Albums for Eternity with Bottle, the Curmudgeon

My freind Reiner Krämer is right, Fishbone is across the board amazing. Unfortunately, i don't have the kind of money it takes to import their albums from Europe, so we'll have to youtubalisten to their 4th album Give A Monkey A Brain And He'll Swear He's The Center Of The Universe (median value is currently $106).  Best album title ever? Definitely a contender. Sample of Damon Waynes in between opening the pool and heavily criticizing the Christian Right. Make no mistake, the "holy rollers" are the bad guys.  Fishbone is tragically underrated. Look at their competition though, Living Colour, Red Hot Chili Peppers, Faith No More, it's a bit unfair that Fishbone comes across SQUIRREL! by comparison. That's not a criticism, it's just reality. Mainly known as a Funk Rock/Ska band, their late transition to Rock/Metal kind of gets lost in the shuffle. Here for example we get 3 rock/alt-metal tracks and then full on Ska for Unyeilding Conditioning and Fu

Oh my. Hushed and Grim, where to even begin to preamble talking about it [motor boat sound].  Maybe that gave you the wrong impression, i like this album a lot, but if Mastodon is just a band you've heard or heard of in passing, you could totally hate this album. I do know what i just listened to, and it's an experience. Not a "hey you should really check out this band Mastodon" kind of experience, but more a "words fail me" kind of experience.  You don't read more than 2 of my reviews expecting to hear me describe what the songs are like or why you should buy it and argue with me, you read them because i am basically the only person on earth describing my listening experience in real time. I took the liberty of just enjoying it in its entirety first, and there is a lot to unpack.  For starters, this is Mastodon's best album since Crack The Skye. Technically i would argue that Cold Dark Place actually deserves that award, but i'll plot it out so

Suburban Mutilation was a first-wave Hardcore Punk band from Wisconsin. They only put out a handful of demos and 1 LP in their 4 years of existence, let's check it out.  Hardcore Punk is basically about being fed up with pretty much everything. Politics, society, existing Punk/New Wave, consistently stating the RPM speed in multiple places, you name it. What are you rebelling against? What have you got? Some bands developed into actual cults, some scenes were more full of violent posers than the trendy posers they were rebelling against. Jello Biafra and Henry Rollins are kind of the Ben & Jerry of the whole thing, though those rokes might be reversed.  Always keep in mind, musical ability is not in any way a prerequisite for playing Hardcore Punk. The joke is something like "these guys are so horrible they make Suburban Mutilation sound like Pavarotti." So long as the noises you make are fast, loud, and angry, you're doing an acceptable job. These guys don't

I meant to do this ages ago, but then i got so damned SQUIRREL! with publishing my own album, and the yearly holiday hideathon, other albums, the general being trapped in my own head, and so today we just take lunch to listen to some awesome music from my friends.  I met Colin Ingersol from loving a Beau Jennings Album suggested by Steven Stark , and Colin is friends with Jake Stinson, an awesome guy i wish i'd kept in better contact with after high school. So, i sent the old googlemafinder to seeing what he'd been up to, and it's such a small world that Giant Stride popped up and there they both are being awesome. Enough of my mushy nostaglia stuff, bring on that sweet sweet Foo Fighters meets Midwest Emo style Alternative Rock my inner 16-year-old soul craves like vitamins or complete protiens or water.  https://giantstride.bandcamp.com/music   I wish there were a hundred tracks, but i'll be content with these 6 because they are quite frankly lovely. I woke up with a

Here's something different. Emanon is soul singer/rapper Aloe Blacc and beatmeister Exile. Their albums are Imaginary Friends, The Waiting Room, and Dystopia. If that's not up my alley then i should just get out of the lurking in alleys business altogether. What's their Dystopia like?  Well, Aloe Blacc's personal dystopia involves only making about $4,000 off Avicii's Wake Me Up. Yes, that's Aloe Blacc singing, Avicii was just the DJ/producer. Avicii sadly killed himself in 2018, and his family made it quite clear that the "business machine he found himself in" was a contributing psychological factor.  Whether or not that 4k is fair in the grand scheme of things is up for debate, it is after all only 1 song, but remember that Laura Nyro sold 1 song to Peter, Paul, and Mary for 5k back in the 60s and Wake Me Up was by almost any standard a very big and ubiquitous top hit in the 20-teens, and it definitely still gets radio play now. 4k over 10 years is $

