Albums for Eternity with Bottle, the Curmudgeon

Corey Hart was fine a few hours ago, but i think we should end the year on a real high note. So, happy last night of the year from all of the various MEs here at Bottle of Beef. Enjoy this final album of 2022 as the soundtrack: Speaking of the 80s, i'll totally switch the blade on the guy in shades with another completely off the wall thing you'd never expect me to review but i've secretly always wanted a physical copy of: Janet Jackson's 3rd album, Control.  But Nipplegate, Bottle, she ruined the superbowl!  Whaaa? How dare Justin Timberlake remind us that Janet Jackson has boobs! Listen to you, then smack yourself across the face so my hand doesn't have to inconveniently sting for 3 minutes. On the scale of scandals i'd rank that about as titillating as cat paw prints in wet cement. She's the least problematic Jackson sibling by a factor of about 5,000, and Control is a groundbreaking album of Contemporary R&B, not to mention her first endeavor after s...

You near, Steve? Normally we'd just listen to Mastadon's Once More Round The Sun and accept the inevitability of another year of it. This time i say NOOO! We're kicking off a new year of kicking things that can't kick back (because safety first) with the randomest assortment of shiny objects i scrounged up today.  Before we do that though, i have a new standing offer. Well, not new, i just don't mention it very often. I will review any album of your choice for $5. That's right, i will listen to anything Honest Abe suggests in its entirety, write a full long form essay, and publish it on facebook and albums for eternity whether i like it or not. All the youtubery guys and gals do it, i just don't want to go through the hassle of maintaining a patreon. $5 to paypal.me/pnmit and a note with the album you want me to write about, no fuss no muss, no let me off this bus. If that's not worth $5 to you that's totally fine, i'll just pick what i feel like...

I just took a trip and a half looking up a song i've been hearing lately. It's hard when all you have are random snippets of lyrics, none of which are the obvious title of the song. I found it though, it's called Rotoscope, but that's not the point. The point is that every time i hear it i think "this really sounds like heavy-dirty Garbage." Not garbage as in trash can food, the band Garbage with Shirley Manson and Butch Vig and that other guy. Then we get to the death-metal growling and surely that's not Shirley. Aren't many female vocalists pulling double duty like that, but i'm pretty certain this isn't Jinjer. So who's this band then? Spiritbox, you say? Ooooh, it's Courtney LePlante and her husband's new band! You remember Courtney from when she stepped in when Krysta left Iwrestledabearonce, don't you? I'll pretend that's a yes. Small world. I definitely like this better than hearing her wrestle a bear (i'm una...

I gave I Prevail's Trauma a pretty negative review. I liked a lot of stuff from it, but the album wasn't good by my standards. It came across weak and powerless, as Maynard might say. Totally willing to give them another shot though, so let's check out the new album True Power. I don't need the slip mat they included, but at least it didn't noticeably inflate the price tag.  I do still expect a similar mish-mash of metal, umlauts, rap, and "is this still the same band?" -ness, but maybe they can make that spastic array of influences work to their advantage and appeal to a tangible demographic instead of the imaginary self unaware thing they had going (i'm the problem, accomodate me!). For comparison, Badflower's This Is How The World Ends was kind of a similar thing, but you can clearly tell Badflower is making fun of themselves. Trauma felt like "the Metacore version of 21 Pilots," so if they can avoid that this time around that would be...

It's Christmas Eve, and you know what that means... yeah, me neither. Gotta give you something, though, so let's bring back everybody's favorite parlor game What the Hell's This Musical About Then? Haven't played it in ages, so quick refresher of how it works. I listen to the original cast recording of a musical i've never seen and try to guess the plot, or at least mumble through the gist of it.  How's about this one? They call it Half A Sixpence, which is just Thrupence if my knowledge of old timey British money math is to be believed. Truth be told, i'd much rather check out the offerings of Australian Alt-Indie-Dancetronica artist Thrupence, but i've committed to this serving of beans on toast. Luckily i also haven't read the H.G. Wells novel it's based on, so this'll be a real shot in the dark.  Oh, well if you're gonna just tell us it's about a guy who literally broke a coin in half, then i guess i don't have to try very...

