Captain Beefheart & His Magic BandTrout Mask Replica There is a bit on Marc Maron’s standup album Thinky Pain where, after talking extensively about his vinyl midlife crisis and trying to find the perfect record player how it’s time for him to “understand Beefheart.” I will never be smart enough or large enough of mind to assess and understand Captain Beefheart. It’s just hanging there. In many ways, he’s not wrong; there aren’t a lot of musical...

Star Trek: Prodigy Season 1 What can I possibly say about Star Trek that hasn’t been said already. If you don’t know what it is, get a clue and get on board. I was very late to the party but have since gone very deep. Star Trek is a warm fuzzy place I don’t think I’ll ever want to leave. For a franchise that has done so much over so many years the idea of Prodigy sounds like a...

Starry Messenger: Cosmic Perspectives on Civilizationby Neil deGrasse Tyson I know Neil deGrasse Tyson is often the victim of ridicule, but I can’t help but like the guy. At the very least he’s considered annoying because he likes to challenge our understanding of things, and people don’t like that. He can sometimes be that guy at parties who likes to correct people, so of course that’s annoying. It’s just that NGT (those who know him personally call him that, or...

Dave HillLive @ Village Social Club I’m all for checking out new venues in Boston, and lord knows we need them. The smaller and more intimate, the better. But, what I didn’t expect is that one of my favorite comedians would be playing a venue I’d never heard of. Maybe that’s because the Village Social Club isn’t the kind of venue you’d expect to see the alt comedy Dave Hill is known for. But, none of that matters. What...

Iggy Pop Every Loser (Atlantic/Warner Bros.) I’m never sure what I’ll get when I get a new album by Iggy Pop. Usually, there’s some version of the standard Iggy — rocking hard, with some social criticism, and a ballad or two – but every now and then he throws us a curve ball; a Preliminaires or an Avenue B. With all of that said, Every Loser pretty standard for him. If there is a surprise here, it is that Iggy...

Lou ReedTransformer (RSD 50th Anniversary) Lou Reed is a hard man to pin down. He’s simply unknowable. Either because he wanted it that way, or because he himself wasn’t quite sure of who he was. He’s been analyzed and idolized endlessly as a messiah or a junkie or a misunderstood genius. The reality is that he was all of those things to some degree, but it’s probably also true that he didn’t care. He was just interested in living his...

White StripesGet Behind Me SatanPhoto: turntablelab.com The White Stripes’ Get Behind Me Satan is an important album both for me personally and in the wider scope of musical history as it gives good perspective on what was going on with music at the time.  For me personally it conjures up memories of driving through the redwoods for the first time, wondering how exactly Meg White manages to hit her drums so hard. It was also the first song we learnt...

A deeper look at the grooves pressed into the ; ) LP by The Shouldies. It’s uncommon enough an occurrence that one can never hope to count on it, but sometimes an album comes along at precisely the moment a listener needs to hear it. In my own case, I’ve been listening to a surprising amount of very moody, very texturally-centered music lately; things like The Downward Spiral by Nine Inch Nails, Depeche Mode’s Ultra and Psalm 69 by Ministry...

Weyes Blood And In the Darkness, Hearts Aglow (Sub Pop Records) In her current incarnation as pop songstress, musician Weyes Blood may have produced the definitive post-Covid album. Sweet melodies, lush orchestration and a beautiful voice combine to express the relief and pleasure of passing through the crisis. The instrumentation is standard pop — piano, guitar, synthesizer washes, arranged into sweeping waves of music. Weyes Blood has claimed “church music” as a great influence on her work, which is a...

It feels good being back at live shows after so long. My 4 month hiatus, instigated by a new baby, finally came to an end with my of my favorite artists playing one of my favorite venues. The Middle East has had a rough go of it these past few years, and even though this show got moved from the downstairs room, I think it can easily be argued that the upstairs, cozier room is one of the best places...