Watch carefully, because in the next sentence, I’m going to make all of my punk credibility disappear. This is the only Clash record I know. I know, right? I tried listening to Sandanista, but what do you even DO with Sandanista? I tried listening to London Calling, but (whispers) I found it really boring.
But, when I stole my dad’s Combat Rock cassette and popped it into my car stereo, my world was turned upside down.
If the future is kind to Grizzly Bear, Veckatimest will be remembered alongside Pet Sounds and Abbey Road as one of the most perfect records of all time.
Even with as long as I’ve listened to Fugazi, I am almost completely unfamiliar with Red Medicine. In fact, the only thing I hear when I think of the album is the super-gained choppy intro and the chorus of opener Do You Like Me? Purchasing the vinyl (and cassette! Gotta love overstock on record companies’ websites) was an act intended to force me to spend time with the record. Well, that and to fill in the two gaps in my collection (Steady Diet of Nothing, I’m coming for you).
Across six albums and two EPs, Fugazi created some of the most fearlessly adventurous, boundless experimental post-hardcore ever released.
And even in the context of their full discography, End Hits is a strange beast. Continue reading
Every so often, a band comes around that is simply the best at what they do, and there’s nothing anyone can do to argue against it. They carry the unstoppable combination of immeasurable talent and fearless experimentalism that makes them legends in their own right and inspire countless others to follow in their footsteps. The Beatles were that kind of band. Radiohead still is (I’ll fight anyone who says King of Limbs wasn’t great). And friends, if you don’t already know, Fugazi was that kind of band. If you know nothing about Fugazi, just know that Fugazi was the Radiohead of punk rock.
If the 1s and 0s used to encode written text on the internet were limited resources, then those specifically allocated for writing about Can (the rock face of krautrock) would be in short supply.
Today, Rumours celebrates its thirty-sixth anniversary. And in those thirty-six years, it has been played and overplayed. Only in most cases, “overplayed” has a negative connotation.
As I mentioned earlier, Embryonic was the first Lips record I ever heard. Admittedly, it’s hardly the most conventional place to start with their expansive discography–far removed from Yoshimi’s space folk and The Soft Bulletin’s wide eyed optimism, and even further from the trippy drug punk from the earliest days.
Not everyone likes Explosions in the Sky, but no one who dislikes them does so because they don’t make beautiful music.
Simplified restatement: Explosions in the Sky makes beautiful music and no denies this.
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Of all of the DCFC-disparaging hipsters I know (which I have become on their latest release), I don’t think I’ve heard any of them say a word about Transatlanticism.
That’s probably as much because the record is as close to perfect as any emo-leaning indie band has gotten as it is because every single one of them owned this record when they were in high school and still secretly love it. Continue reading