Tuesday, September 3, 2019

We Will Run



Walk down these dirty streets and they all look the fuckin' same.

So we will run to the end of this world  (holding hands)
We will rise above death (to see life for what it is)
All the lunatics are in control of the asylum
STFU we'll walk right by them they're the ones who never gave a damn

Everytime I look in your eyes
I see sad reflections of the dreams that you hide
You keep them guarded from a world they can't live in
And if I'm lost, maybe you will get lost too
And then we'll be lost together until we find some place new
We'll build a world in our own image




Burn out my eyes
I don't want to see
The things that you have, are not what I need
Burn a candle for me
My hope, my disease consumes your greed



Die, death waits over me
Takes my every need
My everything, you can take away
You can't handle me
You can't penetrate
Shot through your greed









Friday, August 30, 2019

Descending Again Under The Waves Of Incantation




   After hearing the album for the first time, I felt like I had just undergone a death trance. That is, I didn't move while plastered to the couch throughout the entire running length. After it was over and I let it all soak in, I decided to just listen to the song Descending again.  That's what's playing right now while I type this next iteration sinking into the undertow of Tool's seventh album, Fear Inoculum.

   Sound the dread Alarm through our primal body. While Tool sculpt a sonic terrain that's more or less a fusion between their iconic studio debut Undertow and 2001's forward thinking Lateralus, it leaves me pondering. That more or less places Aenima and 10,000 Days in their own strange little territories. In certain ways all their albums stylistically blend into one another. If, at over the nine minute mark in the song Descending, you aren't wallowing in the groovy synth tones and iterational guitar and drum jamming, then I don't know what to say, except apparently this sort of thing isn't for you. Well then. Away do go.

   Room for me leave, please. Adam is crushing it on this album, stitching and weaving together, with his percussive and painterly band mates Danny and Justin, a sonic terrain that recalls and reflects upon where they've all been as a band and where they're still exploring forward full tilt.   WTF was that chocolate chip trip? It's a spelled out hex played out on sticks, is what it is. And 7empest is a flat out tip of the hat to those Undertow fans among us, giving Justin the opportunity to deliver his homage to Paul and the Sylvia Massy production style they emerged onto the scene with, sort of blended with the pyrotechnical mathematical fusion of Lateralus.

   That first sound we hear on the album, the weird struck tone like a shrinking reflected puddle in a piece of metal diminishing, its watery shimmery echo evokes a certain expectation in the listener. We are about to embark on quite a sonic journey. Immunity, long overdue. Contagion, I exhale you. These are more than simple, powerful lyrics. They are part and parcel of the incantatory ritual this album dovetails into with immaculate grace. Inoculated, bless this immunity. Inculcated, the allegorical elegy gets woven. I think it bespeaks of an individual's journey progressing along our evolutionary pathway. The seventh iteration of the developing spiral begins flowering into the octagonal. Hence Alex Grey's arachnohominid skeleton depicted on the front and back covers of the CD booklet. I take it more as a symbol of humanity's movement. The blurring produces the extra arms, after Shiva and other mythological chimeras. I figure this may be attributable to the composite totality of humanity. Individuals overlaid in tandem produce the octohedral capacity for induction.

   The song Pneuma gets right to the vital spirit and creative force of the album. Remember. We are born of one breath, one word. We are all one spark, Sun becoming. Wake up now, child. And rock.
Bound to this flesh, this guise, this mask, this dream, wake up, remember, we are born of one breath, one word, we are all one spark, Sun becoming. At the six and a half minute mark, the song decays into instrumentality, widening open the spaces in between the sounds to reveal a seething vacuum of interplaying harmonics fusing into an underlying rhythm the tablas and bass and synthesizer begin tracing out, and we're off once again on a deeper iteration of the theme, sinking even farther into the undercurrent yet, until we realize this is a much deeper river than we'd anticipated. We're swimming easy now in dark open waters beneath our oceanic mind. Down here at these depths anything may arise, lurking from the dark. Danny's cymbal crashes strengthened by Adam's suddenly picking up the slack with some crunchy guitar riffage having naturally emerged from the dynamics again, Pneuma. Eyes full of wonder. The motifs resolve themselves in crashing grandeur. The players give each other plenty of time to fill in their respective blanks.

   Each song on this album gives the listener plenty of time for devotion. The opening guitar strumming of Invincible displays some of Adam's most intricate and best sounding playing yet. He's taking his time focusing on crafting these intricate stenciled out guitar signatures. Long in tooth and soul, longing for another wind, it seems as if the fates have granted this request.  Warrior struggling to remain consequential. If these words don't mean anything to you they are not supposed to. But here I am. Beating chest and drums. Beating tired bones again. Age old battle, mine. Weapon out and belly in. Tales told of battles won, of things we've done. Caligula would grin. Well doesn't that just say it all, my lost Grub brother(s). Beating tired bones, tripping through remember when. Once invincible, now the armor's wearing thin. Heavy shield down. Some songs were just written that speak directly to your experience. It just so happens this entire band's lyrical legacy echoes my own autobiography, more or less. I can't help this coincidence, but I happen to suspect it's universal. Otherwise, why would I take it so personal? At least to my ears, the devoted gents in this band have not let me down. That's all that really matters when you get right down to it. And if we all get right down to it, then who am I to object? We're all invited to join this party. Come drink from this water for its depths are infinite. At the seven minute and fifty-two second mark, the song descends into spacey instrumentalism and finally begins, and then Maynard returns with a phantom tinged echo to his vocals as he sings about feeling the sting of time bearing down. It's not really a young man's thing, I suppose. These are the cadences of older, weathered warriors. Its the battle march of the more worn tribes who won't put their weapons down, not because they're on the verge of attack but because those swords are fused to their hands by now. So they wield them sonically in a tapestry of vengeful lamentation and determination to make it to the finish line.

