Run the Jewels RTJ3 photo: turntablelab.com There was a period in the mid-2000s where I almost completely stopped listening to rap music. I don’t know if it was my ongoing exploration of punk, newly discovered love of folk, or what it was exactly, but I just couldn’t relate with the rap I was hearing on the radio or seeing on TV. Then, a conversation with Dillinger Four shed some light on the situation for me. As their bassist Paddy Costello...

A deeper look at the grooves pressed into the 2017 vinyl reissue of Hard Promises by Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers. When it comes to making a follow-up for a career-defining release, the catch is that whatever comes can often feel like a diminished return no matter how good it might be because the new music simply does not have the same spark which ignited the breakthrough of the previous album. It’s kind of heartbreaking to concede that possibility, but...

I Contain Multitudes: The Microbes Within Us and a Grander View of Life by Ed Yong Back in college, like any student, there were a plethora of classes I was forced to take that I didn’t really want to. One of those classes was microbiology. I was a bio major, but I thought microbiology meant looking at microscopes at more multicellular things. I was wrong. I also wasn’t a very good student, if that’s still not clear. It was a...

A deeper look at the grooves pressed into the 2017 vinyl reissue of Damn The Torpedoes by Tom Petty and The Heartbreakers. It might sound like a grandiose claim to say something like, “Truly and genuinely rare is an album like Damn The Torpedoes – it has really introduced some of the biggest and most respected institutions in the modern music industry” but those who think so simply do not know the whole story of the album. First, it’s important...

A deeper look at the grooves pressed into the 2LP edition of Legacy by David Bowie. On the surface, the existence of Legacy – the newest compilation of the greatest hits from David Bowie’s songbook – likely comes off as a little confusing. The set arrived almost two years to the day after Nothing Has Changed (a.k.a. The greatest hits comp which was curated by the artist himself) and, name-for-name, features a very, very (very – it’s about 75% the...

A deeper look at the grooves pressed into the 2LP Beggars Arkive Edition reissue of The Closer You Get by Six. By Seven. By the time the ‘century’ portion of the calandar rolled over seventeen years ago, rock was already beginning to mutate in some pretty interesting ways. By then, the “rap-rock” fan had already come and helped to administer a hefty injection of fresh, crotch-grabbing energy to the form, goth was bigger and more mainstream than it had ever...

A deeper look at the grooves pressed into the 2LP+1CD deluxe edition of the Singles soundtrack. While there are several great soundtracks which were released in the 1990s (the Tank Girl, The Crow and Great Expectations soundtracks all leap to mind), arguably the greatest and most culturally important of the lot proved to be that of Cameron Crow’s first “rock memory scrapbook” picture, Singles. The reason for that is pretty easy to explain; released in 1992, Singles happened to come...

Bertrand Russell The Impact of Science on Society One of the things we love doing here on Ground Control is share some of our favorite books with our readers. We review everything we think looks interesting, even when they turned out to be less-than-stellar (hey, when a publisher sends us a book we ask for, we review it, no matter what). Other times, it’s an absolute joy to write these reviews and tell our audience about these great...

Get Out It’s an absolute joy to write about Get Out, and for too many reasons to get into really. But if I could highlight one thing in particular it’s that Get Out is a movie that lives up to the hype. Unfortunately, sites like Rotten Tomatoes have served less as an accurate gauge of a movie and more as another example of rating inflation. Wonder Woman had some OK moments and holds a 92% rating on Rotten Tomatoes....

The Russian Revolution 1917: A Personal Record by N.N. Sukhanov by Nikolai Nikolaevich Sukhanov, Joel Carmichael It’s incredible to believe that it’s been 100 years since the Russian Revolution: the Ten Days that Shook the World as Jack Reid called them. It begun one of the greatest social experiments in humanity and now, 100 years later, having “failed,” it’s still subject to in depth analysis, what it accomplished, where it fell short, and what we can learn from it. Probably...