…and became entangled in their rock tentacles.

Artist: Sunn O))) and Boris
Album: Altar
Format: 3xLP

Take an angry, nihilistic cat and place it in a pillowcase. Throw it in a small cage housing a lion that hasn’t eaten for a week. Watch, and listen, and be dumbfounded at the sounds. When the calamity settles roll around in the sounds of chewing and satisfaction. From the perspective of the meal, it is a dark day, indeed. From the predator, a goal achieved. Yes, this album is beautiful and dark. Fucking black.

Artist: Nirvana
Album: In Utero
Format: LP

Yes, the same one. It is always nice to revisit places from the annals of memory. Where were you when blasting “Serve the Servants” on shitty headphones? When you rolled your eyes at the ludicrous closer “All Apologies”? Go back to it and remember why it was so good the first time. Albini’s tinny production doesn’t hurt, either.

Artist: Thrones
Album: Day Late, Dollar Short
Format: 2xLP

Joe Preston has climbed the creepy ladder to the top rung. This collection of splits/7″s/unreleased material threatens to distort the mind into relearning everything you thought you knew about music. It’s anarchic, fumbling madness that, by the end, manages to straighten itself out enough the listen to it again. It is worth it just for the cover of the Who’s “A Quick One…”

Artist: Death Breath
Album: Let it Stink
Format: MP3

As the zombie Frankenstein suggests, this is filthy death metal. With song titles like “Giving Head to the Dead”, “Maimed and Slaughtered”, and “Twisted in Distaste” you know you’re in for a pizza party like no other. Lo-fi enough to remain raw but clean enough to be listenable, Let it Stink will surely bring a smile to your vomiting mouth.

…and became relieved when I realized that I hadn’t, actually, missed out on an important time in music history.*

Artist: Spoon
Album: Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga
Format: LP

The cleanest people are the dirtiest. Priests with their little boys. Young, horny teachers and their students. Songwriters living on the fray of acceptable that get quick exposure, falter, and then rebound with such a velocity that one questions doubts that were only a few months old.

Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga?

“He smells like the inside of closets upstairs/The kind where nobody goes”.

Spoon needed soul. 1998’s A Series of Sneaks and 2001’s Girls Can Tell reeked of it. When 2002’s Kill the Moonlight emerged, Spoon took off the musty coat and donned a direction that focused equally on songwriting and studio production, whereas before the weight leaned more towards memorable hooks. 2005’s Gimme Fiction had its lickable, sweet sections but seemed, even after such a long history, parallel to a sophomore slump.

Yep. Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga.

“You got no fear of the underdog/That’s why you will not survive”.

Enjoy the fame, relish the freebies. You ARE the other half now. Swim in it.

Openness: the last studio frontier for Spoon. Everything had its place in the mix…piano here. Bells/drum fill/whistle there. This is the album that they found space. Breathing room. The songs are back. Thank goddamn they have room to show you what is lying underneath. Hear it? Of course you can. It comes between the banisters of drums/vocals/bass/percussion/organ/piano.

You’ve heard it before.

It’s soul.

It’s sexy. But legal.

Breathe deep the bon-fire-warmth of fresh energy. Breathe deep the retreat back to the time where all you could say was, “Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga”.

Genre: Rock

Score: A

Goods: Understanding of where they came from and why they’re there.

Bads: You really should’ve seen them last time they were in town.

*This album is just a piece of the pizza pie that is important music right now. This is not the pinnacle, nor the valley.