   And make it there they do, the wavering finish line turns out to be the undulating and gently curved water's edge of the incoming surf from the sea. The sound of the waves crashing in on the sand accompanies our descending under the waves with this band once again. If we're willing to wear the necessary aquanaut's gear in a face sealed mask and breathe pure oxygen through a tube for an extended period of time, we're welcome along for this exploratory ride.  This madness of our own making. These odes we are taking to the quick are ours to receive if we're open to them. Drifting through this boundlessness.  Sometime in the middle of my second listen I was inoculated. Maybe it's because I'm wearing headphones.  Maybe it's because I'm actually listening to the music. Paying attention until the end of each track. I've found that for every second captured in this recording, it's necessary to provide an equal duration of time paying attention to it. In this way the rewards are merited.

   Jonesy really lets it all out, that solo in Descending is outstanding. They deliver a torrential outpouring of emotional content with this album. Every track nimbly covers the elemental time signatures and syncopation evoking the spirit channeled by the band since the beginning. I suppose if this gets old for you then you really never liked it that much in the first place. Because what I'm listening to right now is the glorious sound of what each and every one of us devoted to the band years ago want to hear right about now. I don't know about you I'm only speaking for myself here. This is my review.  Thorny's a happy camper with these elegies blowing through his ears.

   Hallelujah, the day has arrived. August 30 during the Year of the Replicant has vaccinated us all against the falsely perpetuated virus of fear proliferating across the internet and social utility networks like Facebook and Twitter and infecting a staggering percentage of the populace. Listening to this album melts away all of that to reveal the reality of our own personal struggle with freedom. The more I listen the wider my eyes open in wonder at what I'm hearing, here and now at this particular juncture of the unfolding universe.  I am alive and breathing in this space and time. I won't have my voice culled by the disembodied machine. I won't be added to the hitlist of your false accusations based on your fuzzy psychopathic misperceptions. In the court of public opinion we are already condemned. Fight back tooth and nail and link arm in arm with friend. Otherwise we'll all be drowned in the end. Under the growing surging tide of blank mirrored faces lined up with more and more accusations. We are all innocent while nothing remains proven. Better pack your bags and get movin'. Keep up with the rhythm of the flow. It's in every beat and pulse in this undertow. It's part of what this album's all about. Now hear me from my desktop as I shout.

   I'm surprised how much time the band took to craft this masterpiece. I don't mean to suggest I'm astonished at the length of the interval. Rather, I'm impressed that they actually worked at it long enough to yield such exquisite results in every way conceivable.  I'm not a Christ posing acolyte mindlessly worshiping at the stained window altar of Tool, mind you. I'm just a rocker who digs a good tune.  I'm just a  poet who howls at the moon.  I love heavy music and ambient too. What the fuck else do you expect me to do.  Go listen to your noise, boys.  Don't you dare point that shit at me. This music is not for you. It's something personal I like to do. Sounds like I'll be privately jamming to this album for a mighty long time. The  tickets for the tour in support of this album were just announced but they better not have gone on sale. I'm going to have to acquire one for myself.  The lads are back on the aural attack at last. Those tix are going to sell fast. I heard they go on sale September sixth. Meanwhile plenty of ads are scalping them now, it seems. If I score this ticket it'll be the eleventh time of my dreams seeing Tool live. The last time I think was w/Isis in 2005.

   The extended drum solo jamathon that is Chocolate Chip Trip is simply a gift from Danny to his legion of fans. Nevermind the teeming sea of people who are mainly into the band.  There are so many angles and perspectives and reasons to soak up or otherwise immerse yourself into this music. The seventh and final track, 7empest, becomes the apotheosis of what the band represents. Not a bad way to spend seventy-nine minutes. Maynard sounds great. They're all in tip-top shape. By far ten stars. Now get back to your plugged-in, programmed life. May your existence remain without strife. And may your signal get enough bars. And listen to Gary Numan's Cars.







Wednesday, August 7, 2019

the silent ash tip drops

can't even summon the words
so i put on BPB mix tape volume 1

Now it's doing a trick 



    push  PLAY  and just drift


Gimme yr goddamn Wild berry Lifesaver Gummies

This is a great collexion of songs
put tugether by the master and
everyone himself


   On   to the next   



    John Shirley sent me his latest album with the Screaming Geezers .
It's really top-notch rock'n'roll, fully driven and furious, I'm stunned.
1st track Cell Phone Zombies is great, the whole album just delivers
one killer track after another, there's newer stuff like Ten Strippers at
My Funeral, but the band also covers older material like Johnny Paranoid
and Our Love is Like a Death Camp.   There's a gritty version of
Mountain of Skullz, a rousing rendition of Alice Cooper's Under My Wheels,
and a new song that really got to me, Crushed Under a Cross.
This is relentless, punk fury as if the Stooges were being led by
well you guessed it--the man himself--John Shirley.



Check out the song Strychnine right here on SoundCloud.
While you there just keep listening to all the John Shirley songs.
Far as I'm concerned he's one of my favorite rockers ever.
I mean all you gotta do is listen to him covering TV Eye.
And him and his band's scorching cover of White Light.
 Yeah, he's more than Iggy, Lou, and Alice rolled into one.
He's the Dark Duke of the Underground's #1 Son.


