Albums for Eternity with Bottle, the Curmudgeon

You tell me a story. Tell me about wilma's rainbow of peaceful colors. White, brown, black, blue, and the elusively invisible purple. Tell me about those weasley weezers who tried to sneak red and green into betty's kitchen, and ended up ruining her biscuits. Tell me about the feeble silver hawaiian and his run in with sam hell. It doesn't have to be good, or nice, it doesn't have to make sense, it doesn't have to even be a story at all. I just want to hear you tell it. Next

I'm a very psychosomatic person. Mental stress makes me physically tired, aches and pains stoke the flames of my, let's say it, excessively morbid sense of humor. Tonight's album review could go in two different directions, but if i'm gonna sell my soul at the crossroads of metaphor and hyperbole street, i'm also going to bore the devil with an extended analysis of how both paths are essentially the same and my perseverance along either hinges only on the mindset from which i choose to approach them. I go through periods of loving and hating both Marilyn Manson and Social Distortion. They can be exactly what i want to hear, or they can come across as total poser hacks who i have to ignore for a while. They both wear makeup. Marilyn Manson is essentially a protege of Trent Reznor but fails to be either metal or industrial at almost every turn, and Mike Ness can't decide if he's a greaser, or a hick, or a gangster, but he's really just a grungy vers...

I'm having a bad brain day. I am of course my own proverbial bottle of beef, but day in day out of hearing dumb crap from people who get paid to be important wears on a guy like me, you know? So, before i let any more of it spill out into the world, here's more of it: From Richard Carpenter to Syd Barrett. Richard was a Quaalude brand methaqualone enthusiast, but Syd preferred his Mandrax style, cut with a little Benadryl (diphenhydramine). Neither of them were what you really think of when you say "drug addicts." Syd was always going to burn out, the acid just accelerated him toward the realization that it would be a lot better for him if he did it quickly. Both of them were essentially self medicating the obvious symptoms of severe underlying anxiety. Richard finally realized it was a serious problem and got help, Syd just shut down and retired to a life of painting and gardening in solitude. That sounds dreamy.... Fans of Pink Floyd will know that as Syd beg...

It's monday, and you know that doesn't mean much of anything, so let's play an album with the word monday in it. I bet you thought i used up all my color albums with Weezer, but i've got one more hiding in here. It's the tan album, Carpenters (though mine's starting to look a little pink in anything less that bright light). It's the last one. The red and green albums don't count because Weezer isn't allowed to make it their personal gimmick, and The R.E.D. Album doesn't count because 1) that's it's actual name, and 2) this is my game, not The Game's game. If you've got a legit color album i don't own, i'd be interested.... Sadly, Karen's exceptional cover of Klaatu's Calling Occupants of Interplanetary Craft isn't on it, but her first take sight reading of Richard's edited version of the lyrics to Superstar from a napkin is. I've got a Delaney & Bonnie album hiding in here somewhere, but that...

I did my regular humor album thing about Joe Walsh this morning, but i just want to hear Pink Floyd's Dark Side Of The Moon. It's about a lot of things, but it's mostly about being Pink Floyd without Syd Barrett, and why. It's a contender for greatest album ever, and deservedly so. It's always impossible to describe why something is excellent, because it usually feels like magic. It's that feeling like every single moment is a complete surprise, but exactly what it should be. No one needs to explain this album, the same way Clare Torry doesn't actually have to use words on The Great Gig In The Sky. The album is itself a complete life. Each side is a continuous multi-movement work. You couldn't possibly skip a single moment of the journey. This is just pure musical pleasure in my book. You don't need a reason or an explanation, you only have to keep going and remember where you've been. After all, we are only ordinary men.... Next

Why didn't critics like You Bought It - You Name It? If you read reviews, it's because they liked There Goes The Neighborhood, and it's follow up was somehow not as good, or silly, or... What? This is actually sillier. It's medium rock (as opposed to hard or soft), those weird talk box lines, "things," actual life vs. being rich and being self quarantined from the world for fun and profit. He's guarding his pile of trash. The real difference is that this is normal quirky (ordinary average) Joe Walsh, but the follow up makes it sound like you weren't actually paying attention. That's right, i think critics felt embarrased to admit that they didn't actually notice until Joe cranked the amps up and said "who cares? Nobody." They liked his soft rock stuff and ignored the fact that he was always telling you it's just stuff, it's not important. Joe Walsh is actually a pretty convincing, albeit obtuse, punk stuck in a middle-...

