A deeper look at the grooves pressed into the To Victory EP by Lars Frederiksen. After a career spent tirelessly writing, recording and performing music with a celebrated list of bands on an incredible number of releases (to date, that list includes no fewer than forty-five releases recorded with bands including Rancid, Stomper 98, Old Firm Casuals, The transplants, The Bastards and Oxley’s Midnight Runners), it seems genuinely surprising that, only thirty-eight years after he started, Lars Frederiksen has added...
A deeper look at the grooves pressed into the Digital Age of Rome LP by T. Hardy Morris. It’s weird to think how tumultuous a year 2020 was, and how that tumult was reflected in the music which was released at the time. Even if a band didn’t actually have a political streak in their hair or bone in their body, conflict in the times seemed to appear in the music. Now, 2021 has had its share of rough running...
A deeper look at the grooves pressed into Plizzken’s …And Their Paradise Is Full Of Snakes LP. The fact of the matter is that, in punk circles, no one wants to be a “middle of the road” kind of band. Why? Well, as Dwight Eisenhower once said, “The middle of the road is all the usable surface. The extremes, right and left, are in the gutters,” and it is in those gutters (or teetering on the brink of them) where...
A deeper look at the grooves pressed into Mastiff’s Leave Me The Ashes of the Earth LP. There has always been something which felt a little off about really aggressive metal (or Doom, or Sludge, or maybe Metalcore – pick your favorite undervalued sub-genre) – as greasy, heavy or dirty as it might get, there’s always an inherent clarity about the recordings. Even when the vocalist in a band like that is leaving his throat/larynx/esophagus on the recording studio floor,...
A deeper look at the grooves pressed into the Young Shakespeare LP by Neil Young. One of the more interesting things that has happened since the CoVid pandemic basically put the entire North American live music schedule up on blocks for a while has been the outflow of live releases which have appeared – a cultural moment at which Neil Young has been the centre. Releases like Way Down In The Rust Bucket, Return To Greendale and Tuscaloosa have afforded...
A deeper look at the grooves pressed into the Exit Wounds LP by The Wallflowers. Who wouldn’t love to be Jakob Dylan? Since first appearing with The Wallflowers in 1992, Dylan has kept a “when I feel like it” mentality about his schedule of new releases (seven albums in twenty years – with nearly decade-long breaks along the way – is the definition of “when I feel like it”) and gotten away with it because he happens to be a...
A deeper look at the grooves pressed into the Monsters LP by Tom Odell. When it comes to Tom Odell’s fourth album, Monsters, it’s very likely that listeners will find themselves wondering if context does indeed inform musical creation, to a degree. The reason for that is simple: as soon as a stylus sinks into the A-side of Monsters and “Numb” opens it, an image of Ed Kowalczyk (the once-and-again singer of York, PA’s Live – for the unfamiliar) in...
A deeper look at the grooves pressed into the Culture Shock Treatment LP by Round Eye. It may have taken a while for the band to finally get all the paperwork signed and all of their distribution ducks in a row (technically, Culture Shock Treatment was completed in 2020 and Paper + Plastick Records released it digitally late last year – but then everything got problematic) but, happily, everything has come together and Round Eye’s fourth album has finally been...
A deeper look at the grooves pressed into NEEDLES//PINS’ self-titled album. There is something particularly special about self-titled albums – the unspoken rule is that, when a band puts its name on an album like that, it is intended to exemplify just exactly who that group is at its core. A self-titled album is a statement of a band’s personality as well as a statement of intent; bands always stand behind their output – even if only for the moment...
A deeper look at the grooves pressed into the Confines Of Life LP by Neighborhood Brats. I confess that I spent most of my first play through Confines Of Life, Neighborhood Brats’ third full-length album (and my first exposure to the band), just trying to figure out where to start with it. Somehow, it just wasn’t easy to effectively catch or contain the band; from note one of “Who Took The Rain” (which opens the album’s A-side), the band is...