Reviews

Record #905: The Cure – The Head on the Door (1985)

/ Nathaniel FitzGerald

If there’s one thing Robert Smith hates, it’s being pigeonholed. After releasing a gloomy trio of goth rock classics in the early part of the decade, Smith began to feel like his band was misunderstood as producers of monochromatic dourness. With a slightly shifted lineup, they released a trio of standalone pop singles that shattered the conception that they were one note.

And while that same pop perfection failed to infiltrate their following album, The Top, their 1985 record The Head on the Door was a masterpiece of hook-laden pop songs that didn’t forsake their mastery of dark atmospheres.

Continue reading →

Record #904: The Cure – Faith (1981)

/ Nathaniel FitzGerald / 2 Comments

As it turns out, my mid-thirties aren’t too late for my first Cure phase. And friends, this phase is deep, and I have no recourse against the urge to fill in the gaps in my collection for one of the deepest and most rewarding discographies of all time.

Just like Rome though, the Cure wasn’t built in a day. It took a few releases for them to find their own voice. But Faith, their third record, is where the spectral, teased-hair silhouette of their legacy started to take shape, introducing gossamer atmospheres and dirgelike tempos to their increasingly dark post punk. And while it’s still massively indebted to bands like Joy Division, Television, and Siouxsie and the Banshees (who Robert Smith would briefly play guitar for later), it’s the clearest picture of The Cure to come they had yet released.

Continue reading →

Record #903: The Cure – Wish (1992)

/ Nathaniel FitzGerald / 2 Comments

When I first heard Disintegration, which I bought on reputation alone, I lamented that I didn’t get into the Cure when I was a teenager. My thirties were too late to start a Cure phase—too late for the gloomy goth rockers to sink their hooks into my soul as deeply as they were meant to be (I even blamed my very 80s child mother for not exposing me to them).

Then, I had a child, and at six months old, she is certainly not too young for a Cure phase. As we’ve tried different strategies to get her to sleep, we’ve discovered that the most reliable tool is the Rockabye Baby series’ collection of Cure lullabies. And as those delightfully sweet arrangements have played on repeat in our house the last few weeks, I’ve found myself obsessing over the Cure with the same earnestness I thought I had missed out on by getting into them later.

That new obsession has gotten me to finally check out Wish, which I had assumed for years was an unabashed pop backlash to the dirge of Disintegration, based solely on the sugary hit “Friday I’m In Love.”

Boy, was I wrong.

Continue reading →

Record #902: Floorbird – Fall Apart Anywhere (2020)

/ Nathaniel FitzGerald

Getting into music as a kid, my journey was flanked by a chorus of older dudes chanting “they don’t make it like they used to.” I brushed it aside as grumpy old man complaining, because of course there’s still great music being made. But in the last few years, I’ve started to see more and more of my own peers joining that old refrain, assigning it to ’00s emo and pop punk instead of classic rock.

But my reaction remains the same. There’s tons of great music being released now, much of it checking off the same boxes of the music they loved as adolescents.

Take for instance Floorbird. They’re a newer act, but if you were to tell someone that they played Warped Tour in 2003, they’d likely believe you. Fall Apart Anywhere was released in 2020, but it pulls off the same sort of hooky blend of emo and pop punk as Dashboard Confessional, The Ataris, and Jimmy Eat World.

Continue reading →

Record #901: Elder – Innate Passage (2022)

/ Nathaniel FitzGerald

Elder has been one of my favorite active metal bands ever since I heard Reflections of a Floating World, a psychedelic sojourn through doomy riffs and Krautrock-esque instrumental passages. But ever since Lore, much of the discourse around Elder has focused on the balance between metal and prog rock, and as the band has continued, they seem to favor more and more of the latter with each release.

Innate Passage might pose the question of whether they have finally crossed the line between Metal and Not Metal, but Elder doesn’t seem very interested in debating it any further. Instead, they spend an hour offering up epic journeys through massive riffs, third-eye-opening solos, and the catchiest melodies they’ve ever released.