You know who didn't care about his solo albums? Joe Walsh. You Bought It - You Name It is generally considered his worst. I love it. Joe Walsh is insane. He wanted to record this album with an actual mobile truck. The producer he hired said no, so Joe fired him and did a non-dolby recording at an old ballroom on Santa Catalina Island. It's got a WWII ship on the cover, Joe sings about random crap like not wanting to go to war in the middle east, big tits, and video arcades. Who listens to Joe Walsh for the lyrical content? Dear Robert Christgau, all of Joe Walsh's albums are his comedy albums. He famously said something like "if i knew people were going to like Rocky Mountain Way, i would have done a better job."  You listen to Joe Walsh for the guitar playing. Jimmy Page, Eric Clapton, and Pete Townshend all said "yeah, he's phenomenal." For listening to a guitar player play random stuff he just thought up, this is a pretty decent record. An...

I don't know about you, but after a hard day's night of moving objects from one location to another i like to pour myself an adult beverage and watch a pair of piano pugilists fight to the pain (my family watched The Princess Bride last night, so i watched the whole thing in my head during the gap between the fire geysers and ROUSes, because i've got 1.21 gigabytes of memory, and it's nowhere near full), for my own amusement. That's a lot of references for one little sentence. Nobody has to die, i just have to find a bunch of random ways to blender up all my standard character tropes with things that happened in my real life and let you have a go at trying to figure it all out. Ferrante and Teicher have the hilariously underwhelming distinction of receiving honorary memberships in the University of Central Oklahoma's chapter of Tau Kappa Epsilon. Take that, you wannabe practical physicists and uneducated novelists! I am joking. These guys were legitima...

It's Friday, and you know what that means (it doesn't mean anything); it's Tickle Me Elmo, i mean Color Me Barbra! That's a really complicated joke, because you have to know that the title itself was a reference to the fact that this was Barbra Streisand's first TV special IN COLOR, at a time when color television was still considered a novelty. You also have to know that i'm using both definitions of the word "novelty," and that you can play around with assigning each to both. It's 4 jokes for the price of one, and i'm practically givin'em away (which is itself a TV advertisement style commercialism trope). This album is hands down fantastic. The real question is how could you possibly not like it even just the tiniest bit? But it's showtunes! Yeah, the best songs from plays with songs in them. But it's silly! Yeah, who in their right mind would want to sit in a crowded theater on a Friday night and not have a good time? ...

Tonight's album is a doozie. Before i say anything else, i need to make it clear that this album isn't critqueable. It's simply a fact in the space-time continuum of the universe. It's Jack Harkness. It makes us time lords queasy, but we can't do anything about it. Life Is Peachy. You can feel the sarcasm burn your retinas when you read those 3 words. There is no pretense to Korn. There's no artifice, no gimmick, no image. Listening to a Korn album is essentially watching Jonathan Davis's regression therapy. The world fucked him up, and his friends and a lot of meth, cocaine, and alcohol made the world well aware of that fact. The outrageous metaphors have to be outrageous. Whining, screaming, and tazmanian devil-ing are about the only way you can vocally express it. Every member of the band is playing a different genre. You're supposed to watch it happen and become very aware that that is a world in which you do not live. You can't possibl...

