…while doing a number of things.

Artist: Destroyer
Album: Destroyer’s Rubies
Format: 12″

I smiled at the dickhead riff opening Destroyer’s Rubies. And I smiled throughout the entire record. Such bold statements and melody play would make shitting your pants after an all-night heroin binge an enjoyable experience.

Dan Bejar reaches into the weirdest places and brings out the last thing we would expect from them. I thought of the premiere of the electric Bob Dylan except that it was a wounded David Bowie backed by the echelon of college musicians from Nevada State.

Style: Blues from the year 2047

Score: A

Goods: The questions that it asks. And then the answers that it later gives.

Bads: If I was alone with Dan Bejar, I do not know what he would do.

…for the first time alone.

Artist: SUNN O)))

Album: BLACK ONE

Format: CD

There is nothing here except complete blackness. Slow, terrifying dark presence filling your house with horror.

Style: Utterdespaircore
Score: B

Goods: I thought, at one point, that it was communicating with my furniture.

Bads: The feeling that I needed to be doing something else.

…recently because i’ve been needing a reason to feel that this is an important time in history to be living in.

Artist: The Knife
Album: Silent Shout
Format: 12″

The Knife. A brother sister duo out of the barren cold. Simplistic, dark electronic that only sounds good coupled with the purr of a motor. A record to put on when everything else has, probably, fallen apart.

Images invoke terrible nightmares, unwanted situations, and fog machines that leave you scrambling for the exit. Uncomfortable to the point of addiction. Familiar sounds rearranged to the point of having a fresh scent to it. The first few listens filling your mind with more questions than notes.

That’s when you realize what an important record you are listening to.

This is music that is dangerous. Music with the potential to give you a hangover.

Imagine a Casio becoming possessed and spilling unholy ditties in the night. Or your drunk uncle applying a silly, frightening soundtrack to your own slaying.

Good god, I want to take it off but I can’t.

Style: Minimalist Techno-Pop
Score: A-

Goods: The rare “barren-cold” feeling of the first listen.

Bads: I can’t help but think that this is the Pet Shop Boys drunk and scary.

…recently because I’m on vacation. And I’ve locked myself in.

Artist: The Walkmen

Album: A Hundred Miles Away

Format: 12″

I realized a long time ago that the Walkmen’s music was full of despair, emptiness, and sad revelry.

This is their first installment in complete apathy.

Reckless abandon fill the tracks, appropriately titled Emma, Get Me a Lemon, Don’t Get Me Down (Come On Over Here), and Another One Goes By. Simple, early-rhythmic drumming/percussion exudes a marching quality. Thumping with a purpose. Percussive waves piercing the pores, and only the pores. All 1600 of them.

The voice loose in an anarchic netherworld. Two guitars trying to stay alive until the end. Sometimes three. Organ and bass living together in sin.

This is truly what America has come to.

I can only think of history in a large, for real circle. They’ve used instruments and talent to produce something otherworldly. An achievement that makes you rethink everything else you can remember hearing.

It’s sunny outside and Always After You comes on and you remember why you started drinking alone in the first place.

A hooked piece of cardboard made for a doorknob that simply read “Leave Me Alone” inserted in the album sleeve would have made it perfect.

Style: New Age of Rock N’ Roll
Score: A

Goods: Complete abandon of what a listenable, enjoyable rock record should be.
Bads: They’re not playing live in my living room right now.