Dylan and Jess head up into the stratosphere to invest in the sound of dreams alive, taking on Blimp Rock’s half-aptly named Sophomore Slump. The name is half right: It is their second album. Join us as we prepare to get on a giant blimp hovering somewhere over Lake Ontario, and listen!
My thoughts on what I’ve listened to in the car this week:
Monday June 1st: The Jesus And Mary Chain – Munki. This album is not really what the band is known for, it’s considerably more pop-y than their usual shoegazey wall of sound, but for me it works. It’s pretty long, too; I wasn’t able to listen to the full sixty-nine minutes and change while working tonight, so I guess I’ll definitely be listening tomorrow. To tackle what I did get through, though, the album opens with “I Love Rock ‘n’ Roll“, which is not a cover of Joan Jett’s song of the same title, but is instead a very positive number extolling the positive effects of Rock ‘n’ Roll in Jim Reid’s life. “Birthday” is another excellent song in a similar vein musically, but the real treasure of the first half of the album is “Moe Tucker,” a shout out to women who rock in general and one of my favourite drummers in particular. Moe Tucker was a fantastic drummer famous for being a significant part of the Velvet Underground, and you should take a quick detour and listen to her song “After Hours” before you head on to my thoughts for tomorrow.
Tuesday June 2nd: The Jesus And Mary Chain – Munki. Key standouts on the second half of the album include, “Cracking Up,” and “I Can’t Find The Time For Times.” True to form for a shoegaze band, there’s a lot that sounds relatively similar, but it’s all really quite good, so I’m not really complaining. “I Can’t Find The Time For Times” in particular has a real negative tone, clearly the crie-de-coeur of somebody who feels they’ve screwed up. If you’re paying careful attention, you might note that the more negative tunes on the album all tend to be by Wiliam Reid, where the more positive ones tend to be by Jim. This album was right before the brothers broke off their band for eight years, and it shows. Mirroring the opening song perfectly is the closing song on the album, “I Hate Rock ‘n’ Roll,” which reflects William’s frustration and disappointment with the industry up to that point. This one came first; Jim wrote “I Love…” in response to the negativity of this song, but personally, between the two, I prefer “I Hate…”. The energy of it seems more honest, and the music is just a little stronger for it. Wait for the bit where the lyrics reverse, and it becomes, “Rock ‘n’ Roll hates me…”, it’s absolutely the perfect end to an excellent album, my favourite by the band.
Wednesday June 3rd: Pkew Pkew Pkew (Gunshots) – Glory Days. There’s no link to the album here because, unless you already have a copy, you can’t get one anymore. After being picked up by Royal Mountain Records, the band is either re-recording the album, or recording a new album with many of the same songs, so the original recording is no longer available. I also intend to review the new album on the podcast when it comes out, so I won’t go too in-depth here now. At its heart, this album is best described as “bro-punk,” even though I feel vaguely like I need a shower just putting those words together. It’s reminiscent of Blink 182, to me: raucus and immature, but still charming in its own way. The whole album is suffused with a very dudebro attitude. Use (and abuse) of alcohol is a theme throughout, best expressed in the song “Road To Victory,” in which the chorus is the repeated phrase: “We’re guys, we don’t cry, we just get drunk.” The language is merciless; in the song “Glory Days,” a generic small town “hero” still living in his highschool glory days is admonished with the words, “If those were your glory days, I’m glad I wasn’t around / If those were your glory days, you must be real shitty now.” It probably doesn’t sound like there’s a lot to recommend this album (unless you’re kind of a dudebro yourself), but the whole thing is tinged with a self-awareness that takes the over-the-top attitude and renders it kind of adorable, rather than irritating.
Thursday June 4th: Pkew Pkew Pkew (Gunshots) – Glory Days. I listened to it again, it’s got a fantastic energy to keep a late-night worker going. On the other hand, though, my main disappointment with this album is that, despite its frantic energy, it fails to remotely capture the intensity of the energy that the band has live. Here’s a recording of “Glory Days” again, this time from a live show (and with another number of theirs as well). Even this doesn’t compare to being in that crowd, but it’s a better example of what the band is really like, and I sincerely hope the upcoming release better captures this absolutely insane energy.
