Albums for Eternity with Bottle, the Curmudgeon

I'm glad i document this stuff because otherwise i wouldn't be able to say way back on May 15 of 2021 i hoped Greta Van Fleet would get to make a 3rd album. Here it is a little over 2 years later and i picked up Starcatcher on my after work grocery run. Critics are going to tell me it sounds like a garage full of Led Zeppelin demos they never bothered to properly produce, and that it somehow fails to live up to whatever expectations they invented that morning, so we just won't even bother to go there. Instead we'll take the liberty of assuming it will sound like Greta Van Fleet and hear what their brains told their fingers to play this time around.  Holy hell, my friends, that is a seriously glorious Side A. If you want to compare this to Led Zeppelin then i have no choice but to say it puts Led Zeppelin to shame. I'm not actually a nostalgic guy, and none of this is a competition. Absolutely, this is straightforwardly unapologetic 70s Blues Rock here in the now of ...

Welcome to Friday (though it's probably almost over by the time you're reading this)! Today we ask the ultra important question "was the 1992 Kriss Kross debut album Totally Krossed Out as good as i remember?" The answer is yes, but first we have to nail down what it actually is.  Totally Krossed Out is a concept project created by Jermaine Dupri and Joe "The Butcher" Nicolo, performed by 2 just barely teenage rappers named Chris who wear their clothes backward. That's not necessarily good or bad, i merely point it out so that we all understand that these Chrises didn't set up an appointment under the names Mac Daddy and Daddy Mac to pitch their demos with their football jerseys on backward. At the same time though, this also isn't a Millie Vanillie type C&C Factory switcheroo either. This is a bona fide collaborative concept that rightfully garnered all the success it deserved because everyone actually understood the assignment: 2 teenage ra...

Alrighty then, it's the head to head face off you never thought anyone in their right mind would orchestrate: Brandy's 1998 Never Say Never vs Matchbox Twenty's 2023 Where The Light Goes. Straight up, i have no idea what we might hope to learn about here, but i do have some presuppositions.  Pretty sure Brandy is going to win, but i could be wrong. They both have some positives and negatives. Never Say Never is every bit a double album, and i expect Matchbox Twenty is still every bit the generically inoffensive vanilla Rock band they always were. Still teenage Brandy making her "mature" second album, but then 50-something year old Rob Thomas presumably singing like himself. Never Say Never has the amazing duet with Monica, Where The Light Goes has no songs i've ever heard. I guess if the ree-ul world ever stops hassling me we'll dive right in and give 'em both a listen.  Yeah, just like i expected, Never Say Never is a great album. Sure it's longer...

31 years and my life is still,  Wondering what's up with the only album 4 Non Blondes had a chance to make.  Meter's a little off, but when has that ever stopped me? Better late than never, let's open up this here copy of Bigger, Better, Faster, More! and find out.  1992 was a crazy year in music, coming off the heels of 1991's monsterous triumverate of Nevermind, Use Your Illusion I&II, and the Black Album. In hindsight it was clearly nothing more than the corporate commodification of kookiness, but what a time to be 12 among teenagers; Alternative anything crashing through the gate and unignorably camping out on the front lawn for lack of anything better to do.  As these things tend to happen, it wasn't until mid 1993 that the second single What's Up really became a perennial radio/coffee shop cover staple, and by that point the band was already in the process of unraveling during the recording of their second album, but that's the standard story for p...