Albums for Eternity with Bottle, the Curmudgeon

I feel like everyone who has stuck with me up to this point needs a reward. So, here's some other random blogger's choice for Happiest Album Of All Time. Really, if you type "happiest album of all time" into google, Cosmic Thing by the B52's will appear somewhere in the search results. As you can see, the actual case and booklet are long gone, but there's the disc in my hand. When the blues kick you in the head...just sit on the porch and swing...We're the Deadbeat Club...Tiiiiiiiiiiiin roof! Rusted...let's get in the mud!...roam if you want to...my mind's been going places without me lately...fire in a field of molten flowers...where's my umbrella?...the universe is expandiiiiiiiiiiing...best outro ever. Yep, i've said it before, and i'll say it again: B52's are weird, and it's about the best remedy for reality i can think of.

               It’s weird to read about Pearl Jam because everyone involved seems to have a completely different experience. The one consistent thread is that the band is at war with the business that surrounds making music. It’s much bigger than that, though. Everything about Pearl Jam rages against the fake corporate Disneyland version of life. That was the original name for this album, Life.             Some critics say this third album is their best, some say its experimental aspects are a failure, everyone avoids the actual subject matter at all costs, including me. I can’t review Ten, I could barely describe the aesthetic of Vs., and now we’re literally wrapping actual life in the shroud of bullshit propaganda “polite” society demands in the form of medical authority (sell me immortality). I even went so far as to create a whole story so I didn’t actually have to publish this on facebo...

B: why are you staring at me like that, Compy? C: trying to figure out where you're going next. B: why, i just bumble forward without much thought. More fun that way. C: yeah, but Skip's right. The further we go the more complex you get, but after you say it it makes complete sense. B: i'm just very grounded in observation. I like jigsaw puzzles. Sometimes you focus on shapes, sometimes color, sometimes you pick up a piece and search for where it goes, sometimes you look at a empty space and remember the piece that fills it. The more you do it, the easier it gets. C: yeah, but what album is next?  B: easy, Vitalogy. C: what? Why? B: well i mentioned Des'ree and Naturopathy. Silly pseudo science. Vitalogy. Also, Des'ree felt the need to explain every song in the liner notes like she knew they didn't make any sense on their own. Pearl Jam totally went the other way and built an elaborate collage of weirdness around their coherent and insightful observations of rea...

Remember how I said Beastie Boys were really divisive? Well, yeah, there’s a pretty strong argument to be made that Paul’s Boutique is the singularity that exploded the copyright powder keg. Now, this is a confusing story, so you have to stick with me. We have to go all the way back to 1983 and look at an actual legitimate copyright infringement case. British Airways straight up used “Beastie Revolution” in a television commercial without permission or compensation. That is the actual type of protection the Copyright Act was designed to provide. Beastie Boys hired a lawyer, and handily won $40,000 as compensation for the obvious copyright infringement committed by an international company exploiting an emerging artist for their own commercial interests. The Beastie Boys used that money to buy an apartment and set up their studio to make more music. As the story goes, the first taste of a problem came from their first official single, Cookie Puss. Some kid came up and said “I talked t...

Now, let's nightcap our delightful journey through the smooth side of radio jazz with the highly and rightfully acclaimed tribute to Stevie Wonder by Najee. Sax/flute improvisations on Songs From The Key Of Life? Sign me up twice!I'm a bit bummed that the disc isn't actually in the case, so imma youtube it along with you.  Regardless, enjoy.

I don't know anything about Jazz Crusaders, but i do know that titling an album Happy Again implies there was a period of time spent not being happy. I also know that it'll be relevant to things i've already said, and it will probably be perfectly lovely in spite of the mild reception it got at the time. Alright, C-saw, short version me.  C: Jazz Crusaders were a Hard Bop group. In the 70s they turned to Funk and Fusion and dropped the Jazz. Trombonist Wayne Henderson left the group in 75, but ressurected the original name 20 years later for Happy Again. Critics pretty strongly agree that with a name like Jazz Crusaders, it's Hard Bop or get the hell out of here. That's disappointing, but on the positive side they were happy to hear Henderson's trombone solos again.  B: Yep, told you so. Trepidations, Skip?  E: i'm not sure i'm comfortable with the cover art.  B: why not?  E: well, i mean isn't it kind of racist?  B: how are Robert Palmer Eyes racist...

