POST-GENRE MUSIC My favorite album of the past year or so is Emily Wells’ Regards to the End. It is beautiful, emotionally powerful and transcendent, even; and it is unclassifiable. It is not really rock, or pop, or electronica, or hip-hop, although it contains elements of all. It’s not classical, or jazz, or soul. The best qualifier is simply to call this album Music, with a capital M. Pure music. Then take Nels Cline, one of the most innovative guitarists...
A deeper look at the grooves pressed into the It’s A Matter Of Time – The Complete PALP Session LP by Reverend Beat-Man & The Underground. In this era of digital production, rare is the album which feels and sounds dirty. Now, I don’t mean “dirty” in the sense that it was recorded poorly or the sound quality is poor, I mean the music feels dirty in that, after listening, a record leaves listeners feeling so unclean that listeners don’t...
A deeper look at the grooves pressed into the Humble Quest LP by Maren Morris. It’s funny how, as good as each of the eleven songs on Maren Morris’ Humble Quest are, trying to pin down their appeal will probably take listeners a minute. For example, when “Circles Around This Town” opens the A-side of the album, listeners will be able to appreciate the “hard work will pay off” root which informs the song as well as the pop-country heart...
A deeper look at the grooves pressed into the Free LSD LP by OFF! To say that the last few years have been marked by difficulty and upheaval for OFF! would be an understatement. After Wasted Years was released in 2014, OFF! kept excitement levels up with the announcement that they were working on a feature film project (to be entitled Watermelon) as well as an accompanying soundtrack but, when their Kickstarter campaign proved to come up short, trouble seemed...
L7 Bricks Are Heavy (30th Anniversary reissue) LP (Licorice Pizza Records) Looking back on it now, it’s pretty pitiful how unprepared the music industry was for L7. When the band first appeared in 1988 with their debut album, it’s easy enough to understand how nobody noticed; L7’s self-titled debut came out on Epitaph Records (which, at that time, was a really small record label with limited resources – and Bad Religion was the only band of note on their roster)...
A deeper look at the grooves pressed into the Seance! With Zabrecky glow-in-the-dark 12” single by Zabrecky. On the surface, noting that the Seance! With Zabrecky 12” single is a novelty record just goes without saying. Sure – people still indulge in trying to make contact with the deceased, on occasion, and some people even claim to have been successful; but really, it always boils down to how far one is willing to play along with the shtick; as the...
A deeper look at the grooves pressed into The Slackers’ “New York Berlin” b/w “Tell Them No” 12” one-sided single. I confess that, while the two songs which comprise the new Slackers single are good, solid cuts, I do not understand why this single has been pressed the way it has. First, both “New York Berlin” and “Tell Them No” are perfectly average songs in length – one is almost three and a half minutes long and the other is...
A deeper look at the grooves pressed into the Physical Thrills 2LP by Silversun Pickups. In listening to Physical Thrills, the first thing which becomes self-evident is just how great a success 2019’s Widow’s Weeds (Silversun Pickups’ fifth studio album) was, and how great a financial and creative reward it yielded for the band. Clearly emboldened by that success, Physical Thrills represents an enormous departure for Silversun Pickups; where they once made the most of smaller sounds and used a...
A deeper look at the grooves pressed into The Great Confrontation 2LP by Chip Kinman. I confess that I had forgotten about The Dils until the opportunity to review the band’s Live! reissue came up. Not that I was unfamiliar with the band before (I remember discovering the band at the same time I came upon The Weirdos, The Bags, The Dickies and Fear in high school), they just sort of escaped my memory until the band’s Live! album got...
A deeper look at the grooves pressed into the Penumbra//Antumbra 12” single by Garbageface. If history has taught us anything about Karol “Garbageface” Orzechowsky, it has taught us that the artist takes a lot of joy in turning expectations that fans may have of him on their collective head – and the emcee’s newest 12” single, Penumbra//Antumbra, upholds that practice with focused intensity. The single effortlessly upends expectations; where convention demands a consistent structure through a song – there needs...