review

A deeper look at the grooves pressed into the Battletoads soundtrack LP, released by I Am 8-Bit. I’m going to give you a second so you can process the craziness that you’re seeing here. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you the Battletoads soundtrack on vinyl. That’s Battletoads – as in the Nintendo game from the Nineties, regarded as one of the hardest games of all time. Is this the 8-bit soundtrack in all its 8-bit glory? Yes it is. Is...

A deeper look at the grooves pressed into the Vinyl Me Please edition of Super Ape by Lee “Scratch” Perry. Music is a wonderful thing. If you listen to it correctly and put in the time, it can form a sort of six degrees of Kevin Bacon in your mind; bands get interconnected and genres get mixed and involved. As artists borrow from each other, new sounds are created and the inspirational wheel keeps turning. What am I talking about?...

A deeper look at the grooves pressed into the Record Store Day reissue of At Budokan – The Complete Concert 2LP by Cheap Trick. While the 1970s are known for lots of things which happened musically (like the break-up of The Beatles, the deaths of Jimi Hendrix, Jim Morrison, Janis Joplin, John Bonham and Elvis Presley, the birth of both punk and disco and many other events), perhaps one of the biggest deals was the concept of a live album...

A critical evaluation of Funny Girl by Nick Hornby. I owe a great deal to Nick Hornby, partly for writing one of the greatest movies ever (no, it’s not the new one), but mostly for getting me into reading books in the first place. This happened many years ago and even though I’ve had my favorites of his over the years, every book has managed to strike a chord within me. Whenever I thought I’d have a character or a...

Wayne Federman The Chronicles of Federman (A Special Thing Records) As a comedy fan, I’ve heard the name Wayne Federman thrown around for a while. I really had no idea that it was because the man is a bit of an institution in the alt-comedy world and has been doing comedy for almost three decades. With such a long career, it’s no wonder the man’s comedy is being collected in the form of a chronicle a.k.a. The Chronicles of Federman....

A critical evaluation of Under The Big Black Sun: A Personal History of L.A. Punk by John Doe with Tom DeSavia and friends, published by Da Capo Press While the stories are (almost) never the same, it’s pretty surprising how consistently structured and formulaic most rock biosand scene expositions are; be it the story of one artist or the collected stories of many, the authors of such books often attempt to condense the finer points of “what happened” down into...

  NOFX Live: 04-28-16 Venue: Paradise in Boston, MA Review: Ollie Ottoman Photo: Scott Murry Whenever I think of NOFX live shows, I do that Italian gesture of kissing my fingers and go, “MUA!” Seriously, I have seen NOFX in small clubs and large outdoor venues (yes, the Warped Tour), and have never in my life had a bad experience. Is it because they’re such consummate musicians or because they are simply so goddamned entertaining live? Maybe it’s both. We...

Marc Maron WTF: The First 100 Episodes (A Special Thing) They say everything old is new again, and as far as our entertainment is concerned, that certainly seems to be the case. Sure, big budget productions are more plentiful than ever, but people are also “doing it for themselves” and using the older and easier forms of media to broadcast their programming. In that sense, radio has had a resurgence in the form of Podcasting. At the top of the...

Dan Telfer Ocean of Panic (A Special Thing Records) Let’s make this quick so that I don’t waste your time. I’m going to thank Dan Telfer for making an important standup comedy record. It’s an important album because it nails down exactly what annoys me about some alternative standup comedy today: ridiculous paranoia, superficial fears, and obvious exaggerations because these stories are actually not that entertaining or in depth. Think that shouting words don’t necessarily make them a punchline?...

A deeper look at the grooves pressed into the reissued Smash Hits LP by The Jimi Hendrix Experience. I’m sure I’m not alone when I say that I’m well-acquainted with Smash Hits by The Jimi Hendrix Experience. It was the first Hendrix album I ever purchased, to be honest; as a kid of (shall we say) a diminished bank account, Smash Hits looked like a wise buy because it had lots of songs on it that even the most unfamiliar...