Blonde Redhead - Fake Can Be Just As Good

Label: Touch and Go
Year: 1997

Opening track on this album 'Kazuality' is near perfect in it's noise washed motorik pulse.
And from there it stays pretty great through the remainder of the record. I mean, great if you're into Sonic Youth and Unwound and stuff like that. Which...you are, right?
Oh, and speaking of Unwound, Vern Rumsey plays bass on this one, which is added "fun fact" factor.

Their next album got less noisy and rocky, and more dreamy and moody. And every album since has gotten more dreamy and less rocky, which depending on your disposition (private parts) is either very appealing or very yawn-inducing.

Super recommended. Maybe you AND your lady friend can enjoy this one together (paired with a full bodied chianti and a bowl of olives...that you feed to each other...allowing the juices to drip across your naked bodies...oiling your skin as your limbs become intertwined...heaving...breathing quickens...your now glistening forms melting together as her warm mound beckons you to slowly enter her...)

*originally posted 04.12.17, reposted 03.31.22

DL

Engine Kid - Heater Sweats Nails

Label: Troubleman
Year: 1995

Side A: Engine Kid rips your face off, shits in your child's crib, and drinks your last cold beer before running out the back door and into the woods not to be heard from again for some time. Oppressively heavy, brutal, and mean, this is what they sounded like live, the guitars were turned to "annihilate", and that they do.
Side B: Engine Kid returns to your home to apologize, clean up they mess they made, and restock your fridge with a sixer of smooth, crisp, barley pops. An instrumental that could have been a long lost Slint slow jam.

* originally posted 07-10-11, reposted 01-07-16, reposted for the final time 03.29.22

DL

Bauhaus - Live In The Studio 1979

Label: Nemo
Year: 1997

Decent chance that there isn't a practice tape by your band that's going to surface twenty years from today and be studied by music nerds, dissected, and celebrated as a Rosetta Stone of a nascent genre. I mean, I could be wrong, you might be in one of the best bands out there...it's entirely possible, just not entirely probable. If you catch my drift.
But by all means, keep at it.
And when you stumble across something along the lines of 'Dark Entries', please let me know.

Originally released with a Bauhaus retrospective book that I never saw (cause I can't read...ok?! Fucking rub it in, why don't ya?!). Ground zero shit. Essential darkness.

*originally posted 04.18.18, reposted 03.29.22

DL

Cable - Northern Failures

Label: Hydra Head
Year: 2001

The album that Cable released prior to this one, 'Gutter Queen' is a minor classic in the destructo-rock pantheon (and let's not forget the album that preceded THAT one, 'Variable Speed Drive', a noisy punch in the Adam's Apple in it's own right). So, this follow up had some pretty big shoes to fill, and by getting Steve Austin to record the thing (and scream along here and there), well, that's a pretty good start. And then to double down on the "been drinking since 1:00pm on account of getting pink slipped today at work, but fuck it, that job blew anyway...want a shot?"staggering swagger, I like that approach too.
The riffs get a little more southern fried, but the animosity is still on overkill. This band for real knows how to drive home a point, and usually that point is some derivation of "fuck off", or 'life is hard'. Speaks to me.
Somehow this record seems even more warped than what they had been doing, and definitely separated them from the Botch's and Deadguy's of the world, although you can still hear some of their history as a hardcore band, but now with added thick 16 heft. Cable took a nose dive into a self loathing stew of damaged, cascading, sludgy bile. The resulting listen, though, comes across as  exhilarating, not oppressive. It has enough swing that the groove keeps you on the up and up. Even when you're up and up above rotting prospects and a diseased future. But you're up there...for now.

*Originally posted 06.16.17, reposted 03.29.22

DL