Albums for Eternity with Bottle, the Curmudgeon

What a bizarre feeling to hear an album you haven't heard in 30 years. Sure, the big hits from Facelift are fully in my brain out of context, but all the tracks are bathed in an impenetrable fog of pseudo deja vu. I go "oh yeah, i remember this little part," but i totally forgot how G'n'R on quaaludes with out of nowhere funk the album actually is. If that seems weird to you, you need to remember a few things. 1) Nevermind and the Use Your Illusions haven't come out yet, 2) early Alice In Chains wasn't trying to be different, they were trying to be Mainstream Hard Rock/Heavy Metal and there's more falsetto on Facelift than both Skid Row albums combined, and 3) Grunge is not a genre.  It sounds like early Stone Temple Pilots, Soundgarden, and G'n'R, but it's practically New Orleans Sludge slow, and the guitar solos are decidedly more noise than melody. Sludge very much is a genre, it's a grungy offshoot of Black Sabbath style Doom, but t...

Who wants a BLT for breakfast? Just me? Ok, fine, i didn't want to make you one anyway. I'm kidding, go ahead and save it for lunch. You'll thank me later. Most critics are going to complain about how terrible the cover art is, but i actually think it's perfect. Technically this is a Robin Trower solo album with Jack Bruce as the frontman and Bill Lordan banging the drooms, but i think the sandwich metaphor is perfect for what it really is: 3 simple ingredients that add up to something delicious. It doesn't pretend to be any more or less than what it is, 3 consummate Rock'n'Rollers making a kick ass Random Crap album from whatever ingredients they found in the fridge. No nasty mayo oozing out the sides, just meat, savory fruit, and vegetation stacked up like a Scooby Doo special. No cheese either, just straight ahead Rock songs at home in any Classic Rock block or dive bar juke box. There are a couple murky, haunting tangents in Won't Let You Down and Ca...

How in the world do we tie this CD portion of our adventure together? Sex, gender, religion, war... i know! Let's check out Hanson's 2nd album! They're boys who look like girls and everyone loves to mmmHate them. I don't, i expect This Time Around to be great because contrary to what you might think, Hanson is awesome. I'm serious, without the trail they blazed the number of brothers allowed to be in a Rock band together would be limited to two. Chevelle and Greta Van Fleet wouldn't stand a chance without Hanson, 3 brothers forming a band together was literally part of their marketing strategy. All i'm saying is that mmmBop is literally the worst song Hanson ever wrote, of course it's terrible, they were literal real life children when they wrote it. Cringing through the first Hanson album is no different than cringing through the first couple Green Day EPs. This Time Around we get to hear songs about being an awkward teenager from actual awkward teenage...

Speaking of knife wounds, here's what i consider the first Genesis album, Tresspass. It's not technically their first album, but From Genesis To Revelation was really just your standard singles collection culled from early demos that went nowhere and neither Decca nor the band cared to renew their contract. Tresspass is their first album conceived as an album after deciding to be a real professional band. It's also a pre Phil Collins album, because he was actually their 3rd drummer. The artwork depicts an actual knife slash through itself, and it specifically warns you that it contains tape hiss and other analog artifacts, so that's fun. Digital vs analog certainly fits our developing theme of all out nonsensical culture wars for prophet [snap] i mean profit. "Some of you are going to die...for the freedom that i will provide." Yep, that's totally not how freedom works. Violent revolutions merely result in different dictatorships. That's actually Marx ...

Speaking of smorgasbords and ladies' bathrooms, here's Live's Secret Samadhi. The title at least implies that the album is a meditation on reality, but it's Ed Kowalczyk so i have to keep a dictionary close because i don't have a clue who/what he's referring to half the time. Sure i know that Lakini is the goddess of the Manipura (solar plexus/navel) Chakra, but what does washing her feet with water from the women's bathroom toilet actually mean? Jesco White is a mildly famous folk dancer/entertainer, but he's not dead so how could you lay flowers at his grave? "The followers of Aldous are spinning with their mescaline," Aldous Huxley obviously, but what does that have to do with the secondary thematic concept of intellectual propery? I can't even begin to dissect the convoluted metaphors of Ghost, and we're not even halfway through the album. That's why nobody has anything to say about this album, nobody actually knows what the hel...

Beware the Ides of March. I don't know why, it's always been lovely to me. Mrs. Bottle and i got married 21 years ago this day, and not one single person has ever stabbed me to death, let alone a whole gaggle. I did have a near catastrophic choking incident in my sleep involving a phlegmy molotov cocktail of stomach acid, but that's probably way too much information. Hows about we celebrate with a bountiful harvest of completely random albums? I can almost guarantee not a single person reading this has sat themselves down to listen to Madonna's Like A Prayer album from start to finish, because if you had you'd never stop talking about how wackadoodle it is. We start off with the eponymous Like A Prayer, follow it up with the equally banging Express Yourself, and then we get to her collaboration with Prince where all hell breaks every which way, including loose. I'm serious, it's like Craig T. Nelson pulled out the Marijuana suitcase and now we've got pol...

Wowzers is this thing wacky. The Power And The Glory is a lot of peoples' favorite Gentle Giant album. I don't think it's my favorite, but they certainly aren't wrong. The album is loosely about how ridiculous the whole hoping for a powerful leader to make everything awesome again really is. Hey you, go be King, no wait you suck, maybe that guy will be a better King, oh wait.... For the 40th anniversary 10 years ago, Derek Shulman explained that Watergate, the Cold War, and the 40 years of corporate consolidation their label would experience were the thing they were talking about. Money and power will always win. Not because they're good or beneficial to anyone, merely because "winning" is the only kind of raisins they eat. This year's the 50th anniversary and i shouldn't even need to whisper forebodings about this coming November. Best i can say is that it's really true, No God's A Man, especially not an orange tinted one. Please don't...