Friday June 5th: Pkew Pkew Pkew (Gunshots) – Glory Days. Well, congrats to Pkew, this is officially the first album I’ve got stuck on since I started this. It happens now and then, readers, I wouldn’t worry, I’ll snap out of it. One of the things I noted while driving around this morning was that many of the songs are incredibly simple, and they almost all have sections that lend themselves to singing along, even if you don’t really know the words. I think this is a conscious choice. I know Jess doesn’t tend to like stuff she calls “sing-along-y,” but it works fantastically for Pkew, especially in the live show. It serves to draw people at their shows into their energy, who in turn reinforce and strengthen the energy. I’ve said to a few people that Pkew is unlike any live show I’ve really been to, and I really mean it. If they’re playing near you, and you have even a passing appreciation for heavier music, go see them.
Saturday June 7th: Pkew Pkew Pkew (Gunshots) – Glory Days. Total cop-out this time. Just using the energy of this record to sustain me through the last workday of the week. Something new on Monday I promise.
When a popular Canadian rock band offers personally written songs for fans that pre-order their next album, what happens when they have more fans than they thought? Hollerado’s 111 Songs was the topic du jour for last week’s episode, and since I was tragically technologically ousted from participating, I’m sharing my thoughts here. So the big question on everyone’s mind is: Who is this for if you aren’t one of the names in brackets?
If you step cautiously closer to this project as not a fan, or yourself an artist, this serves two crowds: people who bought a song and people who go to participatory art installations and bid on owning that solitary Wu-Tang record. Having been built narrowly initially for the 100+ fans who pre-ordered, it was after the conception that the band decided to release it publically as well, a move I think is not only justified, but important to how music is made and shared today.
I am going to assert that if you are a casual music fan, this will not likely be for you. But if you are a creator, a fan of ideas, or enjoy the dissection of innovative process, buy this right now because there is a lot to learn from it.
These are well-executed parodies/homages to some fantastic musical ideas and styles that otherwise wouldn’t render a cohesive full album in the traditional sense. Sometimes its bonkers, sometimes it’s clear and unique, sometimes it’s basic and lovely and expected in the right ways. Running the gamut of gritty, dark, goofy, revelatory, silly, boppy, repetitive, mundane, throwaway, too long, underdeveloped but necessarily so, the list goes on.
A solid half of these are genius (Dylan C-M would assert that maybe 20% could be tailored into two great albums) and half are maybe a product of fatigue and possible exhaustion, or maybe I’m obsessed with what this two year process of writing was like. I suspect many of these gems came from that place where you allow yourself time and space to actively not write, or push yourself to. This is much harder than it sounds, especially if your output and touring schedule is full and you are a band that has built and keeps momentum, it can be hard to leave space where the world can colour what you’re making while you ignore it. It feels antithetical but the creative process is so mystified, and this is a great album for a painter or writer or photographer or model to hear, you’ll hear how the differences and similarities appear and how they take bigger risks because the whole is solid. Trusting in your instinct here gave us some wilder weirder gems while still managing to be clearly Hollerado.
Or perhaps it’s more about building something to the specs of the fan, regardless of how it should be heard. Maybe we aren’t even meant to have heard this record, since a fundamental crux of enjoying music is allowing yourself not to believe who or what a piece is about, that it’s designed to be digestible and enjoyable by a wide range. How does that alter the experience of writing for someone? Did anyone really dislike their own track? Could a critic claim that this album is the equivalent of crowd sourcing your new material? You build for your fans to ingratiate them and then you can use the tunes that stuck with you and let them evolve into more. It’s a process worth exploring probably for any band, or single artist, but its also an insanely ambitious project. I imagine the band at the final mixdown walking back in like Jeremy Renner at the end of The Hurt Locker. It’s a dangerous compulsion.
Because this record was so massive and doesn’t totally make sense to attempt to quantify, here are some thoughts and noteable tunes in no particular order, some of which overlap with what the boys spoke to. Listen to a few of them here.
LA Prison is what we will play our kids as an example of rock from the Adolescence of the Aughts (dibs band name).