And Dax Riggs is the prince, of course. 
I wish he'd release another album.
It's been nine years since he said
goodnight to the world...oh



            I    see 







Thursday, July 4, 2019

Happy Day of Autonomy

  



The owls have been talkin' to me. But I'm sworn to secrecy. I woke up in a burned out basement. 
Sleepin' with metal hands in a spirit ditch.   It's the fourth of July in the Year of the Replicant. I've been listening to raw punk demos from Age of Desire along with my 1950s Punk & Rockabilly 4-disc set Rockin' Bones from Rhino.  A ton of killer rockin' tunes from this fresh era of repressed individuals reacting the best way they know how to, by rocking in sheer defiance of their straitlaced times. Ronnie Dawson, Billy Eldridge, Gene Vincent, Larry Dowd, Sonny Fisher, Roy Orbison, Elvis Presley, Jesse James, Gene Summers, Johnny Burnette, Peanuts Wilson, Kip Tyler, Tom Tall, Carl Perkins, Buddy Holly, Wanda Jackson, John & Jackie, the list goes on and on.

   


My friend Vinnie back east has this killer underground band going by AD (for Age of Desire) in the cryptic realm of script, where we meet more than halfway here when you come to think about it enough. He sent me three demos they'd just recorded and they sound great, just straight up jamming on the spot no hold barred like it ought to be. 
Same thing could be said for Old Fezziwig, another underground staple in Philly and its splatterpunked surrounds.  Right now I'm kicking it to Sparklehorse's debut  album   Vivadixiesubmarinetransmissionplot. Hammering the cramps, oh yeah. Great music for a self reflective suicide tinged 4th of July.  You are the most beautiful widow in town. 



As the sun burned down the west, there's one thing we still got, there's one last dance in this parking lot, oh yeah I gotta heart of darkness.  When she woke up in to a fire and the flames kept dancin' higher, Satan would laugh at his screams, then she woke up from her dreams, oh yeah I, I got a heart of darkness.  ~ Mark Linkous  RIP   





 Songs like Someday I Will Treat You Good are just a joyful liberation for me. Really brings me back to a long lost era when me and my best friend would listen to glittering jangle rock together out under the stars at midnight, except Sparklehorse fills in a gap that was never present back then and there but is sure as hell ever widening here and now.


Keep dreaming on as we all unwind along this road together. Forget about what we're going to do someday and just do it now. No dream we can imagine lies beyond the reach of our finger tips.  That's just the nature of the whole beast, the entire trip and caboodle.  We're all caught up in an evolving paradigm shifting from one interlaced combination of elements to the next. We've been here the whole time now we're just waiting for the next refrain to rhyme. When it jumps off course we tend to ignore we were listening to a song and get it wrong. All these twisted circumstances are just the rollicking sound track to our lives. 

Take the very stars out there beyond the sky for example. They're analogous to the shadow of an extension of an idea, the idea being ourselves, of course. We can't normally see it that way of course because our natural born inclination toward split mind objectification gets in the way from our hearing the subtle beauty of the forest growing around us for the trees. In this interlaced network of living post-protoplasmic biology enraptured by the mycelium fortified kingdom of plants we dare to stand apart from each other while dreaming together our lives on this insulated planet suspended in outer space. 


Whatever you think about what's going on around you today in this extremely twisted Year of the Replicant, try not to get all too caught up in very slowly wound-up silky strands of the world wide web pulling you into its comfy cocoon.  You can see where this is leading, I hope. Of course the arachnid in question must be the AI we've dwelled upon long enough to fear. 


Arachnid Interface

That's what 'AI' really stands for.  Arachnid being a good euphemism for what it really is. Something to strike fear into the heart of all human beings. So the real question becomes once again, "which pill will you take? The clear one--which will render you comfortably numb enough to avoid knowing the horrific truth--or the one as black as ink--which will lead you to think down the ever reducible pathway of logic, knowledge, and ultimate wisdom?  You must choose, but choose wisely.  Declare your independence from others and think for yourself. This has been a random, impromptu entry in my Crossover Vinyl blog for July 4th. 










Saturday, April 20, 2019

IN TEN SECTIONS

It's taken me a while to realize my record collection is divided into ten separate sections. 
What follows is a more comprehensive overview of what my collection looks like. 


   


1.  A ~ Z  LPs
This embodies the majority of my collection, about five hundred LPs beginning with AC/DC (Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap) and ending with Frank Zappa (Sheik Yerbouti). The largest sections feature Bonnie 'Prince' Billy, David Bowie, Bob Dylan, Brian Eno, Future Islands, Hank III, Korn, Led Zeppelin, Mono, Opeth, Pink Floyd and Rush.  All the Mars Volta albums are in there, of course. Oh and there's three Dredg albums and a few Coheed & Cambria albums, including a signed In Keeping Secrets. Speaking of signed albums I've also got some signed records from The Supersuckers, Eddie Spaghetti, Dax Riggs, Ares Kingdom, Order From Chaos, Arsis, The Devil Makes Three, Bonnie 'Prince' Billy, Faun Fables, Pelican, and Mono; the last two I've seen play in small clubs half a dozen times each, and they remain two of my favorite live bands, ever. (My favorites being Pink Floyd and King Crimson.) I've got some cool Jimi Hendrix albums (People, Hell, and Angels as well as his complete 3LP Woodstock performance) and a lot of killer Record Store Day scores (such as the Mad Season 2LP with bonus tracks) and stuff like The Shins and Smashing Pumpkins, Pearl Jam, Nine Inch Nails, Tool, but I've also still got some of my older records left over from high school days, like the Buzzcocks, the Pretenders, Stevie Ray Vaughn, Joe Perry Project, and Aerosmith Get Your Wings (the first record I ever owned). I've got Black Sabbath's Born Again (except back in high school I had the album on cassette, and used to blast it in my car with the 40 watt amplifier at top volume, let me tell you the song Trashed makes for good driving music) I scored the original pressing at Graywhale several years ago. I bought Neil Young & Crazy Horse's 2012 album Psychedelic Pill, and it remains one of the best albums in my collection.  In any case there are a ton more albums in this section to keep me going for quite some time.  So let's dig into it, shall we? Haha fake-out; we're skimmin' this for now and moving on to my second category.  



