It’s the 20th year anniversary of this album, which means that for some reason there are a couple appreciations of it appearing in the music press. I find this interesting, because Sonic Nurse is not exactly a landmark album. It’s not Sonic Youth’s so-called “return to form” like 2002’s Murray Street, or the final album […]
Welcome to Metal Mondays, Wagner. This one’s for you because it has a million notes played really fast. According to The Onion, we should just give up on this art thing all together because Megadeth already created Rust in Peace. https://www.theonion.com/humanity-still-producing-new-art-as-though-megadeth-s-1819578062 I won’t go that far, but I do feel that Rust In […]
Okay, last Steve Albini album for a while. It’s probably the most famous Albini-produced album. It’s probably one the most famous rock albums of the last 30 years. Oops, it’s actually over 30 years old. Albini, Dave Grohl and Krist Novoselic sat down with Conan O’Brien to talk about its production last year. That means […]
If you’re into extreme music or movies or artwork, eventually you will ask: how far does it go? Where’s the edge? At what point will the work I’m consuming make me want to barf? You may freeze frame the camera going into Drew Barrymore’s intestines in Scream, you may seek out Martyrs and Faces of […]
Happy Wednesday. Another Albini pick. Released two years before the decade began, Surfer Rosa is the foundation of 1990s alternative rock. It has the loud/quiet/loud, it has girl/boy vocals, it has weird songs with weird structures and weird chord progressions, and yet, it’s all very poppy. When a record exec tried to get Frank Black […]
Hardcore punk and metal have been kissing cousins since the 1980s, although their provincial fan bases hate each other. Luckily musicians themselves aren’t so close-minded, which is how we’ve got the whole genre of extreme music, which includes the most straight up fusion of the two, metalcore. I think drummers are tuned to love metalcore. […]
Three things: 1.) I’m a day late, apologies, 2.) Albini Month continues, 3.) normally these albums have at least some relationship to Heck Reckoner’s music, and this just ain’t the case today. The Magnolia Electric Co. is a country album (or “alt-country” whatever that means) and it’s the perfect example of how a band (and […]
Black Sabbath’s self-titled is for doomers. Paranoid is for boomers. Master of Reality is for stoners. Vol. 4 is for all of the above. It’s also a classic Sabbath album that hasn’t been assed out by classic rock radio playing it for fifty years. “Wheels of Confusion/The Straightener” is the type of multipart eight-minute blues […]
Sorry y’all, it’s gonna be Steve Albini-recorded albums for a while. Albini, who had been recording her since The Pixies’ Surfer Rosa, said Kim Deal has a voice like a “smile.” I couldn’t have put it better myself. She seems so sweet and cool and funny, which makes the juxtaposition of what she’s singing about […]
Around Y2K, something unholy must’ve been brewing in the soil of Savanna, Georgia, from whence the three-headed hydra of Mastodon, Kylesa, and today’s pick Baroness sprang. Remember our talk about hard rock, and how some hard rock is metal and some metal is hard rock, but they’re not necessarily the same? To Baroness, they’re the […]