Albums for Eternity with Bottle, the Curmudgeon

Hi, everybody! Hi, Dr. Bottle! Oh, thank you so much for finishing my Simpson's joke for me. I know you expect some silly album review from me, but it's Sunday, so there has to be some reflective component to round out the week before the lights flick off and p(nmi)t rearranges all the furniture. I thought today we would turn the tables, so to speak. Now, you've watched me ascend Mount Hilarity, wade the tumultuous currents of the River Rant, even swan dive into the empty swimming pool of some long forgotten ghost suburb for the better part of a year. It makes me wonder...can you do it? Can you sit down and waste 30 minutes of your time to listen to p(nmi)t's The Long March and write an essay? That sounded antagonistic. I take it back, it's not a waste, it's an experiment. I simply mean, can you force yourself to do it? Can you carve out 21 minutes to listen to it, and 9 minutes to write something about it? You might hate it and say it sucks. Awesome! You might ...

I did it. I listened to Let It Bleed from start to finish. It hurt. A lot. Let's go back and remind ourselves what my personal problem with the Rolling Stones is. Their albums sound like garbage. The mixes are bizarre, they full pan things for no good reason, parts that should be loud are barely audible, parts that should be subtle are 12dB louder than anything else, Mick's vocals sound like they put a microphone next to the air holes in the plexiglass coffin they keep him in, the harmonica sounds like they put a contact mic on a garbage can and filtered all the highs off. Bill Wyman's bass is the only good sounding instrument in the whole ensemble, but even that gets panned hard right half the time.  Notice how half the title track lives in the vinyl death zone? Some bands can get away with it, but the Stones try to pack every single sound inside the 200-400 hertz range and it's like listening to the full band broadcasting through the copilot's walkie-talkie. Also ...

Oh boy, oh boy. It's time for everybody's favorite game: What's this musical i've never heard of about, then? It's the best thing since sliced bread according to the back blurb. It's practically an opera! More musicians and chorus members than any Fire Marshall would allow if we told him about it. The music never stops (except when it has to for those stupid spoken lines a play has for some reason). Meet you on the other side. But first, a word from our sponsor, Glick's Hardware in Cold Spring, NY. Do you need a 29-cent thing? Well we've got it, just see if we don't! Skip says i should point out that my dad's side of the family lives in and around there. I have lots of vague childhood memories of the village, and if i ever travel again i just might go there for a visit. Now, on with the show. It's closing time, turn all of the lights off over every boy and every girl. Except this girl. It's tough being a waitress and her feet hurt. I hear...

Call me Bottle. Not quite a year ago, i began a voyage into the salty sea of album reviews. Not so much to purge the spleen, but to snap me out of the drizzly late October nights of my imagination. Better than punching people in the queequeg, am i right? But look! Have i got a Matryoshka doll of an album for you. Mastodon's Leviathan. It's their first concept album, loosely based on Moby Dick. Sea monsters and stuff. Loosely in the same sense that Uriah Heep' The Magician's Birthday Party tells a story, or that p(nmi)t and Sandra are "artists."  Loose lips sink ships, but not as impressively as albino Sperm Whales. Melville's novel is equally loosely based on the story of the Essex, which if you're at all squeamish about ironic cannibalism, the part of American history that ran on Nantucket's whale fluid industry, the very real whale named Mocha Dick, and PR nightmares regarding race relations re said cannibalism, you should just avoid altogether. ...

I said a mean thing about Michael McDonald. I called him the Nickelback of Adult-Contemporary R&B. I'm wearing big-boy pants, i said it and i accept the consequences. Now, being the smooth negotiator that i am, i plead no contest because i am perfectly willing to accept the punishment for my actual crime. Most people won't accept my differentiation that Nickelback is a great rock band who play terrible songs on purpose because they mistakenly think those songs are good, so while i'm willing to accept penalty for the insult, i think the judge will understand the simple motivation for my sensational claim: McDonald sounds like he's working through the pain of a particularly nasty hernia, and that is pure useless opinion on my part. In short, it's a false comparison, because McDonald is actually good and i'll prove it.  Skip tells me i have a penchant for prolonging the perplexity, so i'll paraphrase. Your other brother Doobie is the real deal OG: Steely Da...

I'm in the mood for some mid 80s garage-punk. Nonononono, don't run for the egress, it's good. Geez, why do different people take things so differently? It's just trashy rock and roll, like the Stooges or the Ramones. There was a real proto-punk Renaissance in California in the 80s, and you're gonna love the self titled debut from The Lazy Cowgirls. It's not political, or offensive, or obnoxious (well, yes of course it's obnoxious but that's the fun part).  They really were compared to those great Detroit rockers, or like a hybrid New York Dolls/Sex Pistols type band, but they are much more fun. Look, it's 1985, whether you liked New York Dolls or not, Johnny Thunders is dead (not literally), David Johansen is pretending to be Buster Poindexter, and all those kids who moved from Nowheresville, Indiana to LA just wanted to rock. This one'll hit you like a punch in the face, but in a good way. There's some killer bass lines, a whole lot of guit...

Noir is one of those confusing umbrella concepts for a feeling. Or rather, it is the combination of characteristics that produce a certain ambiguous unease.  Those characteristics are generally cynicism, moral ambiguity, fatalism, and often paranoia. You might be familiar with its manifestation as Crime Fiction. Black and white, the good guy isn't necessarily good and the bad guy isn't necessarily bad, everybody distrusts each other to the point that it doesn't even matter because it will play out exactly as bad as it should. Or, maybe you remember my pointing it out in the contexts of Thomas Dolby and Pink Floyd. I'd call it a doorway to doom. I've got an album for that: Songs in the Key of X.  It answers the important question "what would the soundtrack of The X-Files sound like if you guys and dolls wrote songs inspired by The X-Files?" A few of the tracks weren't made for the album, like the song that inspired the idea in the first place, Red Righ...

