I think it’s safe to say we live in an age of music videos today analgous to a tree falling in the middle of the forest: with no major cable TV station playing them, do they really make a sound? Something’s got to give, here, anyway, because bands still make them. OLP, for instance, have […]
Score: 10/10 You have to admit, the plotline plays out like classic cinema: 1970s disco/jazz visionary Roy Ayers recording an album with apparently complete surreptitiousness (which given all the convoluted and obtuse criticisms of it by Pitchfork becomes understandable) in 2018, to then by all rights completely bury the completed project for two years, only […]
Something in particular made me want to write a brief little post about Orange County’s The Ziggens, fellow Orange County harbingers with Sublime, denizens of the latter’s record label Skunk, cited golden boys of Sublime’s celebratory album track “Greatest Hits” and benefactor’s of a sample in Sublime’s “Smoke Two Joints.” And this specific thing would […]
100 Wheat – “Finding Wings” I guess I’m letting nepotism shamefully reign here because I’ve never met another fan of this band other than my dad. As it turns out, at least, we do have different favorite albums by them, his being Hope and Adams and mine being the grittier and more textural ’97 debut […]
Score: 10/10 Inlet is the first album in 22 years from Champaign, Illinois band Hum, who enjoyed minor radio and considerable cult success in the ’90s and hence. On it, the band’s sonic blueprint is decidedly grappled to grunge rock, historically making minimal updates on the sound and instrumentation blueprint of that movement. Astonishingly, too, […]
Alice in Chains is a band firmly embedded in the “grunge” movement, what with their birthplace of Seattle, their hard, distorted and damaged approach to radio rock and of course their late singer departed by bout with hard drugs. As such, they stake their claim to music that is naturally POPULAR, in fact even deliberately […]
10 Lucinda Williams – “Big Black Train” Lucinda Williams’ release from this year Good Souls Better Angels, her first proper LP issued in four years, is certainly not an easy listen, full of full-bodied and brooding emotion as is on display here. The vocals are almost half-muffled, half-sung, on “Big Black Train,” such is the […]