Albums for Eternity with Bottle, the Curmudgeon

Alright, i had a stack of records going until my trip to Ames invited The Birds of Satan to interrupt us. We probably don't need to rehash Metallica or Green Day, but Motörhead could certainly have a night to shine in the near future. For now though, let's return to the old stuff. I've got two more Robin Trower albums to peruse, plus i found a copy of Street Hassle (you remember i mentioned it back when we heard Lou Reed's Rock and Roll Heart), but tonight i think we'll go even weirder and listen to a mildly obscure, but historically important Bob James album. Bob James. Smooth Jazz guy. Godfather of Hip-Hop. Why are you all vacantly staring off into space? No, no, trust me this will be interesting.  The Birds of Satan was contextually morbid, but da fuq is up with the album concept for Hands Down? Splotchy hands on the cover are one thing, but wait 'til you gaze upon the gatefold spread. Yeah, no joke, anatomical drawings of skeleton sections. Again i repeat, d

Ladies and Gentlegerms, i give you hands down the most morbid album i have ever encountered. Not in terms of content, i might need a second post to get to the listening part, but in terms of coincidentally running across it while shopping for records. I'm of course referring to the untimely death of Taylor Hawkins earlier this year.  Hawkins had a ridiculously amazing career from local bands to Alanis Morissette's touring drummer, to voluntarily leaving that gig to join Foo Fighters, to filling in for Chris Pennie on Coheed and Cambria's Good Apollo, I'm Burning Star IV, Volume Two: No World for Tomorrow (jeez that's a title and a half) recording and tour, to Foo Fighters' total domination of mainstream Rock, to being in that horror movie Foo Fighters made. He died in Columbia in March. We won't speculate, he had a known heart condition and a lot of various drugs in his system, said heart noped the hell out. That's not the morbid part, that's just mu

Robert Christgau says Steve Winwood, when left to his own devices, is vague. I mean it's Blue-Eyed Jazz Funk, why would you expect concise and direct prescience? Also, i think you'll notice, he's leaning against a tree, and James Hutchinson painted him less like a Florida landscape and more like a passing extra in the opening credits of a Cheers episode.  I'll grant you it's not exciting, but i wasn't led to believe it would be. I was led to believe it would be an album from a guy leaning against a tree. The real question is "is that a crazy guy leaning against that tree, or is he just a normal guy taking a moment to think a little deeper, however meanderingly, than normal?" This turns out to not be particularly insane or disturbing, so seems fine to me.  I say Jazz-Funk, and it is, but it's like the Soft Rock version of funky. Everything by Steve Winwood sounds like it's going to break out into Higher Love (or possibly Back In the Hard Life Ag

Happy Thanksgiving. Normally we'd listen to Arlo Guthrie today, but i still have a stack of records and a long weekend to be thankful for, so why don't we all be a quarter flash, three quarters foolish and listen to the self-titled debut from QuarterFlash?  If you like The Motels and old-school Sax solos, then you're gonna love most of this album. Critical Times is a bit of an anachronism to my ears. It's in the right place for a track-3 change of direction, but going from New Wave to an Elton John style ballad that sounds disturbingly like Cristopher Cross's Sailing is weird. Plus it's the only Jack Charles song on the album; obligatory inclusion or not it just doesn't fit here.  Completely bizarre and interesting fact, "this album is dedicated to all the Seafood lovers in the Northwest." Some people just don't like turkey, you know? Ah, man, here's Jack again on Cruisin' with the Deuce. At least Marv wrote this song (so it totally fit

I don't normally do comedy albums, you know, eh? Mostly 'cause it's like hosers just talking and like what's so great about that, eh? These hoseheads are pretty ok though. Plus, like Geddy Lee sings the chorus of Great White North, so grab a metric 6-pack (which i'm told is 42 beers), and enjoy. G'day.

Yesterday i poo-pooed a great Power Pop album, today i'll wahoo an album you'll all hate. Strap on your dog collars and sharpen your switchblades, we're headed back to 1983 for some old-school Canadian Speed Metal. It's Heavy Metal Maniac by Exciter and my copy is worth way more than the $7 i paid for it. Technically i paid more for this specific record, but that mother of all "regular" discounts averaged out to $7 a piece.  Unlike other genres, the lineage of Heavy Metal is pretty straight forward. Steppenwolf named it, Black Sabbath invented a bunch of dark alleys it could mug you in, the New Wave of British Heavy Metal invaded America, Exciter said let's crank this up 3 more notches, and that's how Thrash was born. Exciter took the direct influence of Judas Priest and Motorhead, infused it with even more aggression, and scrambled everyone's brains into a pulpy goo.  Exciter never achieved the level of fame and stability as the Big 4, or the Big

