Albums for Eternity with Bottle, the Curmudgeon

I think we can all agree, if i'm telling you to check out a Bluegrass album it's probably pretty spectacular.  Trampled By Turtles, aside from having a fantastic name, is a Folk/Bluegrass band from Duluth, Minnesota that specializes in playing even their slowest ballads at face-blisteringly ludicrous speeds over 100+bpm. How you make allegro sound slow is beyond my comprehension, but there it is. I am of course exaggerating, but only a little.  Accusations of Speedgrass aside, Trampled By Turtles excels at stories where things don't quite turn out as awesome as you might have hoped, songs where you find yourself wondering how and why things got to where they are, songs about finding yourself just a little too far behind the times to even bother catching up. You know, in a hurry going nowhere fast.  Though it does have a bit of old-timey barn dance about it, i wouldn't call it corny in the slightest. It's 21st-century Folk, not Hee Haw. All sorts of cool stuff out th...

On this episode of Two Things That Shouldn't Be Anywhere Near Each Other, Dave Matthews Band takes us for a Walk Around The Moon, and Ghost releases a bizarre EP of cover tunes. What weird conglomeration of circumstances led to these things sharing a May 19 release date is anybody's guess, i'm just here to disassemble them and order the necessary replacement parts.  First up is the new Dave Matthews Band LP, Walk Around The Moon. I don't know whether that means we're really looking at all the debris strewn around this here moon of the sun, or if we're literally walking around it to specifically avoid doing so, but i assume we'll find out fairly quick. I also assume Boyd Tinsley won't be joining us, but even i'm not going there.  Superfans of Dave Matthews Band have heard 58.3% of these songs played live at various times, but i haven't because i've been under the table and dreaming. Enough of my one-liners already, let's just give it a spi...

I've been hitting the self-promotion of my new Bottle's Music endeavor pretty hard over on Faceplant (remind me to tell you about it some time), but tonight, for my own personal enjoyment, an album that's not for sale (at least not my copy). It's the sophomore Talk In Circles from Anaheim Garage Rock hooligans The Willowz. Honestly, if you told me some of these were previously unreleased White Stripes songs my ears would have a real tough time disproving you aside from highly doubting Meg would be singing at all. Side A is just top to bottom smashers, and Side B gets super weird. If they lived on my street i'd totally hang out and have a beer or two in the driveway while they practiced. Trash Rock with a strong Avant Psych Rock attitude and absolutely no regard for sound level restrictions is my kind of entertainment. Good stuff, will definitely have to check out their other 3 albums at some point. For now though, just keep talkin' circles,  communication is the...

Oh my, i'm really jazzercised about tonight's album (that's a super complicated tangential reference to Noah's wife from Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure). Do you like NWOBHM? You know, Judas Priest, Iron Maiden, Diamond Head? Wish there was a right now band doing that? Great news, Seven Sisters will melt your chain mail to your skin and leave you begging the priestess to put in a good word with the goddess for you so you can march to war to defend the crown of the horned one. And they'll even tell you which guitarist is playing which guitar solo like Grandma Megadeth used to do!  Think i'm joking? I'm not, The Cauldron and the Cross is a full out medieval epic full of magic and glory and bloody bloody dying in battle because there's really not much else to do when you find yourself stuck in some Arthurian-analog adventure quest. Go ahead check out their bandcamp page at https://sevensistersheavymetal.bandcamp.com/ and then come back here and as...

Next up, Pornography! No not actual pornography, The Cure's 4th album entitled Pornography. Yes, yes, i'll wait while you put your trenchcoats back on and embarassedly shuffle back out...quickly now...Ok, let's get down to what we came for.  After Pornography The Cure began shifting to a much more radio friendly Pop sound. Not a bad thing at all, i'm often in love on Fridays, it merely marks the shift from "early" to "mainstream" in my mind. Something about their first 4 albums still feels and sounds "underground," and i personally like that very much.  "Oppressively dispirited." Only consistent member Robert Smith said he was a fairly monsterously depressed person at the time, and Bassist Simon Gallup summed up their nihilistic ethos as it doesn't really matter if we all die. By and large they all grew out of it.  Coming off the dreamlike introverted atmosheric mopery of listening to Seventeen Seconds last night, the opener O...

... but seriously, we need a proper review of The Cure's Seventeen Seconds (because i've done several improper reviews elsewhere). To my mind this qualifies as a mulligan, Seventeen Seconds is the Bottle designated debut album by The Cure. I say that because Three Boys (later rearranged as Boys Don't Cry) isn't what Robert Smith wanted for their debut album and he subsequently demanded and received final say over every subsequent album. And my goodness is Seventeen Seconds fantastic. As you might expect from the cover art, this is a lonely, dreary trudge in steel toed boots by the side of a deselate road next to a barren winter forest that can only be described as "soggy." I like to pretend we're in a car that desperately needs new wiper blades and about to unknowingly run them over. I'm of course joking, but the gallows humor seems completely appropriate. They are, after all, one of the 4 defining horsemen of the Goth Rock-pocalypse (Sioxie Soux, Joy ...

Lana Del Rey's major label debut second album (her actual self-titled debut was basically trash-canned after a lackluster release) is a mash up of Baroque Pop and Trip Hop? Ok, i'll bite, i love lavishly unnecessary string arrangements and downtempo noir, bring on the borning to die, i guess.  Sure, that technically qualifies as Trip Hop, Off To The Races ups the intensity rather than killing it, and damn it's good. It better be right? I mean we're holding it to Massive Attack/Portishead standards, aren't we? Lana Del Rey has a unique deadpan delivery, perfect for her image as a reluctant Stepford Wife in training. Outside she's a country club princess, inside she's Cyndi Lauper, as evidenced by the red bra under the white shirt.  Yeah, this is a spectacular mashup of orchestra and electronica, if you hate this you really just hate the timbre of her voice. There i can't help you, you just gotta get over it. I'll have to pull out Chemtrails Over The C...

Tonight's a good night for a record we haven't listened to yet. That's not true, i've listened to it several times, i just haven't reviewed it. It's the 1985 singles compilation from the English Post Punk band Echo & The Bunnymen entitled Songs To Learn & Sing. It's lovely.  You might have the mistaken impression that i don't like compilation albums, and that's just not true. I like them when they serve a purpose, and collecting all the singles from a band's many albums without qualifying that they are necessarily their greatest is a perfectly fine concept. It basically says "well if you're only going to pick 11 songs from the last 5 years, these are the ones that got radio play."  I'll be honest, i don't really know what any of these songs are about, they're poetically obtuse in spite of their readily apparent gloominess. Then again Echo & The Bunnymen formed like right after Pink Floyd released Animals, and...