Albums for Eternity with Bottle, the Curmudgeon

Stabbing Westward's 3rd album, Darkest Days, is an absolute classic Industrial Rock album. But Bottle, it's like 65 minutes long, and you hate that. Yes and no. I hate it when it has no reason being that long. Darkest Days though, it's a 4x4 concept album. 4 songs about how you Wreck-it-Ralphed this relationship, 4 about pining for the fjords, 4 from the bottom of the barrel where Lacy Sturm pats you on the back and says "dude, you just gotta accept the fact that it's definitely over," and 4 pulling your big boy pants on and learning to not be such a douchebag. You can describe the acts differently if you want, but it's a legit double album that takes an hour+ to unfold. I'm cool with that. The important part is the big thumping bass drum and the metallic noisy synths. I can't stop you from comparing it to NIN, but it's not at all necessary. This is exactly what the genre Industrial Rock sounds like, but i'm definitely not going to mistaken...

Ever since they formed in 2014, Muskets have faced the sad reality of being grunge when there's no such genre. Sure, comparison with Nirvana and Seether is unavoidable, they convincingly inhabit that sad, sloppy, sonic sink hole of Alt-Rock between Post-Punk and Shoegaze, but they're also from England, and that's not quite the kiss of death, more like the consolation hug of obscurity. They're never going to "make it," and that's actually a good thing. Muskets are really, really good. I definitely like them, and they could quickly become your favorite band. And yet, I think we can all agree that if you give these guys any sort of prime-time radio play, they'll quickly get overplayed, burn out, and disappear into obscurity anyway. Of course I want more, I want to mainline them into my bloodstream through my earballs and die a slow, sugary, opioid induced coma death, metaphorically speaking. I'll be blunt, what everybody calls "grunge," I he...

Oh Perdida, what are we going to do with you. You can't just say Stone Temple Pilots made a Country album, because the album sounds absolutely bizarre if you aren't familiar with Stone Temple Pilots. If you are familiar with STP, then Jeff Gutt is probably going to sound like a Scott Weiland impersonator of disgusting proportions. I didn't like this thing at all on first listen. 4 years ago Rolling Stone called it generic, but nobody actually reads Rolling Stone anymore, so we're going to go with "generic" is what they were trying to achieve. It's pretty, the songs are actually good for forlorn yet hopeful love ballads, there's tons of quirky STP harmonies and melodic twists, and even I can accept that Gutt just happens to sound a lot like Weiland. Today it's actually sounding really enjoyable. Sure it's a giant stretch, but it's undeniably STP. You know me, the real test is the concept. Well, yeah, he's all alone in a monochrome desert...

K, like if I just said "hey, wanna listen to a Long Island Metalcore album with Industrial-style samples and Jazz Saxophone intro/interlude/outro and one song mostly in Portugese?," you'd be like "that can't possibly be good." But it is. Really, really good. I mean, you're not going to have any idea what actual things Godseyes is metalcoring about, but you'll totally understand the emo they feel about them.  I don't understand why the Sax solos aren't sarcastic, but they aren't. Progress//Regress is a straight up masterclass on the generally intangible concept of Flow. It's not a single piece of music from start to finish, but you can't really dissect it either. You start at the beginning and you end at the end, and aside from the somehow not-sarcastic interlude, there's nothing you can skip or rearrange along the way. It just is a thing you listen to from start to finish, and afterward say "wow, that was cool." You ...

Ready to go way out on a limb with me? Great! Clairo and Suicide Boys (i'm too tired to use dollar signs), a match made in THOSE TWO THINGS DONT BELONG ANYWHERE NEAR EACH OTHER!! Sure they do, they're both "independent" artists with secret major label distribution and "Target bought 7,000 copies" money. Ain't nobody I know distributed by The Orchard, because they are now a wholly owned subsidiary of Sony. I'm not saying they don't deserve it, I'm just on one of those honesty kicks I enjoy so much, because Project 2025 makes the year 2020 look like a minor inconvenience we barely remember. You've all seen the solidarity maxi-pads taped over people's ears, and if that doesn't smell like swastikas you might have a malfunctioning olfactory system from covid brain damage. That's not hyperbole, real research by qualified researchers correlates long covid with up to 20 years of brain aging/loss of gray matter due to the shockingly s...

