Albums for Eternity with Bottle, the Curmudgeon

Have mercy. Next up on our Snowpocalypse Staycation of Doom we have the soundtrack i wish i'd had back when Skip was waiting for the bus all day after getting lost. 2 dudes and a Rube playing Blues Rock in the fine Texas tradition, it's ZZ Top's 3rd album, Tres Hombres. Quite a few Classic Rock staples on this one, Bus, Chicago, La Grange. this is one of those "Boogie Woogie" albums critics liked to dismiss until the mainstream listener got a hold of Eliminator and put a stop to that nonsense. I'm not gonna add much, if you don't adore ZZ Top then there's no helping you. There's a fair bit of not radio single material, but it's interesting. If you thought ZZ Top was all boogie all the time, Hot, Blue and Righteous will surprise you. Slow dance jam with vocal harmony in 6/8 that one, the good stuff. You might not be accustomed to Dusty Hill's vocals, and it can throw you for a loop if all you've ever heard is Billy singing. You'll g...

As the next round of snow moves in, i'm proud to say i am already home and did all my running around so i don't even have to think about worrying about leaving tomorrow. Mrs. Bottle called me a functional adult and everything. I'm deeply offended, but there's nothing else to do except pour a plastic cup full of Admiral Cola and watch the Bottlemobile disappear from the ground up before tackling  my super busy schedule. You see, I was not looking forward to being Bottle the Classical Music Critic, so i foresightedly grabbed a few albums to pass the time. I also got confirmation that my two Hum records shipped, so we can enjoy those in a week or two. Plus i have a B&N gift card from that Christmas thing we skated over a while back, so there's another episode "cheapest new records i can find, giftcardganza edition" in our future. Things are looking swell. I am a bit conflicted, though, because on the one hand it is absolutely atrocious that Barney Fife sh...

Wowzers, it is really coming down, or should i say across, out there. Glad i'm in here.  Obsession is the last original run UFO album with Michael Schenker on Guitars. Michael is of course Rudolph's little brother. I'm not gonna play over/under rated with Scorpions and UFO like most people do, i'm just gonna point out NWBHM bands weren't dropping the name Scorpions in their "influenced by" sections.  Christgau didn't like this one, so i'm sure it will be great. He liked their earlier albums, but called this "exhibitionism." I assume he's referring to the macho late 70s when every early 70s Hard Rock band was forced to grow moustaches and give Disco an ill-advised whirl before breaking up.  I think we'll pair it with the Harland Williams classic Rocket Man and do this what we like to call "the right way." The chimp will steal my sleep pod and i'll be forced to stare at the wall for the entire trip to Mars, i mean play...

B: i hereby call this meeting of Bottle's Album Club to order. First, will the secretary read the minutes of our previous meeting?  E: 17, 19, 44.  C: hut!  B: is there a second?  S: 12 of them, to be precise. Oh sorry, i meant hut hut!  B: i definitely approve of those minutes as well. 37 was touch and go if i remember correctly, but we definitely pulled it together around 44. Any new business?  C: well, i was rechecking the figures and i'm afraid we're out of options.  E: what are you talking about, there's hundreds of albums left in the stacks.  C: yes, you are of course correct, many albums our Bottle has but hasn't reviewed. I'm afraid, however, you'll find the vast majority were composed by long dead white guys of the European persuasion, ranging backward from now to the bowels of barely double-digit centuries. I don't think i need remind any of you that the world has moved well along.  S: yeah, hard to argue people aren't tired of pont...

B: ugh, i just had the worst dream. C: the one where you're falling off a cliff? B: no, i like that one, it's exhilarating. S: the one where you're in a shopping cart on a rollercoaster? B: no, i think that might have been a dream someone else told me about, not actually mine. WHITE ROOM, BLACK CURTAINS? B: nah, that one's more annoying than bad. I dreamed it was Monday and tough actin' Skipactin and i were totally lost trying to steer this ship in some direction that gets us somewhere. Like 3 minutes after he passed out some nice pirate minions gave us a lift and brought us back. C: what's so horrible about that? B: nothing. Literally nothing. Worst dream ever. Then i woke up and it really was Monday, and those are the worst. They taste like Cigarettes for Breakfast. Then out of nowhere Cigarettes for Breakfast appeared in my feed trough and i was like "hell yeah, we're gonna buy their whole digital discography and thoroughly enjoy some gloomy fuzzed o...

Epictetus has been popping up a lot lately, and Stoicism in general is an interesting topic. Like everything else, when you fire up the youtubulator or oscillate the wikiplunger, you get a thousand versions of an introductory synopsis, and they mostly don't do anything for you. The reality is you have to go read stuff for yourself, and you have to admit that you don't know anything until you do.  Epictetus is colloquially known as the loser's philosopher (not to be confused with Diogenes, the actual bum philosopher), and Stoicism is usually dismissed as the philosophy of prisoners and slaves (Epictetus being a slave, then freed from slavery, then exiled in the Great Roman Ban on Philosphers). But even that is too deep, because i'd bet money you think Stoicism is like Vulcan Logic, the complete suppression of emotion. That's just wrong, and the biggest problem we face with any philosophical study is that we imagine it's a lifelong dedication, a menu we select fro...

Part 1 I was gonna do a whole big thing about religious persecution, how i grew up without religion, the way it all ties into my larger project of trying to decipher the insanity of the Klein Bottle that is the Christian Right using historically Left rhetoric, but then i was like "nah, let's climb back up the umbilical noose and do a tediously intricate reading of Heart Shaped Box instead. That'll ruin everybody's Friday night appetite."  I think any proper pop song analysis should start with considering the chorus in its isolated context, then observing what the verses do to it or require from it, and finally culminate  with some coherent statement about the song as a whole. "Hey, wait, i've got a new complaint; Forever in debt to your priceless advice. Hate, Haight, i've got a new complaint; Forever in debt to your priceless advice. Hey, wait, i've got a new complaint; Forever in debt to your priceless advice." So, the chorus is A-B-A with ...