Albums for Eternity with Bottle, the Curmudgeon

You like Gothic Metal, right? Who doesn't? Let's go back to probably the only platinum selling goth metal album, or at the very least the first. It's Type O Negative's 3rd album, Bloody Kisses. The Drab Four are known for three things. 1) there will never be another Peter Steele, 2) they were hilarious, and 3) the scandalous cover of Bloody Kisses.  First, there shouldn't be another Peter Steele, the first one was more than you deserve. Last, the notion that two girls kissing on the cover in 1993 was scandalous is ridiculous compared to the Voodoo-U cover in 1994 (full on cartoon lesbian devil orgy). On to the humor. Romance, sex, death, and a straight cover of Summer Breeze, because Seals really didn't like Peter's parody lyrics (reprinted in the liner notes). I think their humor is best summed up by the video for Black No. 1, where Kenny is playing doom riffs on a 12-string acoustic and Peter has an actual double bass hanging around his neck. There's s

I had one goal in mind tonight, avoid the first presidential debate. I had to leave the basement of doom twice, but 99% of my nose hairs are unsigned. Here's what i did instead. I think i know my geography pretty damned well. I also have Modest Mouse's first album on vinyl, recorded by Seasick Steve a year before Ok Computer. It's called This Is A Long Drive For Someone With Nothing To Think About. I've talked about a fair amount of indie rock, and i talked about their masterpiece We Were Dead..., but this first album is just gloriously disheveled pathos. Plus, the entire enterprise of the band literally comes from Isaac Brock's bedroom. I'm not entirely sure he's ever even been in an actual office building before, or that anyone would let him.  If you're one of those people who only knows their bizarre moment of fame with Float On, then you might not be prepared for how truly awesome they are. Obviously, if singing in tune or playing in tempo is at the

Speaking of the next world war, and waking up to find that you're not dead and have to live like a stranger trapped in your own world where everyone is out to drain you dry and you just wish aliens would abduct you so you'd have an interesting story to tell....here's the monolithic 1997 album from Radiohead. Ok Computer, remind me of what every waking moment feels like right now..... Did Radiohead invent time travel? I honestly don't remember 1997, other than that was right about the time when my high school adopted "core curriculum" and i wasn't allowed to take calculus. Really, scheduling conflicts meant i literally had to choose between advanced math and science classes and orchestra. I chose orchestra and wasted 2 years reading newspapers in classes below my level. I had many nice chats with the principal after doing a weeks coursework in class and reading the newspaper until the teacher just told me to go somewhere else. He agreed it was dumb and unfa

Pretty bold f-ing claim, Bottle, that Trump is a good and proper authoritarian Communist like he was trained to be.... Oh, sorry. That was one i decided not to publish. I meant that Nancy Sinatra was waaaaaay better than Petula Clark. Yeah. We lead off with her greatest hit, Boots. Already, the horns and strings are infinitely better. Who's the dude? Oh, that is actually Lee Hazelewood. Nancy's voice is way better than Petula's, by miles. For starters, she doesn't do that weird dipthongy vowel garbage. I mean, it's all still way too uncomfortably sexualized, and it's really just a best of Lee Hazelwood album. It's like he produced it, or something... There is the duet with dad, Something Stupid (it's international daughter's day in case you didn't know), and how can you not enjoy that?  Seriously, you thought i was joking last night, but Nancy Sinatra is fantastic. I'm obviously not a fan of real thematically relevant Country, but Nancy's

I dunno, what do you guys wanna listen to? We could do more Moon Hooch, or Spoon, or... No! Tonight you suffer like you've never suffered before! Geez, what did i do? Oh, yeah, that working overtime 'cause the man's too dumb to do it properly himself. Alright, what not so terrible Country album is it tonight? OH, EVIL DEITY OF PESTILENCE AND SUFFERING!  Petula Clark? Seriously? Elvis wanted a three way Petulant Clark? I can't read that title in the nominative, "just pet" is a really uncomfortable verbal non-sequiter! I'd rather revisit Barbara Mandrell's house at Christmas, at least that was hilarious. Alright, bombs away. Aaah! It's horrible. Please don't drop a dime, i can't stand your voice as it is, let alone over a  pay phone. Things Bright and Beautiful is the most ghastly audio abomination ever, and i'm the guy who likes Throbbing Gristle and Merzbow. Even if you're the kind of person who hates everything about the Beatles, y

