A deeper look at the grooves pressed into the Record Store Day Exclusive Release pressing of Alice In Chains’ Live Facelift 12” EP. While readers may be familiar with parts of Alice In Chains’ new Black Friday/Record Store Day release, Live Facelift, it’s nearly guaranteed that they don’t know the whole thing. They may know some of the songs – like the performance of “It Ain’t Like That” because it was the song which was playing in the background as...
The Marx Brothers Silver Screen Collection Restored Edition (Blu Ray) I’ve always said I’m late to the game. And as a fan of comedy, one can never be more late to the game than getting into the Marx Brothers now. Oh, of course I’ve known who they are because I’ve been a Warner Bros cartoon fan ever since I was a kid. Those cartoons were full of Groucho cameos and appearances. But it’s only a couple years ago that I...
A deeper look at the grooves pressed into the “Christmas In Hollis” 12″ Picture Disc single coming out on Black Friday 2016 from Run-D.M.C. I must confess that I have never been a fan of Christmas carols and Christmas songs. While I understand the idea of having a song in one’s heart around the holiday season, I’ve always thought that the idea of professional musicians recording albums of the same standards with their own small creative stamp on them pretty...
Mitch Hedberg The Complete Collection One of the great perks of listening to Marc Maron’s WTF podcast is all the stories you get to hear about Mitch Hedberg. He was unique, absurd, kind, generous, and apparently quite the stud (Janeane Garofalo freaked out when she found out Mitch had a crush on her). It’s fun to hear these stories, because after all these years, I don’t think we’re quite satisfied with the answers we’ve uncovered in the mystery that was...
Lenin’s Moscow by Alfred Rosmer It’s been a hundred years and there’s still so much to learn from the Russian Revolution. I’ve read several accounts of the events (including Trotsky’s hefty 1000+ page book), and I still feel like I haven’t quite gotten a hang of what exactly was happening after the Bolsheviks took power. Alfred Rosmer was a former French Syndicalist who was present for much of the hoopla which followed the October revolution and has felt compelled to...
Empty Markets Stainless Steel Albums like the Empty Markets’ Stainless Steel are one of the reasons it’s great writing for Ground Control. You see, we are definitely music snobs over here so we know exactly what’s going to float our boat… except when we don’t. It’s easy to pick favorites and trust the bands and labels that have proven themselves to us and that have passed a certain quality control, but that means we sometimes we miss the good stuff....
A deeper look at the grooves pressed into the Rendered Obsolete LP by Kicker. Since punk rock got started and really began to develop some momentum many years ago, there has been no shortage of upstarts who have come along certain that those who came before them didn’t know jack and threw out the existing rule book which was governing the genre in order to start fresh. That fact may be inconvenient, but that doesn’t make it any less true;...
Charley Patton, Blind Willie McTell, & Mississippi Sheiks Document Reissues Volume 4 (Third Man Records) It’s hard being a music fanatic. No, I’m kidding of course. It’s actually really great. If you’re hardcore enough then you start wondering about the history and links in your music. Who begat what? What are the influences in your favorite band? If you’re serious about your music, you’ll want to know where it came from. Music has become just that for me...
Culture of Terrorism by Noam Chomsky It’s hard to pinpoint Noam Chomsky’s specialty because there are so many. The obvious answer would be linguistics. After all, the man is a professor on the subject at MIT. But what about politics and world issues? The reason Chomsky seems to have so much to say on everything is because he’s really only talking about one thing: US aggression. Whether it’s the Israel-Palestine problem, Vietnam, or Latin America, the US affects the fate...
Akira: 25th Anniversary Edition Where do I even begin with a movie like Akira? I first watched it in college on VHS with the traditional dubbing of the movie and haven’t stopped thinking about it since. I’ve watched the movie over a dozen times, read the manga (that’s 2000+ pages) twice, had a poster in my room all through college staring at me, and saw the movie in theatres for its 2001 re-release (I dragged several people for my birthday...