Albums for Eternity with Bottle, the Curmudgeon

Shhhhhh. Epilogue

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=OLAK5uy_nue5ydhm24OUz9Cn3Z0vFTBTeOq0Q-WP4 Then 10 years later, like he was breaking double-secret probation for the occasion of his 66th birthday, Bowie made another album. He cheekily called it The Next Day, and if you've keyed in on my tendency to get ahead of myself, the first single asked Where Are We Now? Unlike everyone else, i giggle and clap at whiting out the cover of Heroes. It's meant to "subvert" that iconic album as "an obliteration of the past," and obviously i couldn't be happier, i hate that album. And for 2013, it's trash rock. The world is garbage (you all know that's exactly how i felt 'cause we moved to Iowa in 2012 while he was writing it). There's a little bit of subtext, in that Bowie is implying it's garbage because he wasn't making albums, but that's clearly the joke. I remember when the video for The Stars came out and it was awesome. We had celebrities ag

Reality. Bowie's been living and dying and resurrecting and doing it all over again for ever. It's time to retire. So, right on the heels of Heathen he makes his retrospective retirement spectacular. Why? Because reality is over. The world finally caught up with Bowie. Existence is just a stream of digital factoids and humans have no ability to reconcile any of it into a coherent meaningful existence. There's no ego to build out of that, it means Bowie really is nothing more than his discography. There's no knowledge anymore. He has to just wait. And wait he does, for 10 years. But that's in the future. Where are we now? Art rock. The splotchy, colorful, scribbly, weird fonts and out of order typesetting kind of art rock. The Picasso meets Warhol wacky postmodern revival. We reinvented a word for it, that word is quirky. New songs, very old songs (he'd been nursing "Disco King" since the 70s, but it never found a home until now). Now, i'v

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=OLAK5uy_laYhBfj8AOinavNDDeRDukyOMly4X186M So, we've officially made it to the 21st century. Bowie lives in New York, he's got some old friends and some new friends (all famous, every Bowie album is pretty much a supergroup), and they are making their typical angsty Bowie in New York kind of album. It's a comeback album, because we left off at the standard Bowie imagines where society at large is headed (spoiler alert, it's war and death and pointless destruction), and he doesn't want to be on that bus (he's already been on that bus, because he lives ahead of us, remember). The recording is pretty much done, and wouldn't you know it some lunatic crazy people fly airplanes into the World Trade Center, so now he has to mix and master and distribute this premanatory apocalyptic new stuff while the city around him sifts through the rubble. Right place, right time is almost always coincidence. That's because whatever

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=OLAK5uy_kkUPGNk1UfmkhHNvI1xJ5H7nrIbvYv9lg Hello day 4, Hours is the drive to work soundtrack. This is very clearly Bowie's alternative rock album. Not the happy side of alternative (like that's a thing, pfffft), the sleepily lethargic technological side. It's the same place Radiohead went, and then Muse, and all those unhappy 20-somethings born in the computer age. It was the first downloadable album, born from a video game project. It's also the last entry in the EMI ledger, and he'll take another extended break. I very much like it, but it has that "end of an era" feeling. It's not exciting, but it's not supposed to be. Not stale, just run down. I'm good with that. 21 - Heathen

Finally i get Earthling! Seriously, i just couldn't understand Bowie's drum and bass album. It's that standard tandem album broken by the inconvenience of touring we've heard at least 3 times now. The dark industrial of 1.outside obviously morphs into the hardcore d&b, jungle, borderline Prodigy sounding rave music. Yeah, 3 for 3. These albums connect like they never did before. Everybody says it really was 70s Bowie in the studio again, just going for it and happy and making it happen again. I can tell, he's filtered all the bad parts out. This is exciting stuff, every bit as exciting as Ziggy or Diamond Dogs were in their own contexts. I'm not ashamed of hating it before, i'm just very happy that it's finally connecting. The thread of avant-jazz sax and piano under all these albums is not unnoticed either. I know we've been here before, i get excited and then Bowie blows it. Even if that does happen again, it can't be as bad as the

