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 […]
This super sucks. “My guy” Steve Albini died today of a heart attack at 61, so for this week’s Wednesday album, I’m picking the most groundbreaking album of his most groundbreaking band, Big Black’s Atomizer. Although Albini matured into a thoughtful elder statesman of indie rock, he began as something of a proto-internet troll. Quick […]
This one is a bit bittersweet for me, because on one hand, it is the culmination of a great discography: the seventh album in a career with no bad albums, The Woods makes this punky indie band sound like frickin’ Led Zeppelin, and, with its varied selection of songs (including a ten-minute guitar showstopper), acts […]
Treble.com ran a feature on their top 50 post-rock albums of all time on Monday. The name of the genre is silly and vague, but it came to describe a type of music that tried to take rock to more ambient, cinematic, jazzier, and math-ier places. Its heyday was the 1990s, but bands are still […]
During the early 2010s, my favorite type of music — guitarish rock — was in a slump, but there were still some pearls to find among the Arcade Fire-wannabes with wax mustaches and hurdy-gurdys singing about building the Transcontinental Railroad. One of those pearls came from Cloud Nothings, a group of Cleveland kids who kinda […]