Albums for Eternity with Bottle, the Curmudgeon

B: alrighty, kids. You know what today is? Chorus: HALLOWEEN! B: it's always halloween in my head, why's today special? No, it's Bottle's 3rd Book Officially Gets Published Eve. Special day, it only happens once a lifetime. Or, deathtime if you're living that Nac McFeegle reverse chronology thing. Let the festivities commence! Chorus: mumble, mumble, mumble. B: i think i heard a shut up and possibly a Bottle sucks in there. Awesome. Alright, we'll compromise. You guys do Burger King, i'll be Frank Sinatra. I have a greenhouse to build, we have Compy's Howlathon playlist, p(nmi)t's Lady Killer, GREGORY's Piano Recital of Doom, i'll have to take a trip for minion food and pirate juice before we imbibe White Zombie's La Sexorcisto: Devil Music Vol. 1 as tonight's album. Jam packed day of excitement if you ask me. E: i suppose that technically qualifies as something for everyone. S: so, how do we proceed? B: 3, 2, 1, blast off! Space cade...

You don't even know how happy i am this record arrived today. I was not looking forward to revisiting eMOTIVe or American Idiot, or explaining how net worth is more like collateral and the "billionaires" are the actual buffer between government spending and general circulation, or that nonsense idea that congresspeople walk away millionaires. Instead, we'll say welcome back Anthony Green, and revel in the post-hardcore gorgeousness of Saosin's 2016 Along The Shadow.  The whole album is phenomenal, but Alex Rodriguez deserves special mention. No baseball jokes, the drumming on this album is out of this world. Not standout, though, every individual part is stellar, as is the overall songwriting. This is a maximum score album.  It's also a throwback to the good part of the early 2000s, because Green left to be the singer of Circa Survive after their debut EP. So, their first two LPs with Cove Reber are like a completely different band. This is original Saosin...

Rio Grande Blood is the second of Ministry's anti-Bush trilogy, sandwiched between Houses of the Molé and The Last Sucker. All their album titles are parodies of other famous titles and/or humorous slogans. Ministry began as terrible synthpop with a fake british accent, then morphed into much better industrial metal and thrash. I have a conspiracy theory that the quality of a Ministry album is inversely proportionate to the amount of heroin Al is injecting at the time. He has a conspiracy theory that the Bush administration was complicit in the 9/11 attacks. This is not one of my favorite Ministry albums, and that's because it transcends hyperbole and invades completely inaccurate territory. Underlying sentiment yes, truthfulness not so much. It's a "truthiness" album.  Lots of parodized and reassembled Bush samples, some funny some not. Criticisms of the motivations for various wars in the Middle East. Oil played a big part, sure, but the illogic of staging a ser...

C: Holy hell, Bottle. You look like you've been through a Jack LaLanne power juicer. B: It's been a rough couple weeks.  E: I was starting to get worried, you've barely reviewed anything since we finished the book. B: no joke, this time of year is rough, everybody magically wants their houses and hotels and office buildings and crap finished before official winter sets in. Nevermind the covid and flu and all the wildlife fleeing the fields. And those rats on stilts. Fun fact, yes you're supposed to just hit the deer and let your airbag do its job. Yeah, no, i'll pass. Everybody already hates me for driving the speed limit, 5mph slower at dawn and dusk isn't gonna cramp my style any. S: So, should we expect a halloween spectacular, or not? B: i dunno. I was planning to do White Zombie or maybe have Compy do a real mixtape, but the world is right back to not having a clue how anything actually works, and i just can't care. I'm half tempted to do the offici...

Bottle's favorites, part 1  It's true, i love albums. Look, if you took the time to deal with the hassles of practice and corporate executives and studio time, then someone needs to appreciate that effort. I do. Still, i can't help but have nuanced preferences. I have a very cultured and diverse palette. I'm an aficionado. So, here are some of my genuine favorites. I guess if i were like your little league record listening coach, these are the ringers i'd invite to teach you something. No particular order, though.  Parts & Labor - Mapmaker Mastodon - Crack the Skye or Laviathan Spirit - Twelve Dreams of Dr. Sardonicus Supertramp - Breakfast in America The Cars - The Cars MCR - Black Parade Pink Floyd - Dark Side of the Moon  And, believe it or not, the self-titled debut from Marcy Playground. Sadly, my copy is no longer with us, we'll have to youtube it today.  Sex and Candy was their biggest hit, but i'm happy to tell you that it just sits here as the u...