https://youtu.be/7mhSoUZO0os I'm mildly trepidatious about 1. Outside. It's supposedly his return to rock, his return to making this crap up on the fly in the studio. Buuuut, Eno's back with his uno cards, and we're in David Lynchian, Lost Highway, insane asylum territory again (3 years ahead of schedule, if anybody's keeping track). The song "I'm Deranged" was my first experience with the great music/floating hologram of David Bowie 3rd quarter. I didn't like it then, i didn't like where it came from, and the casting couch is full of uncomfortably familiar faces. Maybe i'm wrong, and i'll "get it" this time around? Oh, ok, it's an actual story, a fake diary to not be a boring real life diary of a touring musician, the product of actually visiting an asylum. He's back to being interested in the fringe, not the center of it all (that's long range foreshadowing, wink). There's definitely an industrial undercu

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=OLAK5uy_nqM5dOyOQPKy714IFoBHj2hvTNuu_uqII Then David Bowie woke up after a 6 year nap, got married again, and kind of wrote the music for the after party: Bowie's take on House. I seriously didn't know this album existed, and a quick glance at the charts of 1993 is enough to know why. This was the year of In Utero, Counting Crows, Onyx's Slam, Janet Jackson's sexy comeback, Lenny Kravitz, the most famous Meat Loaf song. Black Tie White Noise seems intentionally underground and obscure by comparison. You know what he did with the break? He learned to play the saxophone himself (he'd almost been proud of not playing any part of the music before). You know what else? It's good. I'm as shocked as you, this is freakin' good. He's using his full vocal range, but he's not doing the airport lounge singer shtick. It's high end nightclub, art dance, Ace of Bass type stuff, but yeah i'm totally on board.

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=OLAK5uy_mkTP9gUhVfNhKZu9Usl34bgldUu5_ZPrI I was actually feeling pretty good about the first two tracks of Never Let me Down. Then he did that low register lounge thing and proceeded to do exactly that. This is the worst of the spandex workout unitard, paula abdul, 80s. It sounds like 1987, and that's a problem. 20 years and for the first time he's not ahead of the crowd. This is the crowd. For Bowie, this is stale. Let's call it like it is. This is purple headband, dancing in the street, workout video music. I've got nothing else to say, he's allowed to be embarrassed by this one. 17 - Black Tie White Noise

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLzYnTvm3yGiSnNBjuiNbHhc1De5YJz8io Tonight. Meh. Half of it is fine, half of it is terrible. Loving The Alien and I Keep Forgetting and Neighborhood Threat and Dancing With The Big Boys are all fine, but he should have never waded into reggae. Here's what's happening in my head. The music is doing it's thing, and it's perfectly fine, but Bowie starts doing this terrible bobble-headed Reno nightclub lounge singer thing, and it feels like cigarette burns in cheap red polyester, dingy shag carpeting, Twin Peaks Red Room in Reverse creepy. Plus, now he's thinking about "the fans." That's a recipe for suck because the fans you think you're writing for aren't your actual fans. I know it's going to get worse, but maybe there's some hidden good stuff? Maybe? 16 - Never Let Me Down

Welcome to day 3. I'm back at work, so the stream of posts is going to slow down to a trickle. You could just say Let's Dance is Scary Monsters part 2, but it's not really. Bowie changed record labels, so while it is a continuation of Scary Monsters musically (it's actually a refocusing of Young Americans, now with Stevie Ray Vaughn), it's the start of the real 80s Bowie that i don't actually have physical copies of; youtube it is. https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLgfSRLUDoi5exYY6tvsG-M_Q5pacJ_odF Critics say this is the last "old Bowie" album, but it's the first hit songs album. To say Bowie now had 17 million dollars is a misunderstanding of corporate finances. EMI started a new ledger called "David Bowie" and allotted $17.whatever-million to it as working capital. Bowie's new job was to make a profit from that by being David Bowie. He hired Nile Rogers, said "Darling, make me some hit records" a lot, and mos