You know what's even better than pointing out the day spa aesthetic of Hilary James? Flying across the Atlantic to hear the crappy British version. Des'ree.  If there's one thing i know it's that quite often, despite everyone's best efforts, love will not in fact save the day. It didn't work in the 60s, and it's not working now. So, you can see my skepticism surface when she said "guys, i'm gonna take a break from this whole selling millions of albums thing and focus on my true passion, Naturopathy."  I'm not talking ancient Chinese wisdom, or foot massage, or even the Colonel's secret 7 herbs and spices. I'm talking "we definitely need to rub this holy mud on that gaping flesh wound to draw out the demons." "Rub this magnet over that annoying tumor 9 times a day and you'll be good as new. "It's natural, so it's better than actual medicine." Snake venom is all-natural, want me to drink that? I...

These first 4 albums are pretty awesome because they just unfolded all by themselves. You readers might be wondering what horrible thing Skip did while i was taking a much needed vacation, but i'm saving that for the memoir. All you really need to know is that he had a little dust up with Princess Zanzibar, and i needed to settle the score. So, naturally, the Godfather of Hip Hop showed up. Turns out he brought his anthropomorphic skeleton of a sax player with him, and now we're gonna have tea with the Queen of Brazilian Jazz, Flora Purim. Not one single bit of that was planned, by the way. I'm still just picking up random albums that feel interesting and marveling and the serendipity of it all. The lesson for Skip is that just because you think reality works a certain way, doesn't mean it's true. As goofy or hokey or embarrassing as Smooth Jazz might seem, we're looking at the direct lineage from Stan Getz/Gil Evans to Chick Corea and Dizzy Gillespie to Flora P...

Ok, ok, i see what's going on here. People hate the fact that Boney James is actually good. They desperately want him to be Kenny G 2.0, but he's not. He's a saxophonist. A good one.  Tom Petty reminded us that when i say bad, i mean someone didn't do a good job of whatever they intended to do. Those Beatles albums are bad not because i hate the Beatles, they're bad because they slapped a bunch of crap together and weren't happy with the result.  Finger 11 was bad because you'd have to be a grade a douchebag to walk around thinking the world isn't good enough for you. Sonny Bono was bad because he was a dweeb who took himself serious. Ten Years After was pretentiousness personified. You get the idea.  So, good is the opposite, sort of. Really, when i say good i mean that i believe you. You succeeded, you worked hard and made something you are proud of making. It doesn't matter if i actually like you or not, it doesn't matter if you can or can...

Playin' Hooky is not one of Bob James's famous albums. Supposedly, his band Fourplay is terrible, but this album is half good half bad. Apparently i'm supposed to steer clear of the tracks with fellow person named James, Boney. I'm just gonna lean into the bad guesses I established when confusing his daughter for his wife and say Boney James is either not related at all, or he's Bob's saxophone playing Aunt on his mother's side. Supposedly Boney is hackwork personified, but i'll be the judge of that. Early on in his career Bob was Avant Somethingorother, but this is 1997 Mario, sorry Warner Bros., so Classical arrangements and Dadprovisation is what we should expect. Only a couple tracks with background vocals, so that shouldn't be a problem. Press play. Aw, yeah. A little bit of Detective Dog Lawyer electric piano, and the Jimmy Buffet equivalent of Samba. A freakin' coach's whistle?! You remember that store in the mall called Brookstone tha...

First, we're going to listen to a mildly obscure submission into the Bob James catalog, Flesh & Blood. He's called the Godfather of Hip-Hop because his track Nautilus from the 70s has been sampled at least 352 times, Slick Rick, A Tribe Called Quest, Wu Tang Clan, Naughty By Nature, Run D.M.C, Usher, everybody.  No idea who Hilary is, all the liner notes say is "thanks for letting us invade your living room" from the producers. We'll just assume she's his wife. First listen, whole lot of "i need a man to feel spiritually and emotionally fulfilled." I kinda zoned out, so i needed a second listen.  Critically speaking, everybody says "why do i have to listen to Hilary not try very hard?" I don't think that's fair. No, she is not forceful, or sultry, or exciting, but i can imagine exactly how terrible it would be if her goal was to out Houston the Whitney. Nothing worse than a mousy voice trying to belt and warble, be yourself i sa...

When i say Smooth Jazz you think Kenny G. Sure, but what actually is Smooth Jazz? Well, historically speaking it's the soft, polished, mass-market Muzak form of Jazz Fusion that rose to prominence in the 80s and 90s. It's Adult Contemporary Jazz, so meticulously designed to be inoffensively non-confrontational that it was simply called "smooth radio" in the 70s. Which of course means that by the 90s it was so aurally offensive as to be a joke.  For our purposes, let's say it's the melding of Jazz, Light Funk, R&B, and Pop into the audio equivalent of shea butter based moisturizing skin cream. Shea butter is totally edible, so we're going to suspend any trepidations and proceed without any cultural assumptions at all. Well, maybe a couple. It will be groove based, rather than impovisation driven. It will be sappy, but we're going to think of it in terms of Marty Friedman's crossover into New Age. Last, we will accept that sounding like the mains...