I never originally planned to write about Back in Black. Partly, i had no idea what i would say, but also because i'm meh on AC/DC, i don't have the jacket, there's no room to argue that it isn't a classic album, it's not going to be particularly funny or clever or... No, you know what? Screw it. Nobody even noticed that it's an ironic album. Bon Scott died, nobody cared that they auditioned like 47 sound alikes 'cause Bon Scott was already the second singer, and everybody said "hello, Brian Johnson. That'll do, pig. That'll do." I don't have any sentimental attachment to any of them, but  i also can't ague that they sucked. Even their dumbest of dumb songs are great rock and roll. I accept full responsibility for not caring, so roll that beautiful bean footage. They come from the land down under, where women blow and men chunder... no sorry "Thunder" isn't from this album... um... oh, i know, AC/DC is the Australian Z...

https://youtu.be/X4lFA-xK0gM Jürgen Engler is just an awesome dude. Write your own coffee grinder review... ... i'm kidding, of course i'll do it for you. For starters, the coffee grinder company doesn't have enough letter Ps. Then you gotta deal with that goddamned WWII thing where half the world wants to be fascist, and you have to say "oh, ok here's a guy who didn't like growing up in Germany at all, because actual real old school Nazis would threaten children like him. England's a pretty Nazi friendly island as well, what with their national institutions of cultural segregation and hard right social politics. America is pretty freakin' sweet because at least you can see the security cameras, everybody knows they are being watched, and it takes an actual personal grievance to get you arrested." Granted, the Trump-dumpster is in need of being emptied at the moment, but we're closer to remembering how easy it is to start lighting your trash on...

You know what i did? I accidentally crisscrossed (jump, jump, i missed the bus 'cause it's hard to run in backwards pants) the Kronos and Brodsky quartets in my review of Black Angels. I hid my blunder on the blog, but it's still sitting right there in the pdf of A Year In The Life... for your eyes and brain to gawk at. Honest explanation for an honest mistake, because the 40 something albums of Kronos involve all kinds of collaborations and even i can't tackle that fondant covered football theme wedding cake. See what i did there? Tackle, football? Bottle's back everybody, put on your hip waders (again with the tackle jokes, did somebody spike my not particularly strong rum and punch?). Whatsamawhosits aside, let's make it up to Declan and the Brods by comparing the two albums side by side. I'm not about to do a head to head/which is better review, because both of these albums are fantastically amazing in their own special way. Apples vs. Beef Stroganoff. I...

  Remember that time two months ago when i ordered the first two Dan Vapid and the Cheats CDs? They made it here today! There's no arguing about it, they sound like the best possible cross of Green Day and the Ramones. This is real pop punk, these are real 50s pop and rock songs with complex harmonies and catchy as hell melodies. Please, as a personal favor to me, go buy their music so they can afford to put out their third album so i can buy it. Then, drive around your town playing it loud enough that everyone can hear it and say "that's awesome, who is it?" Then you can reply "Dan Vapid and the Cheats!," and the world will be a little bit better. Or don't, and the world will suck a little more than it has to, but to be honest that's pretty selfish, don't you think?

What is Static Age? It's The Misfits' first album. G'night. As origin stories go, though, it's pretty awesome. They released their first single on Glenn Danzig's properly paperworked and trademarked Blank Records. Then Mercury wanted to use that name, and Danzig accepted a deal for 30 hours of studio time in exchange for the name, because you can just go fill out the paperwork again with a different name, Plan 9 in his case. There's always strings attached though, so those 30 hours happened late at night, and the engineers wasted most of that time getting levels, so they just bashed out 18 songs of highly varying quality. Musically it's fantastic, but lyrically it runs the gamut from truly shocking classic tracks like Last Caress and Bullet, to enjoyable mid-level songs on various topics, to simply listing the cast of the movie Return of the Fly. It's fantastic (if not exactly intelligent) late 70s punk. Supposedly Sid Vicious' mom was a random guest...

I have absolutely no idea why i thought of Sail and Kill Your Heroes earlier today, but who says i can't go listen to the entire AWOLNATION discography on youtube? Of course i can. I might have to stop in the middle and feed chickens, or have ice cream, or refresh my adult beverage a couple times, but i was going to do that anyway. Skip the first ep, on with the show. Megalithic symphony: Hip-hop intro robot name check. Some lady singing "wake up." So, you should know what you're going to get. Like if Justin Timberlake joined Fallout Boy. No seriously, this is going to be a mishmash of alternative rock and hip-hop from top to bottom, with a couple ballads here and there. Let go of the "pop" and "rock" labels, and think about what you're really going to get. 1) beatwork, 2) borderline rap and soul style verses, 3) catchy singalong choruses. They are not a "rock band," so approaching it that way is a recipe for hating them. The chorus t...

Let's talk retro throwback gimmick bands. The 90s were a kind of crisis decade, and revivals became a marketable enterprise. Obviously we had the punk revival, but we also had real retro Rockabilly, Swing, and possiby weirdest of all, 30s Gypsy Jazz; the most notable band being Squirrel Nut Zippers. Part of the reason we just let it slide is that we all kind of collectively nodded our heads and said "yeah this is an obvious manifestation of mainstream postmodern irony and we'll have a stroke in 2001 and move on." Go look up my review of the Strokes. Is Volbeat any different now? It's all Taco's Puttin' on the Ritz, right? I bring it up because we stepped through the looking glass and we're fighting the Jabberwocky. We know these guys and gals take what they do seriously, even if everyone thinks it's silly. I don't think it's silly, i love Hot. The irony is that for a brief few minutes in the late 90s the Majors didn't know what to do so...