A deeper look at the grooved pressed into Round Eye’s debut LP While the debate over which recorded music format is superior (vinyl, CD and digital download, at least for right now, are the top contenders), no one who has heard it will argue against the fact that Round Eye’s debut album was designed specifically to be experienced on vinyl. The hints are actually on the CD too, if you notice; right before “Fear The Consequence†plays on the CD,...
A deeper look at the grooves pressed into the …And Out Come The Wolves (5 x 7” vinyl set) by Rancid. It sounds a little sensationalist to make this declaration but, of the albums which really sparked the punk revival of the 1990s (including – but certainly not limited to – Punk In Drublic by NOFX, Stranger Than Fiction by Bad Religion, Dookie by Green Day and Smash by the Offspring), it was Rancid who ran closest and truest to...
A deeper look at the grooves pressed into the Dreams From The Factory Floor LP by Louise Distras. The problem with a lot of what is earnestly being marketed as punk rock in the twenty-first century is that much of it is fundamentally flawed: it’s made the way it is because that’s what’s expected.The expectation is that punk songs will come equipped with a confrontational attitude stacked on top of a progression of between three and five chords, and somewhere...
A deeper look at the grooves pressed into Johnny Cash’s Record Store Day-issued Koncert V Prague LP. It’s incredible how great a difference ten years can make for a musician, but even more amazing is when it’s actually possible to hear that difference in their performance. In 1968, for example, Johnny Cash recorded his classic Live At Folsom Prison album; at the time, the singer was already developing a pretty serious drug problem (he’d become addicted to pills). It wasn’t...
A deeper look at the grooves pressed into the Citizen Dick RSD-issued Touch Me I’m Dick 7” Freelance journalist and novelist Joshua Foer once opined that “Monotony collapses time; novelty unfolds it. … If you spend your life sitting in a cubicle and passing papers, one day is bound ro blend unmemorably into the next – and disappear.†It might seem unlikely, but Foer’s logic is also applicable to the music industry; to wit, I contend that it I spend...
A deeper look at the grooves pressed into Cassandra Wilson/Billy Holiday’s Record Store Day-issued split single “You Go To My Head†b/w “The Mood That I’m In.†I love the concept of “versus†releases. You know the ones, reader: the releases which pit two artists against each other under fairly limited conditions – be it to reinterpret the opposing artist’s songbook, or simply to compete and see who can make a better, more lasting impression on listeners in a limited...
A deeper look at the grooves pressed into the deluxe reissue LP portion of the Manic Street Preachers’ Holy Bible box set. The problem with the Brit-Pop explosion that happened in the 1990s (well, it was a problem for some people – others ate it up with a spoon) is that it was a really pretty, really clean and really sterile-looking solution to the void left in pop when grunge suddenly lost Kurt Cobain in 1994. Everything just seemed to...
A deeper look at the grooves pressed into the Popular Problems LP by Leonard Cohen. Prior to hearing Popular Problems, I was of the well-founded assumption that Charles Dickens was the man best able to straddle the line between affection and alienation which often sounded or read like someone saying (to update the language a bit), “I love you, but you such.” Granted, many poets, authors and songwriters have framed their work in a similar manner to Dickens or used...