Continue reading →

Record #900: Failure – Fantastic Planet (1996)

/ Nathaniel FitzGerald

Throughout music history, there are several records that have a mismatched ratio of commercial success to lasting influence. Albums like Velvet Underground & Nico, of which it is often said that not many people listened to it, but everyone who listened to it started a band. Albums that made little impact on the larger cultural conversation but left an extinction-event-sized crater in those who heard them.

Fantastic Planet is one of those albums. It is a record that was mostly ignored upon its release, but history has reevaluated it as a revered classic.

And rightly so: thanks to its blend of HUMmy space rock, Jawboxy abrasiveness, Smashing Pumpkins guitar work, and Nirvana-esque hooks, Fantastic Planet is arguably the most concise distillation of 90s alt rock ever produced, and hits just even harder three decades later.

Continue reading →

Record #899: Converge – You Fail Me Redux (2004/2016)

/ Nathaniel FitzGerald

I’ve been carrying a shameful secret: I’ve never gotten into Converge.

Barring Bloodmoon, if you count that as a Converge album (I don’t), I’ve spent precious little time with the legendary metalcore band’s catalog. However, this is entirely due to the economics of Converge vinyl, most of which sell for well over $50. It’s been far more affordable for me to just ignore them.

But recently while browsing, I spied a cheap copy of You Fail Me Redux, a remixed version of their 2004 record. I dropped the cash on reputation alone, and it’s been worth every penny.

Continue reading →

Record #898: The Gloria Record – The Gloria Record (1998)

/ Nathaniel FitzGerald

I never had a job through high school—my parents said my job was to be a full-time student. Instead, I got a $ 40-a-week allowance to spend on whatever I wanted. So when I graduated high school and got around $2000 between graduation money and cashing out my childhood savings account, I spent like mad.

I blew through most of that sum by the fall, much of it buying up CDs from bands I had tangentially heard of. That included the legendary Mineral of course, but I must have heard of Chris Simpson’s side project The Gloria Record as well, because I listened to this CD all the time. 

Continue reading →

Record #897: Cold Gawd – God Get Me the Fuck Out of Here (2022)

/ Nathaniel FitzGerald

For all of its neon atmospheres and purple-hued aesthetics, shoegaze is a little monochromatic when it comes to skin tone. The demographics of both shoegaze fans and musicians typically skew a bit more caucasian than their relative populations.

This isn’t a unique phenomenon in alternative, punk, or metal genres, and I’m not here to dissect the myriad of social issues that created it. But to my knowledge, there haven’t been too many notable exceptions in shoegaze (please correct me if I’m ignorant).

But then there’s Cold Gawd. Originally formed as a solo project of lead singer Matt Wainwright, their brand of shoegaze is as equally indebted to genre mainstays like Nothing and Slowdive as R&B artists like Solange and 90s hip hop aesthetics.

Continue reading →

Record #896: Another Heaven – III: The Sorrowful Cries of Birds with Singed Feathers (2021)

/ Nathaniel FitzGerald

The internet has come a long way since I would spend hours scouring forums and record label sites for new bands, frantically downloading songs at the speed of dial-up, and hoping that at the end of the three-hour download, it wouldn’t be that stupid Bill Clinton impression. But if we’re being honest, having instant access to nearly every song ever recorded has brought its own problems.

That’s why it’s so helpful when a new band just plops their music right in front of you.

That’s what happened with Another Heaven (formerly post-punk outfit Hollow Boys) who dropped a track onto the r/shoegaze subreddit a couple years ago with a promise that they were working on an album. I saved the post, but forgot about it until a few weeks ago. And when I went looking for said album, I found three. The most recent (and fully formed) of these was this—a collection of heavy, sludgy shoegaze songs about the apocalypse. You know, the exact stuff I’m into.

Continue reading →