One more. That's all i've got in me. Remember, i've listened to 13 David Bowie albums in 2 days. Scary Monsters is a good stopping point though. We're back to proper Bowie writing songs about himself, but it's 1980 so it's got Japan, and we're about to watch the whole world give David Bowie levels of cocaine a try. Fripp is back, but he's being used in a proper context this time. We're still using Eno's compositional tarot cards, or pictionary i ching, or whatever you want to call it, and Bowie's just yelling out other guitarists for Fripp to try to imitate, but he's had to take a different approach for himself and actually write this stuff down and edit it and "compose." What everybody seems to forget is that he's the adult now. They forget that it's all an ego trip that he's writing as he goes. Before he was the kid and didn't want to grow up to be a monster like all the other adults, so he invented new mon

No, see this is great. Why did i have to sit through Heroes? For one line in Fantastic Voyage? Just to remind yourself what the war was about and which side you wanted to be on? Completely unnecessary. Seriously could have just skipped from Low to Lodger. It's his Britpop album. Oasis and Blur directly borrow from it. To say Bowie is ahead of his time is an understatement. He quantum leaped forward back at Diamond Dogs. What he's really doing is finding underground music scenes and being the mainstream frontrunner by about 5 to 7 years, before anybody else is actually willing to invest in "right now" music. I call it here's what your younger brother is working on in his bedroom music. Now that we're moving forward again, please don't make another "Heroes." Let the crappy parts just be random moments i don't like, not monumental sculptures of rusty car parts on the courthouse lawn.... 13 - Scary Monsters

Bleechggh. I thought we'd ease into it a little more smoothly than that. Who invited Fripp? Don't get me wrong, i adore Robert Fripp, but to quote 21 Pilots, "stay in your lane, boy." I've made no secret of the fact that there's a whole segment of Bowie i hate. I could never describe it properly, i always felt it was like the music was doing one thing and Bowie was intentionally doing something different just to sound out of touch. No, it's the sheer SMUG. It's Bowie looking you dead in the eye and saying "HA! I WIN. I FIGURED OUT HOW TO MAKE YOU NOT LIKE ME." The gaul and bile. The betrayal. "Heros is ironic." No shit sherlock. I am pretty much the only person in the universe who hates it at this level, everybody else say "oh my god, spectacular, what a fruitful collaboration, Bowie's back and better than ever." Baaaarf! It's not a smooth transition at all, it's an incredible hulk style "i told

Ahhh, what a sweet sweet breath of fresh air Low is. For starters, it's a terrible album. He's never made one of those before. I love it. No, those things aren't contradictory at all. He had the psychological car crash that was The Man Who Fell To Earth. The music he was writing because he thought he was the composer as well as the actor was rejected, exactly the way Fame told him it would be. He's got a drug habit to kick, France and Germany are way cheaper to live in for his self rehab (he doesn't like heroin so West Berlin's rising opioid epidemic is quite helpful in that regard), Iggy Pop and Brian Eno are there to help him explore things he sucks at (namely electronic soundscapes and dance). It was going to be a bad album anyway he chose to approach it, and the fragments of brand new experimentation are what he has to work with. We're listening to the soundtrack of his life after all, and you can't have the comeback until you live through the

I think Station to Station is best summed up by a pretend letter from Bowie to himself scribbled on a napkin that he didn't remember writing. Ok. You're the Thin White Duke for this album. It's basically Pierrot, but it's really the way you looked in real life while recording Young Americans because your diet is coke and milk and peppers. It's not your fault we're in the middle of the neo-nazi renaissance and everyone's going to forget that you A) are the rebellious child of WWII, and B) chose your side like 4 albums ago, and C) pretend you're secretly a fascist. It's not just the cocaine talking (even though we both know you're doing enough of it to kill 3 elephants), LA is a god forsaken wasteland just like you said it would be, and you have to go back to Europe. You'll pretend you don't know it's going to happen ('cause you'll be doing like 3 other massive projects that won't see the light of day), but you'll en