E: Where are we, Bottle?  B: Interesting question, Skip. If i didn't know better i'd say you're on page 189 of our 4th book, whereas i'm passing through the other direction following the scent of peanut butter.  E: What?  B: I've got a feeling our realities are about to bifurcate. Still, probably best to keep you in utero [snap] i mean on your own timeline.  E: Wha-  B: Shhhh. We'll do it quick like. We're gonna float around here in the Philoso-sea and banter about Columbus until you pass out and some minion pirates take you back to shore. You'll probably dream of 1990 Meg Ryan and wake up on a Monday feeling like you had Cigarettes for Breakfast. As fun as that was the first time around, this time i'm also going to pass out and wash up on some desert island of questionable virginity Asking Alexandria why i'm Faded Out and it's not getting better. Quick, grab that passing volleyball and paddle 'til you puke....  ... so much sand in places

I kind of went a little overboard today. I went in for one thing and walked out with 10. The good news is that i got the mother of all "regular customer" discounts, the bad news is that's way too many to know where to start. I guess that means we'll skip the formalities and get down to what i went for in the first place. Hopefully the rest will take care of themselves after that.  No idea why, but over the last couple weeks Bridge of Sighs has been popping up randomly all over my mediatainment sources. I'm nothing if not morbidly cynical, so i was a little worried that Robin Trower suddenly died, but great news he's merely in the midst of touring his newest album titled like he's not going to make many more albums. I went in for Bridge of Sighs, but [sigh] walked out with his next 2 albums as well. You just shouldn't let me walk around with cash in my wallet, the fool and me will buy used records with it every single time. The solo on that particular t

Speaking of blood, i'm suddenly in possession of Bob Dylan's 15th album, Blood On The Tracks. Mighty fine pun for a title, that one. Today everyone (well, everyone who doesn't unconditionally hate Bob Dylan of course) says this is a maximum score album, but tons of people hated it back in the '70s. Everybody wants to do the autobiographical it's about his dissolving marriage to Sara thing, but i'm way more interested in his own statement that these songs grew out of the newly deep thinking about time he acquired while taking art lessons. It's literally a timeless look at the nature of human relationships.  On the surface that's ridiculous, there are bound to be linguistic time stamps all over this thing, but i suspect the underlying thought is that there's no chronological time happening here; past and future are just as much a part of the present as now is, and you can substitute them all willy nilly like i like to do. Let's find out in the futu

Look, i mentioned this when we talked about Fugees, but i need to emphasize that The Chronic is a Gangsta Rap album from 1992. Something, possibly 6 or more somethings on this album will strike you as offensive. That doesn't necessarily mean it will offend you personally, but it might. Words that start with N, creative things you can do with genitalia, political happenings of the day (both local and international), the right to keep and bear military grade weaponry, various slang terms for that plant with all that tetrahydracannabinol in it, possibly some homophobic/mysoginistic verbiage for Queen Latifah to rhetorically question, some subtle clues that Dr. Dre and Eazy-E are not exactly getting along at the moment, and interpolating "izzle" into words that probably don't need it.  Don't take this the wrong way, but the actual rap is not the point. Rap is about expressing what's currently on your mind in a "that's what i'm talking about" disp

Advise your parents to stick their fingers in their ears, we're about to listen to two albums from discerning young gentlemen who say things of a perspicacious nature. I'm not sure which order we should hear them though. Old then new? New then old? I'm thinking new then old, because that makes more sense. We'll listen to Tyler The Creator's Call Me If You Get Lost and then call Dr. Dre and the Death Row Inmates to come pick us up, lost or not. Tyler the Creator crossed over into fame by eating a cockroach, puking, and hanging himself in the video for Yonkers, and maintained that high by just generally frightening the bejeebus out of any one who hears his music. Some people find things he says offensive, but i find people saying offensive things all the time. I like to pose the question "have you considered the possibility that it's supposed to be offensive?" I'm not saying that offense is good or bad, i'm just saying that the offensiveness of

Attend dear friends, I want to tell you a story. No, not about a gnome named Grimble Grumble, about an album called Fragile Moments. Mr. UPS is going to leave of box of them on my porch tomorrow.  Technically speaking, it's 14 improvised pieces that lie along the spectrum from Rock Instrumentals to Chamber Music for 2 to 4 Electric Guitars, but that's not really what the album is.  The actual album is a collection of "classically motivated" pieces from my much larger and chaotically cacophonous collection of EPs by the me we call p(nmi)t. I suppose we could call most of them Guitar Solos, but not the flashy, etude-style show-stoppers to which you might be accustomed. These are little, delicate, fleeting moods, objects, and situations in musical form. They are also home recordings on cheap equipment, as opposed to professionally engineered studio recordings, and only 50 of them currently exist.  About that. You might wonder why they come in simple cardboard sleeves as