One of many radio-serial homages, some slap-dash but fun like Aliens and UFO’s (Lori Douglas Erica Ian)
Sorry You’re Alright (Evan From Grimsby) was as good as that title. If you smirked, you dug it.
Yummy Posion (Alan Poane) is the dopamine drug trip, one of the many Beatles acid phase moments, I imagine this being the time of night when the band is all laying on the floor with classroom instruments thinking they have it in them to write one more and prescribing themselves another shot of whatever’s on hand.
Shawarmas and I Eat Nachos, like many goofy food and drink related tunes, or those simple yet effective ‘this is the one fact we know about you’ tracks that are indulgently silly.
Coffee Shop (Tom Hildebrant) was a little lazy, if not still applicable attack on the hipster jackasses, but then again I’m typing this on a mac in a loft apartment with remaindered furniture and I host this music podcast. The use of instrumentation here at least elevates the lyrical obviousness, which is often the saving grace of this album. When you put a bunch of great musicians to work on something this big, you’re going to get tunes that are half-perfect.
Join Our Cult or Else (Ron Burgundy) kept coming up on random for me, perhaps they harnessed the power of irony in that track and it compelled me to listen…
Hallelujah, What’s it To Ya (Joe Taylor) is one of a few great manic Christmas tracks, as all great rock and metal bands seem to have today. It’s sister song, I’m Beginning to Drink A Lot Like Christmas, is a fun almost Weezer-parody and slouchy fun.
German Bees (Pete Nema) one of the more genre bending, with hip hop and slick as shit lyricism, coupled with a bizarre trancey German verse. Might be too much going on in one track but the combination played like a family guy joke for me, great, lost me a little, then brought me back around. Childish Gambino for sure, Dylan C-M.
What’s Everybody Running For Part 1 (Gabi) is the requisite surf rock inclusion, done just correctly but with not much new to say, which I suppose here is the point. There is no part 2, after all.
Going Extinct (Luke Chabanole) is another one where the Bob Dylan lackadaisicaly punk rock vocals are intensely unapologetic , which is often an issue for me, but this was the one track that I felt it was completely at home. Could have done without them on some of the sweeter ballads and softer jazzy swishy tunes, it seemed like they could have used a few guest vocalists to round out the sounds in those cases.
Taming the Unicorn (Dylan) was intriguing to me, a Cake meets LCD Soundsystem, talk-sing style which always sounds like apathy in that classic sense of allowing your real feelings to come out under the guise that you aren’t vulnerable or concerned with validation.
Cool Letters (Sarah Mennard) was my favourite, and one of the more definitive of the sense of humour the band has with this album. A fun attack on the formation of the alphabet system and how English works, also an at metaphor for this album’s project in that the concept of distilling the entire language to the most used and most needed letters is like making a record with 10 songs when you wrote 26, the inverse at work here when they have maybe 20 or 30 fleshed-out tracks to compile into something that really slays, but they had to toss in the X Y and Z filler.
While Dylan Clark-Moore made a point that it may not be a viable product as targeting the general music listener, to not make it available for purchase could imply that they felt it only made sense for the core fans and inspireds-by even though I guarantee at some point in those two years they realized there could be more here, almost like a deleted scenes and DVD extras. The chore factor is really exclusive to us with our time limit and need to diligently note take, but then again Siskel and Ebert couldn’t always watch a flick for leisure despite being so in love with the medium. I made an effort to listen like I would a small album, in pieces, and re-listened to what struck me, but also to what I felt was telling of their journey in this undertaking. One could argue that this is a tool for musicians or an exercise in patience but it’s also just a fun idea for background tunes at a party where few people know each other, since every third track is a conversation piece.
Not being a previous fan of Hollerado, it still hit me hard that this record needs to be heard, and not just respected for its innovation in interacting with and rewarding fans for their support. As songwriters this is both an excuse to employ those sounds that wouldn’t be canon with your work but also serves as that classic exercise in creation: restriction harvests creativity. And by supporting this kind of insane undertaking as a consumer of music and a fan, you’re proving that it hasn’t all been done yet, you’re fighting the embitterment of a generation. Go you!