I can't improve upon the words of the man himself. Young Americans is "the squashed remains of ethnic music as it survives in the age of Muzak rock, written and sung by a white limey." In other words, Plastic Soul. Hello Luther Vandross and John Lennon. Music first, lyrics after had always been the way Bowie preferred to work, but he took it to the next level on this record. He'd bring in funk and soul musicians, they'd work up the shape of a piece and once it was put together Bowie would write lyrics that night and they'd just record it live. The band didn't really know what a song was going to be until it was already done and they had moved on to the next one. He even invited the die hard fans who congregated outside the studio in to hear previews of finished tracks. Bowie wanted Norman Rockwell to do the cover art, but didn't want to wait 6 months for him to actually paint it, so scrap that; gotta get it done quick so i can run away for a whil

Like all good method actors, Bowie found out that becoming the character drains you of your actual real-life personality. It's time to not be Ziggy anymore, but the nose candy isn't just an extravagant indulgence anymore either. Welp, time to fire the Spiders, set Orwell's 1984 to music and call it Diamond Dogs (i'm skipping Pin Ups because it's a cover album). Orwell's estate wouldn't let him actually stage it as a musical, so he just reverted to his own post-apocalyptic version of everything. Thank goodness for the paranoia and anorexia of cocaine addiction, gives it that realistic touch you can't get anywhere else. Everyone points out that this is his last glam rock album, but remember he's just moving with the trends and putting his stamp on it. But, like he's been doing all along, he's imagining a world in the near future that he doesn't want to be a part of and then going a different direction. Right now he's still in his

Welcome to day two of my Bowie binge. Aladdin Sane is, in his own words, "Ziggy goes to America." It was written and recorded in the middle of the Ziggy Stardust tour. Like all the best coincidences, Bowie's brother had been diagnosed with schizophrenia, he felt both intrigued and appalled by America in general, he loved playing for thousands of people but hated the bus rides with complete strangers in between gigs. Not surprisingly, the album is a bizarre mixture of classic rock & roll, avant jazz, technological noise. Also not surprisingly, the characters continue to be the casualties of society at large. I haven't mentioned it before, but there's been an increasing sense that these seemingly incidental characters are actually the superheros, the stars, the real idols. I mention it now because it's right there at the surface. Ziggy Stardust is the famous person, but he's surrounded by people who don't know him, asking a truck driver for his

And here it is. The thing that finally made David Bowie a superstar. Does anybody really care if Ziggy Stardust is Jimmy Hendrix? My question is why did it take 5 albums to figure out that actually BEING the character who the album is about would be what people needed to finally get it? We're in David Bowie's version of Lord Sutch and Alice Cooper theatrics. His running joke during Hunky Dory was that he was "the actor" and all i can say is "duh?." Like any good Barthesian narrative, we get to say "hello saxophone, we look forward to where you'll take us next." Aside: you've been reading your Barthes, right? This is mandatory narrative logic. His example is a book with a parrot i can't remember the name of at the moment (the book, not the parrot). His point was that there is no room for illogical occurrences in proper narrative. Introducing the existence of a parrot is mandatory if the parrot matters to the plot. If you didn't

Hunky Dory. Enter the androgyny, the conflict between objective fame and having no idea what you're actually trying to do, humans are crap and it's time for a better species. This is full on piano-man and the spiders from mars pop-rock. Yeah, great, everything's fine. It's still very much character driven, but those characters aren't really related to each other except in the context of "kids" vs "adults." That's what it's all been about so far. I still don't think there's much subtext here, because the overriding sentiment is "the fact that your generation had to have the fight with the Nazis at all is pretty good evidence that we're garbage animals in general" and it's explicit. Forget your mind and we'll be free. This is my wife's least favorite Bowie album, but i think it's fine. The silliness is maybe a little more obvious than before, but i think that's to be expected. Bowie's

