Thursday, March 14, 2024

various artists - Troubleman Mix-Tape

I look at this and think of the old adage, "How you goin' to keep 'em down on the farm when they've seen the big city?"

How are you going to keep the kids from getting even freakier with their sound after they've been on the bleeding edge for years? When they've gone off to college and broken edge and read Baudelaire and taken modern lit and political science and moved past three chords and the truth?

You can't. You never have been able to. It's how we got this comp, 52 tracks from folks who had populated your 7" collection back in the 90s but were ready to reintroduce disco and no wave and free jazz as the  new century dawned and before the world went to shit, all filtered through this lens of basement shows and fanzines. DIY as an ethos, art as a goal. Tell the story however you think fits the moment.

It absolutely shows that it took Mike S. 4 years to put this one together, because it is more than a kwal-lit-tee compilation. It's a perfect mixtape.

Click here to download.

Monday, March 11, 2024

various artists - Resistance!!!

There's an eBay seller who I've been picking up CDs from for the past several months. I keep going back because every single item starts at a penny. And by (moatly) sticking to a max of $2 per item, I end up not spending more than $4 total on any one record. And, let's face it, I'll try anything for less than a fiver.

That's how I ended up with this, a British release from 2003 from the now-venerable London label No Front Teeth Records. I just grabbed it because I liked the cover and I could barely decipher the words "skate punk" on the tiny .jpg shot for the cover. And I couldn't find anything about it online, so I put in a bid for a buck. A day later, I had won this one; a week later, it wsa in my hands.

This ended up being a pretty great purchase. When you put together a few classic JFA tracks, a pair from Clevo HC outfit H-100's, and a trio from the deeply underrated River City Rebels, you have the makings of a delicious comp stew going. Throw in a bunch of British skate punk bands, as well as an obligatory Duane Peters appearance, and this is a sampler that probably should have gotten a lot more notice 21 years ago.

Click here to download.

Thursday, March 7, 2024

various artists - Amphetamine Reptile • Peel Sessions

It seemed like a glaring omission when I saw that I didn't already own a copy of this (currently). So of course I spent the $1.99 to rescue this from a clearance rack last month, along with a Lou Reed "best of" and Boss Hog's "Girl Plus" EP. Because money comes and money goes, but one should never let a sweet deal for noise rock pass them by.

In my humble, stupid opinion, Helmet and Tar still have the standout tracks here. And that tracks with my taste, since both bands are ones that I keyed onto Back In The Day (TM) and spent my hard earned Taco Bell wages on. No $2 CDs back then, I can tell you. But I should not pay short shrift to Cows (I preferred the Heroine Sheiks) and Surgery, who had already dissolved in the wake of Sean McDonnell's death by the time I would have otherwise become aware of them.

This is one that is well worth a listen, as well as a limited edition reissue with all new Haze XXL art.

Click here to download.

Monday, March 4, 2024

various artists - How We Rock

Think of this as a sophomore-level sampler of the sleaze rock days of the early aughts, which are being celebrated by my peers and old acquaintances. I guess you can call me a "well wisher", in as much as I don't wish anyone any specific harm.

What were we talking about again? Medium drugs? The last great rock 'n' roll major label spending spree? How low-res a scan of the cover I found?

I promise, the cover of the CD/2xLP is a lot more attractive than what appears here. And the artist list (the Hives, Turbonegro, New Bomb Turks, Supersuckers, RFTC) is front to back awesome, just a fist pumping, head banging, hip thrusting tracklist that still takes you out behind the elementary school and gets you pregnant.

Click here to download.


Monday, February 26, 2024

various - Quannum Spectrum

When it came to choosing sides in the great hip-hop wars of the 90s, I chose the backpackers, the crate diggers, the beat snatchers. "Entroducing..." came out at a perfect time for me, so it was no surprise that I fucked with the Solesides/Quannum crew in a big way. They were one of a million reasons why I wanted to be in the Bay Area at the turn of the millenium. Fuck tech; I just wanted to see Spazz and Del and Dead And Gone and Lyrics Born.

I loved how intertwined this crew was with London's Mo Wax and Tokyo's Toy Factory, a pair of import labels whose releases are well represented in my collection. This release comes as Solesides became Quannum Projects, and continued to turn dorks like me onto the bleeding edge of what hip-hop was in 2000. Drop-in's from the like of El-P, Souls of Mischief, and Jurassic 5 make this one of my favorite snapshots from this time.



Click here to download.

Thursday, February 22, 2024

various artists - Yoyo A Go Go

It's been a few years since I last posted anything from Pat Maley's Yoyo Recordings. But it's been thirty years since the first Yoyo A Go Go, and since I'm less than 80 miles away, as opposed to the 2,800 or so that I was back then, I thought it was time to pay this one a visit, and share it with you fine peep-holes.

Let me tell you what I recollect about this time. I was listening to my cassette of International Piop Underground Convention a lot in the spring of 1994, so when I heard that something similar was going to take place that summer...well, I didn't give it a ton of thought, because how was I going to go from Boones Mill, Virginia to magical Olympia? Especially since I found out a few weeks before school ended that we were leaving the sticks for suburban Baltimore,

But it was definitely intriguing. And, in retrospect, a little bit gumption could have gotten me out there on a four-day Greyhound with more than a few of my hard-earned Taco Bell dollars in my pocket. And who would I have seen? Unwound, Heavens to Betsy, Excuse 17, and Team Dresch remain the big names for me, even this far down the line. How cool would it have been to see Codeine, or Cub, or two thirds of Yo La Tengo, or Neutral Milk Hotel? Would I have even been into it back then? Or would it have been one of those moments I would have only appreciated in retrospect?

I suppose it's better to regret something you have done, rather than somehing you haven't done. Now, if you'll excuse me, I have to get up in someone's face and scream "SATAN!" over and over again.