Ugh, i hate it when i don't like a good album. Feels like i failed.  S: ok, Bottle. I know just randomly wandering the sonic universe is kind of your MO, but even i'm kind of itching to be a real store/label now.  B: fleas? Finally worn you down, have i? We can't though, it's completely unrealistic.  E: but you keep implying "how hard could it be?"  B: oh, no no no, it's not hard at all to run a record store. Anyone can do it for as long as they want, provided making consistent monthly profit isn't your goal. Convincing people to pay you to make new music happen is the hard part. Traditionally, labels push all that financial risk back on the artist. They're just lending firms with the legal mechanism to bar you from doing anything else until they recoup the full expense plus interest. They're literally gatekeepers. I don't want to be that at all. I want to buy your records at standard markup, sell them for my own profit if any, then buy mor

Wowzers, i just looped back around to Skinny Puppy like i was doing it on purpose. If you missed it, we did a review of Nailbomb's Point Blank that was a bit too overtly political and just plain long for facebook, then i tried to just avoid complicated stuff altogether, but we somehow ended up selling our souls to the devil in Animal Town so i guess we gotta talk about vivisection and satan whether we want to or not. It's VIVIsectVI, pronounced "vivisect six" even though it's only their 4th album, and whooee did Nivek Ogre grow up to not like animal research in the slightest. This album is perhaps the first official "looking at the world of humans from an animal's perspective" Skinny Puppy album. If that's too obtuse, think Planet of the Apes, but in the style of Saw or Final Destination or Texas Chainsaw Massacre.  Obviously the title is a portmanteau of vivisection and 666, the latter being a silly coincidental page number, the former being a p

Sometimes you wake up Monday morning with that damned Dido song playing on constant repeat in your head and even though you are not at all a violent person you nevertheless desperately want to fling that mug of cold tea at the wall or smash it against your own temple in a desperate plea for a few moments of cranial silence. Don't, obviously, in the grand scheme of things it's not so bad, it's not so ba-ad.  [Audible groans from the peanut gallery]  Ok, that was bad, i'll make it up to you with some first-class irony: Indie Rock from a major label. Here's Killing Time by Team Spirit. Vice and Warner Bros., a match made in "whaaaaa?" Regardless, saying "Disney owns Vice Media" is completely misleading. Sure, Disney is one minority shareholder at 16%, but A&E Networks own 20%. Disney's $400M investment is just that, Disney shoving $400M out of its control to prevent inflation inside its own economic bubble. They don't expect to make any

Wouldn't it be nice if after Nailbomb, which was really tough to get into but turned out to be a completely unchallenging listen, we had an album that seemed innocuous but turned out to be way more than we bargained for? I can't promise this Thursday/Envy split will be that, but the cover seems to be a tornado of birds attacking a farmhouse. Then instead of track lists we get descriptions of each side.  Welp, i was wrong, those are apparently the track titles. And the lyrics are printed in both Japanese and English. Oh, ok, Thursday was one of the early Post-Hardcore/Emo bands and Envy is a Japanese Post-Hardcore band. Makes sense now. Thursday had a not that good relationship with their label Victory from their second album onward. I won't recount all the garbage, but the Thursday branded whoopie cushions Victory planned to sell on the Warped Tour is a pretty notable story. They had no idea what they were getting into when they moved up to Def Jam/Island, but once the deal