And then David Bowie got married. He and his wife would sit on the couch listening to the rest of the band jam, and every once in a while he'd get up and play some random chords or go to another room and write a whole set of lyrics in 10 minutes, and that's The Man Who Sold The World. It's his hard rock album that nobody cared about until Curt Cobain broke the rules of Unplugged to specifically use distortion for the solo on his cover of the title track, thus confusing an entire generation of children younger than me who thought Nirvana wrote it. That's the standard rock history 101 description. Bottle will of course add that, that's what mainstream music was doing: Led Zeppelin and Black Sabbath were trying to invent heavy metal without a trail map, and Bowie said "yeah, sure, i can do that too i guess, if you guys aren't going to leave me alone." We still haven't left that "David Bowie's version of it" feeling i keep mentioning.

Like i said earlier, this is just me listening to David Bowie's whole discography and trying to get something out of it (i don't know what). It's not a history or a critique or anything scholarly, though i'll keep my look up random info research methodology going. His second album has been repackaged a few times, but it's the one with Space Oddity. If the first album is Bowie as Cabaret singer, this is his folk rock album. The story is Deram dropped him after the first album, and Space Oddity is the song his brain puked out when the people around him finally got him to write something and convince a new label to publish it. That's definitely a recurring theme in his biography. He's a songwriter/singer/what-have-you, but the people around him have to actually force him to get up and actually do something. You also get a very clear picture that, especially with these early albums, it's a "what's the state of mainstream music? Oh sure i can do

I'm going to have to tackle this at some point. Maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, but soon... ... Well, now that it's raining through yet another clump of my increasingly rare days off, i guess i might as well start. If i'm going to go album by album through his entire discography, you might as well hop on at the start and take the whole trip with me. As far as i know, David Bowie's self titled debut is pretty much gone from our collective consciousness. That's a shame, because it's quite enjoyable. It's a collection of interesting, sometimes strange, stories and character songs, and i suspect it's exactly the context required for understanding his later career. I mean, so many of his albums are actually David Bowie portraying a character, sometimes fictional sometimes pseudo-(auto)biographical. It's 60s pop pretty much across the board, but highly literary. That's not to say there's a coherent narrative or theme to any of it,

Sadly, another great drummer left us Tuesday after a long battle with cancer. I've talked about Bill Rieflin in multiple contexts, and i could play any number of albums from Ministry or KMFDM or NIN or all of the above (i am an industrial rock/metal kind of guy). Let's skip the jibber jabber and just listen to Ministry's Psalm 69. Rieflin was the first phone number on Alain Jourgenson's call list for everything, and Psalm 69 is my favorite (not Ministry's best, but we've already established that i can like whatever i want to like when i feel like it, but it's not so secretly because he finally started actually caring about guitars again with this album). It's got everything. Drugs, politics, war, Aleister Crowly, Gibby Haines (from Butthole Surfers) makes a guest vocal appearance singing Jesus Built My Hotrod. You might be thinking what does any of this have to do with William Rieflin? It doesn't. Bill was always a behind the scenes guy. He w

You know who else made a New Wave album in 1980? Linda Ronstadt. I feel very conflicted about reviewing this album. First, i know i heard a lot of her growing up, but i only remember Different Drum. Second, i've got a lot of Linda Ronstadt records (not even half her discography, but closer to ten than two), but i don't want to listen to all of them just to throw a few fast balls by you at the moment. Third, this was her umpteenth platinum and/or Grammy winning album, so my opinion is worth even less than the normal nothing. Fourth, i don't do the like it 'cause she's cute kind of listening so i might hate it even if the tomatoes and beer bottles start flying at my head. I do know that this was a try something different 'cause the last one didn't do much album, and nothing before or after resembled it at all. I also know that the only tracks anyone cared about were the Elvis Costello covers. But, there's no crying in whiffle ball, so batter and bott

