Local H - As Good As Dead


Welcome to the mid to late 90s. Long before 21 Pilots or the White Stripes, but not quite as long ago as the Carpenters, there was the remnants of a full band called Local H. After the other two guys quit, Scott and Joe said "screw it, we'll just be a drum/guitar duo." I'm not sure if that's keeping or not keeping it copacetic, and i'm equally not sure if they ever gave each other a high-five, but i think the results speak for themselves. Here's their second album As Good As Dead. 

Oh, yeah, this is actually a great place to start. See, we hated a lot of things about life in the 90s. The consensus was we were just losers with chips on our shoulders who hated "success," but that's about the least amount of effort you can put into analyzing the phenomenon. 

Right off the bat, we didn't necessarily hate high fives and steroids and monster trucks as things, we hated the guys who wanted to high five each other for taking steroids and being super proud of winning an award for their personal tricked-out monster truck. We didn't hate being in love, we hated the overly obnoxious PDA that belied the fact that they were actually toxic people who constantly screamed at each other in private. We hated the wanting to get back together after a breakup. We hated being stuck in a crap town with no future except hoping to win the lottery. I think one lyric sums it up pretty good: "If I was Eddie Vedder, would you like me any better?" No, you actually wouldn't, you'd only like the fact that you knew a famous person. 

So, we did what any restless mopey teenager would do, we cranked up our amps and vented our frustration in song. 

Fun fact, the band's name comes from two R.E.M. songs: Oddfellows Local 151 and Swan Swan H; H originally standing for "hurrah." 

So, As Good As Dead is a fantastic album, not just because the songs are catchy and grungy and head-bangingly enjoyable, but because they give us the real context of the zeitgeist. It's a lot like Frank Zappa standing in his living room with a riot happening outside his window and the fake facade of the TV reporting version of said riot making us want to scream about how stupid everything around us actually is.

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

Live - Secret Samadhi

Image
Speaking of smorgasbords and ladies' bathrooms, here's Live's Secret Samadhi. The title at least implies that the album is a meditation on reality, but it's Ed Kowalczyk so i have to keep a dictionary close because i don't have a clue who/what he's referring to half the time. Sure i know that Lakini is the goddess of the Manipura (solar plexus/navel) Chakra, but what does washing her feet with water from the women's bathroom toilet actually mean? Jesco White is a mildly famous folk dancer/entertainer, but he's not dead so how could you lay flowers at his grave? "The followers of Aldous are spinning with their mescaline," Aldous Huxley obviously, but what does that have to do with the secondary thematic concept of intellectual propery? I can't even begin to dissect the convoluted metaphors of Ghost, and we're not even halfway through the album. That's why nobody has anything to say about this album, nobody actually knows what the hel
Read more