alt rock

Record #978: Fleshwater – We’re Not Here to be Loved (2022)

/ Nathaniel FitzGerald

Over the years, an awful lot of digital ink has been spilled debating the question of whether or not Deftones are numetal. For a while, it seemed that the consensus was “No, they’re not numetal because they are good.” However, since Covid broke, it seems that there has been a group of young bands offering a rebuttal: “Yes, Deftones is numetal, and that is what makes them good.”

One of these acts is Fleshwater, featuring three members of metalcore outfit vein.fm, themselves no strangers to numetal adjacency (their newest record even has a turntablist). And while their walls of fuzzy guitars and laid back vocals have definite influences in shoegaze and space rock, their riffs are rife with both the heaviness and grooviness that dominated the JNCOs clad sounds of the turn of the millennium.

And, uh, it kinda rules?

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Record #977: Blanket – Ceremonia (2024)

/ Nathaniel FitzGerald

Where do you go after love at first sight? The first time I listened to Blanket’s Modern Escapism, I was head over heels. I ordered a vinyl copy before I had even finished the second track, and I listened to it on repeat for weeks.

So when I saw news of the follow up, I rushed to preorder it. But after the first couple singles, I started to hesitate. They were poppier and more straightforward, with little remnant of the crushing heaviness that drew me in the first place. In fact, I even canceled my preorder at one point, only to re-preorder it at the next single.

And boy, am I glad I did. While it certainly has a directness and pop sensibility that contrasts with Modern Escapism, the record offers a holistic look at the wide expanse of 90s alt rock filtered through modern shoegaze.

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Record #922: Alanis Morissette – Jagged Little Pill (1995)

/ Nathaniel FitzGerald

In which a Canadian teenybopper pop star turns into an eldritch demigod.

It’s always funny to me when the Rock and Roll Boys’ Club reacts to the rise of some young female rocker with upturned noses (see: Avril Lavigne, Olivia Rodrigo, Michelle Branch, Billie Eilish, etc) when one of the greatest rock albums of all time was released by the quintessential rock ingénue.  For as much as rock music postures itself as a man’s world, in 1995 Alanis Morissette (then twenty-one) laced up her Doc Martins and went toe-to-toe with the entire alt-rock landscape.

Nearly thirty years later, Jagged Little Pill remains as fierce and apocalyptic as ever. It’s a breakup album in the form of a military strike, offering proof to the old proverb that Hell hath no fury quite like this.

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Record #910: The Cure – The Cure (2004)

/ Nathaniel FitzGerald

Here’s the big wrinkle in my personal journey as a Cure fan. I’ve spent several of the last posts talking about how I’d mostly ignored the legendary group until recently, barring a few attempts to familiarize myself with their more celebrated records.

Except that I’ve owned a CD copy of their self-titled record since the mid 2000s. At one point, I even owned the maxi CD single for “alt.end,” which includes the excellent B-side “Why Can’t I Be Me?”

As many people have pointed out, though, this album is maybe the least representative thing they’ve put out, sticking out like a raucous sore thumb in their decidedly less noisy catalog, which makes the decision to christen it with their own name curious. But buried beneath the aggressive performances and in-your-face production is a collection of songs that showcase everything that makes the Cure the Cure.

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Record #906: The Cure – Bloodflowers (2000)

/ Nathaniel FitzGerald / 1 Comment

Let me start by explaining that my recent Cure obsession isn’t totally aimless: my podcast cohost and I decided to take an episode to do a deep dive through the legendary Goths’ discography—a daunting task for anyone, but especially for someone who had largely ignored their legacy for most of their life (namely, me).

While I’d already spent a decent amount of time with some of their most celebrated releases, I set off to familiarize myself with everything I was unfamiliar with. I’ve spent the last couple weeks binging their albums, reading Wikipedia and album reviews like I was cramming for college finals, and filling in the gaps in my Cure collection.

One thing that I learned during this time is that usually, the general consensus about each Cure album is mostly trustworthy. If an album is good, everyone says it’s good. If it’s bad, everyone says it’s bad.

But there is one blindingly glaring exception to that rule: 2000s Bloodflowers, a brilliant and understated record that is almost universally maligned. And while I’ll admit that its artwork does it no favors, this is one case where the collective music historian consciousness is very mistaken.

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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.

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Record #877: Incubus – A Crow Left of the Murder (2004)

/ Nathaniel FitzGerald

I don’t remember the events that led to me acquiring this CD as a seventeen year old. I don’t know if there was a music video I saw or a friend who grabbed me by the lapels and forced me to listen to it. Maybe I just saw the psychedelic album art and a band name I recognized and bought it blind.

In either case, this album of mystical, vaguely funky alt-rock managed to capture my attention when I was up to my ears with bands like Thrice, Thursday, Sunny Day Real Estate, and Fugazi. And now, eighteen years later, it still holds up.

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Record #786: Black Swift – Desert Rain (2019)

/ Nathaniel FitzGerald

The bigger the world gets, the smaller it seems. Take for instance, German alt-rockers Black Swift. I was first introduced to them when my band opened for them on a show of one of their American tours, only to find that the lead singer, Sally Grayson, grew up a short drive away from my hometown.

Then, last week, she embarked on a solo tour that stopped in my living room (alongside ex-Sixpence None the Richer/Velour 100 alum Tess Wiley). It was there, stripped away from the fuzzy guitars and leather jacket drums, that the power of her voice and songwriting became inescapable.

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