A deeper look at the grooves pressed into the “Love I Bring” b/w “My Cat is on Prozac” split 7” single by Sic & Mad and The Slackers. There’s little doubt that this review will sound dismissive – such is the most common byproduct of a release which isn’t very good. Now, it’s true that the governing wisdom in the music industry has always been that, “They can’t all be genius,” and that may be true – but basic quality...
A deeper look at the grooves pressed into the “Windowland” / “I Almost Lost You” 12” Digitally-Printed single by The Slackers. It can be fun to write a short review once in a while and, when one addresses The Slackers’ newest single, “Windowland,” it’s impossible to not be brief. Clocking in at less than ten minutes total, the two songs on the single (“I Almost Lost You” is the second cut in the running but, because both songs appear on...
A deeper look at the grooves pressed into the To Victory EP by Lars Frederiksen. After a career spent tirelessly writing, recording and performing music with a celebrated list of bands on an incredible number of releases (to date, that list includes no fewer than forty-five releases recorded with bands including Rancid, Stomper 98, Old Firm Casuals, The transplants, The Bastards and Oxley’s Midnight Runners), it seems genuinely surprising that, only thirty-eight years after he started, Lars Frederiksen has added...
A deeper look at the grooves pressed into the Digital Age of Rome LP by T. Hardy Morris. It’s weird to think how tumultuous a year 2020 was, and how that tumult was reflected in the music which was released at the time. Even if a band didn’t actually have a political streak in their hair or bone in their body, conflict in the times seemed to appear in the music. Now, 2021 has had its share of rough running...
Rage Against the MachineThe Battle of Mexico CityRecord Store Day Release Let me start off this review by painting a picture of just how important Rage Against the Machine were to my development as a teenager. Growing up in Aruba in the 90s, completely isolated from the world, we craved outside culture. We didn’t have a good idea of what was going on in the cool parts of the world (like the USA), so we’d rely on word of mouth...
Vic Berger IVThe Cabinets & The Cupboards We’re very lucky here at Ground Control to actually get vinyl to review on our column. We’re sometimes doubly lucky, and caught completely unawares, when the label sending us the record we requested, adds on another record because they think we’d like it too. Maybe “shocked” is a better description than “caught unawares,” because vinyl is becoming more and more of a luxury to own, and it’s becoming harder and harder for labels...
Pearl JamAlive 12” (Record Store Day edition) Everything critical that can be said about Pearl Jam has already been said. What’s left now are just end stories and personal experiences. The validity of “grunge” as a music genre can be debated (and it should be since it’s complete limited to the bands that came out of a certain part of the earth in a certain point of the 90s), but what is a fact is that Pearl Jam was one...
A deeper look at the grooves pressed into Plizzken’s …And Their Paradise Is Full Of Snakes LP. The fact of the matter is that, in punk circles, no one wants to be a “middle of the road” kind of band. Why? Well, as Dwight Eisenhower once said, “The middle of the road is all the usable surface. The extremes, right and left, are in the gutters,” and it is in those gutters (or teetering on the brink of them) where...
A deeper look at the grooves pressed into Mastiff’s Leave Me The Ashes of the Earth LP. There has always been something which felt a little off about really aggressive metal (or Doom, or Sludge, or maybe Metalcore – pick your favorite undervalued sub-genre) – as greasy, heavy or dirty as it might get, there’s always an inherent clarity about the recordings. Even when the vocalist in a band like that is leaving his throat/larynx/esophagus on the recording studio floor,...
Cobra KaiOriginal Soundtrack 3XLPby Leo Birenberg & Zach Robinson Welcome to a very special edition of the Vinyl Vlog. Special for a few reasons. Not only are we featuring one of the coolest pieces of vinyl on the planet, but it also commemorates our reunion with Mondo Tees as a collaborator. Mondo is a company we’ve featured on the site in a variety of ways. We’ve featured their clothes (some of the finest prints around), their vinyl (hint hint), and...