A deeper look at the grooves pressed into the Pretty Garbage LP by Come Closer. While it’s very easy for me to get excited about a new punk band that I’ve never heard before (I’ve been listening to a lot of punk, for a for a lot of years), running across something which makes me excited because I can’t immediately qualify it is instantly attractive because it’s obviously operating within a paradigm I recognize, but there’s something about it that...
A deeper look at the grooves pressed into the 2LP Astralwerks reissue of Come With Us by The Chemical Brothers. Ever experienced a moment when, through no fault of its own, an album just seems to go underappreciated and/or just generally taken for granted, reader? It’s not an incredibly common occurrence, but it does happen; every so often, an album will suffer because it really just feels like “more of the same,” no matter how good it might be. For...
A deeper look at the grooves pressed into the …And Out Come The Wolves (5 x 7” vinyl set) by Rancid. It sounds a little sensationalist to make this declaration but, of the albums which really sparked the punk revival of the 1990s (including – but certainly not limited to – Punk In Drublic by NOFX, Stranger Than Fiction by Bad Religion, Dookie by Green Day and Smash by the Offspring), it was Rancid who ran closest and truest to...