A deeper look at the grooves pressed into Blood Lemon’s self-titled debut album. The beauty of great music – I mean truly great and timeless music – is that while listeners will feel as though they can easily pick out aspects of what they’re hearing and place it among other excellent or classic works, they’ll also breathlessly enthuse about how original that album is too. Listening to Blood Lemon’s self-titled debut album is just exactly like that; from note one,...
A deeper look at the grooves pressed into the new craft pressing reissue of the Creatures For Awhile LP by Personality Crisis. Things like this get said a lot but, in this case, there is actually verifiable proof: while they were working, Winnipeg, Manitoba-based punk band Personality Crisis were in a league of their own. Granted, the band was not around for very long (Personality Crisis formed in 1979 and ran until 1984) and Creatures For Awhile was their only...
A deeper look at the grooves pressed into Pop Evil’s Versatile LP. Okay, this first observation of what Pop Evil is offering with their sixth album, Versatile, doesn’t actually have anything to do with the music pressed into the vinyl, but it would be easy to extrapolate an impression of the merits of this album, how it’s presented and the potential difference between “how it’s presented” and “what you get” from it. On the (surprisingly large) hype sticker which adorns...
A deeper look at the grooves pressed into the Shirushi LP by Teke::Teke. Without question, Teke::Teke is a creature completely in its own quadrant of the pop diaspora. Does that mean that everything about their new album, Shirushi, stands completely separate from everything else in pop? Certainly not – there’s no question that it’s possible to pick out sounds and ideas which could be associated with film score composer Neal Hefti (who composed the iconic Batman theme in 1966) as...
A deeper look at the grooves pressed into the 4LP reissue of Since I Left You by The Avalanches. While I have serious reservations about a reissue which features enough remixes to occupy half of the medium into which the title is pressed (the 4LP reissue of Since I Left You presents the album pressed into two LPs, and features enough remixes to fill another two LPs), there is absolutely no way to deny the influence of The Avalanches’ first...
A deeper look at the grooves pressed into the Dymaxion LP by Garbageface x Wolfagram. Over the last few years, Karol “Garbageface” Orzechowski has used a laptop, a few instruments and a prodigious amount of talent to expand the vocabulary of electronic music, and really gone out of his way to both force change and re-arrange some musical conventions and paradigms. Watching his body of work unfold, (particularly N0 FUTUR(E) and Apostasy) has been nothing short of hypnotic, in fact;...
A deeper look at the grooves pressed into the Coyote LP by Spencer Burton. The problem that many musicians (particularly those associated with music genres which are usually aligned with “youth” as a concept – like pop, rock and punk) run into as time passes is that, at most, they age awkwardly – if they figure out how to age at all. That might sound odd, but think about it, reader; rock, pop, punk et cetera all have a sense...
The Hold SteadyOpen Door Policy Thank god for this album, folks. Thank GOD! I think I’ve said this before, but the Hold Steady are one of those bands that suffers from Monty Python syndrome, in the sense that it’s good, but the most annoying people in the world will not shut the fuck about it. Have you met a Hold Steady fan? If you’re not sure, then you haven’t. The real Hold Steady fans are annoying as hell. As such,...
A deeper look at the grooves pressed into the JT LP by Steve Earle and The Dukes. The fact is that no parent ever assumes they’ll outlive their children. There’s a security in that knowledge; at a certain point, parents realize that it’s unlikely they’ll accomplish all the things that they hoped to do in their lifetimes (either for themselves or for their progeny – some things will simply be left undone), and so there’s a certain comfort which comes...
A deeper look at the grooves pressed into the Call The Shots EP by Suzi Moon. Listening to Call The Shots – the debut EP by Suzi Moon – there’s no way to deny that listeners will be able to recognize a great similarity to the vocal tone and timbres of Courtney Love, but listeners also won’t be able to deny that the three songs which comprise this EP are more enduring and enjoyable than anything the Hole singer has...