 


2. Soundtracks & Classical
I have about seventy records in this category.  Stand outs include the red die hard Bladerunner original Vangelis soundtrack released a few years ago, Conan, Robocop, Alien, The Emerald Forest, The Dark Crystal (clear vinyl), Twin Peaks The Return, The Hateful 8.
For classical my favorites are Von Karajan conducting Tchaikovsky's 6th Symphony and a Beethoven Sonatas record. I'm much more into the soundtracks than I am the classical. I've got an old original pressing of the Plan 9 From Outer Space soundtrack. I've got the reissues of Phantasm, Salem's Lot, and Shogun Assassin. Oh yeah and there's Thomas Dolby's film score to Ken Russell's Gothic, Return of the Living Dead, and now I've got the Trent Reznor + Atticus Ross remix of the Halloween theme by John Carpenter on pumpkin orange vinyl. It's a 12" single that was recalled and 'deleted' due to copyright infringements or something.
I don't know.  It sounds badass.  I've got the Legend soundtrack, I love the Tangerine Dream sequences the most. One of my favorite soundtracks is the one composed for El Topo, by Alejandro Jodorowsky.  I've also got the soundtrack to Jodorowsky's Dune.  These are really cool albums to listen to.  But they're only the gateway to a much larger world of instrumental and post-rock music.  Which leads me to the third category in my record collection. 






3. Instrumental & Post Rock 
I've a box alphabetized from A ~ Z featuring records without the human voice included as an instrument, just people playing music as it suits their mood.  It starts with William Ackerman's Passage and ends with Zombi's Surface To Air EP.  In between I liberally sprinkled a slew of Eno ambient records along with some Behind The Shadow Drops, Godspeed You!Black Emperor, Jean Michelle Jarre, Mogwai, Synergy, Kraftwerk, Mono, Penguin Cafe Orchestra, Pelican, and most of Xander Harris's catalogue. You'll find the Dirty Three right after John Carpenter, as well as William Basinski and Harold Budd.  I've got one Explosions In The Sky record, The Earth Is Not A Cold Dead Place. 




4. Rap & Hip Hop
I've got somewhere around 40 hip hop records, beginning with a Beck remix album (Guerolito) and going through The Best of Death Row Records, several Ice Cube records, Ice-T, Method Man, Snoop Dogg, Son Doobie, Warren G., NASA, Non Phixion, Rakim, Soul Assassins, and ending with a Tom Waits album I couldn't resist including in the pile, Real Gone.  That album's straight up hip hop. I was going to throw in Lou Reed's Mistrial, with his song The Original Wrapper, but I realize that's going too far. I'm not about to throw my Blondie album in or the Grateful Dead either, and the same thing goes for Bob Dylan. 



 

        

5. Punk 
There's a distinct line separating this genre from the rest, as all-inclusive as its original spirit remains. I have about forty of these records, starting with half a dozen albums from The Accused, then going through a couple of Bad Brains, two Buzzcocks, three Cancerslug records, Crime's Exalted Masters, DBC, Dead Kennedys (Plastic Surgery Disasters reissue), and on through Dead Milkmen, Devo, Distillers, D.R.I., -skip, skip-Nina Hagen, Iggy & the Stooges original Raw Power pressing, a nice slab of Iggy albums including a rare all acoustic outtakes from the Brick by Brick sessions that I purchased long ago at Nuggets in Kenmore Sq., Boston; -skip- (the) Melvins, Misfits, Nausea, Pearl Jam, Plasmatics, the Ramones, Sex Pistols, TSOL, Violent Femmes, and so on down the line. (There's the Repo Man soundtrack and Return of the Living Dead soundtrack in there, too, and a few old nearly worn out X records --Wild Gift, Under the Big Black Sun, More Fun In The New World, and that 4th of July more commercial sounding album.) What I really need are some Cramps records and some B-52s.  I've got three Siouxsie & the Banshee records. I do have Rudimentary Peni Death Church. Let's face it, there's a ton of artists any one of us would plunk into this category without hesitation. Southern Death Cult which eventually became the Cult are pretty punk to me but so are The Fields of the Nephilim which morphed into the Nephilim, a pretty heavy industrial outfit. Speaking of which, I'd also assign Skinny Puppy to this category in a heartbeat, and Gary Numan. (But I didn't: those are in the first section, A ~ Z LPs.) When thinking in this vein, the connective tissue leading from one to the other is the original wave of post-punk. Johnny Strike just released Naked Beast before he died last year at the age of 70, rest in peace Johnny. I ordered mine just in the nick of time, there probably aren't a lot of copies pressed. One of my favorite punk records is the LA IN compilation of Bay Area punk bands, designed to resemble the A L I E N movie that year, 1979, the final year before the 80s moved in and took over completely. I'm a real child of the seventies, tbh, and most of the time am caught thinking it produced the best music of all the decades, ending with an abrupt post-punk snarl from the amps. But I always get carried away like that. I know better, now. I realize that the best decades of music are always eternally perpetually the present one in which we're so damn lucky to be stuck. I don't have any Billy Idol albums anymore, but I do still have my Generation X. I don't have any Endless Struggle but I do have an All Systems Fail.  I've got an old Alarm record and a Jason & the Scorchers one too. Sure, you know, categorizing all this music seems pointless, but it's not. We've got to stick to our base values, I mean even if they're fluid and adaptable to change, there yet remains certain fixed ideas around which we've molded our behavior as a society and define ourselves as being unique and separate from the rest of us within it. Look, all I'm saying is, it's fun to categorize every once in awhile. One day I became curious, "I wonder how many of my records are punk rock?" It was fun throwin' them together. There are no Pearl Jam albums in my punk collection.  They are filed in the first category, A ~ Z LPs.  