So, Buckethead. Here's the thing about Buckethead. He's a phenomenal guitar thinker. But, with very few exceptions, he plays parallel period after 8-bar parallel period after 8-bar parallel period after 8-bar parallel period after...8-bar...parallel....

Fair warning, this is going to be a negative review. Somewhere back there on the dusty two-lane we've been traversing i implied Tom Petty's 3rd and last solo album wasn't good. Let's find out if i'm right. Saving Grace is a bad-ass opener. If that's the album we're in for, then hell to the yeah. Fuuuuuuck. Square One is an even worse drive off the cliff than Heartbeat City. I'll point out some of the low-lights, but this is another one of those albums that sounds exactly like random crap. Flirting with Time sounds like a terrible 90s sitcom theme song, or like if the Oneders had survived their one hit to make an unnecessary 14th album. Jack is just terrible. No, like terrible terrible. You could maybe appreciate the experiment he was trying to experiment with, but it straight up sounds terrible. Turn This Car Around is much better, but we have to address the problem head on. The entire album is scattershot Tom Petty cliches. It's a scrap quilt of eve...

The first thing p(nmi)t ever sent me was the Slumlord EP. Not the EP itself, the tracks. They were already titled, so all i had to do was put them in an order and give it some cover art. Bottle's taxonomy is filled with all sorts of clever ways to name things, but the standard convention for EPs is to use the title of the focal track. Slumlord stood out like, well, a stereotypically greasy slumlord. By the time we get to the outro you can practically smell him strutting down the hallway in his sweat stained white tank top, banging on doors, and demanding rent money. Actually, in my head he looks exactly like Carl from Aqua Teen Hunger Force. Hyperion was a possibility, but the rest of the tracks sound like insects and living in a run-down world, Slumlord just worked. Then i found that lovely picture of a house in Hungary, and there you go. I suppose it's technically electronic dance music, but that's kind of like sticking a straw in your soda can. Sure, you can do it, but w...

Wow, just wow. A week ago when I was talking about EL&P I wrote the phrase "that's how the game works, losers. We own your copyrights, remember?" Today, the story pops up that WMG literally told Jesus and Mary Chain that just because the Copyright Act of 1976 allows majority holders to nullify all grants after 35 years, doesn't mean they have to so, they won't. WMG literally said "no, you can't have the rights to your recordings back." That’s disgusting. The reporting on Jesus and Mary Chain's suit against WMG is pretty terrible, so i had to actually go refresh my memory. Section 203 specifically deals with non works for hire. It is completely within the majority owner's right to nullify all grants between 35 and 40 years with written notice and effective nullification date. However, if as their label contends these albums are declared "works for hire," then JMC has no claim to ownership at all. What's the distinction? Simpl...

You're listening to KBTL after dark. Tonight's album is a dedication from our old friend  Bottle to everyone battling it out in the trenches. Don't think i'm not thinking about you, go on and let that savage beast be soothed by The Best of Astrud Gilberto. I don't have much to say, so you know that means it's lovely."

Speaking of Charisma...  I think of myself as an idea guy. I've invented thousands of bands, gimmicks galore, but i know my place in the upper-middle of the pantheon of pineal prestedigitation. Tonight i give you the grand prize winner of the highly coveted Bottle of Beef Holy Crap You Actually Did It Award.  We've seen some great concept albums, we've seen some outstanding concept albums, fake bands making amazing albums, amazing bands making fake albums, but nothing, i mean nothing, can even hold a candle to tonight's honoree. We here at Bottle of Beef would like to present to you our dramatic interpretation of what that board meeting must have been like:  M: Guys, we're not making any money here, and i can't help but notice the band you hired isn't recording anything at all. Time is a-ticking.  [Humorously extended bong gurgle]  B: ...fffffffffffff. Damnit, Carl. I told you to close and lock the door, you're letting all the Miltons in.  J: Well 's...

What's the real theme of this particular Adventure Time? Well, when it comes to assessing the validity of genre labels and the value of any particular album from them, it matters who's doing the labeling and why. Plus i just like hating Walmart out loud. The magic part is that i didn't plan it that way, that's the story these albums tell as i pick them up. I try to make them funny or relevant, but i'm still just making it up as i go. Power Pop, Britpop, Alternative Rock, Hair Metal, Prog-Rock, and now Prog-Pop. It's the 10th Genesis album, Duke.  I'd call Duke the first proper Phil Collins's Genesis album, And Then There Were Three was merely the result of first Peter then Steve quitting. Phil's wife didn't want him to do the full tour and moved to Canada. After the 1978 tour he told the band he was moving to Canada to save his marriage, but they divorced anyway so he moved back and the trio started a new record in late 1979. Now keep in mind, th...

