Reviews

Record #820: The Get Up Kids – On A Wire (2002)

/ Nathaniel FitzGerald

Sometimes, context has a way of tainting our perspective. When we’re in the midst of events, we’re sometimes too close to be able to see clearly.

Case in point: On a Wire, the follow-up to their classic sophomore album, Something to Write Home About. While I personally wasn’t enthralled enough by that record to follow them any further*, many die-hard fans were disappointed with this disc to the point that they felt betrayed.

But for me, having come back to this record with two decades of space between its release and my listening, hearing it without the crushing weight of anticipation and dashed hopes allows it to blossom into a wonderful collection of great songwriting and catchy pop rock.
Continue reading →

Record #819: The Get Up Kids – Something to Write Home About (1999)

/ Nathaniel FitzGerald

Over the years, I have stated publicly and often that I missed the Get Up Kids when I was in the throes of my emo phase. Most publicly, on the first episode of my podcast, which I host with a Get Up Kids superfan.

As a teen, I had a copy of the B-sides and rarities disc Eudora, but really only loved a couple tracks on it. I have a vague memory of buying Something to Write Home About, regarded by many to be their best, but I don’t remember being very enthralled with it.

However, a couple months ago I bought a box of records from a friend that had a number of emo classics, including many from TGUK. “I might as well keep this one,” I said of this disc, before putting it on and realizing something surprising…

I knew every word to this album. 

Continue reading →

Record #818: The Cure – Pornography (1982)

/ Nathaniel FitzGerald

It’s taken me until my mid-30s to realize something that should have been obvious: the Cure really is one of the best bands in the world. Yet approaching their immense discography now, and not as a teenager when I no doubt would have spun their albums on repeat, has proven to be a daunting task.

Of course, I’ve loved Disintegration for a few years now, but sorting through the rest of it, I feel rudderless in a sea of gothy pop songs. Recently, I decided almost on a whim to order a copy of Pornography, their fourth record, and one of their darkest.

And it’s appropriately titled: like pornography, this record is almost exploitatively intimate, often uncomfortable, yet basely alluring.

Continue reading →

Record #817: Charles Mingus – Mingus Ah Um (1959)

/ Nathaniel FitzGerald

Some years bear a strange significance in music history. Single calendars that compress massive explosions of musical ingenuity within their pages.

In 1967, it was psychedelic and progressive rock. In 1977, it was punk. 1991 brought multiple waves of noisy guitar bands, from grunge to shoegaze to post-hardcore to the massive umbrella of alternative rock.

For jazz, that year was 1959, which saw several seminal releases: Coltrane’s Giant Steps, Brubeck’s Time Out, Coleman’s The Shape of Jazz to Come, and Miles Davis’ Kind of Blue, which is arguably the greatest jazz record of all time by every metric.

But even among such legendary peers, Charles Mingus’ masterpiece, Mingus Ah Um, stands unwavering on its own two feet and swings mightily at all challengers.

Continue reading →

Record #816: Bad Brains – Bad Brains (1982)

/ Nathaniel FitzGerald

The conversations around the greatest punk band of all time are often focused in the rivalry between USA and the UK. Punks wax philosophical about The Ramones or The Clash, Black Flag or the Buzzcocks…(note: I’m intentionally omitting the band Virgin Records put together to reappropriate punk aesthetics).

One factor that’s not often brought up is that of race. True, there might not be too much to talk about there—for all its rebellion against the status quo, punk has always skewed heavily white. But for Bad Brains, whose legend demands that they’re mentioned in any conversation about important punk bands, their punk cred is tied intrinsically to their blackness, both in lyrical content and the way they were perceived in their early days.

Continue reading →

Record #815: Eugenius – Midlife (2020)

/ Nathaniel FitzGerald

I am by no means a connoisseur of hip hop. The hip hop section of my collection is very meager, and I feel ill-equipped to talk about hip hop in any sort of meaningful way.

That said, my metric for good hip hop is much the same as Justice Potter Stewart’s metric for pornography: I know it when I see it. And Midlife, the sprawling, mercurial debut from Cincinnati’s Eugenius, passes that test with ease.

Continue reading →

Record #814: An Autumn for Crippled Children – All Fell Silent, Everything Went Quiet (2020)

/ Nathaniel FitzGerald

Last year, I said that An Autumn for Crippled Children’s Try Not to Destroy Everything You Love should have stolen them the title of “The Cure of Heavy Metal” from post metallurgists A Year of No Light. That album’s heavy use of moody synths, drum machines, and melodramatic grand pianos betrayed a great love for the Goth Rock legends that mixed surprisingly well with the blistering black metal guitars and shrieked vocals.

On last year’s All Fell Silent, Everything Went Quiet, AAFCC leaned even further into the goth, new wave, and post punk influence, making this sound almost like a Cure-worship album with added black metal elements, rather than the other way around. In either case, it certainly works.

Continue reading →

Record #813: East Ghost – If I Sleep (2014)

/ Nathaniel FitzGerald

One of the neat perks that comes from mingling around the DIY music scene is that sometimes, when you order something from friend’s label, they send you some freebies.

In this case, that would be when I wrote about Fashioner by In Parallel, my friend Bryan of Something Beautiful Records (and the podcast As the Story Grows), he asked if I had a copy of their debut, which he had put out, and offered to send me a copy. When that package came, it included this record from a band I had never heard of.

But believe me when I tell you: this is a true hidden gem.

Read more a yearofvinyl.com #eastghost #indierock #postpunk #postrock #vinyl

Continue reading →

Record #812: Aphex Twin – Selected Ambient Works 85-92 (1992)

/ Nathaniel FitzGerald

Years ago, I purchased Selected Ambient Works, Vol 2. My attempts at listening to the monstrous triple-disc collection of untitled tracks proved fruitless. I eventually sold it, and when I transferred the blog from Tumblr to a standalone site, the original post didn’t even make it over.

As it turns out, I thought I was buying this one. 

I had always meant to fix that in the back of my mind, but never got around to it. But when my podcast cohost brought this album up in a conversation about avant-garde and experimental music, I decided to correct my error.

Continue reading →

Record #811: Autechre – Tri Repetae (1995)

/ Nathaniel FitzGerald

Last week, while recording an episode on experimental music for my new podcast (oh yeah, I have a podcast now), I remarked that part of what makes Radiohead great is that they take the harsh weirdness of far more inaccessible bands and mold it into pop structures. “Radiohead would be the first ones to tell you, ‘just listen to Autechre,'” I said, and then I realized two things.

One: I didn’t know how to pronounce Autechre.

Two: I had never listened to them.

I promptly sought to correct that, and within half an hour of listening to their pioneering opus Tri Repetae, I ordered a copy. And now, I’m not sure which is harder to believe: that this record came out in 1995, or that humans had anything to do with its creation.

Continue reading →