Albums for Eternity with Bottle, the Curmudgeon

Damn! I take 1 day off and everything malfunctions like nobody else knows how to do anything. No overnight transfers to check in, UPS label mixups, corporate software changeover confusion, now i guess i'm on call for potential jury duty from April to July. Everybody all "bottlebottlebottle, what're we gonna do?!," but i'm like "none of this stuff is hard or meaningful, or even remotely important." It's all stupid pointless complexity for the sake of someone who isn't me getting a merit badge or unlocking a new achievement and it's exhausting.  Like, seriously i got asked why the shipping cost of a 45lb box from Marietta GA to Badger IA was $289. I get that that's exorbitant. It is, we call that "prohibitive pricing," you're supposed to find some other alternative. Regardless, i have to explain that UPS charges the higher of package weight or dimension weight. An actual 45lb box would only cost like $25, but dimension weight ...

No way around this cringeworthy opening line, "big brother is watching you" hits completely and disturbingly different in the context of Ten and Van Halen. Let's all listerine that taste out of our mouths and just listen to 1984 on its own terms. Eddie and Diamond Dave and the producers had been having intense creative differences for a while. Mostly Eddie wanted to expand Van Halen's creativity with keyboards, because Van Halen had serious synthesizer money in the early 80s. Dave and the production squad always put up a fight. In fact Dave had previously refused to write lyrics for what became Jump at least twice before. But, while Eddie was having his new Studio 5150 built (named after the California code for temporarily committing someone who represents danger to themselves or others due to mental illness into involuntary psychiatric custody), all he had on hand was an Oberheim OB-Xa (retailing for around 5,000 1982 dollars; that's about $15,500 by today's ...

Interlude:  E: where are we going with this, Bottle?  B: awfully editorial of you for asking, Skip. What if i said "dunno?"  E: i'd think you were lying.  B: i believe you, that's totally a thing you'd think. I don't plan this stuff, you know? I really do just pick out whatever strikes my fancy from the available options, then try to write about the sculpture they form when you stick 'em all together. This one is definitely lending itself to a kind of "hate the game, not the player" sort of thingamabottle.  E: how so?  B: well look. Pearl Jam was pointing out just how unsavory and depressing actual life was in 1990/91. Yes it has a fair bit of hyperbole and sad boi melodrama, but that's a legitimate reaction to being pounded to a greasy pulp by the meat tenderizer of the mid to late 80s. Equal and opposite reaction sort of conservation of energy type thing.  E: so what, you're gonna blame Van Halen?  B: no, actually. Don't you see, we...

Prelude: Attention! All minions on deck, Heartiest to the Con, directly to the Con, do not pass go but by all means collect any spare change you find on the way. This is not a drill, i did a thing and it was icky. Details will be distributed on a need to know basis. Cap'n Bottle out.  ---  C: What do you think he did, Sandra?  S: i don't know, but between Trump assembling his election squad for 2024 at the same time he and his lawyers are being sanctioned and fined a million plus dollars for wasting the federal judiciary's time with frivilous lawsuits, everybody having hissy fits over books being edited, people having no comprehension of the fact that corporations are really just glorified landlords with no actual stake in the businesses that make up their investment portfolios, and recently being forced to attend his own 43rd birthday, i imagine he got desperate enough to look for records in a place he wouldn't normally look for records.  C: you don't seriously thi...

Wouldn't it be nice to have a Regenerator button? About as likely as riding a mammoth through the snow to Avalon, but King Buffalo certainly does not fail to deliver a refreshingly uplifting, bouyant, immensely satisfying voyage through the cosmos on the back of your eyelids.  From appropriately trippy hallways of echo work, through mountain crushing riffage and grooving bass lines, to astonishing fuzzed solos and lush synths, Regenerator really does deliver the goods.  What else is there to say? From top to bottom and in all the nooks and crannies, King Buffalo has the ability to seep into the fiber of your being and make everything pleasantly vibrate. I'm still not sure what i should do now that i've accomplished 43 laps around the fireball, but at least the soundtrack for this next day of the rest of our lives is delightful. Prelude and Ten

Blue canary in the outlet by the lightswitch, i implore you, must i really binge listen to these 30 waltzes all in one go?  Fine.  Bottle of Beef trepidatiously presents the Longines Symphonette Society's proud presentation of the Treasury of Waltzes from the Family Library of Beautiful Listening. We've officially exceeded my prepositional phrase quota, so that's fun. I can't help but notice, however, that my boxed set is missing both the enthralling 16 page booklet chronicling the history of waltzing and any indication as to who or what actually performed the 30 waltzes i'm about to hot dog eating contest into my brain. All i know is that Divisional Vice-President Eugene Lowell produced it, so i assume these are random recordings from the 1940s, because The Longines Symphonette Society was a mail order side hustle subsidiary of daddy Cartoun's Longines Watch Company. They literally bought the entire Capital Record Club catalog and republished random boxed sets ...

If you're wondering why i haven't been writing much lately, 1) you're weird, 2) i am existentially tired, and 3) i've been listening for the sheer enjoyment of listening and that makes for boring essays. Tonight it's one of my several thousand favorite albums in the universe, Saosin's Along The Shadow.  I am of course me, as in Bottle, so i feel the need to crassly point out that being the lead singer of Saosin is an observably terrible thing for Anthony Green to do to himself in terms of the heroin addiction that relapses when he does, but it is a beyond phenomenal album to listen to so i am needless to say very conflicted. Not about the album though, Along The Shadow is simultaneously the most beautiful and heart-wrenchingly tragic things my ear brains have ever listened to. It is most definitely Post-Hard-Emo-Core, so your milage may vary, but at least you know i fully understand how weird i am when i say it's absolutely gorgeous.