Albums for Eternity with Bottle, the Curmudgeon

You know me, i am Bottle, I can't just let the splendor of Core on vinyl go without a rebuttal. I think we all know the million dollar question, can a new vinyl remaster make the sonic abomination that is the piezo pickups on Jar of Flies more tolerable? Nope.

I picked up this brand new remastered Core, and it was like I'd never heard the bass lines in my life. Let's A/B it with the OG CD. We'll use track 7, Creep. The very first problem is volume. The CD is louder than the record. That's a line vs phono level problem, I'm converting the much smaller analogue signal to digital and pumping them out of the same headphone jack. If I want them the same volume I have to actually normalize the sources to the same volume. OK, let's do it. 'Scuse me while I feed them both into Ardour. Yeah, peaks at -1 for the CD, peaks at -10 for the record. Best I can do is cut the CD and boost the vinyl until my ears are satisfied. Now the second problem, they don't play at the same speed. The vinyl is faster by a rate of about 1 second per minute. You're probably not going to feel it if you listen to one then the other, but it does mean you can't just flip back and forth without a noticeable disruption in continuity. That...

You know something? When it comes to albums, there's obscure, and then there's the Hinduism-based Jazz/Folk Rock Fusion of Golden Avatar. They only made 2 albums, A Change Of Heart is the first one, but let's just say George Harrison ain't got nothing on Golden Avatar. It's H.R. Pufnstuf level weird, and so 1970s you can feel the polyester leeching into your skin, but my goodness is it an album.

It's 5:45am on a Saturday, let's find some peace of mind in the obscene. Humanity is androgynously evil, and excuse me while I go look up the definition of "integuments." A tough outer protective layer. A human peeled like a banana, there's an image to ponder over your breakfast cereal. Meshuggah is American Yiddish slang for cray-cray, but I think they're really easy to understand and appreciate: it's all about that polymeter. 4/4 against 23/16 is always a fan favorite. Tack on some twangy disjointed string smacking, haunting atmospherics, avant-jazz guitar solos, and shredded vocal chords and you've got yourself a party. Personally I don't think humanity is inherently evil, I think humanity is collectively susceptible to binary occlusion; we gravitate to one extreme of a binary opposition without leaving a trail of breadcrumbs to find our way back to center. Half of us exploit the exploitable and the other half get exploited until they go insane....

Did you know New Zealand owns the section of Antarctica that stretches from the south pole to 60 degrees south latitude between 160 degrees east and 150 degrees west longitude? Me neither; thanks a lot Enya. Hopefully I can rum and coke that brain cell into oblivion before that factoid accosts an unsuspecting stranger. Stranger than that, Orinoco is both an actual river and the former name of the studio where a bunch of unsuspecting strangers had to listen to Enya perfect her hardcore rap cadence because Rob Dickens didn't sign Enya to make money, he signed her 'cause this is what he calls "now that's what I call music, mofos." I can't hate even a little, Enya's L33T and I'm not even close to joking. We did a refresher of Irony with yesterday's album about horizontal ladies, but Cursum Perficio is probably my favorite example of true irony. That phrase was inscribed at the entrance to Marilyn Monroe's house. "Your journey ends here" i...

How much you wanna bet I'm gonna absolutely detest how much I like this album?  That is of course a joke based on the lead off track, but Tom Marolda is a very Todd Rundgren meets They Might Be Giants with a Limp Bizkit sense of humor kind of guy. You absolutely have to remember this is 1995 Gen X humor and should be taken as ironic as possible. That's confusing, I know, what with all the different flavors they make at the irony factory these days, but capital I Irony happens when the significance of action differs for the agent and the observer. Think Alannis Morissette's "Ironic." It IS ironic that the character asks "isn't it ironic?" whenever life creeps up on her in its funny way. Likewise, it IS ironic to make blonde jokes about women you are very much attracted to sexually. The actual string of words "God Is A Girl" IS ironic because 1995 American English requires God to be a man so that Tom Marolda can inflammatorily call him a girl...

Barnyard by Good Morning is much more my speed at the moment. Mid tempo indie rock with a dose of detuned mope folk. That said, if Coldplay meets Deerhunter isn't your idea of a good time, you'll definitely wish everything had already disappeared while listening to Wahlberg; it does indeed sound exactly like Futurism. Damn, I guess that means we have to try to figure out if that even means anything. Deerhunter came first, so what's that song about? Well, it depicts a bleak dystopian future in which we are caged, but content to decorate that cage. Furthermore, our significant others are encased in plastic, safely protected from the terrible outside world. This is a future founded on fear. Wahlberg however is a criticism of men insisting upon fathering more children well into their 60s and 70s. You know, breeders. I don't know, makes perfect intertextual sense to me, I assume you're supposed to think Good Morning did it on purpose, but then again I have no idea if Dee...

I have 2 questions. First, is Of Montreal of Montreal? Second, which "ur" are we dealing with here?  If they're actually from Montreal then it's totally funny for the grammar needs like me, but if they're not from Montreal then it's not at all funny for a guy who hates post-ironic humor like me. That's a joke, I'm practically the poster child for post-ironic humor, and I'll mud-wrestle both Tim and Eric to prove it. More pressing, is the album title "You Are Fun," "Your [as opposed to my] Fun," "[the authoritative version of] Fun," or some menage-a-conglomorate of the 3? No confidence listening to it will answer either of those questions, but we came here to down the hatches, so down the hatch it goes. I can't lie, I've tried to review this album many times, but I have a completely unfair bias against it. First, they aren't from Canada, they're from REM/B52's land, Athens, GA. Second, Kevin Barnes h...