6. Recent Releases!
Usually about fifty odd albums rotating through this pile.  I've got them propped up in the record display holder my wife got me for Xmas, last year. I usually alphabetize them, but right now Lou Reed's RSD reissue of Ecstasy stands tall at the front, my having been unable to stop spinning all four sides of this overlooked late classic from our pale lingering New York ghost. It's been five years since you shed your mortal coil, Lou, but your spirit remains settling over us still like slow motion bath steam from our latent dreams. I love absorbing the echoes of your still shedding spirit from listening to old records you made that I hadn't spent any time with. The other one that comes to mind is Set The Twilight Reeling, I should have just bought it when it came out, I remember holding the record in my hand at Bull Moose in Portland, Maine, and feeling like I wasn't into it just then, and set it back in the rack. At least today I remain grateful I still have some Lou Reed to look forward to. I feel blessed that I was able to get a copy of Lulu a few years ago while they were more readily available. I think it's an overlooked masterwork as well, and even time ain't tellin'. It's something we have to find out for ourselves, if we have the guts to lay ourselves bare to receive it, just like you were when you delivered it.  I usually only want to go back four years in this group--in this case, going back to 2015.   But some albums, being both recent acquisitions as well as latter-era albums in the careers of legends (Lou Reed and Metallica, for example) might prove exceptional enough to be included here. Anything in the Twenty-teens, certainly.   It's too easy for my most recent records to get buried in the bulk, fated to be overlooked, so I've got this section stocked with only my latest records. It gives me time to focus on them and listen to them sufficiently.  This section also serves as the queue for records that I want to listen to next, so technically any album from my collection could end up in this section.  There's always a handful of those in there, up front, ready to be rocked. 



7. kvlt 
I have nearly a hundred of these, beginning with both Acid Bath albums, Ares Kingdom, Arsis (got the guys to sign it at Burt's Tiki lounge at a technical metal fest headlined by Necrophagist (Canada's Neuraxis was there I remember), Bathory, Burzum, and on through a delirious compendium of blackened ichor a-swell with sinister intonations and reverberating with darkness and suppurating evil. A slab of fetid, offensive human ordure in the guise of noise as music. Truly the most extreme levels of sonic dysfunction to have contaminated souls for the last three and a half decades rendered into blackened vinyl grooves for our listening pleasure. A few early Celtic Frost records (an original of Morbid Tales, To Mega Therion, and Into the Pandemonium). A couple of Coffins albums, they are a sick Japanese doom band. You will find my own friends in Gravecode Nebula pressed into one of the heaviest albums ever recorded, Sempiternal Void, in there. I've got Evoken's 1997 album A Caress of the Void.  But Gravecode Nebula is some heavy epic outer space metal from beyond black hole dimensions, it's an unrelenting voyage into the heart of oblivion, straight up blackened doom metal.  I have a signed LP of Stillbirth Machine by Order From Chaos. That's because I met Chuck and the guys at the first Embrace The Hate fest, at the Black Castle in Watts many years ago. I ended up so deep into that scene that I'm still friends with everyone in it, or should I say everyone who's survived it. I've got Ludicra on Alternative Tentacle records. Slayer, Thorr's Hammer. Cannibal Corpse Suicide Gallery. The Cryptopsy Blasphemy Made Flesh/None So Vile double album. All the Mortem albums, Mercyful Fate, Hirax, Oh yeah I've got that Hellhammer 3LP Demon Entrails, Insect Warfare's first album, King Diamond, two Leviathan records (one that was released as a vinyl only and is my favorite, A Silhouette in Splinters), Nile, Phobia, Venom, Voivod, Xasthur Telepathic with the Deceased. 





8. 10" 
A very cool format.  Compact yet able to contain just enough music for a good listen. A neat size to handle and spin over to the other side in your hands. Accessible and fun. I have about twenty of these, including a double gatefold of Janis Joplin's raw demos and outtakes (the Pearl Sessions), Joe Jackson Look Sharp! (w/button), How To Destroy Angels, Oingo Boingo (self titled EP),  that I got on a Record Store Day a few years ago. I have this sick Witchburner / Abigail split on ten inch. Decapitated The Negation. RATM People of the Sun EP. Dwarves/Blag Dahlia split, Turambar Fallen Dreams. Jethro Tull Moths RSD, and a couple of Bonnie 'prince' Billy ten inches ("The Mindeater" w/The Phantom Family Halo and "Island Brothers" w/The Cairo Gang). 






9. 7"   
Not my preferred mode (who wants to keep flippin' the record after every song, right?) yet nonetheless a small treasury of rarefied bits of song here and there, I haven't counted them yet, but if you add the stack of 45s my mom gave me that she used to listen to in the fifties and sixties, plus a bunch of my own, there's gotta be at least sixty worth listening to.
I suppose I should include my only box set of 7" records, Bowie's just-released Spying Through A Keyhole, in this category, as I just received it a few days ago.  Or it could go in the next category, hm; a conundrum.  (That dredg 7" depicted above I got signed by the band). The MorD is a 2ep mini masterwork, IV tracks, one per side, an epic in seven inch form. 

