Albums for Eternity with Bottle, the Curmudgeon

Welcome to dystopia.  I've got a real mental quagmire to wade through here. On the one hand, Dan Vapid and The Cheats released a new album today, called Welcome To Dystopia. So obviously i want nothing more than to plop on the headphones and review it like i do. But you see, i don't just run my mouth for the fun of it at someone else's expense. I pay for every album i review (in one way or another, but primarily with actual money). Maybe you didn't realize that, maybe you did, that's not important. What is important is that sleazy little part of my brain that wishes a bunch of people would pay me a couple dollars for the entertainment value of doing it on the spot. That's not so horrible, is it? I mean Facethony Talktano, and Todd in the Poor Lighting, and all those dirtbag Allmusic freelancers make money from views and patreons and sponsorship advertising when they do it. But then again, my humor is esoteric at best and you're all my actual friends. I mean,...

B: Aw, hey Lower. What's wrong, bud? Bronco bucked you in the dirt?  L: We wanted to go to the party. The party in your bunker.  B: Oh jeez, i'm sorry guy. But sometimes you can't always get what you want.  L: But Willowz got to go.  B: No, no, no, i just wasn't gatekeeping thoroughly enough. That's on me. Would you feel better if we did your album next?  L: Are you gonna be nice?  B: No promises.  L: Then no. Leave us alone.  B: Are you really just upset that Pitchfork skewered you? They qualified their panning of your album with nice word things. I read it, they said there were a lot of redeemimg qualities to your crappy debut album. Sure, they backhandedly implied it's not as good as your previous underground stuff because you changed up your style and almost barely qualify as Post Punk. I'll at least merely elbow you a little. And that's assuming i don't particularly enjoy it. You guys could be great for all i know. I'm honest here, i like ma...

We're trying something different this time. My new novelette, The Bottlean Gaze, is available for download over on the home page of  bottleofbeef.com . It's a humorous (or at least attemptedly humorous) look at the male gaze. You can download it for free and share it wherever you like. You can also financially support my writing by sending some money to paypal.me/pnmit . Either way, thanks for reading. Cheers.

There's a new batch of records on the way (and a doozy of a story to go along), but today i was trying to think of the most unsung record in my collection. Actually, it was pretty easy, and i already know. It's Oak & Bone.  It seems completely ridiculous to say some random band you've never heard of made a perfect self-titled debut album and stopped, but they did. What did i say the first time around?  "... the self-titled LP from Oak & Bone. The opener is called Oakener, so you should just expect pushing Hardcore Punk as close to the edge of Stoner Death Doom as possible.   Aspirin and alcohol aren't the most exciting drugs in music, but i think we can at least give proper credit for specificity.   I'm somewhat known for being really hard on lyrics, especially when they are terrible. These aren't. It might not be your cup of caffeinated beverage, but these are legitimate free verse poems delivered with what must be the world's strongest uvula. ...

Anybody heard of Glass Animals? Me neither, but it was this or the new Florence + The Machine album, and the only thing i like less than double albums is double albums with only 3 sides. Cloudkicker gets a pass, but nobody else.  I paid how much for this? It better buy me some dry clean only clothes from the thrift shop and take then to get dry cleaned before handing them to me. I don't even want to try to guess what it is. Let's just be confused in real time. I've taken the liberty of not even looking it up, so whether you believe me or not, this is the real deal: What The Hell Are We Listening To, Bottle Tries To Guess.  White on pinkish lyric sheet, you're just trying to strain my old man eyes. Which side is A? Nothing, alright let me hold it up to the light so i can get a glare on the runout. Oh, ok, hand in front of face is Side B, no hand is Side A. It's like those hipster bathrooms with spurs on one door and a bicycle on the other.  Whaaa? Is this just the in...

Epilogue  C: so what does it all mean, Bottle?  B: it don't mean a thing. The amount of coincidence in that whole run was just that, coincidence. It's not foreshadowing, there's no ultimate answer to life the universe and everything no matter how funny the answer 42 is. It's funny because it's absurd. I might even go check out David Duchovny's 2nd album.  C: but you hated the first one.  B: who said that? Where did i say i hate it? I had a criticism, that criticism was that the album structure was crap. It didn't mean what it intended to mean, it meant the opposite for me. As music though it was lovely, and as an Alt-Rock album a decade after Alt-Rock was the thing, it's as good as any other. It's a believable album from an ironically cookie cutter world of individuality.  What was the actual theme? I didn't spell it out (even though i'm going to now), but it should be pretty obvious. Every single one of those 10 albums wrestled with the idea...

Chapter 12  And here we are on Labor Day with a thing i never even thought to imagine might exist. Obviously some people know it exists because otherwise i wouldn't be holding it in my hand and wondering what the hell i'm about to listen to. I'm not one of those people, and statistically speaking i doubt you're one of those people either. I cannot even begin to fathom the possibility that this album sold even thousands of copies. 400 at most. Friends, Countries, Roaming Men, the truth is out there, David Duchovny made an album. Yeah, only David Duchovny i know about, that David Duchovny.  Which of course begs the question, what in the wide world of alien sex addicts is a David Duchovny album going to turn out to be? Does he strum a guitar and sing crappy Country? Is he an accomplished Jazz Pianist like H. Jon Benjamin? Is he about to Rod McKuen up my earballs 'til they burst? Does he beatbox while playing Trombone? I [clap emoji] am [clap emoji] terrified [clap emoj...

