review

A deeper look at the grooves pressed into the 2016 vinyl reissue of the Psychotic Supper LP by Tesla. It’s a little hard to believe now but, twenty-five years ago, the music business seemed to be getting suddenly and violently pulled in several directions at once. At that time, glam metal and hard rock were still pumping out some pretty important albums – Guns N’ Roses would release both Use Your Illusion albums in ’91, Metallica released The Black Album,...

A deeper look at the grooves pressed into the Basses Loaded LP by (The) Melvins. It’s mind-boggling how such a prolific band can be so under-appreciated. Krist Novoselic of Nirvana fame has said that the Melvins are the only band left standing from the grunge-rock cacophony of the Nineties (take that, Pearl Jam), and even the new kids like Mastodon have gone on the record as saying they’re one of the greatest bands on earth. Of course, the Melvins don’t...

A deeper look at the grooves pressed into the Guitar Boy LP by Bloodshot Bill. The moment I first saw Bloodshot Bill will forever be burned into both my eyeballs and my memory. It was at the Middle East in Cambridge while waiting for the Jon Spencer Blues Explosion to go on. And here comes this guy, wearing a robe, hair slicked back, armed with nothing but a guitar, bass drum and hi hat. What followed was thirty minutes of...

Artist: Adam and The Ants Album: Kings of the Wild Frontier (35th Anniversary 2CD reissue) Label: CBS/Legacy/Sony Music While most critics maintain that The Ramones’ debut album and Nevermind The Bollocks, Here’s The Sex Pistols rank as the two most important music and culture-defining artifactsin the punk rock pantheon, that’s really just a shortcut to thinking. The truth is that one particular album stands out as a subversive document which doesn’t overtly attempt to stand out from the pack –...

A deeper look at the grooves pressed into the vinyl reissue of Hater’s self-titled debut album. I must confess that I had never heard of Hater before Ben Shepherd put out In Deep Owl a couple of years ago. I was really, really taken with that album and had been thrilled at the prospect of taking an interview with him when the opportunity came up; in fact, I jumped at it. It was during that interview when I learned about...

The Descendents Hypercaffium Spazzinate (Epitaph Records) The differences in the performance and presentation of Hypercaffium Spazzinate from every other Descendents album are subtle but evident from the moment “Feel This” screeches in to open the album. There, while the tempo of the drums and guitar are precisely at the speed fans would expect them to be (at that of an over-caffeinated blur, of course), the tone in Milo’s voice has changed to reflect a different demeanor from that of any...

A critical evaluation of Trouble Boys – The True Story of The Replacements by Bob Mehr. Maybe it has something to do with the sort of “Little Rascals” image that The Replacements have always given off as a lateral by-product of the band’s popular “loveable loser” image and mythos, but even just reading the words “The True Story of The Replacements” – specifically that nagging word “True” included up front – can get a mind percolating. This is a band...

R.E.M. Monster (Warner Bros., 1994) To this day (now) twenty-two years after it was originally released, R.E.M.’s ninth album, Monster, still feels like it should have been a risky record for the band to make. By then, the band had long since broken through the glass ceiling between the underground and the mainstream; they had become patron saints of the thinking man’s end of college rock (which later got annexed by alt- and is currently a province of the indie...

A deeper look at the grooves pressed into the Pick Your Poison split 7” by Control and Harrington Saints. While I happily admit that I appreciate the 7” single as a format, a split 7” is often a much harder sell with me. Why? Often, the focus feels too diverted on a split; the amount of time that each band involved has to leave an impression is very short and splitting focus two ways only makes it that much more...

A deeper look at the grooves pressed into the 10” reissue of the Airplane Tracks EP by The Burdocks. It might seem unbelievable, but perhaps the greatest creative crime that Sloan ever committed was being so good and becoming so popular and casting such a large shadow in the 1990s and early new millennium that they completely eclipsed all of the other bands which were beginning to appear in Canada’s maritime provinces. Really think about it, reader – Thrush Hermit...