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,...

A deeper look at the grooves pressed into the deluxe 2LP reissue of Maxwell’s Urban Hang Suite by Maxwell. It’s incredible how wide the stream of creativity was in the mainstream music scene of 1996. While rock had finally started to get itself worked out following the death of Kurt Cobain (there were a few good rock records that year – Ministry released Filth Pig, Lou Reed put out Set The Twilight Reeling, The Wallflowers released Bringing Down The Horse...

Hollywood Said No! Orphaned Film Scripts, Bastard Scenes, and Abandoned Darlings from the Creators of Mr. Show By Bob Odenkirk, David Cross, and Brian Posehn. Welcome to our new book review column here on Ground Control called “I Wanna be Literated”! We are going to try and keep this column up with not-just music related and not just brand new books. Some will be topical, old, some new, some borrowed, and almost all of them blue. We are proud to...

Artist: Various Artists Album: Lazarus – Original New York Cast (2CD) Label: Columbia/Sony Music There’s a certain salacious irony about the fact that the final recording to feature David Bowie’s music (including the last song the singer recorded before he died) is a soundtrack which is largely comprised of actors singing his music. In that, it could be said that the original cast recording of Lazarus renders the singer as a soulless commodity or presents the beginnings of presenting him...

Artist: Green Day Album: Revolution Radio Label: Reprise/Warner It will probably sound strange to the legions of fans that Green Day has won in the years since the release of American Idiot (let’s be honest – the band now has some supporters who are too young to remember when Kerplunk! was released), but the first words which will cross the minds of fans who were at least tall enough to get into the Gilman when Dookie blew up as they...

A deeper look at the grooves pressed into the High Hopes LP by Like A Motorcycle. There are few scenes that appear in motion pictures which are more worrisome than those where light explodes on the screen and, after the camera’s focus adjusts, viewers realize they’re staring up from the floor of the trunk of a car. The reason that image is disarming is because the trunk is a small space – it is incredibly confined and exists as a...

  Artist: Lou Reed Album: The RCA & Arista Album Collection (17CD box set) Label: RCA/Arista/Sony/Legacy Recordings The thing which really set Lou Reed apart from the other stars he was grouped with in the Seventies (including David Bowie, Iggy Pop and so on) is that he never once considered pandering to his audience – he always made them work for their enjoyment of his music. It could be said that making them work was the one consistent thread which...