fingerprints on them, and generally eliminate their resale value because i just like physically putting on records. The furthest i go into the real "collector" side of things is thinking i'd really like to say "i have that record." When i go shopping, i'm going to spend $20-$50 and i'd prefer to have more than 2 frisbees when i get home. On the other end of the spectrum, i don't buy stuff i can find anywhere until i have a reason to buy it. I

Speaking of hard sells: which alternate universe had Tony Mattola as America's Greatest Guitarist, and can i please apply for relocation? Even Google questioned whether i actually meant Tommy Mattola, when i clearly didn't. That makes me sad. I mean, yeah the cover is farcical, but i'm sure there some truth to the notion that Italians like smoking and motorcycles and boobs. No, the music doesn't sound like that, but it does sound like continental Europe circa 1968. Larcange sounded like France, Mattola sounds like Italy, and they both sound like they are shaking martinis as they dad tango across the white shag carpeting in their knee high socks and tennis shorts. It's a lot like Larcange's album, only for guitar and with a little more improvisation. It's department store jazz guitar, and i actually really like it. He sounds like he's having fun, maybe not Django fun, but still. The thing i hate about bad jazz guitar is the same thing i hate ab

Tonight's review is a little bit all over the place. We all weight 5-15 more pounds than we did yesterday morning, and those of you who shared in my Christmas feast of Jesus Christ Superstar are undoubtedly anticipating my words for the dangerously delectable wafer-thin mint they are sure to be... ... and now for something completely different. Let's listen to The Best of Herman's Hermits. It's not the best of Herman's Hermits, because that would be at least a four record set, and half if those songs hadn't even been recorded at the time this record was pressed, that's why there are more greatest hits albums in their discography than regular ones (i didn't actually do the math, but there are many). They are far and away my favorite of the British Invasion bands, but i'm more interested in the story they tell about the music business itself. When we think of a band that got "discovered" and turned into international superstars, we'

I had two possible choices for my album on actual Christmas. I flipped a coin and it came up Woodstock. I was going to do a whole work up, a 12 days of christmas joke with the punchline being "5 records of Woodstock!" (I have both the 3 record soundtrack and the double album Woodstock 2). Alas, it blows. It's not fun to listen to (unless CSN&Y singing to a nastily out of tune acoustic guitar while giving audible eq instructions to the sound guys is your idea of fun). Plus there's 9 minutes of Ten Years After hiding in there, and that's 9 minutes too many. Executive decision, plan 9 from outer space, we're listening to the original concept album, Jesus Christ Superstar. Murray Head sings Judas. I'll even do some real research for my snarky one-liners, and properly proofread before publication. I have a tendency to be crass, but i assure you that's not my intention here. It's a fictional rock opera about Jesus and his apostles as actual peo

Speaking of l'accordéon, your Christmas Eve present is this delightful instrumental album from Maurice Larcange. Larcange wanted to play professional soccer, but figured music was a more stable career to fall back on (why is my left eye squinting all of a sudden?) should his dreams not come to fruition. He firmly believed that "french song" was the pinnacle of musical achievements, not because he cared about singers, but because without cheesy songs he wouldn't be able to prove that accordions were better melodic instruments than human voices (or other instruments for that matter). I wouldn't go that far, but he does have a point. Accordion is a highly enjoyable melodic instrument, and it deservers a much bigger place in the serious music listener's library beyond Weird Al's greatest hits. It's a very '60s mod album, meant to be listened to from your white futon, or egg shaped chair with a dangerously perched glass of red wine at your fingert

Bonsoir, mes amis! Je suis Bouteille, et ce soir nous écoutons l'album premier de Claudine Longet. Luckily, she sings in English too, so i don't have to do this whole thing in French. "Qui?," demandez-vous. You know, the French pop singer. She was married to Andy Williams. Bonjour? Bonjour? Cette chose est allumée? Pouvez-vous m'entendre? Ok, i'll stop. She not surprisingly retreated from public life after her conviction for "negligent homicide." She shot her boyfriend, but it's not clear if it was premeditated (plus there was a bunch of procedural misconduct), and the jury had no evidence that she actually wanted him to die. Anyway, would you like some of my tangerines? Sorry, i'm writing this while listening to the record, the silliest lyrics tend to creep in without warning and you know i'd never treat you mean. It's definitely French-pop, accordions a-blazing. It's meant to be cute and bubbly, and it certainly is

