Record #749: The Appleseed Cast – Mare Vitalis (2000)

/ Nathaniel FitzGerald

Across their near twenty-five year career, The Appleseed Cast has cemented themselves as a band that can do no wrong. Their work has consistently exceeded expectations, pushing their songwriting, instrumental performances, and inventive production to the limit with each release.

But what’s sometimes difficult to remember is just how quickly they jumped to that level, as seen by their 2000 full-length Mare Vitalis, a masterwork that demonstrates the group’s ability to blend emo expressiveness and post-rock atmospherics, seasoned with some bursts of post-hardcore to taste.

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Record #748: The Jimi Hendrix Experience – Electric Ladyland (1970)

/ Nathaniel FitzGerald

Whenever a new technology makes its way into music—such as autotune, synthesizers, samplers, or drum machines—it’s often accompanied by a chorus of naysayers saying things like, “you’d never see a REAL musician like Jimi Hendrix using that crap.”

They’re really betraying their own ignorance there, as Hendrix had absolutely no qualms about utilizing whatever new technology he could get his hands on. This is most demonstrated on the last album he made before his death, the massive double album Electric Ladyland. While the Experience had plenty of psychedelic elements on their two previous albums, Electric Ladlyand dives headlong into studio weirdness and compositional surrealness, offering an album that is as rewarding as it is imposing.

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Record #747: Jesu – Terminus (2020)

/ Nathaniel FitzGerald

Few members of the music scene are as prolific as Justin Broadrick. Since the first Jesu release in 2004, he has had more than twenty releases through that project, including a number of studio albums, EPs, splits, and collaborative albums.

Of those albums, I fell deeply in love with 2007’s Conqueror several years ago, but haven’t found anything else in his extensive catalogue that has captured me quite as tightly.

That is, until last year’s Terminus, which showcases his brand of sparkling bedroom doomgaze in an understated yet compelling way.

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Record #746: Jay-Z – The Black Album (2003)

/ Nathaniel FitzGerald

As a white Christian kid growing up in the suburbs, I was raised without much appreciation for mainstream hip hop. Sure, I would karaoke “Rapper’s Delight” as a joke and would stan some other old-school hip hop, but by and large, any time someone like Jay-Z came on MTV, I would flip the channel, turned off by the prevalence of profanity and barely-dressed backup dancers.

In the years that followed the release of The Black Album, though, it was impossible to avoid the plethora of mashups that flooded the internet. I was drawn in by the novelty of mixing these tracks with The Beatles, Weezer, or Radiohead—I even tried my hand at a Fugazi mashup.

But something happened that I didn’t expect: after putting these mashups on heavy rotation, I actually fell in love with the album in its original form, like some sort of musical Trojan Horse. Even my white-washed, purity culture background couldn’t ignore the fact that this was one of the most important and impressive hip hop albums of all time.

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Record #745: Jason Isbell & the 400 Unit – Reunions (2020)

/ Nathaniel FitzGerald

Country music gets a bad rap. Admittedly, much of the vitriol is deserved, especially in the sanitized, cookie-cutter blandification of the Nashville-churned pop country that has come to dominate the genre.

But even the most scathing and accurate criticisms of country music fall flat in the face of Jason Isbell.

When I was first introduced to Isbell, I heard someone call him “your favorite songwriter’s favorite songwriter.” His prowess was likened to legends like John Prine and Bob Dylan. Those are impossibly high standards, but his 2020 album Reunions somehow lives up to them.

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Record #744: Have a Nice Life – Deathconsciousness (2008)

/ Nathaniel FitzGerald

In the years since its release, I have often crossed paths with Deathconsciousness, the seminal debut record of goth/post-punk/shoegaze duo Have a Nice Life. At times, we’ve flirted. At others, I’ve tried to avoid eye contact. A few times, we sat down together and had a nearly incomprehensible conversation.

And yet, for all of its eldritch weirdness, there was something about this monolithic double album that has continued to call out to me. For a long time, the high prices of vinyl has kept me from exploring it any further, but when The Flenser announced another reissue (which came with a book!), I bought it almost out of impulse, unable to resist its alluring weirdness.

That impulse has paid off, as revisiting it again has proved it worthy of every ounce of its reputation.

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Record #743: Entropy – Liminal (2020)

/ Nathaniel FitzGerald

Last summer, in the midst of global pandemic, some friends and I started a remote band called Bares His Teeth. As often happens when you write music together, we started sharing a lot of music with one another. We shared music that inspired us, songs that we wanted to emulate, and just songs we loved that bore no educational value to our own songwriting but we wanted to share anyway.

But towards the end of the year, the band chat became obsessed with one release in particular: the album Liminal by the small German outfit Entropy. It was hard to find, but that didn’t stop three-fifths of us from ordering it.

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Record #742: Beck – Hyperspace (2019)

/ Nathaniel FitzGerald

Since scoring the megahit “Loser” nearly thirty years ago, Beck Hansen has established himself as one of the most inventive—and inconsistent—musicians in the mainstream.

His prolific career has run the gamut from Technicolor hip hop to cartoon funk to sparse singer-songwriter ballads to trippy electronica to psychedelic ring leader to fuzzy alt-rock (he wrote all of the Sex Bob-Omb songs in Scott Pilgrim vs. the World), grabbing elements from dub reggae, punk rock, jazz, and country music. The term “chameleon” is thrown around to a lot of artists, but Beck truly embodies that.

While he usually hits more than he misses, his extensive catalogue is not necessarily perfect. Identities are shed and revisited with varying success. But when he does it well, he really does it well. 

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Record #741: Alcest – Le Secret EP (2005/2011)

/ Nathaniel FitzGerald

Even legends have to start somewhere. Through years of bouncing around the European black metal scene, Neige was dissatisfied with the ability of the kvlt to properly express what he had to say. Between other projects, he spent his time crafting otherworldly overtures that transcended the narrow confines of traditional black metal. In 2005, he released a pair of tracks under the name Alcest, a name he had used for another project as a teenager.

But Le Secret, that first EP, sounded nothing like the scorched-earth, burnt-church trad-black of his previous band. In fact, it didn’t sound much like anything else that had been released up to that point. The 2011 rerelease, reissued upon the success of the incredible Écailles de Lune, features rerecorded versions of each track with more resources to fulfill his original vision. But even in the face of the clearer versions, this EP demonstrates that Neige’s idea of what he meant Alcest to be has been unchanged from the beginning.

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Record #740: Gorillaz – Gorillaz (2001)

/ Nathaniel FitzGerald

It was supposed to be a joke, right?

No one would start a band fronted by cartoon characters who fight robots and ghosts and expect to be taken seriously, right? Especially not when that person already has an incredibly successful band that blurs the lines between Britrock and punk?

They were just supposed to bring in a couple underground rappers for some fun features, write some jokey tracks, and call it a day. They certainly weren’t supposed to eventually bring together legendary artists like Lou Reed, The Clash, Bobby Womack, Grace Jones, and Snoop Dogg to create multiple masterpieces. 

That seemed to be the plan when Gorillaz released their debut record on the world. Have some laughs, release a couple novelty singles, and call it a day. No one expected them to become one of the most impressive projects in the landscape of modern pop music.

But looking back at Gorillaz from the other side of their now legendary catalogue, it’s clear that this understated LP was hiding a bit more than they let on.

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