I know what we should do, we should listen to Lulu. I've never actually heard what is apparently an audio atrocity the whole world desperately wishes was a Mandela-Effect fever dream. Perfect time considering we listened to Bob Dylan & The Band's The Basement Tapes this morning. That's what this album actually is, right?  This is also Lou Reed's last album. I've previously mentioned that Lou Reed legitimately didn't care what anyone actually thought of his artistic endeavors, and this adaptation of Frank Wedekind's Lulu plays (Earth Spirit and Pandora's Box) is clearly not meant to be enjoyable. It's supposed to be shockingly grotesque.  Not surprisingly, i'm 4 tracks in and this is fucking amazing. It's terrible, and that's the point. Both Lou Reed and Metallica are spot on in their own comments on the project. Reed said Metal Machine Music killed off his fanbase (released the same year as The Basement Tapes, dontcha know), Metallica...

Oh the blizzard outside is frightful, but the basement is so delightful. No better soundtrack for it, here's The Basement Tapes.  This is the original 1975 version, not the "complete" 2011 anthology. I won't dive into the complex history of critical scepticism, except to say there are two fundamentally different ways you can approach this double album. At the time, people generally had the notion that this was a retrospective release, a chronicle of Bob Dylan and The Band in the basement of Big Pink post motorcycle crash, pre Americana becoming an official genre. In that sense, it is kind of weird that there are two separate albums going on.  In contrast, i think we should look at it as the culmination of the conjoined evolution of Bob Dylan and the Band from 1967 to 1975. That may be a fiddly distinction, but i think it makes a big difference. It's not really a SOAD Steal This Album kind of release of previously bootlegged material, nor is it an intentional conce...

Another all caps, what are the chances? This one is STREET HASSLE. It's the first binaural recording. That sounds fancy, but basically you just get a manequin head and place it in the live room with microphones where its ears would be. The actual thing about this album is whether or not the song I Wanna Be Black is racist.  Don't worry, it's totally not racist. Don't misunderstand me, the sentiments expressed in the song are blatantly racist, but the song holds up exactly those white, middle-class racist tropes for ridicule in the context of the larger album. You see, the real sociological dilemma of an age of irony (whether it comes after the backlash against the impending age of Aquarius, or after a supposedly right-wing conservative president attempts to ignite a communist revolution), is that the structure is inversable. You get incel-metoo, fascists calling the antifascists fascist, the christian right hoarding all the money to destroy the monetary system... take a...

Alright, for lack of anything better to contemplate, let's give the new Arcade Fire album WE a spin. I legitimately haven't heard an Arcade Fire song since I Bet You Look Good On The Dancefloor was their first single.  C: No, that was Arctic Monkeys.  B: Oh. Ok, Chasing Cars?  C: No again, Snow Patrol.  B: Ok, i give up. Which one was Arctic Fire?  C: That's Arcade Fire, and their first two singles were The Suburbs and Rebellion (Lies).  B: Not ringing a bell.  C: Kids on bikes and sewer tunnels for the former, the band parading by themselves...  B: Oh, oh, stupid silly post-animation on the marching snare hits? The "sleeping is giving in" one? No wonder i barely remember, sleeping is the single best thing humans can do with or without clothes on. Waking up is the nightmare.  Alright, i suppose this does qualify as the most recent Age of Anxiety, WE'll give it a whirl. First though, 10 dollars off a 10 dollars too expensive album hardly quali...

