Albums for Eternity with Bottle, the Curmudgeon

I've written like 4 or 5 albums reviews that I haven't published because they just aren't that great. Now I know why. I've been chasing waterfalls instead of sticking to the rivers and the lakes that I'm used to. I absolutely adore TLC, I've loved them from the day the video for What About Your Friends debuted on MTV, dude probably deserved to have Left Eye light his house on fire, but I have no idea if CrazySexyCool is a good album. Life literally cannot proceed until I find out. Off to a real good start with Malik "Phife Dawg" Taylor from A Tribe Called Quest introducing you, especially when your producer/songwriters are Dallas Austin, Puff Daddy, Babyface, and Jermaine Dupri,  there's a Prince song hiding in there somewhere, and Cee-Lo Green, Busta Rhymes, and Andre300 are hanging out. Yeah, I know the artist formerly known as P-Puff McDiddlyDad is canceled for somethingorother, but back in the 90s he didn't suck from a purely musical perspe...

If you thought Stone Temple Pilots making a Country album was weird, wait 'til you get an earful of Mitski's The Land Is Inhospitable And So Are We. It's like if The Caretaker and Lana Del Rey hired a full orchestra and alzheimered the hell out of an Emmylou Harris album. Not literally, it's just so dark and bleak and bass-heavy and orchestrationally cacophonous that it sounds like a grainy black and white Spaghetti Western with dogs barking and Mitski stalking you through the overgrown orchard of an abandoned farmstead like the ghost of a runaway pioneer fugitive wanted dead or alive. Good stuff. Don't let the ghastly unreadable neon orange typography fool you, this thing is seriously heavy, highly rewarding. It's not Neutral Milk Hotel, but it listens very much like On Avery Island with soft flowing vocals over a sea of turbulent Americana-esque sludge.  I haven't heard her first 6 albums, the first 2 being her senior project at Purchase College (SUNY), bu...