I knew i had it in here somewhere. It's Peter, Paul, and Mary's 7th album named after the Warner Brothers catalog number it was going to receive. It's got a song by Leslie Braunstein, the Chevy Chase/Pete Best, of Blue Öyster Cult's history. For those of you who don't know that story, Chevy was the drummer in The Leather Canary with Fagan and Becker (who later became Steely Dan). There's a song by some Colorado guy too, or something. More interesting is Weep For Jamie. That song is downright macabre for whatever image you had of this beloved folk trio. If you live outside of chronological time like i do, there's even a song named after Green Day's Whatshername. Sweet Kristofferson, i just got to the Great Mandella (sic) at the end of Side A. If there's an anthem for right now, it's that song without question.  Obviously, you're going to bring up the answering the door naked and hitting on a fourteen year old thing, and i'll remind you tha

Waaaaiiiiit. Is Bottle going to review an Amy Winehouse album?  No. Tonight we ask the toughest question ever asked by people who understand the concept of questions. Who's prettier, Jason Priestly or Jennifer Connelly?  I suppose we need to back up a little. See, Billy Steinberg and Tom Kelly wrote "I Drove all Night" for Roy Orbison. He totally recorded that song in 1987, but that was the culmination of his 2nd wave of popularity and it just got lost in the shuffle and he unfortunately died in 1988. Not to rag on Steinberg and Kelly, but in 1989 Cyndi Lauper recorded it and they were like "sweet! She's not dead and people will finally hear our awesome song." Finally in 1992, some guy pulled up his original and gave Roy yet another posthumous bout of stardom. Strangely bizarre non-sequiter fact, Roy Orbison and Glenn Danzig were friends. Is Roy Orbisons's sampled and augmented original version awesome too? You betcha, but just like our actual question,

I unbottled so much stuff today, i just want to listen to some of Pete Seeger's earliest recordings dubbed from the original 78s. Just Pete and a banjo (or guitar), and old folk songs from the 30s and 40s. Lovely. But does it have songs Lead Belly personally taught Pete? Yes, of course it does. Now shush.

I built a table today. Yes, obviously i deserve praise for my magnificence, but so much more importantly my friend Steven Stark shared some Italian prog i've never heard before, and sweet baby Yoda it's amazing. Tonight we're listening to Per Un Amico by Premiata Forneria Marconi (youtube link at the end). You're old pal Bottle isn't completely in the dark about Italian prog, i love Goblin and i'm well acquainted with the insanely enjoyable symphonic death metal that is Fleshgod Apocalypse, but i've never heard PFM. All i can say is wowzers, because this is about the wackiest blend of rock band with flute and violin i've ever heard. You know what it sounds like? It sounds like Ian Anderson gave the Grateful Dead and Dave Matthew's Band 'shrooms and they all just winged it for half an hour.  Then at 21:38 it turns into like a deranged atari-core adventure game soundtrack that then morphs into a rainy jazz piano solo, and it's amazing! Go give

My dad had a lot of CDs too, and here's an interesting one. It's called Gershwin and friend punch holes in paper tape for money... Joking, it's Gershwin Plays Gershwin, but it's really Artis Wodehouse recording Gershwin's actual piano rolls of his pieces. Seriously, Gershwin was a piano roll arranger from 1916 to 1927. He made about 130 altogether, arrangements of pop songs and his own pieces. When my beloved vinyl records and the Great Depression killed player piano sales, he just switched right over to studio recordings and radio broadcasts. If you remember your history, Bell invented the needle in water thing in 1876 (they were terrible), Carbon mics in 1886 (slightly less terrible but crap for music even after Neumann's improvements), Wente gave us condenser mics in 1916 and Neumann kept making them better. Then in 1924 Schottke and Gerlach invented ribbon mics and yay we can record music that sounds like it wasn't played inside a trash can! Neumann came

