A deeper look at the grooves pressed into the Rendered Obsolete LP by Kicker. Since punk rock got started and really began to develop some momentum many years ago, there has been no shortage of upstarts who have come along certain that those who came before them didn’t know jack and threw out the existing rule book which was governing the genre in order to start fresh. That fact may be inconvenient, but that doesn’t make it any less true;...
A deeper look at the grooves pressed into the 2016 reissue of the BLACKsummers’night LP by Maxwell. On a superficial level, leaping around an artist’s catalogue can be confusing in a variety of ways; there can be a disconnect in the continuity of the artist’s development and that may mess with the perceptions of their catalogue as a whole. Such a phenomenon is absolutely true of Maxwell’s songbook – when the singer’s started with Urban Hang Suite in 1996, his...
A deeper look at the grooves pressed into the deluxe 2LP reissue of Maxwell’s Urban Hang Suite by Maxwell. It’s incredible how wide the stream of creativity was in the mainstream music scene of 1996. While rock had finally started to get itself worked out following the death of Kurt Cobain (there were a few good rock records that year – Ministry released Filth Pig, Lou Reed put out Set The Twilight Reeling, The Wallflowers released Bringing Down The Horse...
A deeper look at the grooves pressed into the High Hopes LP by Like A Motorcycle. There are few scenes that appear in motion pictures which are more worrisome than those where light explodes on the screen and, after the camera’s focus adjusts, viewers realize they’re staring up from the floor of the trunk of a car. The reason that image is disarming is because the trunk is a small space – it is incredibly confined and exists as a...
A deeper look at the grooves pressed into the Shift and Shadow 12” EP by XIXA. XIXA released its debut full-length album earlier this year (discussion of that release will be coming in the very, very near future) but, now that it’s out and it has had the chance to really establish itself with the indie rock community, some listeners will be wondering what might have come before the “grand introduction” that Bloodline represented. As it turns out, XIXA’a output...
Thee Oh Sees Drop Our Thee Oh Sees coverage ends with a special entry. I remember when I heard that Thee Oh Sees were breaking up. An incredible workhorse of a band like this one just calling it quits like that? Did leader John Dwyer just burn out from putting out more than one album a year? How can someone’s creative juices just stop flowing? Well the hiatus lasted 4 months and everyone both rolled their eyes...
Thee Oh Sees Mutilator Defeated at Last It’s a funny thing when you think a band has topped themselves to the point of no return. That happened to me when I first heard Mutilator Defeated at Last by Thee Oh Sees. Now this statement (topping oneself) is a hard one to make for a band like this. I’ve said it before and I’ll keep saying it: Thee Oh Sees put out records like Donald Trump lies. Now there’s a...
A deeper look at the grooves pressed into David Bowie’s Let’s Dance LP. To begin with, I have to confess that I disliked Let’s Dance from the time I first heard it until early 2016 – right around the time I first saw the Five Years documentary. In Five Years, both Let’s Dance and the album’s producer, Nile Rodgers, played significant roles and seeing that presentation was what convinced me to revisit the album. Because of that film and the...
A deeper look at the grooves pressed into a vinyl copy of David Live 2LP by David Bowie. It’s incredible how good, interesting, revealing and even informative an album can be, while simultaneously being critically abhorred. How such things happen is anyone’s guess, but they do – a perfect example is the live album that David Bowie released in 1974, David Live. David Live was Bowie’s first official live album. The album compiled tracks from a two-night stand at th...
A deeper look at the grooves pressed into a vinyl copy of Diamond Dogs by David Bowie. While it might not sound like the greatest endorsement of an album’s quality or of the creative foresight possessed by an artist on the surface, the adage that Diamond Dogs exemplifies first is “Just because an idea doesn’t work out in its intended manner does not mean it should be thrown away and forgotten.” The manner in which David Bowie’s eighth album lives that...