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...

Artist: Lou Barlow Album: Apocalypse Fetish Label: Joyful Noise When Lou Barlow released his full-length solo album late last year, he ensnared the attention of even the longest-running and cynical of his fans. The reason for that was simple: when not playing sideman to J Mascis in Dinosaur Jr., Barlow had always shone brightest in the relative anonymity of putting a band name on his myriad projects (see Sebadoh, Sentridoh, Folk Implosion, et c.), even if there was no actual...

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...

Artist: My Chemical Romance Album: The Black Parade + Living With Ghosts (10th Anniversary 2CD) Label: Reprise/Warner Upon first sight of the tenth anniversary edition of The Black Parade by My Chemical Romance, even the greatest and most fanatical of the band’s fans will find themselves asking, “What the fuck is this?” They’ll be asking not because anything is wrong exactly, just that they won’t be able to immediately recognize what they’re looking at; unlike the original release of The...

A deeper look at the grooves pressed into the 2016 reissue of the BLACKsummers’night LP by Maxwell. On a superficial level, leaping around an artist’s catalogue can be confusing in a variety of ways; there can be a disconnect in the continuity of the artist’s development and that may mess with the perceptions of their catalogue as a whole. Such a phenomenon is absolutely true of Maxwell’s songbook – when the singer’s started with Urban Hang Suite in 1996, his...

Scharpling & Wurster Live at Third Man Records I mean it when I say that Tom Scharpling and Jon Wurster will go down in history as one of the great comedic duos of our time. Maybe the greatest. For those of you who are uninitiated, don’t feel bad because I didn’t know who they were a year ago either. But one thing is certain, if you get what they’re doing, you won’t be able to get enough. What these guys...

Powers and Prospects: Reflections on Nature and the Social Order  by Noam Chomsky  It’s hard not to sound like a broken record when talking about Noam Chomsky. What can we say that hasn’t been said countless times before? The man has had such an influence and his books are simply imperative reading for any human being. Powers and Prospects collects Chomsky’s lectures in Australia in the 1990s which were supposed to cover East-Timor. But we get so much more. Unfortunately,...