I miss my dad the most on Sunday, so i thought i'd share a very personal memory with you. He bought this actual copy of Live's Throwing Copper for me as reward for doing my geometry homework. I don't know if he really had the formulas for the area and circumference of a circle switched in his mind (i doubt it), or if i was going though one of my not caring about school phases (i had a few), or if he just wanted to see if he could make me doubt myself (he couldn't). He bet me a CD, i won the bet, and i chose this gem of 90s social angst. Coincidentally, it's an album about communication, or lack thereof. It's an album about death, and how we crumble under its inevitability, accepting the torture of mindless labors for a delusional feeling of belonging. The album starts with suicide, and ends with "i can't start 'til i'm dead," and we just keep on spinning. That's harsh. The album itself is a semiotic masterpiece, because the over

Tonight's album review is very, very special for many reasons. 1) i ran out of Christmas albums to talk about/share with you, but 2) my friend Ken and Psychic of Orange released a Christmas album today, so 3) i get to talk about an interesting group of music genres and say nice things about a fellow music maker. If you're not at all familiar with hypnagogic pop, or glofi, or ____wave, or any of their subgenres, they generally fall under the umbrella concept of technological nostalgia. More specifically, they play with your memories of developing computer/audio technologies and pop culture from the 1980s and 90s by elevating consumer level equipment and output to an artistic medium while refusing to make overt statements about any supposed value in doing so. It's a post-ironic artform, is what i'm saying. Critics and social philosophers often describe it as "post-elevator" music, because we only know how to define things as derivative forms. To my mind, t

My wife and kids left to visit Oklahoma for the weekend. So slightly tongue-in-cheek, it's time to pull out my personal favorite Simon & Garfunkel album. It's one of the albums i had the songbook for growing up, and i literally learned every song in my own way (i might have even rewrote the lyrics of "Kathy's Song" to be about my '77 van for a college class). I can still play most of them. Shut up, p(nmi)t, this album has bottle worthy trivia that's way more important. This album (no sophomore slump at all) may have been produced by Bob Johnson, but he sure didn't produce this particular version of "The Sound of Silence." I'd give you a prize for guessing, but you'd cheat and i wouldn't be able to finish this essay, so tough. The original version of "The Sound of Silence" was on their first album. They didn't create this version. Say whaaaat? Yeah, some dude with adamantium testicles was sitting at the

We all know i love iron butterfly, so this review of their 4th album, Metamorphosis, will obviously be positive. They have a couple new guitarists this time around, but i've already told you that doesn't matter. Iron Butterfly is Doug Ingle, and he simply doesn't know what the word "genre" means. The real problem with Iron Butterfly is that everyone heard Inna-Gadda-Da-Vita and said "that's it. That's what we are going to remember you for, and you might as well not bother writing anything else. Ball? Sure, yeah, great album, put IGDV back on. Another version? No thanks, you got it right the first time. A fourth album? Okaaay. Nah, this just doesn't do it for me." Well, i call shenanigans. The best part of IB is the weird parts, and this album has some of the weirdest. Obviously, the universe doesn't explode like on 1 & 3, and everyone but me hates the constipated grunting and early talk-box experiment in the middle of Butter

I don't currently have any more actual Christmas albums to share with you, so i've decided to invoke the Die Hard Technicality and listen to Bernstein conduct Grofé's Grand Canyon Suite. You'll probably hear the celeste solo from the third movement at some point in the next week, because it used for the dream sequence in "a Christmas Story." Tone-painting suites were Grofé's schtick. The desert, a big river, some waterfall, New York, you name it. If it's a region of our country, Grofé wrote a suite for it. Mostly no one cared too much, but Toscanini took a shine to this one. Disney did a short movie using it as well. It's unapologetically romantic orchestral writing, but you can tell that Grofé likes his orchestrational dissonance as much as Copland and Bernstein himself. It definitely has that same kind of American terroir, pairing the nostalgically idyllic Hudson Valley School -esque landscapes with the violently impressive crash-bang weath