Thanks once again to Dylan Clark-Moore, of The Netflakes Podcast, who was a fantastically articulate and insightful guest host, possibly taking the coveted Feedback Loop Snark Award from it’s previous champion, Dylan Z.
Coming up next week is Blimp Rock’s Sophomore Slump (which it is anything but, to steal that line from every other person who’d heard it). Get in the loop!
My thoughts on what I’ve listened to in the car this week:
Monday May 25th: The Cure – The Head On The Door. It’s been a long time in coming, but this has finally edged its way into the lead as my favourite Cure album, I think. It’s an interesting album, one that is remarkably more than the sum of its parts. It only had two singles (“In Between Days” and “Close To Me”), neither of which were particularly massive compared to songs like “Boys Don’t Cry,” “Friday I’m In Love,” “Love Song,” and others in that vein. As a complete unit though, it is, to me at least, remarkably successful. It manages to fit beautifully in the space between their earlier, harder-edged work, and their later, more-bombastic work like Disintegration and Wish. More about this tomorrow.
Tuesday May 26th: The Cure – The Head On The Door (con’t). As I implied earlier, this album is definitely worth listening to straight through (ideally on vinyl, in the dark, as my Dad would agree), but I need to get into some specifics. Two songs in particular stand out for me; “Six Different Ways,” and the second single “Close To Me.” Latter first, I actually had to do some careful searching for that link, as there are other versions, but this one is specific to Head On The Door (and in my mind, superior to the others). There’s some fantastic horns in this, and it’s potentially the only time I’ve heard breathy gasps that I liked in place of more traditional vocals. The lyrics are quite simple but not without weight; many of the songs are like the album, that is to say, greater than the sum of their parts.
“Six Different Ways” has some shades of what’s to come on Disintegration and Wish, but the big synth and piano theme gives way to some very simple melodies with some slyly deep lyrics. I know the words by heart but even now I only have the vaguest sense of what they might mean. Fantastically, one commenter online said that the lyrics are about telling different stories to journalists about song meanings over and over… and then the following comments say that it’s actually about multiple personalities, another says it’s about a conversation Robert Smith with Simon Gallup about how many ways there are to skin a cat (“It’s definitely six ways”), that it’s about having a revolver held to your head, with six bullets, “Six different ways,” he said, “I’ll tell them anything at all.” So maybe it is about contradictory stories about the meaning of the lyrics. I don’t even know. Great song.
Wednesday May 27th: Pixies – Trompe Le Monde. This album is certainly one of the.. well I was going to say “weirdest” albums by the Pixies, but I hesitate to quantify the weirdness of any recording by a band deeply associated with the phrase “Wave of Mutilation”. It’s certainly out there, though. Way out there. Extraterrestrial, in fact. The whole album is peppered with themes of extraterrestriality, but it’s probably the clearest in the songs “Bird Dream Of The Olympus Mons,” a reference to the largest mountain on Mars for anybody not in the know, and “Motorway To Roswell,” the tale of a poor alien who ends up in the wrong place at the wrong time. Unfortunately, being released in 1991, this album had to compete with Nevermind, Metallica’s black album, and Pearl Jam’s debut album Ten, among other things, and never quite got the love I think it deserves. More thoughts on it tomorrow.
Thursday May 28th: Pixies – Trompe Le Monde (con’t). At 15 tracks and only about 30 minutes, there are a lot of short songs on this album, and listening to it is a bit of a whirlwind of sound. The first song, also called Trompe Le Monde, kind of gives you a sense of what you might be in for. The shorter ones are among my favourites, but I’ve always had an appreciation for a song that knows that brevity has a power all its own (see Stella Ella Ola’s I Think We Should Hang Out All The Time for a masterclass in the power of brevity). I don’t want to post links to the whole album on youtube one song at a time, but I’m also a big fan of “Letter to Memphis”, “Distance Equals Rate Times Time”, and “The Navajo Know.” There’s something about how the first song starts and the last song ends that makes it feel, to me, like I came into something after it started and left before it ended, but that sense of only getting a snipped of the middle really works for me, here. Find this album, give it a listen, maybe let me know what you think.