Chapter 11  I know you probably think i'm quite familiar with Lou Reed. You think i've almost certainly heard at least Metal Machine Music, and probably even Lulu, but i haven't. I've heard some of the things he helped create for Verve/Pickwick, i've heard covers of his songs, but of him actually making his own music i know exactly Walk On The Wild Side, same as everyone on the cotton overground. I really should listen to the two albums i mentioned because they are right up two of my many favorite alleys, but in the meantime we're listening to what is widely considered one of his worst solo albums, the 1976 debut of Lou Reed on Arista, Rock & Roll Heart, as i guess a personal philanthropy project by Clive Davis (former president of Columbia Records and later Chair and CEO of RCA Music Group). If people who love to hate Lou Reed don't like this album, then it definitely has a home in one of my alleys. Supposedly the follow up, Street Hassle, is one of his...

Chapter 10  Today i think we'll do two more albums, but only because they are coincidentally linked to each other through no fault of my own. Enya and Tom Waits were bizarrely linked together by copyright lawsuits, so naturally today's pair are linked by admiration for each other. I'll go ahead and spoil the surprise, Lou Reed once said that Cowboy Junkies' version of Sweet Jane was his personal favorite. It should also be lost on no one that Lou Reed is an underbelly icon and Cowboy Junkies have a female lead singer. The coincidences just keep on rolling, don't they?  Now, my brain is for some reason ill-equipped to understand the name Cowboy Junkies as a Canadian Alt-Country band like wikipedia tells me they are. I just instinctively want them to be a Texas based Al Jourgensen Industrial Rock side project like Revolting Cocks. I don't know why, i'm just complicated like Sunday morning butchering chickens, i guess. They have a gig at The Cabot in Beverly Ma...

Chapter 9  What could possibly be the exact opposite of Enya? Steak knives drenched in motor oil? Death Metal or possibly Clown Core? Nope. Wait for it... wait... Tom Waits! Patron Saint of Hobo Hipsters.  We now teleport from the green and pleasantly misty fields of Ireland to the decidedly less pleasant intersection of Heartattack and Vine. The story is that a homeless lady carrying a dead animal walked up to the bartender and said she was going to have a heart attack. The bartender stone cold replied that she was more than welcome to go back outside to do that. So, Waits started calling Hollywood Blvd. Heartattack Blvd. I hear tell one of the tracks from this album was used as the theme music for a 1985 miniseries called "The Atlanta Child Murders." If all that's not the opposite of Enya then i give up. His wife is Irish though, so further confirmation bias that opposites attract?  Best story about this album though is that Screamin' Jay Hawkins did a cover of the ...

Chapter 8  Why in the world did you bring be an Enya album, C-k and Destroy? More importantly, how did i not know that Only Time was only as famous as it was because of 9/11? That's beyond Tusk level oblivion as far as i'm concerned. That freakin' song is lodged in my frontal cortex like a lawn dart. Probably yours too. The album that it comes from, though, is somehow critically divisive. Get this, there are actual Enya purists out there who have a strong dislike for her musical 180 into using an actual string section. Lemme check some actual chronology real quick...  ... The Score was from 1996, A Day Without Rain was from 2000, yep she'd almost certainly pocketed her portion of the 3-million dollar lawsuit money by that point, so screw Enya and her litigious string quartet money. I'm blatantly on record as saying i think sampling is totally fair use that should be exempt from royalties for the simple fact that nobody has any clue what samples anyone is using until...

Chapter 7  What if you're trying to mums the word on the epic concept, but people figure it out anyway? Here's Rush's Signals.  Sometimes Neil Peart is too obtuse even for me. I mostly get the gist of what he's saying, but sometimes there's a fair bit of intense, Claudio Sanchez level, grammatical confusion happening. Other times, like in Digital Man, i think he just picked mystical sounding places because they rhyme.  This isn't an album review though, it's a concept review. 1982, Rush was a full year ahead of Styx in realizing that people don't want the epic concept shoved in their faces anymore. They want fleetingly enjoyable garbage. I don't care enough to go find the source inteview again, but an interviewer asked him "but isn't this equally a concept album anyway?" Neil replied "shhhh, you trying to get me fired?" Maybe he didn't say those exact words, but close enough for Cold War hand grenades, anyway.  I prefer be...

Interlude C: i can't tell if you're feeling better or worse. B: why can't i be both? C: because that's weird. B: when have i ever been not weird? C: touché. B: Watch where you're flinging those acutes. Someone could lose an eye. C: i'll be more careful in the futuré. B: ow! You bastard! Hiding it as a pun on Canadian grammatical idioms. Diabolical. I guess i did whiffle ball the fact that Rush is next. Take your lap while i have a trainer minion fetch the tweezers and gauze. I don't miss C-cophant, but i'm gonna have to keep my non-watering left eye on you. C: Ha! What did you do to miff Skip and Sandra? B: failed to raise enough money to publish Fragile Moments and then just kind of ignored them for all of July and August. C: that'll do it. Think they'll come back, or is it just you and me now, again? B: i dunno. If you want to get technical, Skip never asked to be here in the first place, and Sandra was always lamming it for the refr...

Chapter 6  Kilroy Was Here? Where? I need to see him about a thing and stuff. Never you mind what, that's my own business.  It is totally fair to call the concept of a dystopian future where Rock & Roll has been outlawed cliche. 2112 springs to mind, but i'm sure there are at least a dozen others. I'm fine with that. There's only like 5 basic stories anyway. Levi-Strauss (not the guy on your denim jeans, the Structural Anthropologist) says the rest is all just playing around with diachronic/synchronic structures on a 2-dimensional intellectual axis. Big fan of non-chronological time and meaning, i sure am. Plus, mythology itself has cultural value as a means to get past an apparent contradiction (you know, like now admitting that you intentionally took the documents but complaining that investigators spread them out all willy nilly so they could take pictures, totally messing up your artfully treasonous feng shui); not solve that contradiction, merely keep moving fo...