Albums for Eternity with Bottle, the Curmudgeon

I thought yesterday was bad, but today was a straight up dumpster fire. Let's just go straight to the hard stuff, here's Slayer's 1998 opus tritonus, Diabolus in Musica. Depending on who you're talking to it's either the best Slayer album since sliced bread, the most expirimental Slayer album, or the first of a string of unenjoyable Nü-Metal (send all umlaut related hate mail to Blue Öyster Cult) indulgences. Yeah, i'm as confused as you, it sounds unremarkably like a 1998 Slayer album produced by Rick Rubin. Never once, not for even a second, did Slayer ever even lurk in the parking lot of Mainstream. They knew they were scary, they knew Metallica was an extremely effective gateway drug, they.... We'll listen to their 3rd supposed Nu-Metal album at some point, but if you're a long time reader, you'll know i have a complete lactose intolerance for calling things that don't have turntable scratches and/or rap verses Nu-Metal, regardless of how the...

Today was such a mess, i needed the calming bliss of combing through moth ball scented records/CDs on the floor of a junk shop that can only be differentiated from a hoarder hovel by the delicately blinking "OPEN" sign in the window. Maybe that needs some context.  You see, way back in the horrible year of 2019 my dad died and i stopped making music in favor of listening/writing about his record collection. Little did any of us know what kind of circus freaks 2020 and 2021 would parade through our living rooms, but i weathered the worst of the storms with headphones firmly clamped over my ears. Over 1,000 reviews, 4 brain baffling books, and an actual published compilation album (all of which you can buy, ask me how) later, i decided i'd try becoming an actual record store. Album review frequency tanked, but i still avidly collect records and write about them when i feel like it. Here's today's: Is there a more perfect Rändom Crap band than Blue Öyster Cult? I sub...

No idea why, but today i want to listen to Dummy, the debut album from Portishead. Sadly, my copy is visibly grotesque and the disc has a crack in it, so we're slum-tubing it today. That's fine actually, they famously put records on the floor and walked on them before sampling/scratching the hell out of them. I'm always confused when people call it somber or heavy or overwrought, like that's surprising. Of course it is, this was the age of full-frontal sarcasm. This is an album about intensely emotional femininity under the umbrella of an entendre, make it a double.  We won't go full abstract, we'll keep it in the context of Beth singing inside the dark, intertextually sampled, and heavily manipulated musical world that Adrian and Geoff create. A world where the only outlet for intense emotion comes from the way in which all these quotations and allusions are presented; it's the act of speaking the ideas that matters more than the specific content/context. A...

Part of me feels very conflicted about picking up the new 30th Anniversary remaster of Vs. On one hand, this is the Target paid for single LP as opposed to the actual Ten Club double LP or the Warner extended version, and it's clear, which completely goes against spinning the black circle. I know spin the black circle is the Vitalogy version of Blood, and i know the original CD was in clear jewell cases because i have multiple copies, but c'mon.  On the other hand, it's my favorite Pearl Jam album by quite a large margin, my copy of Ten was very lonely, and it could definitely benefit from a remaster because the original CD suffers from being mastered so loud my teeth vibrate even with the volume turned down. Oh my i can't believe it's not butter, this sounds amazing. Don't get me wrong, it came fresh out of the jacket with factory dust bordering on the size of gravel, and the fact that it's clear is exceptionally irksome, but the sound is spine tingling. Ev...

Alright, i've been avoiding it for months, but i have to review Our New Doomsday from Widow7. Why have i been avoiding it? For good or bad i don't lie, it's because i'm not going to like this album. I'm not happy that i won't like it, but i didn't give Sevendust's Next a thumbs up, nor Fire From The Gods, nor Volbeat, nor The Pretty Reckless, nor any of the other bands implied by this closing elipsis.... The truth of the matter is that no matter how intentional you try to make it, a collection of potential radio singles does not an album make. Now, yes you can argue that Our New Doomsday is a completely appropriate concept for a list of things that aren't awesome, and that those things do not in any way need to add up to anything coherent, but actually listening to that kind of garbled gripe ramble is incredibly unpleasant for me, especially when there's absolutely no obvious reason why the next song starts after the previous song just finished o...

It's Friday, so today's lunchbreak soundtrack is of course the new Andre 3000 "not a rap album" flute-tacular entitled New Blue Sun...  [6 hours later] Ok, time to get back to the second half of New Blue Sun, Andre 3000's first solo album. I listened to the first half on my lunch break, and it was delightful. I wasn't expecting anything particular going in to it, so the strange melding of ambient bleep-bloopery, improvisatory percussion, and modal melodic meditation was a nice surprise. Even if you're only familiar with Outkast in passing, i think we're all aware that Andre 3000 is extra, so it's a little odd to hear him plying his orchestrational talents at a slower than turtle's pace, but it turns out those amorphous washes of electronic soup really highlight his quirky and playful melodic sensibiliies.  I don't know what else you could call it but Ambient Modal Jazz, but in spite of the double digit track times there's plenty of vari...

Moment of truth, it's time to check out the new Rolling Stones album, Hackney Diamonds. A little refresher might be in order. I completely love everything about Rolling Stones except the sound of their records. I have glossy, well cared for original pressings and they sound like absolute garbage. Actually listening to them is agony. I don't care which other famous people are playing on Hackney Diamonds, i don't care about genre or style or lyrics or even if they're too old and feeble to perform well, i just want it to not sound like sandpaper on aluminum siding. Is that too much to ask? Is it? There's a glimmer of hope, though, because i have a lot of new "Made in Czech Republic" albums that sound wonderful.  No more stalling, time to spin the purple circle for good or bad. Holy shit, this is gorgeous! Yes, yes, absolutely yes, this sounds amazing, like human ears actually listened to test pressings. I know i said i didn't care about anything musical, ...