The C-faring stranger found another Emerson, Lake, & Palmer album to add to the assortment. If you remember, my love affair with EL&P started way back in 2019 when I heard Tarkus for the first time, and i've salivated over every album i've stumbled across since then. My collection's not complete, but tonight we get to hear Trilogy. It also means we can delve a little deeper into that whole defecting from your birth-country to avoid serious tax-evasion charges thing. England's income tax system is pretty much the same as the US, it's a tiered or bracket system. Everyone pays the same amount of tax in each bracket. Also, contrary to sloppy thinking, your operational expenses get itemized and deducted from your gross income to determine your taxable income. If you made no profit, you get all the money you paid in taxes back as a refund. It's not perfect, but it's not evil either. If there weren't some mechanism for measuring economic activity, then ...

I've mentioned this before, but the 80s had the absolute most bizarre version of "romantic." It started out as the shoulder-pads and baby powder materialism of Dionne Warwick, but by the mid 80s it had morphed into this weird i need a break from riding my motorcycle between arena gigs, c'mon babe, lay your head on my chest while i drape my leather-jacket clad arm across your shoulder as we sit on this couch in the middle of an airport hanger for no apparent reason. Welp! Time to run, those groupies over there aren't gonna have sex with themselves, see you next Tuesday. Hey, before you run off, can i borrow your hairspray?  I'm well aware i shouldn't like it, but i love hair metal. I will unashamedly belt out the cheesiest power ballad you can think of with pure glee. Sure, it's total garbage, but I'm convinced it's a scientific fact that 80s Hair Metal fits into your dopamine receptors like a thing that fits perfectly into another thing (i don...

Fair warning, this one's a doozy. Mostly because i had to squeeze 3 gargantuan 90s albums into one tiny little bottle to do it. The most confusing part of Power Pop is that it's a make it up as we go genre. The central theme is that critics hated "happy sounding" rock and roll that wasn't actually happy, more longing, pining, searching, chasing the illusion, hoping things will change with jangles on top. So, for 3 decades they just kept chucking bands that felt like that into the alge filled swimming pool. Somehow Green Day is the punk infused version of powerpop. Todd Rundgren? Sure. XTC? Absolutely. Gin Blossoms, Ben Folds, Cheap Trick, what is wrong with all of you? If this all reeks of the Nu-Metal incredulity i shared a while ago, then do what i do and carry an old school clothes pin at all times. Regardless, when i think of Power Pop, i jump straight to the mid 90s version. Critically speaking, Power Pop is an American thing, but what should we call the Brit...

I don't even know where to start. It's 1979, and there's a storm a brewin'. Everybody's about to hate disco, but which of the underground rock trends is going to take its place? It turns out none of them, synthpop will dominate the 80s in the mainstream. One of the real contenders though is this weird thing called Power Pop. It's the name The Who gave themselves, but The Who was only one component of the cocktail we call Power Pop. If you read a lot of rock criticism, you'll be completely confused because it's kind of a conglomeration of emulation: a gumbo of Beatles, Beach Boys, Who, and Byrds, like you and 3 friends are a garage rock band and you're not really a Punk or New Wave band, you much prefer the uptempo sunshine and vocal harmony of 60s Pop Rock. Critics and rock fans automatically think you suck, and dismiss you as the bandwagoning American reaction to the British Invasion. That's really confusing for a guy like you, because you'r...

B: Alright, Cross-brace, corral me a collection of curiosities. I want random crap. C: Why? You could just do that yourself. B: Sure, i could, but you're better at it. The stuff you pick is more interesting than the stuff i pick. I don't know why, it just is. I look at the same stuff you do, but i always seem to pick the less interesting famous stuff. You come back with little gems of obscurity and weirdness.  C: Ok, i was getting bored anyway. Is there a spending limit? B: Dunno. Anybody bought copies of our books in the last 4 days? C: Lemme check. Oh. Uh, Bottle, you're not gonna believe this, but there're 20+ copies of those things walking around in public making friends. B: Really? That's crazy. Flattering, but crazy. Ok, i got no argue, full 50 it is. More than two frisbees though, i always want as wide an array as accomplishable. SWOOSH B: That was quick. Oh, i see you scoured the used CD bin as well. Random crap indeed. Better Than Ezra, the first two Oasis ...