I'm supposed to hate Phil Collins. I'm sure of it. Turning Genesis from loony prog to synthy sellout dad-pop. Drum machines and ending sentences with prepositions. What a loser. No, screw you guys, with your mohawks and bolo ties, or whatever dumb fashion combination you're into. I love Phil Collins, and if Disturbed can cover Land of Confusion, then i can say this is the best Side A of the entire 80s. It's not, but i can say it Tonight, Tonight. I'm already In Too Deep, so roll that 15th album. They wrote the whole album and more just jamming in the studio after a 2 year break for solo projects. Everybody wrote lyrics to a song or two. It's all over the place in terms of mood and themes and style, he even sings a quirky new wave song to a pin-up girl. Then Domino shows up. I agree with Mr. And the Mechanics, that's an awesome ADD track even Adderall couldn't wrangle into the shape of political commentary (yeah, it's supposedly about politicians and

I like to type nonsense into bandcamp's search. As you can see, today's word is "morkon." Moron Manor Media? Yeah, let's review an indie internet label from Syracuse, NY. What have you morons got for me? Ooooh, acousticy emo songwriter type stuff. We'll skip the two big things at the top and go for the innards. First up, it's Bridge Under Fire from AD80. Scratch that, other way around. Gargly garage indie. I like it, but i wish they took the three minutes to type the lyrics. Think i heard the word "die" in there somewhere. Really nice 2.5 minute song. Ahnest! Ft Rob Button gives us Rainclouds. Hey there's "die" again! I smell a theme here. Lovely mopey little ditty that morphs into a p(nmi)t style dissonantly amorphous synth seascape and devolves into noisy noodling. Creepy. Love it! Looking through the small list of tracks that follow, this is Ahnest!'s label. My kind of guy.  Ten Years. Sweet, a 3 track. Nick Burger. I like hi

I was going to do Spoon's They Want My Soul, but i heard "Cold(But I'm Still Here)" by Evans Blue today, so i'm going to listen to their debut album instead. It has a good title, The Melody and the Energetic Nature of Volume. See, told you it's a good title. But, it's from 2006. It's no secret that the mid 2000s to the mid 2010s is like Bottle kryptonite, the audio equivalent of dunking an oreo in ketchup. I've mentioned a few bands from that time frame, and i'll mention a few more. I like some stuff from that period of rock radio wilderness, but there's a Harry to my Hendersons, a giant brown bear in my cabin in The Great Outdoors and it's the hard side of rock. Emo, biker rock, nu-metal, you remember. We did the grungy flannel, we took a shower, then we just kind of walked off into the woods and started screaming nonsense at the trees about how much our high school manbearpig boy/girlfriends were terrible people and we're sad. I l

Hot Thoughts. "Took time off from my kingdom, took a break from the war...." I don't think Spoon belongs to any particular subgenre, this is just 21st century rock. They went back to Matador for this last album, so i guess it's indie by default, but it's also psychedelic noise timber collage wrapped up in an 80s neon adidas track suit, but not in a joke kind of way. If pop-rock could be a free-form scrap quilt of sparkly sound gems from every single piece of equipment in the studio, this would go in whatever you call that genre. Not really baroque or psychedelic pop, not really garage-indie, more like testing out all the sound effects on your synthesizer while everybody's pogo-ing on the dance floor. This is a stellar album. It sounds amazing and the songs really do have a tip of the tongue, exploding mental kaleidoscope feel to them. They feel like pop songs, but Britt Daniels doesn't use formulaic catchphrases or mindless repetition, or any formulaic poe

