Albums for Eternity with Bottle, the Curmudgeon

Where do you go after Tea for the Tillerman? Well, he did build his house out of barley rice and green peppers, and i am a proverbial Talking Head, so why not More Songs about Buildings and Food? I have an in-store promo copy, so it should be nice and scratchy and warped, as opposed to my surprisingly pristine $8 copy of that Cat Stevens masterpiece.  Call me skeptical if you must, but i don't think the cover version of an Al Green song is the only reason people decided to buy lots of copies of this album. It's 1978, real people want absolutely anything that isn't macho-mainstream jock rock. Punk and new wave, disco, even country: the soundtrack of whatever kind of restless teenager you happen to be is what everyone desperately wants to distance themselves from their ultra-conservative parents.  You could probably accuse me of hiding in the bathroom and "inventing situations," but i drink a lot of coffee and my mind is on a permanent wandering vacation; i wholehea

Look at that, another day has passed and we're at the finding out what i'll listen to next part. I always take door number 3, and crazily enough it's Cat Stevens's 4th album. Op, 'scuse me while i detour around this hallway pointedly not lined with religious iconography and inadvertently stumble down the one containing a fervently ridiculous semantic argument about the etymology of "Tillerman."  No joke, people get seriously worked up and start citing the Oxford English Dictionary and passive aggressively suggesting the character on the front doesn't look like he even knows what a firetruck is. One guy was even like "attempting to decipher the meaning of the word from the painting on the cover is a dubious and highly questionable act of uneducated buffoonery!"  "Whaaaaa?!," Bottle interobanged. You're seriously confused about creative wordsmithery when there's children from Jim Henson's The Dark Crystal climbing a tree,

I gave it a try, but this not writing about albums you're listening to thing is terrible. How do all you weirdos live like that? Hi, i'm Bottle. You might remember me from somewhere, i've lived a lot of lives. Most recently i used so much brain energy ranting about the nonsensical Communism v Capitalism fight that led to Putin's personal Cold World Wargasm that i exploded my own fortress of solitude into shrapnel. Time to rebuild, so i got some random records. I think we can all agree that's it's a circus world out there and we're all juggling our lives in our own hands. Great news! Camine Appice's little brother Vinnie's band Axis made an album called It's A Circus World. Can't make this stuff up.  Instead, what you can do is listen to some perfectly lovely Hard Rock from 1978. This is one of those totally underappreciated one-off albums that only serious rock fans know about. It's the album that convinced Tommy Iommi and Dio to hire Vin

... and now to wash out the taste of all that negativity from the last review with something i like very much, Sad Pop. Here's Vivienne Artur's debut EP Everything I Am in my own collected playlist. It's on whatever streaming platform you like to use as well, so definitely go give it a listen. She can sing, the songs are great, the ambience is dark as 2AM at the Tasty Freeze, i'd publish this on CD in a heartbeat if i could. Thanks for sharing, Anthony Artur! https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PL4moS9C5WRLxtF-NlctRl1iT1mkCYBNWn

Today was apparently record store day, but i don't really have one of those closer than a half-day road trip, so we'll do something even better. Truth be told, most record day releases are kind of crap, but bandcamp never fails to deliver something insanely awesome that'll never get pressed. Buckle all your g-suit straps (yes even the uncomfortable ones), because we're about to blast off into the sprawlingly massive mythos of Hello Meteor. If we were in England we could just lump it under Ambient Dub and get on with our lives, but we're not. This is America, so we have to call it some sort of VaporAge NewStalgic ElectroFiction DanceTronica from inside a lucid dream with 18th-Century Samurai, interstellar astrobiology, and Hawaii. Now, what i'd like to do is click the "buy discography" button, but that isn't an option. I can't even afford to just buy them all individually either, some have bizarrely specific prices like $11.11 or $12.42, while