I have a nasty little secret. I don't own one of the albums by my friend Steven Stark. Tonight was the perfect chance to remedy that situation, 'cause yesterday i criticized Paul McCartney for running off to make a different album in the middle of making an album. Come to find out, CD Baby closed their web store last month. In the apocryphal words i put in Ric Ocasek's mouth, "screw you guys!" The youtube link to his album Country Wrong Turn is below. Go check it out. I'm so bummed that i forgot all the hilarious things i was going to say. So, to my friend Steven i say, you know where i am over on the darkside of bandcamp, and there's more than a couple beers waiting for you when you get here ;) https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=OLAK5uy_m9l0RjVC29TKZrszNJjdvxO8a5TRMwhao Next

We should shake things up a little. Here's some photos of Paul McCartney's 2007 album Memory Almost Full. Go listen to it. You tell me: is it good, or is it a vacuous piece of twaddle that only superficially connects to anything in reality housed inside the CD jewell case equivalent of hostile architecture? Objection. Leading the witness. Sustained. Did you, or did you not start MPL as the umbrella company for your own post-Beatles publications, then just buy as many smaller rights holders as possible to make yourself the largest private copyright holder in the world? Yes. Did you, or did you not start recording Memory Almost Full, get bored or frustrated or whatever word you want to use, record, publish, and promote an entirely different album, then think "oh, i guess i should finish this thing i abandoned a while ago," and licence it's distribution exclusively to Starbucks so that you incurred little or no financial liability? Objection! ...

You know who else felt really conflicted? Ric Ocasek. The Cars was a magic awesome breakout, but after Candy O went platinum, the critics were like "you're just a vapid trendy pop band making awful emotionless new wave garbage," and Ric was like "screw you guys!" They went from being a bar band nobody cared about to being the center of the universe to being told that they weren't living up to everyone's expectations. What expectations? We're just a band. You like one thing we did and somehow it's our fault for tricking you into thinking we're awesome? Sounds to me like you guys are the ones who don't know what you want. We aren't beholden to any rock cliche, or pop standard, we're "alternative" in every sense. Cutting edge technology, shaking things up, living the confusing life. Wanna see how weird and creepy and sarcastic we can be? Hello, 1980. Here's a Panorama of how bizarre this all is for us. Next

Dirty little secret: Green Day had this little subconscious gremlin in their minds that they should model their career on the Beatles. Hello, Rob Cavallo, you unofficial 4th member of the band. They asked Rob what they should do after the stuff they demoed for the next album was stolen, and Rob said "was it any good?" Green day said "no." Let's make a concept album! That's exactly what the Beatles would do at this point in their career. I have to tell you, i like this album a lot. Buuut, Billy Joe decided to go to New York City and hang out with Ryan Adams for a few months. I don't mean to brag, but i was like 8 or 9 years ahead of you guys in figuring out what a little weasel he is. Rock opera about a teenage anti-hero, blah blah blah. The real point is that Green Day was never a political band, but Warning couldn't help but be about hoping the W didn't become president. 4 years later it's album time and by the way please don't re-...

Warning: we've reached the end of the second chapter of the book of Green Day. It has been a 10 year roller coaster of ups and downs, popularity and rejection, redundance and experimentation. It's time for something new. I sure hope Al Gore doesn't lose the election to an ultra conservative frat boy who invites the corporate vampires into our fragile politico-economic landscape. Last time that happened we went to war for the opposite of a good reason (which 20 years later, we're still not officially engaged in fighting), not to mention the 4 times before that. The result is an incredibly spastic mush of acoustic guitars, retro pop quotations, cabaret stories, and fables about growing up. To borrow the Conan O'Brien gag, in the year two thou....sa...nd, Green Day made a sort of folk punk album. It's just another Green Day album, but it's hard not to compare it to other things like Meat Puppets or Violent Femmes; it's pop-punk with a whole lot of acous...