 


10. Box Sets
I've got about a dozen box sets, including Eno's Music For Installations, Bowie's A New Career In A New Town, Tow Waits Orphans, Pearl Jam's Ten Deluxe, and Mystifier's Baphometic Goat Worship.  There's also Sisters of Mercy, Alan Moore Unearthing, Led Zeppelin BBC live recordings, and Jimmy Page Sound Tracks.  I bought a deluxe vinyl edition of one of Eno's albums, Small Boat on a Milk Sea, that comes as a box set. There's also the slipcase which came with the first three Tomahawk albums in it (with enough room to slip in their fourth). And I got the deluxe Ten box set which contains (among many amazing things) the only official DVD of their MTV live unplugged session. It's also got a 2LP very early live album. Listen, I don't have any tattoos. Just a decent record collection. 
Although I barely even got into the real meat of my collection here in the first section, A--Z LPs, and the range of artists in the nearly five hundred albums included, this overview nonetheless paints a low-res and rather lurid depiction of what I've collected since 2006, which is the year I began buying records again.  It had been awhile, since it was the early 80s when I started in earnest and had amassed all the albums of my favorite bands (Aerosmith, Led Zeppelin, Rush, Pink Floyd, Jethro Tull, King Crimson, and Yes). I had Nick Mason's Fictitious Sports, Music From The Body w/Roger Waters and Ron Geesin, a 3LP bootleg of The Wall Miami show (with red hammer symbol on the front), and well, a lot of albums I don't want to think about right now. It still hurts they are missing.  I should put up an entry here going over all the lost albums I occasionally agonize over. For a few minutes. 

Well, thanks for reading my blog, and keeping up with me on my sporadic and unpredictable journey ahead collecting and listening to music pressed on vinyl into records, the way it should be when you're granted at least one thing to go right, let it be the music I surround myself with.  If you want to know which artists I have the most records of, the answer would be Bonnie 'prince' Billy, David Bowie, Bob Dylan, Brian Eno, Hank III, the Mars Volta, Nine Inch Nails, Korn, Mono, Opeth, Pink Floyd, and Rush.  In between though you're likely to find anything, a wild and sundry list of odds and ends that I serendipitously stumbled across during my travels along the eastern seaboards.  For example, my Boiled In Lead album, From the Ladle to the Grave, I got back when we saw those guys perform in E. Cambridge and they ended up coming over to our place (Pub Grub) to party.  That's a righteous group of dudes and Boiled in Lead are amazing.  I love The Smashing Pumpkins, so I've got Gish, two editions of Siamese Dream, Adore, and Pisces Iscariot.  I wish I had Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness, but alas, some parts of our lives are destined to be utterly wiped out, I guess. It's probably for the better. You can't bring along everything in your luggage. 






I've got one of the numbered, limited edition Nick Drake Family Tree LPs, and it's a thing of beauty. I've also got his mom's album, Molly Drake. Talk about a time machine. Listening to that album really feels like being sent back to that time. Music has that eerie power and of course it remains one of the main reasons someone like me is so hooked on it. Records are like big neuron imprints that plug you back in time to when you originally experienced the music. The way our mind associates the feelings of sharing the experience of listening to music together opens a magical dimension in which even ghosts may sit in to rekindle the old flames of all those times long lost. 
   
Although the Dax Riggs album image above isn't my own personal edition, I did happen to get that LP at one of his shows (when it was printed as We Sing Only Of Blood Or Love by mistake) and I got him to sign it, of course.  That was in Ogden at Kamikazes.  I filmed him perform three songs, in black and white. It's a Wonderful World, Lungs, and Living is Suicide. I wonder what Dax has been up to?   I'm still waiting for 2010's  Say Goodnight To The World to come out on vinyl.  I hope it didn't already slip past me ...  where were we again? Oh yeah, my record collection.  It's insane how many Eno albums I have. That could qualify as its own post, right there.  Well I think this pretty much wraps up today's posting on Crossover Vinyl.  Where everything under the big black sun crosses over in an incredible mish-mashed tapestry of post slipstream musical exhibitionism the likes we don't really get to see much of, around here.  Until next time,   Thorns  out ~;^\~






p.s. 
There's one section not included above, I just realized.  Picture discs.  There are two kinds. The ones you listen to, because more often than not (such as in the case of Tool's Lateralus, for example) that's just how the regular album was released, on picture disc.  Some have maintained over the generations that picture discs can have a lower quality, and not sound as good, and while this actually does happen to be the case in a lot of examples, there's also an exception for the multitude of albums pressed on various different colored or treated vinyl that sound passably well or even fine.  At least such has been the case, in my experience.  That Hank III (Straight to Hell remix 12") I never play because it's just for hangin'.  Same with the Korn self titled pic disc, it's meant to be a wall ornament. But I've got an ABSU album on pic disc that sounds very good.  I guess it depends somewhat on who pressed them, and how. I don't really have that many picture discs.  Oh yeah, System of the Down, Hypnotize / Mesmerize came out in dual pic disc form.  They sound fine whenever I play them. Which ain't much, these days. I should really pull those two albums out, for a listen. Right now my head is ringing with the cascading electric guitar cadences from Lou Reed's mighty 2000 album Ecstasy--pretty much the best album I scored on RSD 2019.  



Monday, April 15, 2019

RSD 2019 Haul

A horse... a horse... my kingdom for a horse.  I finally got Sparklehorse's  debut album (1995's Vivadixiesubmarinetransmissionplot--on CD)--at the Graywhale in Taylorsville on Record Store Day, Saturday, April 13, 2019.    I ended up buying  thirteen records over the weekend (9 of them RSD albums), spending a bit over two hundred dollars on the coveted vinyl platters.  + one CD =
This is what I came away with.




  I finally have the first Sparklehorse album on CD. 
It's playing now in the aftermath of my having listened to all ten of my RSD albums. 
This album Vivadixiesubmarinetransmissionplot is amazing. 
It's the music of a slow motion dream captured inside an ice cream box. 
It's the soundtrack to being trapped in an abandoned refrigerator in an old junk yard. 
It's the worn out poetry of carousel horses with grimaces frozen in time. 