Click here to download.

Monday, February 19, 2024

various artists - Un-Cabaret Presents: Freak Weather Feels Different

When you see a chance, you take it. You find...an indie comedy CD from the mid-90s.

I have no idea why I started quoting Steve Winwood in a blog post about UnCabaret, the still-running alt comedy showcase based out of L.A. Maybe it's the murderer's row of comics providing tracks. "Mr. Show with Bob and David" would come out on HBO around the same time this released, and Mssrs. Cross and Odenkirk are both repreented here. I sometime forget what a killer comic Bobcat Goldthwait was, what with my being a great admirer of both his directoral efforts AND his portrayal of Officer Zed McGlunk, My teenage crush Janeane Garafolo does a bit named after my porn crush Annie Sprinkle. There's Terry Sweeney and Julia Sweeney and Taylor Negron and Andy Kindler and Dana Gould and even Andy Dick, that sonuvabitch that got Phil Hartman murdered.

Basically, if you've loved the places comedy has gone over the past 30 years, you'll probably dig this.



Click here to download.

Thursday, February 15, 2024

various artists - Sub Pop: Patient Zero

It's been twenty years since the release of this particular Sub Pop sampler, and if you don't think the gravity of the fact that it's been twenty years since "Our Endless Numbered Days" and "Burned Days" came out isn't weighing on me like so many dozens of boxes full of vinyl being moved from apartment to house to apartment to storage unit then homey you're clearly a boomer or a Zedder.

The fun part is admitting that, at least where this spotlight on Sub Pop's discography is concerned, my taste remains pretty fossilized. Still love the Thermals, iron and Wine, and the Catheters, hate the Shins, feel ambivalent about the rest. But, hey, you might be really into Rogue Wave or the Helio Sequence. And there is a Postal Service remix on this that I didn't previously own, so I guess it was worth the buck plus shipping I paid a few weeks ago.



Click here to download.

Monday, February 12, 2024

various artists - Let's Do It For Lance! J Church Tribute

We live in a world where a wonderful, kind Hawaiian man who had an encyclopedic knowledge of the 80s UK anarcho-punk and who wrote some of the finest, most literate punk rock songs of all time has been dead for 16 years, Yet Donald Trump still darkens the planet. It hardly seems fair.

Lance Hahn was always a dude I deeply admired. He made great music, released some great art from his friends, shared his knowledge freely. J Church remains incredibly underrated. Cringer is barely a blip on the modern radars of music listeners.  But his successors are legion, filling up Gainesville's venues every Halloween, treading the boards in punk house basements and on stages in tiny clubs from San Pedro to the Lehigh Valley to Manchester to Sendai.

A bunch of labels put together this record to aid Lance's healing back in '07. It's a suitable monument to his songcraft, as well as those he inspired. It has some pretty great bands turning in pretty great versions of the man's cuts. It's a great sing-along record. The organizers got Ben Snakepit to do the illustrations. If you see this one on a rack for $5, I say, grab it quick.



Click here to download.

Thursday, February 8, 2024

various artists - CMJ Presents Certain Damage! - Volume 30

When i think of CMJ, the College Music Journal, I think of going to the cool bookstore as a teenager, copping "New Music Monthly", and learning about what the kids a few years older than me were into. I didn't know about publicists or the politics of major labels or the world of college rock; I just knew I was getting drawn into something that didn't play on the radio in southwestern Virginia. It wasn't covered in "Rolling Stone" or "Spin", aside from the occasional 50-word review. And when it did show up on MTV, it was in the "120 Minutes" ghetto, banished to late, late night.

Not that I got cable that far out in the boondocks.

"Certain Damage!" was the precursor to the NMM samplers that I'd swipe out of Borders. I've turned up a few of these recently, all dating from the days before Lollapalooza. Volume 30 here has the last great Replacements song, a Redd Kross cut, the Jane's Addiction song you'd actually hear on the radio in the daytime. There's also a Hank Rollins side project, an appearance by both Fred Firth and Henry Kaiser on the same track, and the first house track I remember hearing (Soho, "Hippychick").

This was what the College Music Journal thought was worth hearing, the month of my 13th birthday.



Click here to download.

Monday, February 5, 2024

various artists - Mojo Presents: The Bad Seeds Jukebox

This one's been sitting in my Kraken folder since last September. I had initially intended to dash off fifty words about this; "it was compiled 10 years ago by Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds, it has a bunch of weird shit on it, blah, blah, blah." But something told me, "hold back for a laundry day. Listen to this on random. Throw the tracks in with a bunch of your regular tunes."

So I did. And gratefully so.

Other than the curators, I grabbed this initially because it had tracks from Adrian Younge (who I've heard and loved), Betty Davis (ditto), and Karen Dalton (who I'd heard of, but never heard). And there were no surprises there; everything I'd heard about Karen Dalton was, if anything, understated, and I rushed out to cop her two initial releases.

It was the unfamiliar that knocked me for six, especially when it was slotted in between a Get Up Kids track and some classic Adam & the Ants. The likes of Moondog and  Giorgos Xylouris were revelatory; "Else Torp singing Arvo Part" is a sentence that is almost unfair in its simplicity, for how powerful a track it is. Even songs from Thurston Moore and Bill Callahan are almost gobsmacking in their strength. It's enough to make me reevaluate how I feel about those artists.

(Hint: I wasn't a fan.)

So, yeah, this has been on my phone for about five months now, on account of how it inspires me to listen broadly and experience sound differently.



Click here to download.

Read This One

Post #400: Double Dagger - Ragged Rubble

It took from May to August 2000 to go from 100 to 200 posts. Then I hit 300 posts two days before Christmas 2000. And now I'm here, anot...

People Liked These