Yay, Dookie/Insomniac is over. Let's go tour Europe. Oh, wait we don't actually like being the big arena rock band we tried to convince ourselves we wanted to be. Ok, let's make another album instead. We should just have a bunch of unrelated songs this time. It'll give us a chance to do weird crap like the critics wanted us to do for the last album. I've always wanted to hire a violinist to play 1 intro to a song about my newfound alcoholism. Ok, fine bring the rest of the quartet and i'll write an acoustic ballad. Oooh, i could write a real nasty hardcore thing and snarl. And that surf rock sound check instrumental we've been playing. We'll call it Nimrod. Aside: Billie Joe constantly writes about break ups, and it tickles me to no end that "She, "Good Riddence," and "Whatshername" are about a girl who literally left him to join the Peace Corps. The album itself is influenced by The Clash and Bikini Kill (London Calling an...

I've been a little down lately. Not for any specific reason, just the normal hills and valleys of third-winter and universal cacophony. I want to hear something terrible. I've got just the thing. Disko. Not with a "c," with a "k." This isn't your typical boring old compilation album of 70s cheese, it's a cover-band album from Pickwick Records' in-house, third string, not at all suspiciously anonymous Disko Band. 50 cents is practically grand larceny if you were expecting the actual original recordings, but if you want to belly laugh at rhythmic bungles, out of tune horns, and the worst falsetto ever committed to tape,  then this is easily worth the 7 dollar cover charge and 3 drink minimum. You get 2, count 'em 2, kung fu songs (i assume that's Carl Douglas's entire oeuvre), a mediocre Rock the Boat, and all the sweaty polyester you can imagine. I promise it gets worse and worse as the album progresses. Why am i so happy about...

Green Day think Insomniac is their most honest album. I think it's their best. It's also my favorite. It's about their own immense internal conflict. The only thing they want to do is make more music. Caffienate themsleves to the bursting point, bash out a 2 minute masterpiece, take a nap until their fingers stop bleeding, and do it again. Why? Because they are proving to themselves that they deserve their success. We worked for it. We are in charge. Why do we believe that stupid story that we're flash in the pan posers? Every song is a story by a narrator who hates himself for actually acting like a loser. Billie Joe is auditioning amps for every song because he wants it to sound exactly right, but his inner teenager is sneering at how pretentious that is. So what are we talking about? I don't want to be a trust fund loser. I don't want to be a meth-head. I don't want to drink rage-a-hol. I don't want to have panic attacks. I don't want to b...

So now here's Dookie. A&R guys are taking the trio out to dinner, Disneyland, begging for the money this thing will bring anyone who touches it. It's all done and in their heads and fingers, Green Day isn't pitching ideas to anyone, they've been playing whatever songs they wrote yesterday to fans screaming "when can i give you all of my money?" It's just a question of who's tolerable enough to talk to on a daily basis. They didn't just sign to whoever, they went with Frank Sinatra's Reprise because they liked Rob Cavallo's actual work with the Muffs. They wanted to sound like the Sex Pistols or Black Flag, and they had it remixed until they liked it. They were the darlings of Gilman, and the punk scene in general. They may be dumb, but they weren't stupid enough to think they could ever go back after they signed page 12, and initialed here, and here. We started out as punk, sure we miss our old friends, but we want to be a mains...

Hello, Tre Cool. Welcome to Green Day. We've just jumped 10,000 light years away from our first album, and we're gonna do it again after this one, so good thing you hopped on the bus now. Kerplunk! Here's our second album. Lookout, we're gonna sell 10,000 copies on the first day, drive all across the country and stress your limited production budget by quintupling that figure in a couple months, and move to a major label where we belong. I told a similar story with Godsmack and Offspring. This band was going to be gigantic. I could save this story for later, but it's relevant now. Green Day were in it to win it from day one. You can get all pissy about them moving to Reprise (aka Warner), but Lookout couldn't support them after Kerplunk! "Sellout" is factually wrong. Imagine you are a company. Let's pick an arbitrary number, say 2 million. That's your credit limit, period, no negotiation. This next album is going to sell an astronomical n...

