Albums for Eternity with Bottle, the Curmudgeon

I didn't review it at the time, and i honestly can't remember why, but i totally have a copy of Primus's Conspiranoid, and tonight's as good as any other night to give it a spin.  Would you believe me if i said it's because i was waiting for a good context, and that hilarious story about Les Claypool auditioning for Metallica (72 Seasons being last night's album) certainly overqualifies? I wouldn't, i'm a totally unreliable narrator (it's 100% true, and now i guarantee you have no clue what to believe anymore). Bring on the insanity.  Hold on, gotta find it in this unalphabetized mess. At least i know it's somewhere on the top shelf...  ...there we go.  Hmmm, unopened, if i know me it's almost certainly a nasty little gremlin whispering "this will be worth a lot of money in a few years." Sometimes i make me wanna puke. Puke i did, guess we'll just hear it while watching someone else's copy spin on their table.  It's only...

Alright, here's the deal. Slayer retired on a high note, Megadeth has been a revolving supergroup playing Dave Mustaine riffs since the late 90s, Anthrax is not my cup of coffee, and Kill 'Em All through S&M is my Metallica. But they have a new album, because they're allowed to make any album they feel like, and it at least promises to rock in a Metallica type way. After all that Disco, they'd have to really be off their rockers to disappoint.  But more importantly, liking or not liking it isn't actually the point. The point is talking about listening to it. It's easy to joke around and criticize most anything, much harder (ocassionally impossible) to dissect why you actually enjoy something. Sure it's mass produced media, sure Metallica is ridiculously famous, but there's certainly no ambiguity as to what this album is about, unless you aren't familiar with dividing a year into 4 seasons or what things look like after being lit on fire. We'r...

 ... all of which in no way begs the question, is there such a thing as good and/or bad Disco? Possibly, let's find out.  Strangest thing, i came across Chicago 13 and Chic's Risque shrink wrapped together for no obvious reason. They do have something in common though, they were released a month apart, Risque is commonly cited as the definitive Disco album par excellence, and Chicago 13 is generally regarded as the worst Chicago album because they have no business playing Disco. Seems like that would imply it's terrible Disco. Worse than Three Dog Night, even.  I don't know though, is it actually a bad album? Is it bad Disco? Is it Disco at all? What the hell even is Disco? I think it's just uptempo funk with big orchestral arrangements and synth melodies, but let's listen to Chic's Risqué and find out from whence it came.  Holy crap, yeah this is fantastic. It's way slower than you might expect, but my goodness is it fun. And it's supposed to be. Ri...

This is not my industrial wheelhouse, this is not my beautiful wife, this is not the Dutch band Soviet Sex, this is the self-titled EP from short-lived NYC band Soviet Sex, not to be confused with US/Soviet politics or the serious problem of human trafficking you'll read about if you try to search for them. Well, self, how did i get here?  Sometimes you just can't get anywhere with the research, so you give up and just do a quick phenomenological blurb without any external context whatsoever.  I suppose that's not completely true, they had some traction on college radio and toured a fair bit for a couple years in the early 80s. Generally speaking, that's the biography of most any band. You see, here in the US we've all been kind of brainwashed into believing that anything short of fame, however brief that fame may be, is not success. That is of course preposterous, fame is the exploitation of success for profit as an alternative to systematized welfare (not poorly m...

What were we talking about before we rememberd the future and climbed a mountain? Oh yeah, the incoherent genre that is New Wave. We left off at Industrial influenced bands making dance music, so let's skip ahead to 1990 and see what happens when a dance club band dabbles in Industrial and Dub.  Punk of the not-Ramones persuasion, if you'll remember, also involved the English revival/mash-up of Dub and Ska with quirky Rock & Roll. Renegade Soundwave said "you know what will really confound people? We'll take Dub (not Dubstep) and mix it with Hip Hop in an industrial fashion to present a definitive and questionably alternative view on typical societal subject matter.  Works at confusing me right off the bat because the cover inexplicably makes me think i'm about to listen to the soundtrack of that terrible Who Framed Roger Rabbit? knock-off Cool World. Lot of good music wasted on that movie. I'm not a big Brad Pitt fan, sorry. Big fan of 90s Dark Dancetronic...

Ladies and gentlemen, squirrels and squirrelettes, have you ever heard the song Mississippi Queen and wondered if the album it came from is any good? I have, i've wondered that multiple times. Great news! It is. We'll get to that in a minute, first we have to address the critic schlock. This album was produced by Felix Pappalardi, so the go-to snarkicism was some form of joke involving non-dairy caffienated beverage lightener, but Mountain is widely regarded as one of the key influences on Heavy Metal as any form of coherent genre. More than that, their debut album has both an exclamation point and creates a pun when you say it after their name. Here's Mountain Climbing! See how much fun that was? Whaddawe get? Fuzz. Heavy bass fuzz, heavy synthy guitar doodles even Robin Trower would drool over, and some of the best early 70s Hard and Acoustic Rock songs ever written. Now, with a name like Mountain Climbing!, it's obviously going to be a "here's all the squirr...

Believe it or not, Front242 is not the only pioneeringly influencial Belgian practitioner of Electronic Body Music (aka Industrial Dance). The Neon Judgement shares that exact same distinction. But, where Front242 took inspiration from Karlheinz Stockhausen, Fad Gadget, and Joy Division, The Neon Judgement's biggest influences were apparently The Velvet Underground and Pink Floyd. I don't know if that's audibly true, i haven't heard any of their music yet, but luckily enough i have their 3rd compilation album General Pain and Major Disease. That's an Industrial album title par excellence, so i expect it will at least be highly enjoyable, whatever it turns out to be.  But this is a Bottle review, so it's barely tangentially about the album and instead more about the overarching context i blindly walked into by buying random albums from semi-anonymous randos on the internet, like i do. I somehow wandered into the weirdness that is European New Wave. I say European...

Oh my sweet militaristically computerized dystopian future, i cannot even begin to describe the level of absolute cerebral joy and pleasure my brain feels at being bombarded through my earholes by Front242's Front By Front. It's one of those albums i can't review, i can only photograph it upside down, turn that photo upside down so it's right side up, and call it quintessential.

Today on Please Don't Make Bottle Go Back To Work Tomorrow, we check out something brand new, and buffer it with something brand old. Don't worry, i didn't know there was a tunnel under Ocean Blvd. and you don't need me to tell you about it, so instead of Lana Del Rey's new album, we'll check out Fall Out Boy's new album. After that we'll check out Public Enemy's second album and possibly see how what's going on now compares to what was going on in the mid 80s.  So Much (For) Stardust   Fall Out Boy has never been concerned with being in any way consistent when it comes to musical expression. Totally fine, genres shouldn't be the goal. On that front their latest So Much (For) Stardust doesn't disappoint. Massive orchestra, Disco, a sort of Michael Jackson impression, catchy Pop Punk guitars followed by bombastic Emo, some Electronica, old-school Rock & Roll, it's the audio equivalent of the day after a crazy house party. On one ha...