Writer | Speaker | Project Leader
There was never a universe where Flipper were going to become commercially successful. Even at their most accessible, they sounded like a band actively resisting the idea of popularity. Slow, ugly, repetitive, sarcastic, deliberately uncomfortable, and seemingly allergic to anything resembling conventional punk energy, Flipper made music that felt designed to clear rooms instead of…
There’s something strangely comforting about Storm the Gates. Of all the older metal bands still releasing basically the same record every few years, Venom might be the most consistent of them all. They are still cranking out songs about hell, war, Satan, evil, and destruction with the enthusiasm of a band half their age. It…
Walking in London (1992) by Concrete Blonde feels like the point where a really distinctive band starts to lose a bit of its center. Not all at once, and not disastrously, but enough that you notice it if you’ve spent time with what came before. By this point, Johnette Napolitano (vocals, bass), James Mankey (guitar),…
Where Have All the Merrymakers Gone? (1997) by Harvey Danger is one of those albums that feels like it should have had a longer shadow. Instead, it got compressed into a single, era-defining moment, Flagpole Sitta, and quietly filed away. Spend time with the full record and a different story shows up. This is a…
It was 1985, just like in the song from Bowling for Soup, and we were all wondering who the new guy in Van Halen was going to be. It is very hard to explain the importance of this moment in our young lives. Mostly because, in the greater context of the planet, with all its…
For someone like me, a Gen Xer who was 18 in 1991, Nirvana has always had a special place in my musical heart. Now I’m nearly 53 and it’s a little different of course. I remember the whole “grunge explosion” and how the pop landscape changed as a few distorted chords took over airwaves and…
The fact is that Hendrix’s Woodstock performance was mid, as the kids say. They should have left it with the original soundtrack album. His myth was secured, 100%. On Woodstock: Music from the Original Soundtrack and More, Jimi Hendrix closes both the festival and the album with a compact, ferocious sequence: “The Star-Spangled Banner,” “Purple…
The Big F did not come out of a scene so much as out of a state of mind. They were born from frustration, the kind that only comes after you have already “made it.” Not the romantic broke-band frustration, but the deeper kind that creeps in when success starts to feel like confinement. Endless…
This record has always been treated like an afterthought. Not the debut, not the myth, just the second one that came out too fast and didn’t change the world. Which feels about right for a band like the New York Dolls. It’s a weird, lopsided album. Half originals, half covers, all of it a bit…