It's time for another full discography. However, this one will be controversial. This is my Green Day. Everything after American Idiot is a different band. I don't feel like i have to defend that statement. I don't dislike current Green Day, i just don't care about their last 3 albums. Maybe in 20 more years i will? Dookie is there in spirit, my CD is currently hiding. Probably somewhere unpleasant. Johnny Rotten thought Green Day were weasley little posers, but i think Public Image Ltd. was a terrible band, and the one Sex Pistols album isn't fun, even for me, the guy who can learn to like anything. Nobody's going to win that coin toss, 'cause listening to Lydon's opinions on anything is like desperately trying to forget that you said the opposite thing a year ago. Rotten says whatever thing will make the person he's talking to confused and upset, that's his character, he wants to be centrist compared to whichever bias you throw at him and...

My brain feels like dog food. I don't want to write about an album tonight. Thankfully, Les Claypool saved me some effort and made his own gravy. Next

Let's listen to some Kurt Weill. No, my spelling is correct. I'm not talking about the ex The War On Drugs guitarist turned indie-folk hero, i'm talking about the German composer responsible for the music part of Bertolt Brecht's Epic Theater. I need a gimmicky thing though. I've dragged the socialist/communist stick through too many puddles of mud already. I know! You're already familiar with Jim Morrison's take on Alabama song, so why not hear a completely different bizarre version of it. Luckily, i have Marianne Faithfull's album of Weill's music. The whole Seven Deadly Sins and some other stuff (the aforementioned Alabama Song, a couple things from The Threepenny Opera, and one from Happy End. Before you even bother to ask, she's the "da - da di - da" from Metallica's The Memory Remains. She was also the leading female of the "British Invasion" but that get mansplained away as "Mick Jagger's girlfriend...

If you thought i had a dark and morbid sense of humor, i've got news for you. I'm a Positive Penelope compared to Alkaline Trio. Here's their fourth album Good Mourning. Spoiler alert, Kenny dies in every episode. You might be tempted to think this is just tasteless misery for the sake of gloom, but the sheer scope of describing everyday normal occurrences in elaborately morbid ways is pretty impressive. And the puns, oh the glorious puns. Lydia Deetz ain't got nothing on Matt Skiba and Daniel Andriano. Musically speaking, these are some of their best songs. The melodies are fantastic, the words are fun to sing, the've got one leg in the punk world and one in the alternative rock world. If i could only take one album with me to the waiting room for eternity it would be Spirit's Twelve Dreams of Dr. Sardonicus, 'cause this one's surely already in their jukebox and i want to impress Juno, my caseworker. Next

Suddenly, over the loudspeaker i heard an album that i think is spectacular. If you remember 3rd Bass at all, it's going to be their hit "Pop Goes the Weasle," a dis track making it very clear that 3rd Bass doesn't want you to put them anywhere in the same paragraph as Vanilla Ice, unless like I'm doing you're making it clear they thought he was an embarrassment to humanity at large. Don't worry, they equally hated MC Hammer. You need a proper historical context for this album. Hip-hop came from the Bronx. It's the melting pot of Jamaican turntablists, clever word play, graffiti, looking fly, and jumping up and down like teenagers do with their black/white/latino/jewish/whatever friends who are equally stuck in the inner-city. Two turntables, some old funk and soul and jazz records, a microphone, and your hype-man showing off some cool new dance moves. Everyody had something to like, because everybody was involved. Naturally, some coked up white ...

Tonight it's Alice In Chains' second album Dirt. It's about the Egyptian goddess Sekhmet, the lion headed daughter of Ra whose fiery breath shears the land to desert. I'm joking, it's about Layne Staley's herion addiction, and how that basically defined him as a person. It's about other things too, but it's an explicitly autobiographical album from the perspective of a serious junkie. It's also a real world coincidence kind of album. Remember how Bowie's Heathen was interrupted by September 11? Well, AIC were tuning their guitars when the verdict of the Rodney King trial was being read, and LA decided it was time to have a riot. Back up. I hate that phrase, police officers were the defendents on trial and they were excused from punishment for unnecessarily beating the shit out of him, which they were filmed doing. Eventually, two of them saw the reverse angle of prison. Needless to say, Jerry Cantrell's afternoon run to the gas station fo...

