A deeper look at the grooves pressed into the 2LP reissue of Dig Your Own Hole by The Chemical Brothers. …And then, with the release of Dig Your Own Hole, The Chemical Brothers became a pop culture phenomenon. Now, it could be contended that the arrival and immediate public embrace of Dig Your Own Hole was the result of several different factors intersecting (after grunge, Brit-Pop overtook both the charts and popular imagination thanks to bands including Blur, Oasis and...
Ben Webster Gone With the Wind I think it says a lot that I can go from listening to GG Allin to Ben Webster in the same day. But that’s what being a true punk rocker means: your music world is constantly expanding and your appreciation for different genres is elevated. The punk and jazz connection is there in some form or another and I’m sure entire articles and even books have been dedicated to the subject. But, let...
Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me – Original Motion Picture Soundtrack 2XLP Music by Angelo Badalamenti Artwork by Sam Smith Few TV series have been as compelling as Twin Peaks. Being a very strange show about death, mystery, and the supernatural that somehow captivated its audience, it’s even more remarkable how it’s lived on and made new fans after all these years. It probably doesn’t hurt that this bizarre show is even weirder when you place it is its original...
A deeper look at the grooves pressed into the new Exit Planet Dust reissue from The Chemical Brothers. From the outside, The Chemical Brothers have never really appeared to be an act that anyone associates with the concept of “evolutionary development,” but that is really the fault of shortsighted critics who simply assume that the group’s influence and growth is limited because the music first gained life on a series of dance floors. Such rigid thinking is foolish, really; in...
A deeper look at the grooves pressed into the Oczy Mlody LP by The Flaming Lips. It has been pretty evident that The Flaming Lips were in need of a change over the last few releases, the band just wasn’t sure what needed to happen in that capacity and so elected to throw everything at the wall to see what might stick. They tried getting darker and more dissonant on The Terror, but that didn’t work out so well because...
A deeper look at the grooves pressed into the vinyl reissue of Clumsy by Our Lady Peace. With the knowledge of what Clumsy would ultimately become in the context of Our Lady Peace’s catalogue already a matter of public record (it was a runaway success, being certified Diamond in Canada and Platinum in the US – each denoting at least 1 million records sold), the possibility that the making of the album was laborious may come as a surprise. Not...
A deeper look at the grooves pressed into the vinyl reissue of Naveed by Our Lad Peace. Now with the benefit of hindsight, it is genuinely incredible when one considers how many classic bands just seemed to materialize from nowhere on the streets of Toronto in the first half of the 1990s. That might sound like an overstatement to those who came along later, but it’s true; bands like The Tragically Hip, the Headstones, Gorp, 13 Engines, The Morganfields, Thrush...
Bracket Hold Your Applause It’s a wonderful world we live in where Bracket is still fighting the good fight and putting out records even though the songs they bring to the world are heavy in content. Seriously, Bracket songs can get rocking and sad as hell at the same time. But then again, this band has always been an underdog that’s full of surprises. Most people know Bracket as a FAT band, but that’s only part of their history. They...
A deeper look at the grooves pressed into the California Heart LP by Great Apes. It is often said that the mastering process required to present music on vinyl (instead of CD or mp3) is part of what really changes the overall experience of the format (above and beyond the obvious physical contact made between stylus and vinyl), but that still doesn’t exactly explain the difference a listener will discover between a digital copy of Great Apes’ newest album, California...
A deeper look at the grooves pressed into the First Ditch Effort LP by NOFX. While the last few years may not have looked like the busiest for NOFX on the surface (yes, as every fan knows, four years lapsed between Self-Entitled and First Ditch Effort – the longest gap between new full-length albums in the band’s 33-year history together to date), to say that the band’s members sat fallow would be completely untrue. In fact, it could be...