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A deeper look at the grooves pressed into the “Gangsterville” single by Joe Strummer, being reissued for Record Store Day 2016! With the benefit of hindsight, the first thing listeners will notice about this single’s title track is how well it dovetails with the final days of The Clash, and where they were when the wheels finally fell off with Combat Rock in 1982...

A deeper look at the grooves pressed into the Record Store Day-released Goodfriend LP by Matthew Sweet. Chances are, if you grew up anywhere within the reach of a rock radio station’s signal between 1989 amd 1996, you have more than a few memories for which Matthew Sweet’s music provided the soundtrack. Between 1989 and 1996, Sweet was everywhere; a string of singles including “Sick Of Myself,” “Girlfriend,” “The Ugly Truth,” “Time Capsule” and “Evangeline” got heavy...

Artist: Fat White Family Album: Songs for Our Mothers Label: Fat Possum Records Isn’t it incredible how, over time, the basic structures of established musics can become re-imagined/re-engineered for no other reason than they’ve become displaced from the time and places they were first developed? The possibility of time and place being so important for something non-corporeal like music may seem like a dubious one but, in listening to Fat White Family’s new album, Songs for Our Mothers, it suddenly...

Artist: The Rubens Album: Hoops Label: Warner Brothers Do you know the reason why the catbird is able to immitate other bird and animal sounds, reader? It’s actually a defense mechanism: catbirds want to either blend in with their surroundings and not get noticed by potential predators, or imitate a sound which will scare potential predators away. The catbird’s abilities come to mind when one thinks about The Rubens too; on first listen, it’s easy for listeners to melt into...

Artist: Ron Hawkins Album: Spit, Sputter and Sparkle Label: Pheromone After twenty years of trying pretty much any and every permutation of rock which struck his fancy following the first break-up of The Lowest Of The Low in 1994 (projects which followed included designer knock-off stuff with the Leisure Demons, coffeehouse acoustic songwriting elsewhere on his own, bar-rocking with The Rusty Nails and Do-Good Assassins and more), hearing that Ron Hawkins has spontaneously come into his own again and produced...

A deeper look at the grooves pressed into Last Of Our Kind by The Darkness. I know I’m a punk and therefore my taste in music has a holier than thou flavor by default, but we all have our guilty pleasures. My greatest guilty pleasure is the music of The Darkness – and there are several reasons I’ve come to love The Darkness over the years. They are the perfect soundtrack for the gym (punks can be healthy too, you...

A deeper look at the grooves pressed into the Sundazed pressing of Safe As Milk by Captain Beefheart. 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...

A deeper look at the grooves pressed into the Record Store Day-issued Live At Grimey’s LP by Justin Townes Earle. For some reason, it always feels a little awkward to review the work of a second generation musician. Maybe it’s because the easiest comparison to make (be it positive or negative) is to the artist’s progenitor; like, how easy is it to look at Sean Lennon’s work and not see John Lennon or Yoko Ono in the periphery, and one...

A deeper look at the grooves pressed into Johnny Cash’s Record Store Day-issued Koncert V Prague LP. It’s incredible how great a difference ten years can make for a musician, but even more amazing is when it’s actually possible to hear that difference in their performance. In 1968, for example, Johnny Cash recorded his classic Live At Folsom Prison album; at the time, the singer was already developing a pretty serious drug problem (he’d become addicted to pills). It wasn’t...

A deeper look at the grooves pressed into the Citizen Dick RSD-issued Touch Me I’m Dick 7” Freelance journalist and novelist Joshua Foer once opined that “Monotony collapses time; novelty unfolds it. … If you spend your life sitting in a cubicle and passing papers, one day is bound ro blend unmemorably into the next – and disappear.” It might seem unlikely, but Foer’s logic is also applicable to the music industry; to wit, I contend that it I spend...