A deeper look at the grooves pressed into the Warhorse LP by Charger. After releasing a couple of singles to introduce themselves last year, Charger (Rancid bassist Matt Freeman’s side project) has finally elected to give listeners a full-course meal of exactly everything they’re all about with the Warhorse LP. How, let’s be honest here – some side projects have all the tags to be of great pedigree in plain view, but Charger isn’t one of those; on paper, Charger...
Now thirty years and several significant cultural movements later, it’s difficult to get a sense of how much excitement and promise there was surrounding Jane’s Addiction at the height of the band’s fame. Simply said, Jane’s Addiction represented a way to transition from the staid, well-established values and forms evident in classic rock to the far most untested and new paradigm exemplified in alternative rock in the Nineties. 1990’s Ritual de lo Habitual was the band’s third album and proved...
A deeper look at the grooves pressed into the reissue of The Lorrainas’ Party ‘Til It’s Dark LP. Sure, this vinyl reissue of Party ‘Til It’s Dark – The Lorrainas’ first and only full-length studio album – may seek to re-introduce material which is now seventeen years old, but anyone who hears it will excitedly admit that the music sounds one hundred per cent fresh; after the rush of endorphins which come with the music initially begin to fade. The...
A deeper look at the grooves pressed into a reissued copy of the Charm School Dropouts LP by The Vapids. For almost three decades now, The Vapids have been one of the hardest working bands in Canada. Since the day they started in 1993, The Vapids have never stopped working; the band has toured regularly as well as doing one-off shows from their home-base in Hamilton, Ontario, and kept a respectably consistent stream of releases on their merch table both...
A deeper look at the grooves pressed into the You’re Class, I’m Trash LP by The Monsters. Arguably the greatest compliment one can pay to a punk record is not to call it “good” or “great” or anything like that (because such terms can be – and have been – dismissed as a matter of opinion or as a matter of perception), but to simply exclaim, “You’ve gotta hear this” to as many potentially receptive ears as possible. Word tends...
A deeper look at the grooves pressed into the Voodoo Rhythm Records Label Compilation Vol. 5 LP. I confess that label compilations have never been my favorite thing. Not that I’m definitively against the form (I have heard some good comps over the years, and labels like Sub Pop, Killrockstars, Epitaph, Fat Wreck Chords and Pirates Press have a longstanding history of having produced some pretty great ones), it’s just that many of the compilations I’ve heard (and this includes...
A deeper look at the grooves pressed into the 3LPs in the Acid Box by Acid. There’s no question that bands have come up with some pretty unusual items to include with their albums and/or box sets in the twenty-first century, but Acid – the band formed by Jeff Hassay and Imaad Wasif (Wasif – the guitarist who filled in for James Iha in the Smashing Pumpkins in the Nineties, formed The New Folk Implosion with Lou Barlow and collaborated...
A deeper look at the grooves pressed into the I Am Alive, But Only If You Say I Am LP by Long Range Hustle. While the nature of the album’s title seems inherently soft, on its face (most bands want to exclaim, “We are here,” but the title of Long Range Hustle’s sophomore full-length album seems to ask for the validation that most other bands just claim), there’s no question that I Am Alive, But Only If You Say I...
A deeper look at the grooves pressed into TK and The Holy Know Nothings’ The Incredible Heat Machine LP. It isn’t always easy for this writer to get into country music (there often has to be a “alt-country” plank in the floor to make it easier to enter on), but it didn’t take me long to find my way to relishing the music on The Incredible Heat Machine – TK and The Holy Know Nothings’ sophomore full-length album. From note...
A deeper look at the grooves pressed into the Vespa & Londonians 12” EP by Booze & Glory. Remember back in the early aughts when Fearless Records compiled a series of albums which found some genuinely great punk bands covering a multitude of different artists and genres – recasting them all in a punk context? Some of those covers were actually really, really cool (hearing AFI perform Guns N’ Roses’ “My Michelle” was pretty cool, as was Strike Anywhere’s cover...