Pharoah Sanders' next album after Jewels of Thought was Deaf Dumb Blind/Let Us Go Into The House Of The Lord. These two extended free jazz pieces are quite different from each other. Deaf Dumb Blind features the over blowing and crazy extended techniques he's best know for, and is essentially a trio of soloists over a chaotic percussive ensemble. The soloists aren't really the focus though. The real power of the piece comes from how the ensemble as a whole builds and releases tension without ever actually coalescing. Each instrument sets up its own musical home base, so to speak, then extends out of it and returns. When two or more parts seem to return to their respective bases, it really does feel as though the chaos is retreating. To me at least, it sounds like a panning back and forth between the identifiably musical and an a menagerie of animal sounds. Almost as if the ensemble itself is slowly breathing. Into the house of the lord, on the other hand, is almost e

http://deadhotworkshop.bandcamp.com/album/1001 You know Gin Blossoms, and The Refreshments, and i hope you know Meat Puppets, and you probably even know their younger depressed brother Jimmy Eat World, but i doubt you know the real hometown heroes of Tempe, AZ (unless you're like me and look up bands other bands say nice things about). Rock is a generational form of popular music, and it's almost always paired with the other predominant genre of an area. In other words, whatever the 20-somethings are angry about blends with whatever they've been forced to listen to on the radio and produces the cocktail called "rock." The 60s were all about LA, the 70s were NY and Detroit, the 80s were LA and NY, the early 90s were Seattle, and the late 90s were Arizona. Yes, Arizona with it's incredibly distinctive country tinged alternative rock. Amazingly enough, the really famous bands all looked up to one group of guys. You know about Gin Blossoms because they drove

Today would have been David Lamb's 42nd birthday, so i'm listening to Salt for Salt by Brown Bird. I've pointed my facebook friends to it several times in the past, but this is just superb dark neo-folk. They had been a full band, but scaled down to a husband/wife duo with Morgan playing violin/cello/bass and Dave playing everything else, one-man band style. It's surprising how full and energetic they can make such a small, intimate duo sound. Songwise, the album focuses heavily on nature, the ocean, and the idea of meeting the oncoming storm (whatever form it may take) with the determination to embrace/accept the fight and persevere. The two sides are subtitled flesh and blood, and i can't think of a better analogy. It's a melancholic, at times angry sounding, album but it's so damned good that you end up feeling a real sense of catharsis in spite of knowing you'll lose the fight in the end. MorganEve Swain is still out there performing as "

It should be pretty obvious that i like Iron Butterfly quite a lot. For my money, i think they were truly one of the most innovative, experimental, and just plain enjoyably adventurous bands of the 60s, and their 3rd album Ball has everything. The opening minute is the most gloriously frightening thing i can think of (picking up right where Heavy left off in the explosive noisescape department), and even the admittedly ridiculous moments are still enjoyable (Lonely Boy makes me laugh every single time i listen to it). Doug Ingle is clearly not from the same reality that you and i inhabit, but he sure is fun. Erik Brann's psychotic guitar leads remind me of Robin Trower, his tone is completely unhinged (like his amp is really about to explode), but somehow it doesn't sound obnoxious or out of place at all. The songs are all over the place, but i think they are supposed to be. This band isn't so much an image as a juggernaut. They just walk into the room, crank everythin

We have reached the end of my Christmas records. I know you're all sad, so i saved the Life Treasury of Christmas Music for last. It's lovely music (mostly plainsong) with very little personality (it's the blandest reindeer of all), perfect for making you not exactly sad that it's over. Oh. Still two more weeks of it in the real world. Oh well, look on the bright side. If nothing else, i've given you the gift of conversation. You could now say things like "if you think THIS is bad, then boy have i got a record for you," or "no no no, the best Christmas album by far is...." You can regale your friends with trivia, or frighten the hell out of your local used record store clerk. Your welcome, and merry future Christmas. Next

Christmas - For Children Only. You can't tell me what to do, Cricketone Chorus. I'm gonna drink my evening rum & coke while listening to your record, i'm gonna enjoy it, and your campy 50s orchestra and the Playhour Players can't stop me. How do you like them apples? https://youtu.be/F2nvCx0ry0c Next

If you are the type of person who genuinely enjoys your child's elementary school Christmas choir concert, then i have a real treat for you. This is not the St. Killian Boychoir at the Lincoln Center . These are 60 random kids being wrangled by Don Janse, who spent 30 years directing the U.S. Coast Guard Academy's Idlers. Don't get me wrong, it's not a trainwreck or anything, but these are untrained voices with an appropriately wide tonal focus. My only criticism is that pesky problem of counting songs. They don't go the full Kingston by just skipping numbers, but their inventive approach to the 12 days of Christmas is pretty high up on the OCD scale of misery. Take special note of the coin toss approach to deciding whether the choir or the organ will perform "5 golden rings." All in all, i think this album might be a unique addition to anyone's collection of confusing albums to play randomly at a dinner party. It's a real conversation start