Why not keep the fun going? You know who made her major label debut 2 years before Whitney? Cyndi Lauper. But She's So Unusual isn't actually the start of her story. Cyndi Lauper was the singer of a band called Blue Angel. They were a NYC club band, but only one of their two albums actually got published. Their A&R guys boss's boss's boss over in Germany got fired, and the new guy just dropped the whole roster. Blue Angel kept on playing clubs but fired their manager after a Studio 54 gig. He sued them for $80k and that bankrupted her, so she just worked at a retro clothing store and kept on singing whatever she felt like at all the clubs she already made a name in, and a new manager finally scooped her up. Being the savvy New Yorker with two functional middle fingers that she is, she made sure that she was an equally credited arranger of every song, got her own songwriting credits, and didn't actually pay for any of it herself. You can call it new wave, o

Oh you're in for a real treat tonight. Or a brain hemorrhage. Either way we all have a lot of fun. That's a moderately oblique Men In Tights reference, everyone who didn't get it takes a shot. True story, my dad had a hard time pronouncing certain words, and i could swear he consistently pronounced her name Whitney Useless. I don't think that's fair, because she didn't actually get a choice in the matter. We aren't talking about Cher, or Dionne Warwick, or Barbra Streisand. The title and the voice are the only part of this debut album that belongs to Whitney Houston. This is a Sony stables production, a producers album, a Berry Gordy style "one of these songs will hit it big" type album. Jermaine Jackson, Kashif, Michael Masser, and Narada Michael Walden, in a grudge match to the death to see who will emerge victorious in the pair this new kid with an established duet partner grudge match of 1985. Walden won, by the way. Much as i hate to a

Only half a record tonight, because Debussy's La Mer only takes up one side. This is George Szell and the Cleveland Orchestra playing Debussy and Ravel (i'm not interested in hearing Ravel right now). La Mer is a tricky piece. It's not a symphony, it's not a symphonic poem, it's not "impressionistic," it's not what Debussy was known for writing up to this point, and nobody had much nice to say about it until he conducted it himself. The general reception ran along the lines of "how the hell is this 'the sea?' It's just half an hour of scribbley nonsense." I'm sure it won't shock you that i find classical music criticism even more odious than rock criticism. Let's ignore them and take a more bottle approach. It took a year of looking at Japanese paintings and daydreaming of childhood memories for Debussy to write it, and for him that was a rush job. He didn't want it to be an actual symphony, but he didn'

There can be only one album for tonight. I wasn't saving it for any particular reason, but for all the obvious and secret reasons it's Steppenwolf's third album, "At Your Birthday Party" (the quotes are actually part of the title). You remember "Rock Me" as the finale of the Candy soundtrack, right? It also has a fantastic little instrumental called "Mango Juice." I don't feel like concocting some clever essay, it's everything i want it to be. Steppenwolf could have played "wheels on the bus" or "baby shark" and i'd still love 'em. I love the sound (as feeble as the mix/master might sound compared to other albums). More than any other band, you can hear them playing. Who cares what the actual word for word lyrics are? As it stands though, there are quite a few pertinent statements. Perhaps most relevant is a sentiment my father taught me (if maybe not quite so succinctly): it's never too late to sta

You know what i haven't done in a while? Record roulette. That's where we grab a record i know absolutely nothing about, and hope it isn't terrible. Black Oak's I'd Rather Be Sailing. They look like Southern Rock to me, and they're fully committed to The Lonely Island's I'm On A Boat schtick. It's 1978, so there's not going to be a T-Pain guest spot, but there's "syndrums" and glockenspiel, and everyone plays guitar (some with e-bows). I won't know if they are actually from Arkansas until two or three paragraphs from now, but Capricorn Studios is the "birthplace of southern rock" so i feel somewhat vindicated in my judging of the cover photo. Time to walk the plank, i guess. Sweet baby buddah, i choked on my drink trying not to laugh. It was just shock, and I'm still getting used to his voice, but Jim Dandy Mangrum is unique. I just wasn't expecting the opening at all. The electronic toms are ridiculous,

