Author: Nathaniel FitzGerald

Record #831: Iggy Pop – The Idiot (1977)

/ Nathaniel FitzGerald

Iggy Pop lost himself for a while in the mid ’70s. His heroin addiction had proven too large a beast to manage, leading to the breakup of The Stooges in 1974. He tried his hand at a few musical ventures, auditioning to replace Jim Morrison in The Doors and to join KISS. Both were as unsuccessful as his stints in rehab.

In 1976, he reached out to his friend David Bowie, battling his own addictions, for help. The two moved in together into a Château near Paris and Bowie offered to produce an album for him. The resulting record, The Idiot, stripped away the proto-punk fury of Pop’s previous band in favor of Krautrock-influenced electronic textures—a sound that Iggy would describe as “James Brown mixed with Kraftwerk.”

In that way, The Idiot isn’t just a great record in Iggy’s catalog, but it’s also the spiritual prequel to Bowie’s Berlin Trilogy.

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Record #830: Hot Water Music – Caution (2002)

/ Nathaniel FitzGerald

By now, anyone who knows me should already know that there are some inexplicable and inexcusable gaps in my music knowledge. There are plenty of bands that I should have grown up loving but ignored for one reason or another.

In the case of Hot Water Music, my suspicion is that I had confused them for Poison the Well, who I never cared for. And yes, I know how stupid that was.

I’ve set to mending these gaps over the last few years, but few of those undertakings have been as satisfying as Hot Water Music’s Caution, a fiery burst of melodic post hardcore that checks just about every box of what I was looking for as a high schooler.

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Record #829: Gates – Here and Now (2021)

/ Nathaniel FitzGerald

Sometimes, it feels like I discovered Gates completely on accident.

I had never heard of them when I saw that they were touring with Thrice and La Dispute, two bands I love that sound absolutely nothing like Gates. I was intrigued by Wikipedia’s description of them as a post rock band, but that description clashed with the first few seconds of Parallel Lives, and it took a few other people clamoring about the record for me to revisit it in earnest.

Once I was enraptured by it, I took to searching for anything that gave me the same heart-rending mixture of indie, emo, and, yes, post rock. Their debut record, Bloom & Breathe was fine enough, but it felt far more like a Moving Mountains tribute than the band that would give me one of my favorite records of the last ten years.

So when Here and Now was released, it was one of the fastest instant-buys I can remember. And that paid off. These six songs don’t just satisfy the craving for more music like Parallel Lives—they exceed it.

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Record #828: Bossk – Migration (2021)

/ Nathaniel FitzGerald

As much as I love post metal, I won’t deny that the genre has no shortage of color-by-numbers acts that regurgitate the same few influences. I’ll admit, this isn’t always a dealbreaker for me. I’ve heard and enjoyed a number of albums that might as well have been subtitled “A Study in Russian Circles,” and even purchased a number of them—such is my hunger for heavy guitars and dark atmospheres.

With that in mind, when a post metal act releases something that looks beyond the scope of the overworked soil tilled up by Isis, Cult of Luna, and Russian Circles and replanted by just about every other band in the genre since, the results are truly fresh.

Take for instance Migration, the second full length from Kent, England’s Bossk. It draws enough from the conventions of post metal to pass the smell test, but it infuses those flavors with generous bits of seasoning from trip hop, industrial, and hardcore.

The results is one of the most inventive and rewarding post metal albums of the last few years.

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Record #827: Gypsum – Gypsum (2021)

/ Nathaniel FitzGerald

Working for a music site, I’m constantly inundated with press releases and review submissions. After a while, it all starts to bleed together, like a never-ending Pandora station with messed up seeds that plays in the background.

But every once in a while, something grabs my attention, like a nugget of gold in the muddy silt of a riverbed. As a mineral, Gypsum may not be very valuable, but the band that bears its name was enough to make me feel like an old timey prospector.

Their debut record came across my inbox and, after ignoring it until the week it was out, I was instantly enraptured by the genre-bending songwriting, rich atmospheres, kinetic grooves, and engrossing harmonies.

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Record #826: Diiv – Is The Is Are (2016)

/ Nathaniel FitzGerald

Few records have hit me with the same immediate and enduring affection as Diiv’s Oshin. That record’s blend of post punk, shoegaze, Krautrock, and surf rock hit me like a truck full of bricks at first listen, and remains one of the richest albums in my collection with every repeated listen.

So it might seem odd that I didn’t devour their sophomore album, Is The Is Are, with as much voraciousness.
But that error is all mine, because the sophomore record takes the same elements and stretches them to fit an ambitious double album that is far more personal while remaining just as alluring.

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Record #825: Deafcult – Auras (2017)

/ Nathaniel FitzGerald

Throughout the history of shoegaze, bands have tried hundreds of different techniques to create the huge blissful walls of sound the genre calls for. Of course there’s gliding, the method developed by Kevin Shields and aped by ever other shoegaze guitarist ever (guilty), but bands have also tried everything from walls of amps to layering dozens of takes of the guitar parts to more guitar pedals than one person should be able to understand.

Brisbane Australia’s Deafcult employ a novel method that’s genius in its simplicity: they just have four guitarists.

It’s an elegant, if obvious, solution and the results speak for themselves on the hazy, crushing atmospheres on Auras. 

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Record #824: Coastlands – Death (2020)

/ Nathaniel FitzGerald

Discovering music used to be so hard.

Usually, you were entirely reliant on the help of a tastemaker friend or a record store employee who had the time to sort through the silt to find the gold they’d pass on to you. Besides that, you could scour the websites of record labels you liked or study the liner notes of your favorite CDs to find what bands the bands you liked would work with. Then you’d take all of that to the P2P network that hadn’t been shut down or overrun with viruses yet and hope that the file you downloaded was properly labeled (it usually wasn’t).

These days, great music just falls in your lap, via the recommendation algorithms of your streaming service of choice and the endless stream of posts from likeminded music fans online. Or, in the case of Coastlands, the band might just start following you on TikTok and end up being super good.

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Record #823: Beastie Boys – Ill Communication (1994)

/ Nathaniel FitzGerald

First impressions are a powerful thing. Like many people, my first introduction to the Beastie Boys was “Fight For Your Right,” an irreverent and ubiquitous track that struck many as a novelty. And at the time of that track, the Beastie Boys were a novelty: the three Jewish kids from New York had transitioned to hip hop after their hardcore band found a burst of attention with the jokey rap song “Cookie Puss” (after which they hired an aspiring DJ named Rick Rubin).

But after riding the novelty act thing to notoriety, the Beastie Boys decided to get serious—a memo I had largely missed until my wife picked up a CD copy of Ill Communication on my regular detour at Vertigo Records in Grand Rapids. Listening to it on the drive home, I realized what an idiot I was for not just buying the vinyl at the same time, because this is truly one of the greatest records of all time.

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Record #822: Airs – Apart (2015)

/ Nathaniel FitzGerald

I’m starting to worry that my weak spot for noisy, crushing shoegaze is going to become fatal. Sometimes, I’ll hear a few seconds of fuzzy guitars with washed out vocals and start frantically searching for vinyl copies online.

That happened last week when I came upon Airs, the now-defunct “Loudest Band in San Francisco” on a playlist on Spotify and scoured the internet, eventually purchasing what seemed to be the only copy for sale online. In fact, given that Apart is the only release from Airs that saw a vinyl release, this was the only Airs wax for sale on the whole internet.

And I had to have it.

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