My confusing (probably offputting) anger about the Beatles begs the question, what IS a good album about creating a homogeneous collection of songs that actually add up to larger meaningful statements while being equally self reflective? I'm glad you asked. Here's Bjork's 3rd album, Homogenic. All the songs take place in a character (call it Bjork) that has stepped back from the world to evaluate both it and her? relationship to it. This character has been hurt by love, doesn't really enjoy the pressures and responsibilities of daily life all alone, is for good or bad "very Scandinavian," and ultimately arrives at the intuition that existence is actually inherently positive and our struggle to embrace that love is the real matter of importance. There are three songs i really don't like, but their purpose for the larger meaning makes that irrelevant (try to guess which ones). She wanted it to sound homogeneous, and the pallet is a blend of electroni

You might have the impression that i don't like the beatles, but that's not true at all. I love the beatles, but i get really worked up over the feeling that they just didn't care about the larger context of their music. From the beginning they were a singles band, and there is absolutely nothing wrong with that. 90% of their output deserved to be top 10, and they deserved to be fabulously wealthy from it. The b-sides were just as good as the singles themselves. But, they specifically said they wanted to elevate "the album" to an art form, kept their singles off their albums (unlike other bands that built their albums around their singles), but i think they did a terrible job. I realize that they were pioneers, and their influence is undeniable, but their idea of making an album never went further than simply picking the best songs they recorded that week. They weren't writing toward any coherent statement, they were just trying to make things sound like

Super-duper Beatles geeks will understand why i say The White Album is the end of the band. It really was the last Beatles album. They hadn't actually been "a band" since Revolver. Harrison straight up said fuck touring, Lennon didn't like being a studio musician, Paul said seriously let's actually play together again, and Ringo showed up early every day because he was the only professional of the 4 at that point (it was his job, and he liked that job). The last few years are a jumbled mess because Capitol wanted a mix of albums and compilations to distribute in america. I said this period ironically produced their best stuff, because they sucked at making albums. Their epic, iconic, best loved works are silly movie soundtracks, not Beatles albums. Lennon and McCartney were amazing songwriters, but they were flat out terrible at weaving a coherent narrative from their respective brain farts. That's why they smashed so many incomplete ideas together. When

All of my Christmas albums so far have come from the world of popular music. But the Classical world has no shortage of Christmas albums, and it's a nice change of pace. Andre Kostelanetz was a Russian conductor who did truly believe in melding the two worlds, and Phyllis Curtain was reasonably famous as far as American opera sopranos are concerned. This album really is a philharmonic concert with soprano and boys choir, and there's not much funny or astonishing to say about it, other than it's like a thousand times better than most Christmas albums. The arrangements are quite complex, and it's not cheap or commercial in any way. Exactly what you'd expect from the New York Philharmonic. Next

Snuggle up kiddies, it's time for the last batch of Christmas albums. Fred Waring was a pretty interesting dude. He's most famous as a bandleader and radio personality, but his actual contribution to humanity is moderately important in its own right. I told you the story about how vaudville composer Michael Brown coincidentally funded one of the classics of American literature. Fred Waring also funded a thing that turned out to be special. He funded the production and promotion of the first electric blender, called the Waring Blendor. It not surprisingly became a big deal in hospitals across the country for preparing special meals for patients. Thus, Jonas Salk used it while developing his vaccine for polio. Yes, Fred Waring eradicated Polio for about $25,000 (a big sum in the 30s, but an inconsequential fraction of his fortune). Sure, someone would have invested in it eventually, and Salk would have succeeded regardless, but coincidence is the name of the game and this

My morning Markovian chain of looking up things on the internet somehow led me to Rammstein, and now i have to talk about Reise, Reise. For those who don't remember or don't know them, Rammstein rose to prominence as one of the best industrial metal bands of the late 90s. Their success is predicated on two unrelated phenomena. First, they wrote super catchy, heavy dirty groove metal (hooray me for the 21 pilots reference). Second, they perhaps unintentionally elevated human intelligence by being a specifically German band who intentionally paid attention to the collision of German and American culture. So much so that one of the primary appeals is actually translating their lyrics so that we can understand what they are saying. In other words, they say "you and i have fundamentally different outlooks on the world. I have been acculturated to yours, now you need to learn something about mine and i'm not going to spell it out, you have to get out your German to English

