Albums for Eternity with Bottle, the Curmudgeon

B: alright, crew. Most ridiculous thing we could listen to after taking off our Helmets? S: the Mississippi abortion case. B: oof, no. My position is already well documented. I can't do any more than i've already done. C: the MLB lockout? B: double oof. No intelligent conversation to be found on either side of that one. Hard pass. E: we could all pick a record we think you'll hate and you pick your poison? B: hmmmm. That has potential. Brain damage quotient is still astronomical, but at least i can educated guess in my own favor. Yeah, let's do it. On your marks, get set, scamper! [The sounds of scampering with assorted comical banter and giggles] S: ok, i think we're all ready. We just grabbed whatever we found, here's 5 choices. B: whaddawe got? Barry Manilow? Not the worst. Anne Murray? Not great. The Statler Bothers? Might be hilarious, but very risky. Oliver Again? Tempting, but i didn't do Oliver the first time, so my standard joke won't make any s...

S: Bottle, can we wrap up this Marx thing soon?  B: yeah, it's probably time. I'm dangerously close to sticking my finger in the socket and becoming real again. Nip me in the bud. Here we go.  I believe it was Beavis and/or Butthead who said of tonight's 10/10 sophomore album "that drummer looks like a regular guy... If you, like, saw these guys on the street, you wouldn't even know they were cool." Said that then drummer is none other than now Battles drummer John Stainer. The band is of course Helmet, jazz guitarist Page Hamilton's Alternative Metal meets Noise Rock masterclass in harmonically and metrically complex dropped-d riffage. He really does have a hard time playing and singing this stuff at the same time.  I believe it was a much younger version of me who upon seeing the movie Jerky Boys said "that band really sounds like Helmet. Oh, it is Helmet? Ok, i guess i do know what i'm talking about." They have a very distinct sound. I ima...

B: told you i'd wake back up. Ok, Skiperninator, what's in your bottle?  E: You can't just lump Marx and Smith together. They are opposite.  B: no, they are qualitatively inverse. Economics is a two-headed beast, a sine wave, the actual breathing of humanity, inhale/exhale, the coin flipping. They exist at the same time. You're smashing completely different aspects of Marx's Philosophical project into a garbled mess of unintelligible nonsense, and you are mistaking what people do in response to Marx for Marx. This conversation right now is the clash of reality with your hyperreality.  Marx's description of Capitalism is completely different from Marx's feelings about the system he is describing. He expands upon Smith's explanations of Classical Economics and connects that system in all its historical forms to the effects that system has upon society at large. What he finds is that it contains the essential oils of its own decomposition. In other words, w...

Well, we wandered into the murky swamp of Bottle's Bootlegs a few days ago, might as well keep going. I have the 2nd run copy of Pissing in Action, a compilation of 3 concert bootlegs (including their headliner set from the 1992 Reading Festival) from Italian label Little Capone. The first batch was cooked up in March of 1994, this batch in July. It's one of several items in my collection specifically banned from sale on Discogs. None of that matters, when we pull the cork out of this particular bottle we get the entire ant colony of intricately woven hallways that is my experience of visiting Moscow when i was 14 or 15. I'm fuzzy on when that trip actually took place, but the images in my mind are spectacularly vivid.  Your old friend Bottle has literally bartered with packs of cigarettes, ordered "water without gas," sat quietly through a police search of our chartered bus for stowaway Chechnyans, been showed the price of things i ordered on a calculator because...

Last but not least, it's Ingenuity from Belgian Punk Band The Reactionaries. Not to be confused with the 70s/80s American Punk band who morphed into The Minutemen. I should do a whole series called Names Are Hard, Let's Use That Discontinued One, Surely No One Will Notice.  Belgian politics is really fun because Liberal equals Right Wing. It's a Monarchy, and a Federation, it has a constitution, and its government is a Representative Democracy with a bicameral Parliament. Language is a major political issue because French and Dutch essentially represent the Upper class and the Proletariat respectively.  Many people consider Belgium a "flawed Democracy," but i am Bottle, hear me say "nope, they're using all those words properly. How refreshing." What's this album about, then?  The answer is half an hour of the most gloriously disheveled, dive-bar, stoner-tinged trashy rock and roll this side of Danzig era Misfits. Calling this fantastic is a tragi...

The Dog Eat Dog LP from Animal Slaves is not going to be everyone's cup of tea. This is mid 80s, New Wave-ish, bass forward, post-punky cult-rock from the Vancouver underground. Elizabeth Fischer said her singing was terrible on this album. She does sound very reminiscent of post barrell-bottom Marianne Faithfull, and this is not happy, date-night music; i'm not complaining, but you know how you like your tea, i don't.  Interesting morbid fact, when she was diagnosed with terminal lung cancer in 2015, she raised enough money from friends and fans to visit Iceland on the way to her assisted suicide in Sweden. She tried some regular treatments first, but it became clear that she wasn't going to survive and she wanted her death to be as calm, painless, and legally/psychologically uncomplicated as possible for everyone. Reading interviews and her website you get the sense that she had a genuinely wicked sense of humor tempered by a hardcore dose of rationalism. Total Gladys...

I thought i had way more time to kill, so i was halfway through writing the next installment of Bottle's Bootlegs. Screw that, Canada sent me records! Let's listen to On! Air! Library!'s only album i liked so much back when i liked it so much the first time a week or so ago.  They formed in 1998, got enough local buzz to put out a split with The Album Leaf, made their debut LP, toured with Interpol and The Secret Machines, broke up in 2005. Easiest discography i've ever reviewed.  Ha! Inner sleeve bent to hell straight from the manufacturer. Hilarious.  Experimental Ambient Post-Rock? Sure, that's about the best you can do for this total downer collage of lethargic harmonies, fragile melodic duets, and musica concrete soundscapes. This sounds like what The Bird and the Bee implies it feels like on the inside. Not gonna lie, this is an incredibly accurate aural depiction of what those days i tell you were a struggle feel like. They feel like this. I wanted to say the...