To the best of my knowledge, Brazilian Metal Guitarist Max Cavalera has always been out of bubblegum. Taking names is probably not on his agenda either. I think everyone has at least heard of Sepultura, if not Soulfly, but in 1994 he collaborated with English Industrial musician Alex Newport to make quite possibly the only Industrial Thrash album ever. Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's technically just Industrial Metal, but Thrash in particular doesn't play well with other genres. You wouldn't call the Metal component of Ministry or Die Krupps or even Fear Factory "Thrash." Anthrax with movie samples and electronic ambience would sound ridiculous. Rammstein doesn't have a single Thrash-type riff in their entire catalog, but Megadeth came within kicking distance a couple times on Countdown to Extinction (see Captive Honor and Architecture of Aggression for some very nearly Industrial quality Thrash riffage and psuedo sampling). Hardcore is really the bouillabaisse of In

And i said to myself "self. I'm gonna wake up early and listen to what is surely an obscure album even by Death Metal standards. Here's Liberated Sounds by Counting Days.  I then proceeded to sleep in until 9, and it turns out this is actually Metalcore. Death Metal wouldn't be caught alive listening to this. It's pretty good though, and not even merely by Metalcore standards. What's the difference with all these granular subgenres of Extreme Metal? Well, it's subtle but it boils down to this: if you and i can play it or you're hearing it on the radio it's Metalcore, if we'd need a month of rehearsals it's Deathcore, and it just gets more virtuosic as you rise to Death Metal to Technical Death Metal. Likewise, lyrically we go from pretty much any hardcore punk topic to dead and disgusting things, to full on hellscape-nightmare gore and evil. Clean vocals only exist in Metalcore, Death and Tech are completely unintelligible without already kn

B: Hi, everybody!  [Chorus of non-distinct mumbles]  B: why you guys acting like your cat has diabetes (true story, that one)?  S: i think i speak for everyone when i say Skinny Puppy did indeed give us nightmares.  A for everybody: harumph!  B: really? Did me up a treat, i'm loving the fact that we go from Bites to Teeth through absolutely no thought or pre-planning of my own.  C: i think i also speak for everyone when i say you absolutely must be lying. There is no possible way you managed to pick this album without recognizing the coincidence.  B: honest as the day is brighter than the night. I figured even mild Skinny Puppy would leave a lasting impression and i thought we'd do another not so hard edged one before the shrapnel hits the fan. This one has Horns and Banjos, how horrible could it be?  I honestly don't know, i've already forgotten what anything i previewed by The Loom sounded like. Certainly wasn't bad enough to stop me from acquiring it, so there

Yippee! It's the first Skinny Puppy LP, Bites. Technically it's their second album because their first EP Remission got an extended rerelease on cassette with additional tracks added and everyone took a vote and decided to grant it a mulligan. Critics weren't particularly kind to Bites in spite of being on board with Skinny Puppy's new Electro-Industrial Rock amalgum. Quick history, Skinny Puppy formed in 1982 before Trent Reznor was even beginning to make Synth-Pop. Bites was released 2 years before NIN officially came into being, so the only real things critics could compare this to are the Joy Division evolution of Cabaret Voltaire, Kraftwerk, Depeche Mode, and The Human League. I doubt you'd want to be anywhere near the cocktail bar that would let cEVIN or Nivek waitress, but that joke is hilarious. Bites is still technically Dark Synth-Pop, but the samples from The Legend of Hell House and The Tenant are defining characteristics of what would become the Industr

E: be honest, Bottle, is there a point to all of this?  B: you know me better than that, Skip. I'm always honest, and there's never an actual point to the points i sharpen. I guess it's kind of implied that a lot of newer albums are going to directly tackle the socio-politiconomic snafu of the previous half-decade, and a lot of older albums will get completely recontextualized in the process, but that's just life. What i can tell you is that the simple fact that i am here instead of out in whatever the road conditions actually are right now is a paradigm shift of epic proportions.  Back in the day it was expected that you would either get there, die trying, or get fired. Not worth it. Granted, i am in a position of privilege to just take a day of vacation and try again tomorrow, but it took a completely unnecessary and exhausting amount of standing firm and drawing lines in the sand to get there. Some people are workaholics with no personal identity outside their chosen