If you thought i was being heavy-handed before, then to quote Randy Bachman, "b-b-b-b-baby you just ain't seen n-n-n-nothin' yet." It's NIN time. The Downward Spiral. I've been known to make semi-disparaging remarks about NIN, but that's only because they are the Five Finger Death Punch, or Gin Blossoms, or [insert ultra famous band from a much larger scene here] of industrial rock. You should know full well by now that i love Trent Reznor and his tech crew, but they are the made-in-china american flag on the iceberg that sank the Titanic. You say "industrial," i start yip-yapping about my beloved genre, and you have that deer on the highway panic attack that screams nine inch nails, i only know about nine inch nails, and honestly only one or two songs from the downward spiral 'cause i heard johnny cash cover "hurt" but i didn't really get what all the fuss is about, and actually i haven't really listened to the whole t

It's a thing i do now, so let's all take a moment to say Happy Birthday, Steven Stark. You can download his first album at https://store.cdbaby.com/cd/stevenstark10 Or, you can hear my playlist at https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL4moS9C5WRLySvvGVFeTa_NRKI-y4OBBN Either way, it's an album of great songs with interestingly complex harmonic twists, catchy melodies, and enough abstraction to find relevance for whatever state of mind you find yourself in. I don't just mean your current frame of reference, but how you felt back whenever your particular "then" might be, and in the future when other things have happened. It's an album to have, and experience, and come back to, and most of all enjoy. He usually describes himself as "compositional pop" but he has a very distinct indie rock personality too. Not the crazy kind like i've been showcasing, but the calmer rational side of thinking outside the box. Or maybe it's an adjacent

I brought out the Meat Puppets for show and tell yesterday, so it seems appropriate to continue with the post-punk music ('cause tee hee last week i did 90s punk, see how this all just unfolds like i have any idea what i'm doing? I repeatedly tell you i don't, and i mean it, i don't. It's a subconscious thing). Modest Mouse's fifth album, We Were Dead Before the Ship Even Sank, originated as a concept: Isaac Brock had the idea to write every song about sailors that die in every song, like Kenny from South Park. He couldn't actually keep it up for an entire album, but the core idea is definitely there. Aside: i'm really not as fascinated with death as my humor and record collection make it seem. You're going to laugh, but i am actually an extreme life loving optimist on the inside. But, Modest Mouse. They are idie rock, or alternative, or even art rock, but most of all they are anti-facade, exactly like the meat puppets. It's ridiculous, o

You seem tense. Are you scared, confused, angry? Are you sitting there wondering why Republican politicians are repeating the talking points of previous candidates for the Democratic nomination? Are you worried that your employer won't sell off their worst speculative investments to pay you for the work you've been doing? Are you not sure how this "grow plants and raise animals you can eat" thing works every spring? You just need some perspective. I'll feed you, baby bird. Meat Puppets. No no, not you. The band. Their second album, Meat Puppets II. You're not crazy. These guys are crazy. It's the Kirkwood brothers and a drummer, playing what could only be described as Cowpunk. I suppose you could warp the Venn diagram so that some of it  falls within the label Psychedelic Rock, but why? If you like the Oak Ridge Boys, you'll detest this (and vice-versa as my case may be). Let's start with the cover. What the hell is that a painting of? The

Speaking of The Wonder Years (that's a non sequitur), here's Sleeping On Trash. It's a compilation of non LP recordings from 2005-2010. It's got tracks from out of print EPs, splits, covers, and demos. It was a way to make a lot of their rarest recordings available in one affordable record. It's also a good chance to talk about the old school methodology of current punk labels. You've got singles, a "hit" and another song. That's where the term "b-side" for certain tracks came from. This is what labels used to send out in press kits to radio stations, distributors, potential reviewers, etc. Next, let's say you've got 3 or 4 tracks burning a hole in your brain, but not enough time, energy, or money to flesh out a full album. That's an EP. A split can be any size, but that's where two bands put out a record together. Basically you're only paying for half a record, while doubling your potential audience. The point