Saturday, March 19, 2011

Cosmic

Two buddies of mine have formed a droney psych project called Hierarchies. Their new EP, Cosmic Sloth delivers the goods.



Also, take a gander at that badass cover art. Click on the link to download and pay whatever you think is fair for three tracks of dark droney goodness.

Thursday, March 17, 2011

Blarney

Happy St. Paddy's Day! Enjoy something from the best Irish band of all time.

Hey by the way, U2 sucks, except for Under A Blood Red Sky and a few other songs, none of which have been written in the last 20 years.

I try not to get political here, but please donate to your local Red Cross to help the earthquake and tsunami victims in Japan. That is all.

Tuesday, March 15, 2011

Ides

Original Iron Maiden singer Paul Di'Anno was jailed on March 11th for scamming welfare. I was surprised to learn he wasn't there already.

More to the point, on this day in history 2055 years ago, Roman general and "dictator in perpetuity" Julius Caesar was murdered by a group of constitutionalist senators who opposed his centralization of the Roman bureaucracy and his authoritarian reforms of the Roman state. Among the killers was his friend, Marcus Junius Brutus. The subsequent civil war was a critical point in the transformation from Republic to Empire under Caesar's nephew, the Emperor Caesar Agustus. As I do every year, I will observe the Ides of March and commemorate Caesar's death by listening to Iron Maiden's Killers, featuring its devastating one-two opening punch of "The Ides Of March" and "Wrathchild."

Up the Irons!

Friday, March 11, 2011

Audition

What the hell are we doing here?

The Replacements are still one of my favorite bands ever. What a bunch of losers. Rocking Pleased To Meet Me as I type.

Today I went to Value Village and picked up AC/DC's Back In Black and the first Santana album for 50 cents each. Go me. Oh, and Nazereth's Greatest Hits. Now you're messin' with a son of a bitch.

I love scouring old used record collections. Generally the ones you find in second hand and non-record stores are in deplorable condition, and you often have to dig through mounds of John Denver and Bing Crosby Christmas records, but a solid find is always so rewarding. It's the thrill of the hunt I guess. Records are pretty resilient as it is, and I don't really mind a few pops and a little static... seems to give it character. I like the idea that someone was listening to the same record in a smoky basement thirty or forty years ago. It's like a window through time.

I think the reason you don't find much of worth in places like that is that the people to whom the music really matters will generally hang on to their records, and there are more rock fans who are like that than pop fans. The few quality records that do end up in the bargain bin at a pawn shop are soon scooped up by ravenous treasure hunters like myself. Once in a while though, you get really lucky and find something that is just obscure enough that whoever is selling it has no clue what it is. You can scoop up some pretty pricey goodies that way. I once fleeced the local hipster record shop (Zulu) when I found a pristine copy of the 1973 debut record by Cleveland, Ohio's severely underrated Granicus for a tenner. Dig those Robert Plant-esque vocals.

Keep your eyes and ears open, droogs. Never know what you might find the next shelf over...