Happy Easter. I'm not religious, but i have no argue with celebrating rebirth, redemption, and really anything that lets us contemplate the deep injustices of existence together. What better album than Thrice's The Artist in the Ambulance? Supposedly it asks the question "do artists have a responsibility to be more than entertainment?" Yeah, that comes through i suppose, but it's mostly just an enjoyably eclectic post-hardcore romp through exactly that kind of existential quandary of embracing the other against the propagandized morality of authoritarianism. Its a great album, but it's the concept that intrigues me most: The Artist in the Ambulance is an insanely complex title, and we should unpack it.  You might want to put on your sarcasm helmets for this one because all the songs are written from a kind of matter of fact "this is what we're being fed" perspective, and the implication is that both the narrator and you are supposed to realize it

...and at the complete other end of the spectrum of blue, we have the 752th thing Third Man Records published. Steady as she goes, i don't dislike anything Jack White has done, i'm just not a total fangirlmanhobbit. Difficult vintage guitars are a fun gimmick, liking Son House is a thing we should all do, his impromptu SNL performance was as awesome as everyone says, pasty white sun-fearing excessively off-kilter hipster rock is totally at home in Bottleville, i think its just that the ironic anti-celebrity celebrity of jazz-hands "Jack White" so vastly overshadows his actual music ALL THE TIME, so i just go "meh."  I'm a little bit apprehensive about calling "in true DIY spirit" when that spirit involves your own personal multi-million dollar pressing plant, but it is Easter weekend so i had no choice but to throw the Depeche Mode reference in there. Afraid of the Dawn is a strange concept in English or Greek, here's hoping it adds up to s

Crazy thing, i never actually published my original review of Ride the Lightning. It's in my 3rd book (The Two Become One), but i didn't put it on facebook or the blog, then totally forgot i didn't. It starts with the sentence "highly critical of those in power," and ends up confirming that Metallica does in fact know how to read. This time around we're more concerned with blind first impressions of a remastered repress made purely for profit. Who wouldn't buy a copy? I imagine Metallica owns a significant percentage of their own royalties at this point, not that they actually need to care.  I also have very little interest and/or enthusiasm for A/B-ing this record with my CD copy, so that's a last resort if it happens to sound weird in some way. No, i want to approach it on a fundamental level: do i actually prefer imbibing it as a record? Will The Call of Ktulu give me the ASMR chills the way the cassette did to my pre-teen sponge-o-brain? Can tweaki

Ever since Jack White published his bizarro investor video where he straight up begged the majors to rebuild and fund their own pressing plants so us plebes don't have to wait 9+ months to get a European short-run, i've felt conflicted. I don't want what some exec at Warner thinks i might buy, i want bands to be able to invest in themselves and then be able to distribute it to within 60 miles of me. I want more Jack Whites actually doing it so i can find weird shit i like without going to Target.  So i was at Target today, and wouldn't you know it, they had Jack White's pun on an Iron Maiden title and a repress of the greatest Thrash album of all the sophomore Metallica albums ever recorded. Well, we got some questions to ask. Most obvious, do Jack White's employees know how all the knobs and buttons work on all the pressing machines he bought for them? Only slightly less obvious, how does my last year's review of the original dubbed to CD master of Ride the

Pssss mss shf ashim sho pff... Alright, i'm listening to the whispering, and whoever's out there creeping in the dark needs to speak louder. I'm 12,000 years old on the inside, i scattered my imaginary friends farther across the universe than the freakin' pieces of the triforce, and i just can't even with the sky schmutzing like it is today.  Oh, it's you guys. Named after a Satriani piece that's named after the MacGuffin from a Vonnegut novel. Can you guys even read? Nevermind, not important. I guess we're gonna listen to Ice Nine Kills' The Silver Scream II: Welcome to Horrorwood, huh? Ok fine, well first we have to get past the intro that's a mash up of The Blair Witch Project and poking fun of the lead singer from Every Time I Die hiring an actual hitman to kill his girlwifefriendlady. Oh, then the actual prelude where you sing the concept. Sure, go ahead. I know you genre hop a lot, but can't we just call you Metalcore and be done with i