Hey Bottle, is Ric Ocasek's second solo album any good? No idea, what are you expecting it to be? Most of the Cars are here, Emotion in Motion was a #1 hit. It's Ric Ocasek acting natural, whatever that means to ya. The real question is "which side of paradise" are we talking about? Love bites, love stinks, love is a bunch of synthpop songs about how complicated love is. It's a very 80s album, and by that i mean the overwhelming vibe is a drizzly 1AM on the 14th floor of a downtown hotel with the neon from the street signs flashing through the window blinds while you pace back and forth smoking a cigarette and wondering how you ended up being caught in all this noirish intrigue. Oh, and some ripping 80s guitar solos from Steve Stevens and G.E. Smith. I'm intrigued by Ric's outsider perspective on his relationships, particularly how he manages to never come across as stalkery. I don't have an answer for that, his inner-poet monologue just seems sincere

One of these things is not like the others, one of these things is good. Spoiler alert, it's Rosie Ledet playing the accordion and singing songs chocked full of innuendo! So instead we'll listen to the underwhelming fifth album from Sevendust.  I didn't compare Fire from the Gods to Sevendust for no reason. Lajon Witherspoon doesn't rap, this is straight up alternative metal with alternating scream singing. It's djent before Meshuggah inspired Misha Mansoor to coin the term djent. It's not a bad album because the band did a bad job, it's a bad album because they were lost in the universe and writing track after potential radio/soundtrack/anything track because it's 2005.  They had lineup changes, and left TVT for Winedark's promise of Universal's distribution channels. They recorded this in the same house Creed used for Weathered. Winedark was secretly already folding, stopped funding anything without telling the band, the band was maxing out eve

It has been one of those days. We played awesome games like "forklifts in the rain," "logistics with morons," "will the substitute UPS driver come back at our scheduled pickup time?," and my personal favorite "suffering manager, aka no overtime for bottle 'cause he costs too much." Somewhere in the middle there i got stuck explaining the truly bilious concept of the Friedman Doctrine, aka Shareholder Theory through absolutely no fault of my own, and it's times like this i usually remind myself what true suffering is by listening to country music. Not today. Today we're going to suffer with my least favorite technological advancement ever: piezo pickups. Plus I said "ant farm" the other day, so heroin up your hypodermics, it's Jar of Flies from Alice in Chains. EP my ass, it's 30 minutes. 15 minutes per side, album on your lunch break, no garbage inner-most tracks to tolerate. Their original bass player couldn't h

$20 Adventure Time with Bottle B: I have a new idea. Let’s make up a new thing called $20 Adventure Time with Bottle. I’ll send C-student into some place that has used records, he’ll buy as many as he can for $20, and I’ll write about them. What do you think? E:  Will this be a self contained essay, or the normal facebook/blog thing? B: Both. See, the problem with a book is that there’s no instant gratification, and that means I get real uncomfortable, like I’m lying. On the other hand, facebook posts are useless for my ramblin’ gamblin’ style of verbal gunfighting. I’m thinking C-spray hands me a small collection of records, I run my mouth about each one, but also talk about what it’s like to do the whole thing. Sumo-wrestle the whole experience, you might say. C: So I get to rummage through stacks of stuff other people threw away? B: Yeah, totally. C: I’m in. $20 bucks makes it a challenge for both of us. S: Excellent point, C. I think I speak for everyone when I say you are making a

One more album to go before i try to sum up this 4 album markov chain of reviews that led us from an impromptu compare/contrast essay about Katy Perry and Rush Limbaugh to labor day. Spoiler alert, it's completely coincidental that she's pregnant and recently released a facebook exclusive music video dressed as a clown alone at home playing a video game about life being a circus, and the band are all posing with the same chair on the back. I still don't know anything about Argent other than the obvious concept for this album: life is a circus. I assume it's prog, but we'll do the real time jot down notes kind of review for this $2 naked high wire routine.  Yep, the in your face kind of proggy weirdness. Spooky. IN THE CIRCUS!!! So far this is great, it's 70s hard rock with the added deranged modulations and abrupt style changes you'd expect from conceptual music. It's not drive time radio material, but quite enjoyably amusing. That guitar/synth duet towa