Category: Reviews – Vinyl
Metal still sounds best on large, round pieces of pressed vinyl. The smell, the artwork – and it gets played through a needle.
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The Avalanches – Since I Left You (4LP Deluxe reissue)
The Avalanches Since I Left You 4LP (20th Anniversary reissue) (Astralwerks/Universal Music) While I have serious reservations about a reissue which features enough remixes to occupy half of the medium into which the title is pressed (the 4LP reissue of Since I Left You presents the album pressed into two LPs, and features enough remixes…
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Personality Crisis – Creatures For Awhile (Reissue)
Things like this get said a lot but, in this case, there is actually verifiable proof: while they were working, prairie-based punk band Personality Crisis were were in a league of their own. Granted, the band was not around for very long (Personality Crisis formed in 1979 and ran until 1984) and Creatures For Awhile…
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Neil Young – Way Down In The Rust Bucket (4LP)
In the fifty-two years which have made up his career to date, Neil Young has been a lot of things – an activist, a fortune teller, an elder statesman, a folkie, a rock star, a filmmaker and other titles too – but he has never seemed to be lighthearted. The singer has been interested in…
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Pop Evil – Versatile LP
Okay, this first observation of what Pop Evil is offering with their sixth album, Versatile, doesn’t actually have anything to do with the music pressed into the vinyl, but it would be easy to extrapolate an impression of the merits of this album, how it’s presented and the potential difference between “how it’s presented” and…
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Longstocking – Once Upon A Time Called Now LP
Some events simply defy the laws of probability – and that Longstocking never got a fraction of the attention the band deserved is definitely one of them. Seriously – how did the band get overlooked as much as it did? They were in the right place (in Los Angeles) at the right time (from 1995…
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Jello Biafra and the Guantanamo School of Medicine – Tea Party Revenge Porn LP
Ignoring the fact that Jello Biafra and the Guantanamo School of Medicine really missed the opportunity to address the activities of the Trump administration and of Republicans in general (seriously – there was no new music from the band between 2014 and 2020 – how the hell did that happen?), it’s impossible to ignore the…
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Dale Crover – Rat A Tat Tat LP
Listening to Dale Crover’s second solo album apart from The Melvins is a funny/unique experience because, after having made music with the same band (well, “the same musical counterpart,” singer/guitarist Buzz Osbourne, anyway) for so many decades, it’s hard to remove that sensibility from the music – or hard to remove it completely, anyway. As…
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Puscifer – Existential Reckoning 2LP
Ever since Maynard James Keenan first appeared on the rock radar, the singer’s depth as a creative entity has never been questioned or debated. The singer has always been so prolific that his muse has required three bands to be contained and satisfied; Tool came first and accommodated the heavy/mathy/stoic root of the singer’s output,…
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Paul Leary – Born Stupid LP
When vinyl records made their return as one of the foremost music media at around 2014, a lot was discussed regarding the difference in the sound and fidelity of vinyl and pretty much everything else on the market, at the time. It was an exciting moment; vinyl sales went up 280 percent from what they’d…
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AC/DC – PWR/UP LP
AC/DC has tried a few different things and taken a few different turns to try and grow up (or age up? Or act their age?) in the last thirty-eight years with limited success at most. Every time the band has tried to move forward from the callous one-liners and double entendres which first helped to…