I know what question you've been dying to ask this beardly visage. You want to know which greatest hits album from 1990 is, well, the greatest; Go Gos or Bangels? Geez, that's a tough one to call. I mean, they represent different worlds right? The Go Gos are hanging out at the mall with their friends shopping for funky hats, while the Bangels are secretly stealing their boyfriend and going to the drive-in. Contradicting my rule that it's always Chad's fault, it's not Chad's fault. Chad likes rock and roll more than new wave inspired pop. We all knew Chad was a jerk, and it only makes sense that he gets a little bad karma heartbreak of his own to chew on when it's all said and done. I'm not an image guy, but it's no secret that the Go Gos are "cute" the Bangels are "sultry." The Go Gos are Claire's Boutique, the Bangels are the makeup counter at Nordstrom. If you're asking me to choose between Belinda and Susannah, i...

Tonight's album is going to hurt a little (assuming you actually go listen to it). That's because you don't like death metal. You don't think screaming and growling is an acceptable use of a vocalist's instrument. You think there are certain things no one should write songs about. So, tonight we'll turn the tables. The Black Dahlia Murder's 2003 debut, Unhallowed. Cannibalism and death and demons and anything you can think of that might make Tipper Gore's skin crawl. But, as i've tried to teach my children, sticks and stones may break my bones, so please don't throw them at me. It's just music. Yeah, if you forget that it's just music then you might turn into a psychopath, but the same can be said about two people fist fighting over the last bag of potato chips. More to the point, i find sexism and racism and hypocrisy appalling, but that's all the last two firing brain cells of every 1 out of 3 people i see in a day (in real ...

South Africa has given us some amazing things. Die Antwoord, Charlize Theron, an alternate reality where Nelson Mandela died in prison and people's names are spelled differently, Leonardo DiCaprio's abysmal accent work, but they also gave us the musical venereal disease that is Seether. Seether, the international Nickelback. *Disclaimer: You think i'm going to be biased. Obviously i hated it the first time around and i haven't listened to this album in decades, but i am always willing to be wrong. But, before we start i'll tell you that i have absolutely no problem with their 1 hit single "Fine Again." Perfectly lovely song. Sure, i may have enjoyed making fun of the final vocal cadence. Who didn't? Let's all listen to it with fresh ears. We're going to ignore the fact that i put it in my computer, and my computer vomited it back out as seen in the photo. I have to put them in backward, and it actually happens a lot. Pure coincidence....

I feel like i've already used up most of my allotted wordy-words today, so lets just enjoy this George Nielsen/Dave Brubeck split. Bop and Cool Jazz. CST 470 if you're a catalogue kind of guy. Very nice. Now that i look, it's not on youtube anywhere. Give me an hour or so... Geez, that only took a minor eternity. It's like there's a teenager hogging our upload stream with video game commentary, or something. Anywho, please enjoy some cool jazz on me.  I filtered out the usb squeal, but left the clicks and pops for that authenticity you've come to expect. https://youtu.be/J6wncV_p1yI Next

I like Pearl Jam's first three albums, but i just couldn't get into No Code, or their stuff with Neil Young, or anything after. Their second album is my favorite. I have a weird thing about loving second albums, and Vs. might be a good indication why. The story goes like this: Ten was a huge deal. They are famous. They start out jamming with their new drummer for the second album, but Brenden O'Brien moves them to high end LA. Eddie Vedder, being the method actor he really is, can't stand it because a) it's too nice, b) that makes it impossible to get into the insanely negative head space he writes from, and c) how is any of that rock and roll? Long story short, he starts living in his truck and his band mates try to make it as miserable an experience as possible for him, and everybody is super excited because once he actually gets some lyrics penned down they're a good enough improvisational jam band to just go wherever he takes them. The end result, in t...