9) Good Rats - Birth Comes To Us All

Hahahahaha! Please excuse my knee-slapping outburst of belly laughing. We looked at the bad rats, now we'll hear from The Good Rats. Beautiful. Admit it, you have no idea what this album is, do you Sandra? 

No, i just knew it was the end of the story. 

Well, let's review. I was making it up as we went along, we all know that for true. We established that you really did assemble them from some deep gut feeling it would tell a story about your character without contradicting the character i've already established for you. We started out in the sleazy underground industrial discotheque, worked our way up through the secretly more sleazy world of big business pop (sadly losing some friends along the way), with the delicious irony that business is class, people are trash, and crash landed in the pacific with the most Zappa-like album ever created from the complete opposite approach of Zappa, and found out you ran away leaving those sad rich losers feeling like sad rich losers (the riffraff) and couldn't be happier. All those dress rehearsals paid off, welcome to the first day of the rest of your life. Let's hear some obscure Long Island club rock. Like they say, Birth Comes To Us All. So, let's all find out together. 

15 albums, everybody from the surrounding 5 blocks got a turn to be in the band before moving up to a bigger band. These guys were the Dead Hot Workshop/Canned Heat of the Long Island rock scene (Twisted Sister being their Gin Blossoms, but with a much better outcome than the analogy suggests for either of them). 

You're gonna say, jeez this is all over the place, they overtly copy everybody, i don't get it. My response is, this is a 7 night a week, top 40 cover band whose fans started demanding original material. This was their idea of success. Also notice this isn't a pipe dream album, these guys are good at what they do. What they do on this album is point out that every one of us is born into the same bizarro world where everything is a lie and you reach this late teenage point where you realize none of this is the way you think it should be and there's nothing you can do about it. Some people grow up and lose, some people mature and make the best of it, but everyone is in the same rickety old boat. Nobody asked to be born, but what matters most is how you choose to live that life. I'd call that some real good philosophy. 

How you doin', Skip. 

There is not enough ibuprofen in the world to ease the migraine of climbing through the convoluted Escherian staircase room you've constructed in the last two days. You've got responses to scenarios before you develop them, reviews from one album weaved into another, i can't decide if Sandra was a call girl or a professional assassin, or both for all i know, Al Pacino showed up out of nowhere. Somehow it's a simple breakup and start a new life story, but man there's a lot of emotional baggage. 

So you're saying i did a good job of fractalating reality around Sandra's trip down memory lane? 

But how do you even begin to end it?! 

Spaceballs. 

What in the hell is that supposed to mean!? 

That was Sandra's industrial strength hairdryer, and she can't live without it. 

I hate you so much right now, Bottle! 

I didn't know you were a Kelis fan, Skip. 

Aaaaaaaarrrrrrgggg! THUD. 

Maybe that was too much, Bottle. 

Nah, he'll be fine. He might have a bump on his forehead for a couple days from slamming it against the desk like that, but we all have growing pains.