Is there anything better than being freshly snowed in with a coincidentally large stack of new records? Substitute whatever conditions you prefer for this karmic delicacy, but i submit that there is not.  I only know 2 things about Samara Lubelski. 1) she's a Violinist, and Half-Off Sale) the cover art for Parallel Suns is phenomenal. If i know karma though, there will certainly be a trade off. Yep, spindle hole is too small and the sides aren't marked except for the etching in the runout. Normally that would leave a bitter aftertaste, but the concept clearly suggests that you can and should listen to either side first. Don't know if that's true or not, so let's find out.  Ooooh, not exactly surprisingly this turns out to be Psychedelic Pop. There's a definite Bird and the Bee vibe to it, but without the overt irony. This just sounds like honest 60s Psych-Folk. Now that I have seen the colors, that transition into Taste the Candy makes me a little scared to tast

B: Alright kiddos, at first i was unsure of where to start. I was tempted to let you pick, but then i saw this and i knew it was perfect.  E: is that a picture disc loose in a vinyl envelope?  B: yep, a proper 1 sided Punk EP to boot. It's 2018, Trump is a gigantic embarrassment, our country is a global joke, and we're currently looking back from 5 dystopian years later. Biden documents, or something.  Now before you get offended and try to defend any of it, fuck off. Don't care about your opinion. Would we still have some of the same problems if we hadn't had Truck Nutz for President? Yes, he didn't create most of them, he just intentionally made them as openly terrible as possible.  More recently Taylor Momsen described how the children lost their minds with Tom Morello as backup, but i think Debt Neglector says it better back then. The Kids Are Pissed. They should be, insulin is not expensive to manufacture, and neither are records for that matter. Yet here we ar

B: C'mon snowpocalypse, Bottle needs a day of not dealing with it.  S: And i would like to mention that we are being highly underutilized.  B: Naaaaaaaawwwww, c'mon Sandra, don't make me play with my imaginary friends. No offense, but i was really enjoying not needing to imagineer any of you weirdos. All it ever gets me is a trip to the white room and a completely conundrifying conversation with a couple gray blobs. See? I'm already alliterating aloud again. Atrocious!  S: Shut up, Bottle. I just thought since you have a vast assortment of records arriving, you might include us to alleviate the incredible boredom we are suffering.  B: not knowing what it's like to be bored, i can only imagine. Alright fine, but i'm all rusty car parts in the plot conceiving department. Wouldn't even want to hazard a guess as to when/which timelines you guys are traversing. Any suggestions?  S: that's not my department.  B: which one's yours? Eyebrows, jeez lady! Righ

I went a tad overboard on this year's gift card depletion plan, so i have a ridiculous number of records scheduled to arrive tomorrow. Tonight i just want to hear something fun. Let's revisit The Escape Club.  I can't help it that everyone only remembers Wild Wild West from their second album, but their first album White Fields is fantastic. Depending on which side of the street you walk on, the video for that big hit is either embarassingly hilarious or total cringe, but this first album is hard to pin down. Some say it's Pop Rock, but that implies that this is in some way mainstream. Some people more accurately say this is first-wave Alternative Rock, but i don't like that at all. As crazy as it may sound, this is actually the Gin Blossoms of Post-Punk. A bit New Wave, a touch of Goth, very forward bass grooves, and some Power Pop for good measure. Yes it's Pop Rock, but it actually rocks. I think you'll be surprised at how much not like Wild Wild West eve

Tonight we're listening to a fantastic album of early 80s Michigan Industrial, Bleeding Out from Shame, Exposure.  There's no Rock or Metal here, this is very much experimental noise music. My copy has the additional CD with extra tracks, but i'm listening to the actual 4 track LP tonight (fun coincidence with yesterday's Acheron).  There's not much to say, unfortunately, Industrial is meant to be provocative, uncomfortable, grotesque anti-music. Haunting, cold, inhuman, and grating tend to be the most appropriate adjectives for pretty much any of it.  The one exception is the title track, here taking up the full Side B. Bleeding Out sounds like you're having a really bad acid trip in a fairly busy video arcade, or possibly the local carnival. It's all a distorted dystopian mechanical nightmare that for me at least sounds like how consciousness feels most of the time. Participating in reality is exhaustipating, so i get a counterintuitive feeling of meditati