i. Lately when I want music with some real TEETH, Pearl Jam hasn’t been doing it for me. I go to the great master Billy Corgan and Smashing Pumpkins’ 1993 sophomore edict Siamese Dream. Now, this album has the rambunctious bite of a quintessential debut effort, as we all know. You might ask, then, why […]

Now, I say it “sucks,” and yet we’re a country that has to put up a wall to keep people out, so it stands to reason that it doesn’t “suck” as bad as some other places. A more precise way to word my discourse here might be something along the lines of “constant horror from […]

And now once again braced within this horrible climate atrocity (not making a political statement here), I saw fit to write about a different atrocity altogether. It started, actually, brilliantly enough. Also, for anybody who doesn’t know the backstory of Jeff Tweedy, Wilco frontman formerly anchoring the heavily folky Uncle Tupelo of St. Louis, I […]

Have you ever noticed how da** ALLUSIVE The Velvet Underground were? Sure, this might be a stupid question. If you’re like me, you’ve read Jeremy Reed’s (yes that really is his name, apparently, and he doubles as a British poet) excellent Waiting for the Man: The Life and Career of Lou Reed [1] so you […]

This post isn’t about sex (or candy). It’s about the real-life prospective possibility that America will need soldiers for world war 3, to fight against the North Koreans. And don’t gimme that world-war-3-won’t-need-any-soldiers-because-one-flick-of-the-wrist-will-set-off-a-nuclear-bomb-crap. That’s too easy. Anyway, I just saw this photographic portrait of Marcy Playground’s John Wozniak on Wikipedia and good God he’s FAT! […]

Readership, I hope you like me will take some time this week to stop what you typically do, and in your own way pay your respects to the victims of this devastating hurricane in Houston. For me, it didn’t feel right in such close time to keep with the shallow, sluffed-off exercise of music criticism, […]

I don’t think there’s any question: especially given how awful “comedy” shows are these days, as little as once-venerable alternative news sources like The Onion and The Daily Show, we’ve hit an epidemic age today of people generally taking themselves really seriously and being fully of themselves. Even with this being the case, I’d been […]

I am so fu**ing done with Pandora it’s not even funny. They have no regard for what quality music is, whatsoever. My first nightmarish experience with it came at work, in this kitchen in 2016. I was new on the job and trying to make a good impression. The guys said they wanted to know […]

* “Does anybody need another blank skyscraper? / If you’re like me I’m sure a minor miracle will do” – Lou Reed . “Miraculous” is obviously a strong word, but an incident which happened recently at a Phish concert in New York City, my friends (my friends) makes a strong, strong running for qualification. As […]

This post can’t really be about MUSIC, per se, when… I’m not even sure what it’s about at all. I in fact feel like I’m focusing on thin air — like I’m waving my computer up into a cesspool of mossy nodes, fishing for an answer when there isn’t one. After all, Chris Cornell was […]