No lie, if someone doesn't snatch up this copy of Pine's self-titled debut LP for the insanely low 15 I'm asking soon, I really will keep it all to myself. I'll hold out 'cause I need the money for reasons, but if this Shoegaze Power Trio from Ottawa doesn't completely knock your socks off, I'll just have to chalk it up to you not liking awesomeness. People like to compare Dar to Hayley Williams, but I don't do that unless i absolutely have to, I just say she sings real good. Judging by social media they broke up in 2020, and that sucks, but then No Sleep isn't going to press any more any time soon if ever again, so i'm just making it harder and harder to keep it listed on bottlesmusic instead of relocating it to my personal collection and listening to it several times a day until it disintigrates. Their bandcamp page is still up if you want to check them out without handing me money. So here's the thing, no matter how rich and famous you thi...

Be honest, have you ever read a 670 page pdf Act of Congress? I have. Several actually. I don't have any proof that's quantifiably more than most acting congresspeople, but I hardly think the burden of proof falls on my shoulders. On Jan. 8, 2002, George W. Bush signed into law the "No Child Left Behind Act of 2001," and on December 10, 2015 it was repealed and replaced with the "Every Student Succeeds Act." I only tell you all that to point out that as far as the federal government is concerned, Lyndon B. Johnson had it right back in 1965, and if Americans would just stop being stupid and do well on national standardized tests we wouldn't be in any of these messes. Let's refresh our memory, education is a totally bipartisan concern, but standardized testing is almost completely the only metric Republicans understand (though I personally question how many congressional Republicans know what a "metric" is). Not entirely their fault, it is tr...

Ah, the first Uriah Heep album. It's an absolute mess. I love it, but it is not good. You can call it "proto heavy metal" if you absolutely have to, but ...Very 'Eavy...Very 'Umble is quite audibly British Acid Rock from start to finish.  What's the difference between Acid Rock and Psychedelic Rock? Glad you asked. The first two Pink Floyd albums are psychedelic. Early Moody Blues is psychedelic. Progressive Rock grew out of psychedelic. Acid Rock is the Iron Butterfly, The Doors, Jefferson Airplane, oh god the walls are melting extreme kind of psychedelia that blossomed into the proper Heavy Metal of Steppenwolf, Black Sabbath, and Led Zeppelin we all know and love. It's all still basically Blues Rock, but louder, crunchier, and at times downright nightmarish. Nightmarish, that's a good description of the organ and guitar solos on this charming monstrosity. Don't even get me started on the abysmal production. This album will make you realize that ...

I mean, if you're walking into Dartland, the debut LP from Worst Party Ever, expecting head bangers with huge sing-along choruses, bombastic enthusiasm, and fully fleshed out song forms, then I don't think you know how albums with houses on the cover work.  This is an album that fixates on the depressingly mundane, longs for anything new or exciting to break up the monotany of meaningless suburban isolationism, and perhaps most important, gets us nowhere. No arc, no climax, no anger, no answers, just a frozen moment in time that wishes everything was different, but shrugs and accepts it never will be.  Maybe you'll love it, maybe you'll want to slap them all in the face and say stop being such whiny-pusses, maybe even that isn't really important either. Maybe just hearing someone else ramble their half-explored existential ennui is enough to get you going. It's good though. I don't rank or grade albums on anything other than pass/fail, and I got no argue wit...

I actually did it. I have a real online shop called Bottle's Music . I sell records from my basement! I'm a year in on my secret mental 5-year plan, and things are going as well as can be expected. I'll be honest, it is insanely hard to connect with anyone interested in buying records online from a random guy in Iowa. Granted, I have no physical location, an advertising budget of zero dollars, and I'm not exactly famous for anything else (or even this), but it'll get there. Hell, I started this blog in 2019 and it literally received its first ever comment yesterday. The couple sales I've made in the last 6 months are a noticeable improvement by comparison. So what's next? Well, connecting with more people online and in real life without spending an arm and a leg and a lot of money I don't have is the main thing. Find a few more people willing to have a conversation, check out what I have in stock, contact or mention me. It's tough to know what's ...

K, guess we're just gonna abstractly start with what sounds like track 7 from some other album and be completely confused as to which songs are about his dad or his ex-girlfriend. Word of warning, seriously cringe if you confuse the two. Even worse if you try to hear it as a recontextualization of dead dad to dead girlfriend. But whoever the hell he's talking about he's all of a sudden sure that he loves whomever's lust he's soaking up. See how creepy that is if you thought he was still singing about helping his dad with the yard work? If you're just joining us, The Story So Far is that I Want To Disappear is an interpretational trainwreck of mixed metaphors and character confusion delivered by an unreliably unreliable narrator. You read that right, both unreliables are necessary. So, instead of any of that, I'm going to put on my Bottle Of Beef Executive of the Chair helmet and criticize the album as product from my own personal secret stash of consumer pre...