i hate the sound of guitars

The lead single from Please and Thank You manges to be simultaneously sweet, creepy, and poignant in a character portrait of uncommon economy. The song’s narrator is moving in with his sweetie. If we take him at his word, he’s literally drooling at the thought of a live-in friend-with-privileges, which is at least a [...]

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Back in April, I wrote this about Big Dipper:
But if they pull a “Mission of Burma”-style return to active duty (and I hope they do), I would love to see/hear them again when they have another few shows under their belt, hopefully in a better-sounding room, and when I’ve had a chance to rein in [...]

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Great Plains is the band that ruined my life. You might know their signature “Letter to a Fanzine” as the “Why do punk rock guys go out with new wave girls?” song. But I know it as the Song of the Big Lie:

You like everything that comes out on SST
You like everything that comes out [...]

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Cultösaurus Erectus is the BÖC album that everyone likes better than I do. Conventional wisdom calls it a rebound from the disastrous Mirrors. but I think it’s actually a worse record (although perhaps not quite as dated production-wise). The band sounds unsure of its own identity. Presumably they were feeling pressured to repeat the success [...]

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Mirrors is my pick for most-underrated BÖC album. It has a terrible rep, which I think is partly because it opens with “Dr. Music,” one of the worst tracks ever committed to tape by the classic lineup. (Discuss: are the harmonica squeals the kiss of death, or the synth-toms, or the faux-soul backing vocals, or [...]

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Fair warning: Imaginos not only has a storyline, it has snippets of dialogue interwoven into some of the songs. Every track is at least 5 minutes long. “Overblown” doesn’t do justice to the arrangements; there are several guest lead vocalists, and for a band with such serious guitar chops, there’s a befuddling proliferation of stunt [...]

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And now for something else completely different, taking up the gauntlet thrown by my pals Jestaplero and Flasshe, a subjective evaluation of the relative merits of a non-comprehensive selection of Blue Öyster Cult records, starting with the one that’s probably at the bottom of my pile, 1998’s Heaven Forbid.
Novelist John Shirley titled his [...]

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I love this band so much that I’m untrustworthy on the subject. Usually I cringe when backing vocals stray out of tune or when tempos drift between instruments. When B for Brontosaurus exhibits these flaws (which they do sometimes, especially live) I make excuses to find it charming, rather than grating. “Their enthusiasm outpaces their [...]

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