Well, today was a special brand of suck. Please excuse me while i go kick a cloud. We'll try again tomorrow.

I was naughty and bought some records earlier this week. Hopefully they ship out tomorrow or saturday. It's like there's a shortage of packaging materials or something. Oh well, it's not like i didn't wait months for Guiot's l'Univers de la Mer to get from Sweden to Iowa, let's just go back to albums i didn't write about in my 3 books (i also told you the collection is over a thousand, didn't i?).  Core. What an album. Invisible Purple is of course my favorite STP album, but wowzers that debut is smack you in the face awesome. Supposedly it's Core, as in the apple core left behind after Adam and Eve did that Bob James/Rasheeda Azar impression that made Skip blush like "well, i never!" Fun fact, the actual fruit is unspecified. Some random guy decided it should be "apple" so he could copyright his version of the bible. The internet told me that, so grain of salt, you know? The important point is these are all character pieces f...

It's been a couple years, maybe i can learn to like Clear. I love 1, 2, & 4, it seems such a shame to hate it. Spoiler alert, no, i can't.  It's not the band or the songs, though. It's the engineering and mixing. The first time around i said it sounds muddy, and it does, but that's not really all that's bugging me. Randy's vocals are fine, and most of the lead guitar parts are ok if really really dark, it's everything else that sounds like oatmeal. You can totally disagree, but i hate drums panned left, bass panned right. Next, things like background vocals, horn, strings, all that kind of sonic middle-ground sounds 30+ feet away from the mics. There're basically no high frequencies, so it only sort of sounds like someone might be playing a piano in a different room and you can't hear any attack on the synthy sounding guitar parts, but the hard left hi hats are so distracting it's hard to actually concentrate on anything else. The reverb ...

Today on Bottle of Beef, we find out if Germany is good at pressing records for Target. This one's gold-dust colored, apparently.  I heard lots of rumors that people don't like the singing voice of Stevie Nicks. You know me, as long as it's not Petula Clark or Barbara Mandrell, i don't care what barnyard animal they compare you to. Beeflieve it or not, i've never actually heard the entire British spelling. So, in that spirit, let's kick Mick in the toilet chains and ask him to cough up an album of mystical sagas about not 1, not 2, but 3 simultaneously failing relationships, and an amount of cocaine to rival David Bowie, Miles Davis, and Rick James. It's the undeniably classic album, Rumours.  Daaaamn. No, really, people say this is a pretty flawless album, and except for Lindsay's terrible chorused vocals on Never Going Back Again, i have to agree. The story goes that they'd show up at The Record Plant Sausalito (which looks more like a horror movie...

You'll like this. I did a totally Bottle thing. I had this gigantic essay where i intertwined a serious discussion about Anarchy and The Association's 5th album. All sorts of calamities could happen at that point, so i try to copy them as a backup, but this time i hit delete as i was trying to copy it. It's fine, i don't care. We'll just hit the salient points. 1) The Association is one of those bands that completely surprises me. 2) You might think a self-titled 5th album goes against Bottle's Taxonomy, but it's their first proper album, not just a singles collection, so that totally works. 3) It's stonehenge on the moon and Earth is a cube. This is half PP&M style folkstravaganza, half Psych-Rock pistache, including a critique of Vietnam, a song about Dubuque, one called Broccoli, and a whole lot of "the trappings of the modern world are garbage." No, seriously, it's about "turning you on to broccoli," the actual vegetable. ...

B: Why so glum, Mz. D?  S: Hmm? Oh, sorry, i guess i'm just bored. We finished GREGORY's album, but i can't really do the cover for the book until Skip tells me the actual page count; they're sticklers about the spine width. What about you? I figured you'd be all over facebook after today's outage. Didn't you write anything?  B: Sure, yeah, a dozen of the little buggers. One about Lars Vilks's car crash on Sunday, the mutual benefits of cooperative business structures, Proudhon's erratic version of anarchy, funny blurbs about the album, not funny blurbs about the album, today's DNS failure (which is like the 9th or 10th this year alone because decentralization and redundancy are the foundation of the internet as we know it, but corporatization doesn't have a brain to understand why centralization and monopoly are points of failure rather than security), the weird idea that giving addicts a platform for honest expression is actually worse than...