[Insert White Album Cover Here] So. What is it that makes the White Album an amazing mental kaleidoscope or a nonsensical mosaic of vacuity depending on which side of the bed you fell off that morning? How can i even ask that question? It's blasphemy. The White Album is a masterpiece. How dare i! Shut up p(nmi)t, bottle has the floor. The White Album is Sgt. Pepper, the sequel. It exists at all because the fab four had to make another album, but they had to make that album as the band who created Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band and The Magical Mystery Tour. They've sprained their epic imagination muscles, but the hallucinogenic residue is still blocking all their pain receptors. This album can be whatever you want it to be (it is a blank canvas, after all) because it's just a string of empty metaphors. The boys brought their lego buckets to play time and dumped them all out on the floor. Sure they made a sculpture, but it's the pieces rather than the

In the grand tradition of counting all your recordings to produce ridiculous introductory sentences, Steppenwolf's 7 is their fifth album (because live albums are a separate category). It's the one with a song about John Kay and his mother fleeing East Germany as it was officially forming when he was 4, and also chicks, and drugs being bad. It's not a coherent story, is what i'm saying. It is good old fashioned 60s/70s hard rock, and hard rock's version of country. It's an album for people who like Steppenwolf. None of the songs ever cracked the top 40, but since the band actually still exists, who cares? It's a lot like Steve Miller Band's Number 5 in that respect. No, it's not the stuff that made them famous, it's the stuff they made because that famous stuff made them professional rockers, or because their famous stuff hasn't happened yet and you live in a reverse time line... If you like the band you like it (and i do), if you only

I shared Streetnoise with you what seems like ages ago. I have other things they did together, but i wanted to hear their 1977 collab without The Trinity, Encore. Streetnoise was an unpredictable mish-mash of anything (and it was awesome), but this is a jazz album with some funky vibes (also pretty awesome). Julie Driscoll Tippets is really great, and Auger rivals Emerson when he wants to. I say that because sometimes he's perfectly happy to just hang back and accompany. But when he does let loose, he's a keyboard maniac. This is just a great all around listen; insanely talented musicians making phenomenal music like it's what they do. Side B, starts with an interestingly strange Jack Bruce song (I definitely need to dig deeper into his writing). Gotta snark on something...um...er...nice lady mullet? Mull-ette? No joke, good stuff. Next

4 years have passed since that unspeakable winter night of 1982. All across the country, people slowly picked up the shattered remnants of their lives, villages rebuilt, children learned to laugh and play again. 4 years have softened our memories of the nightmares that await us, should they ever return. This snowy night, all is peaceful, all is quiet. Too quiet. Suddenly, far off in the distance, right on the edge of hearing, the faint sound of an electric piano floats on the wind like the scent of a thousand dead muskrats. The memories cascade, fear grabs you, and one terrible thought consumes your whole being. Oh no. Oh NO. OH NO! IT'S CHRISTMAS AGAIN, AND THE OAK RIDGE BOYS HAVE COME TO FEAST UPON OUR SOULS!!! I'm joking. It's significantly better than their first Christmas album. This really is just an Oak Ridge Boys album that happens to be Christmas oriented. They aren't trying to be cute, or funny, they're just being a "country choir," and i

Singer's mid 60s Donna Reed commercial was a joke, but this is a Christmas album.  "Historically, Christmas is a festive season, conveying great religious significance for those of the Christian faiths.... For those who do not subscribe to the Christian faiths, Christmas also has a meaning of more than passing significance." It's from 1958 by Jacques Fontanna and His Orchestra and Choir from Masterseal Records. It sounds like it's from 1958. As hokey or nostalgic as it might sound to you, it's what people generally agreed sounded festive, celebratory, hopeful. Sleigh Ride is agonizingly too slow, but that's the only criticism i can conjure up. To bring back my favorite Vonnegut reference, this is the Uncle Alex of Christmas albums. If this isn't nice, then i don't know what is. Not that you doubted me, but since i couldn't find it on youtube i dubbed my crackly poppy dirty 61 year old lp for your listening pleasure. https://youtu.be/ij

The joke about this album isn't that it's generic orchestral/choral Christmas music. The music is not ridiculous at all. The joke is reading every word on the back cover. I'm admittedly too lazy to type it out myself, so i took close up pictures. Enjoy. Next