i hate the sound of guitars

It was just about a month ago that I became aware of the self-described “pop music cult” Hussalonia, and since then I’ve listened to Hussalonia songs about 350 times. Even more surprising, I’m showing no signs of getting sick of them.
Partly this is because Hussalonia is really good*, partly it’s because they (mostly just he [...]

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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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