BABYMETAL. Bet you didn't see that coming after yesterday's rant about a crappy David Bowie comp. What's worse is that it's fantastic. No, not joking, it's a phenomenal self-titled debut.  I'm totally guilty of repeated ...because, Japan jokes, and there's a fair bit of that from start to finish here, but this is good. High quality Hardcore Metal with J-Pop floating on top. It's standard Beauty and the Beast stuff like Birthday Massacre or Ike and Tina or something.  But Bottle, BABYMETAL DEATH is literally just the words babymetal, death, and their stage names a hundred times! It's worse than Misfits' Return of the Fly!  You mean better, right? Yeah, it's the first track of a self-titled debut by a band that was literally a school project by performing arts tweens that went internationally viral and only failed to achieve Dethklok levels of world domination because of Covid and how hard it is for Japanese teenagers to go on world stadium tou...

I just kind of trailed off and haven't written anything about anything for a while. Mostly it's because we're in that 57 days of the war on Christmas thing and bah humbug to that. I don't hate Christmas, i hate the way it has metastasized into some kind of bizzaro wintertime state fair that interrupts every other aspect of life. I believe i remarked about the snowman-shaped yard balloons back at Halloween. Also, the dripping icicle lights put me in mind not so much of water, but more like your house has a particularly nasty STD or slime mold infestation or something.  You don't have to stop just because i'm seasonally afflicting all over your disorder, but don't act like i'm required to congratulate you for torturing my astigmatism with the several hundred tiny  supernovas stapled to your house.  <font style="sarcasm">I know what will cheer me up! Let's listen to what i'm told is the "40th Anniversary Edition of the classic c...

A terrible sadness accompanies the release of Meridian by Latvian Ambient Metal band EYRTH. Since their debut Fracture in early 2019 the band, and indeed the whole world has suffered a global pandemic, intense ideo-political turmoil, the death of friend and bandmate Igor Golovin, and the Russian invasion of Ukraine.  The war in Ukraine still wages on, even though we in the Western hemisphere seem to have largely forgotten. These are turbulent times, and Alex and Andrey are rightfully entering an extended break. We may not see or hear new music from them for a while, if ever, and that is completely understandable. The music they've created, however, is truly breathtaking. Self-described as "Uranium wreckage in audio," the music of Eyrth is every bit as hauntingly beautiful as it is brutally crushing. Close your eyes and you'll quickly find yourself in the achingly cold and desolate wasteland of human technological atrophy. Slow, ponderously heavy, at times rabidly ragi...

Back when i listened to Bridge of Sighs i mentioned that critics generally loved it, then generally didn't love the next two Robin Trower albums. Let's try to hypothesize why that might be.  The possibilities are staggering, so we need to condense it down to a few theoretical categories. First, people generally don't like change, so it could be that tonight's albums are radically different from Bridge of Sighs. Second, people generally don't like consistency either, so if it's too much like Bridge of Sighs then they'll say "meh, i'd rather just listen to Bridge of Sighs again." Third, people generally don't form their own opinions or understand their own tastes, so most all of it is a not particularly spicy gumbo of non-gumbo appropriate ingredients. So there you go, it could be too different or too similar, but mostly no one knows what they're talking about. Trashcan that idea, we'll just give 'em all a spin and see what floats...

Ahem. I say in my stereotypically memish talking to dogs voice "Who's a good boar-tusked hell demon? You are. Yes you are. Where's my snausages? Op! Bit my fingers right off, you naughty little mongrel."  Motörhead emerged from a particularly violent London alleyway in 1975, right smack dab into the fracas between Punk and Metal. They are of course merely snarling some old-school Rock 'n Roll, but goodness is it gruff and abrasive and downright fun to listen to. I suppose you might have to translate what i consider fun into something like having your eardrums haphazardly regraveled and a seemingly unnecessary umlaut spit upon you, but i hardly see how that's my problem. Plus, it's not the point. Tonight, the point is what i learned from Motörhead's self-titled debut.  You know how every genre of music has its own preference in terms of yeast-fart beverages? Pop has its cherry wine, Blues has its thoroughgood trifecta of bourbon, scotch, and beer, Count...