Spin Doctors - Turn It Upside Down


I cannot tell you how great it feels to get the end of the story out of the way. It's on the blog, but i didn't actually publish it here on facebook. Now we can just keep filling in random middle parts. Like mid 90s funk rock. You probably know 1 or 2 songs by Spin Doctors, but they aren't on their second album Turn It Upside Down. You probably didn't know John Popper was an early member (prior to their name change). 

Spin Doctors is a jam band. I don't mean that in a bad way, i just mean you have to take them completely on their own terms because there isn't any larger statement they try to make than "hi, we're a band, hope you came here to hear some random funky rock songs about drug euphamisms." Dirt means heroin, by the way. Especially if it's in a bag.

Ok, normally i don't like this album, but today it's totally fine. It could just be that finishing the  story is a big mental relief, but probably anything sounds a little more chipper and light after all the screaming. Funnily enough, the band had to sit out a year because Chris Barron woke up with vocal chord paralysis one morning in 1999. We ended up taking the timeline fork tine where it came back and they kept playing and made 2 more albums in the 21st century, but it was a legitimate coin toss back then. 

Critically speaking, this is a "meh, it's fine, i don't completely hate it" album. I'd call it an album for people who specifically want to hear more Spin Doctors songs. They're fine. They're a weeknight bar/festival, good time band, not a  theatrical headliner. They're also as excessively 90s as Dave Matthews Band, in the same way Uriah Heep or Citadel are decidedly 70s. I'm surprised this album didn't come with weed and patchouli scented scratch and sniff stickers. If you don't mind my asking, what's it like for you to go from Between the Buried and Me to Spin Doctors? Do you feel anything? I personally don't feel anything, i'm tired and hungry all the time anyway.

The end

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Welcome to my blog, and my record collection.

This is a blog about my love of listening to albums. It started off as a nightly perusal of my dad's record collection (which sadly became mine) on my personal facebook page. Over the last two months it has become quite an enjoyable process of simply ranting about what i think is a real art form, the album. It needs a more permanent home. Some of my reviews are positive, some negative. They might not be what you expect from album reviews, but i hope you at least find them entertaining. For the most part i do very little research, and they tend to be train of thought reactions rather than calculated essays. If nothing else, know that i'm really listening to them and whether they are amazing or abysmal i want you to go listen to them too.  I'll start migrating the 60+ i've written so far over here in the next few days, and hopefully get to the point where i just start writing them here. I'd probably even take suggestions if you're just dying to know my tho
Read more

My Life With The Thrill Kill Kult - Hit & Run Holiday

Image
I noticed today that the strange part of the world who actually knows about My Life With The Thrill Kill Kult has finally accepted that they are in fact "industrial disco." The history of Wax Trax and Chicago industrial music is a subject worthy of an entire library, but MLWTTK is my favorite band to emerge from those humble record store beginnings. They are an unpredictable band for sure, and i definitely don't like all of their albums, but Hit & Run Holiday is an album i think every human being on the planet should hear at least once. This album is simply impossible to describe, because it doesn't actually belong to a musical genre as we understand them. It's actually a movie. I know that sounds weird, but the band is actually a movie. My Life With The Thrill Kill Kult was the name of the movie they were trying to make, but composing the soundtrack led them so far afield that they just shrugged and kept going as a band instead. All of their albums come f
Read more

Eyrth - Meridian

Image
A terrible sadness accompanies the release of Meridian by Latvian Ambient Metal band EYRTH. Since their debut Fracture in early 2019 the band, and indeed the whole world has suffered a global pandemic, intense ideo-political turmoil, the death of friend and bandmate Igor Golovin, and the Russian invasion of Ukraine.  The war in Ukraine still wages on, even though we in the Western hemisphere seem to have largely forgotten. These are turbulent times, and Alex and Andrey are rightfully entering an extended break. We may not see or hear new music from them for a while, if ever, and that is completely understandable. The music they've created, however, is truly breathtaking. Self-described as "Uranium wreckage in audio," the music of Eyrth is every bit as hauntingly beautiful as it is brutally crushing. Close your eyes and you'll quickly find yourself in the achingly cold and desolate wasteland of human technological atrophy. Slow, ponderously heavy, at times rabidly ragi
Read more