I just wasn't up to waking up at 4:00 am on Saturday morning for the early Record Store Day turnout. Well guess what. Turns out that Kyle told me folks began lining up for it the night before around 9pm. By the time the store closed there were easily a couple dozen people camped out to be first the next morning.    On the way to Ogden Saturday morning we stopped in to the Graywhale there around 11:00am, and managed to snag a few good records that were still available, namely Pearl Jam's  Live at Easy Street, David Bowie's The World of David Bowie on blue vinyl, Townes Van Zandt on brown colored vinyl, Gorillaz The Fall on forest green vinyl, Lou Reed's Ecstasy, an album of Jeff Buckley outtakes from his debut, Jethro Tull 10" North Sea Oil, and Van Morrison's 10" alternate Astral Weeks.  I also scored the Halloween soundtrack by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross that was 'deleted'--a mix they hadn't got permission to use, apparently--on orange vinyl.




This live bootleg of Pearl Jam (featuring a half hour of their longer set) back in 2005 marks just about where they were at the one time I saw them live.  It was in Las Vegas in 2006 with Sonic Youth.  Shasta and I were on our way to Oakland to Nils's  40th birthday bash for a two-night live concert extravaganza headlined by Sleepytime Gorilla Museum.  Pearl Jam were on fire for that show and in this concert they keep the action intimate and in-your-face, delivering a series of off kilter songs that make for a performance of great immediacy.    They play a Dead Kennedy's cover off Plastic Surgery Disasters that you would never notice wasn't supposed to be one of their own songs ("Bleed For Me"), and during the set's highlight they cover X's mid-80s commercial breakthrough "The New World" with John Doe on guest vocals--a stellar version.  I just listened to it and this easily qualifies as one of my  best scores.  A searing live performance which ends with a surprising rendition of Porch that takes the crowd unawares, I'd say.  It's nice to see the band I've long thought of as ranging from punk to epic levels of rock and roll prove my musings to be true with this record. Pearl Jam being official ambassadors of Record Store Day, I thought I'd kick off with this #1 score on my list. 

Shasta grabbed the Lou Reed Ecstasy reissue and handed it over to me, that's a no - brainer and the curious thing, besides the fact it never was released on vinyl outside Germany in the year 2000, but Ecstasy is one of the two Reed albums I never got (the other one being Set The Twilight Reeling).  This one comes as an extraordinary bonus considering Lou left us five years ago, and this album really features the iconic singer digging deeply into these songs with his band, paying particular focus to the sound and power of the electric guitar. A dark and sometimes disturbing collection of songs, after listening to it just once I can tell I'm going to have to spend some more time with this. 

      photo by Stefan Sagmeister of Lou jerkin' it ~ image courtesy of Warner Bros.


This song hits me right in the feels
 

The next album I managed to snag was  The Best of Townes Van Zandt. It's on Fat Possum Records and its a thing of beauty.  Not only is it packaged in rustic brown paper gatefold, but the 2LP vinyls are die hard amber marblized and the collection of songs is stellar, covering a wide variety of his albums.   I recorded  Dax  Riggs  cover Lungs  when he played in Ogden a few years ago.  That song appears on this double gatefold collection, kind of bringing my catching up with this artist full circle. 



 I filmed this in Ogden a few years ago  




I also scored these really cool  10"  limited records:  Jethro Tull and Van Morrison. 





The above records are almost supernaturally incredible, in that they each evoke past time periods of my life that mean a lot to me. The album Stormwatch was a big underlying sound track to the days Greg Grub and I forged our legendary friendship, on late night excursions to the White Tower and battling the evil forces in the Witch Woods. The songs from that album served as backdrop on our wintry excursions and also featured in our Station 3 dj  broadcasts.  Listening to the instrumental  ballad  Elegy and understanding how it's transformed from a fiction to painful fact in the lives of the Grub Brothers evinces emotions almost too strong to bear. The album TB Sheets dates back to when Greg and I stayed with my Dad in Honduras one summer, I had it on cassette and we played it a lot.
The alternate takes on songs like Beside You and Madame George are really chill. 





Snatched  The Fall    by   Gorillaz       -   It's dated as a  2010  release -  not released in the US til now.  Listened to it once through, and it's a pretty low -key and interesting sounding album, although not remarkably so.  Maybe with more spins I'll get into it more. Glad I picked it up.  That makes  Demon Days + The Fall  =   my Gorillaz vinyl collexion   


Nowhere I looked could I see   the Bob Dylan  New York  test pressing of Blood on the Tracks  nor any Tangerine Dream  or  Iggy & the Stooges records.   But I looked and there was  The World of David Bowie  right in front of my eyes - I snatched it up, but quick.   This super early era of Bowie's has always been my favorite, and this recording is on pale opaque blue vinyl.  




(I wish it had Please, Mr. Gravedigger and The Laughing Gnome on it, but its got the songs I've been missing for some time now, and this really does come as close as I need to completing my db collection.  Just as soon as the Spying Through a Keyhole 7"  box set arrives, it will be complete.)


"Come and Buy my Toys", one of my favorites of the early Bowie tunes.






Went ahead and picked up this  rare - outtakes  collection  from Jeff Buckley's  first album sessions -  "in transition" -  - it's a nice group of songs --  here's the tracklisting:   

A1. Mojo Pin (Takes 1&2)
A2. Unforgiven aka Last Goodbye
A3. Strawberry Street
A4. Je N’en Connais Pas La Fin
B1. Hallelujah
B2. If You Knew
B3. Satisfied Mind


Their first EP Black Smoke Rising


Which leads me to my final purchase -  Greta Van Fleet's   "From The Fires" -  (their first two EPs packaged together as one LP) - -  with 7,000 copies pressed, it enjoys the highest number of pressings of any of the RSD  2019 releases  (one thousand more than the Pearl Jam Live album) which is saying something about these young cats from Michigan.   

