i hate the sound of guitars

Breaking all kindsa rules: I haven’t even listened to this record all the way through once, and it’s already one of my favorites of the year. It’s got me bouncing around in my seat so much, I just have to tell someone about it right now!!! Manhattan Love Suicides (from Leeds; the name is [...]

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You’ve got just about a month left to place an order from Asaurus Records, the micro-indie label that releases beautiful hand-packaged CDRs from the likes of Pants Yell!, Colin Cleary, The Mathletes, and many more. There’s a very generous selection of free tracks to download, too. Among the “I Hate the Sound of Guitars”-endorsed discs [...]

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There’s basically nothing I don’t love about Smokers Die Younger’s X Wants the Meat.
I love the cheap-sounding keyboards (Casio? I can live in hope). I love the also cheap-sounding and frequently fuzzed-out guitar and bass (Slates amps and Skinny Rat guitars? Sounds like they could be), the determinedly plonky single-note guitar lines they play, and [...]

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I really should have found the time to write about this album two days ago, but oh well, life is full of missed opportunities. I also missed my opportunities to hear Ash Wednesday in the year of its release, else it would’ve been shortlisted for the best-of set.
I try to avoid Neutral Milk Hotel as [...]

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More justification for my usual laggardly approach to putting together the year-end mixes: If I’d put my 2007 list together midway through January, it definitely would’ve included Les Ondes Silencieuses, represented probably by “Echoes and Coral,” or “Sea of Tranquility.”
Colleen (real name: Cécile Schott)’s story would be intriguing even if I didn’t love the music. [...]

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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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We interrupt the continuing coverage of the Blue Öyster Cult catalog to bring you a late addition to the 2006 year’s best list…
On January 1st, 2008 I finally finished my “not quite the best of 2006″ mixes. Yes, six. The most recent addition to make the list was The Electric Kisses, a perfect fusion of [...]

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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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