   Look -  - -  I get it - - they sound like Zeppelin.   Josh Kiszka's vocals come uncannily close to a young Robert Plant -- it's all over this record -- and I get it:  that don't stand right with some folk's sense of aesthetics.   No prob.  Skip 'em - - and go on with your bad selves.  There's a whole world of music out there.  Who needs another Zeppelin - right?  Bands like this are a dime a dozen... Wolfmother, etc.    But there's something going on with these guys that catches my ear, nonetheless.   I made my decision:  considering the initial pressings of these EPs  (and maybe this one as well, I'm not sure)  have all Sold Out --   I decided, what better way to truly listen to what this  post-classic rock band has to offer, than to spin the black circle on my turntable?  (The few songs I've checked out on YouTube sounded pretty decent, to my ears.)  

  For one, Kiszka's vocals, when they're not emulating Robert Plant's mannerisms, are possessed of a certain  sprite-like quality that I can't quite put my finger on, but which nonetheless modulates on a level that reaches through to me.  There's an original side to his voice that intrigues me--a way in which he emulates that I find refreshing and different.  Meanwhile, his brothers  (guitarist  Jake and bass player Sam) really know how to kick out the jams, old school.   It's not just Zeppelin these young dudes are channeling.  I can hear some Deep Purple and even early Aerosmith in here.  And not just purely derivative of those  classic 70s bands, either.  It sounds like they mean it.  

  So I spun the record after I got home, and I've gotta say, I enjoyed listening to it.  The amount of shit these kids get for emulating their -- or should I say, our --  classic rock heroes is just ridiculous.  At least there's a solid core audience for them out there that appreciate what they're doing --  to the point their records have gone out of print, already.  I'm with the crowd that wants to allow them time to grow into themselves. They are so young, that I feel like giving them a chance to fill the shoes they've so boldly stepped into.  I'd like to hear what they do on their follow up albums, myself. 

  "Greta Van Fleet," that's a pretty funny name for a band which seeks to ape classic rock, and at the same time, a perfectly suitable band name poised at this juncture of rock history.  All I got to say to the guys in the band is, "Well played, my dudes.  Well played."  Rock ain't dead yet. And with young kids like these willing to go out on a limb and deliver hard blues rock in a classic vein, I for one am all ears, and am very interested in what their future has in store.   











Albums I Did Not Score To My Everlasting Dismay

Bob Dylan  "NY test pressing" of Blood on the Tracks
X-Ray Specs  2LP
Tangerine Dream  (Poland and Machu Picchu)
Bill Hicks
John Lennon   (Imagine  Raw studio mixes)
Iggy  & the Stooges   (2LP live album Paris Hippodrome '77)
Pink Floyd  (A Saucerful of Secrets  MONO)
Robert Plant   Fate of Nations  
Ramones   (Live at the Palladium)
Roxy Music   ("Remixed"  2LP)
Serj Tankian   Harakiri  LP
RUSH  Hemispheres  picture disc
The Crow  (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack) 
I Know What You Did Last Summer  (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack)


BONUS ALBUMS (not  official  RSD albums, but solid scores nonetheless) 




This is the  "DELETED" version - due to some copyright claim or another - -  of the Trent Reznor & Atticus Ross version  of the Halloween theme on  pumpkin - orange  12"  single vinyl.  A bunch of these were recalled and supposed to be "destroyed," but thanks to some rebel record stores unwilling to comply with such ridiculous demands, I ended up with this sweet piece of orange candy in my hands.  


Scored this as well - -  Drivin N Cryin's   '97  self-titled album, now given a new title and reissued on vinyl format for the first time.     You can never go wrong with Drivin N Cryin -- my favorite southern  rock band of all time.   




And finally, I picked this used LP up, for old time's sake.  Of course back when I owned every Aerosmith, Led Zeppelin, Rush, Yes, Jethro Tull, and Pink Floyd album released at the time--back when I was in high school--I used to listen to this album and dug it very much.  Released in November of 1979, it's one off the last albums from the 70s, squeaking by in the nick of time. It may not rank that high up on their best list  (that's reserved for their first six studio albums) but there are plenty of good songs on here, nonetheless.   

  Oh yeah, almost forgot.  I also picked up "Switched-on Bach II, by Walter Carlos", for $5 from the used bins.  Having stumbled on his A Clockwork Orange  soundtrack last week on YouTube, I couldn't resist getting it.  With this stack  o'  wax  next to my turntable, it'll be some time before I can afford to buy any more records.  For now, I am tapped out.  







p.s.

My RSD 2019 plan was to arrive at 5:00 am sharp -- three hours before the record store  opened at 8 am -- but I just didn't have it in me to do that, and it turns out that on our drive to Ogden that Saturday, we made a pit stop at the Ogden Graywhale around 11:00 am --  
just three hours after the doors opened.  
That's the reason I didn't end up with the Dylan or Floyd records, but did manage to get lucky and score the Lou Reed and David Bowie albums, as well as the Townes Van Zandt record.  

Reminder!  Kyle, the manager at the Taylorsville Graywhale  (now only one of three Graywhales in Utah: Sandy, SLC, and Ogden) informed me that people began lining up for RSD the evening before around 9:00 pm!  By the time their store closed later that evening, there were at least two dozen people lined up to camp out for the night.  So my old strategy (which worked fine up until last year) of showing up a mere "three hours early" ain't gonna cut it any longer, folks.  If you want to be among the first ten in line  (often necessary in order to score those rare RSD-Only pressings that fly out the door within minutes)  you are going to have to show up the night before, nowadays.  Unless you live in some podunk town where nobody really bothers to show up early, I suppose.  I wonder if anyone showed up the night prior in Ogden?  I have no idea, but considering the proliferation of hipsters out there these days, it wouldn't surprise me in the least. Happy record hunting, everyone.
~ Thorns out.