Friday May 29th: NOFX – The War On Errorism. This album came out in 2003, I would have been fifteen, though I don’t think I got a hold of this album until a couple years later. Not unlike a teenage male, this album sure as hell ain’t subtle, and it’s not particularly mature either. The opening number, “The Separation of Church and Skate,” asks the question: “When did punk rock become so safe?” Unfortunately for them, listening to much of the rest of the album just makes me ask, “When did punk rock become so elitist?” You’ve got “Franco Un-American”, which mocks the politically disengaged, you’ve got “Medio-core,” which mocks what the band sees as weak music, and at its peak-asshole, the album has “The Idiots Are Taking Over.” An excerpt from the lyrics:
Mensa membership conceding Tell me why and how are all the stupid people breeding Watson, it's really elementary The industrial revolution Has flipped the bitch on evolution ... And I'm starting to feel a lot like Charlton Heston Stranded on a primate planet Apes and orangutans that ran it to the ground With generals and the armies that obeyed them
There’s a lot inspired by Idiocracy in there, of course. I could do the takedown myself, but I prefer to send it over to Randall Munroe and his webcomic XKCD:
This sort of elitism hasn’t been great for punk, or for any previously-unpopular sort of music or subculture. Gaming, comics, and other things considered traditionally nerdy are dealing with similar issues now, policing fandom (as suggested in “Separation…” and “Medio-core”) and ascribing superiority to the “true followers” (as suggested in “The Idiots Are Taking Over” and “Franco Un-American”).
Before any punk gets too hoighty-toighty about the state of punk music today, or in the 90s/early 2000s, I just want to point out that the Ramones did “I Wanna Be Your Boyfriend“, and “Rock & Roll Highschool,” so let’s maybe get off our high horses, eh?
The album’s not all bad, though. Tomorrow I’ll talk about the better parts of it.
Saturday May 30th: NOFX – The War On Errorism (con’t). One of the best parts of the album is what happens when the band engages in a little utopia-building without directly putting anybody down. Two songs in particular, “Anarchy Camp,” and “Mattersville” embody this sort of exercise. The more famous of the pair, “Anarchy Camp” describes a summer camp for anarchists, where, “everyone who’s no one will be participating,” and, “random acts of dumbness will be rewarded.” In true anarchist style, “if you see somebody taking charge, you’ll be expected to beat them.” While a little immature in its politics, the whole effect of the song is quite charming, though not half as charming as “Mattersville,” which I think is my favourite song on the album. It describes a gated retirement community for “punks over the hill,” in true anarchist style. “Cops can’t come in”, and “we can do whatever we want, whenever we please.” My favourite line, though, is the one that awkwardly rhymes, “Duane and Stevie Cab they still skateboard / But most of us lawn bowl and shuffleboard / We may be getting ripe but we ain’t bored.” Yeah, that’s board, rhymed with board, rhymed with bored.
When the album hits its politics right, it really hits them right. The second last song on the album, “Re-Gaining Unconsciousness” opens its first verse with the following lyrics:
First they put away the dealers, Keep our kids safe and off the street. Then they put away the prostitutes, Keep married men cloistered at home. Then they shooed away the bums, Then they beat and bashed the queers, Turned away asylum-seekers, Fed us suspicions and fears. We didn't raise our voice, We didn't make a fuss. It's funny there was no one left to notice When they came for us.
A clear and obvious reference to Niemöller’s “First They Came…” statement. When I first heard this earlier today, I was ready to write off the song for putting some equivalencies out of whack, but as I got out of the car, and started delivering my last round of papers, I began to consider each of the issues raised by this verse in turn, and I slowly turned around on the song. It’s brash, yes, but not offensive, I think, because I can point to news stories from the past year or two related to all of these issues. Recent Tory attack ads in Canada have gone after Justin Trudeau for being in favour of legalizing marijuana. New laws in Canada have pressed hard on sex workers. More American cities are making it illegal to feed the homeless. Despite advances in parts of the world, many places including Russia still link homosexuality to pedophilia. Australia can’t seem to get their shit together on asylum seekers (and they’re not the only ones). All of these issues are relevant today, and if the language used to broach those issues by NOFX catches our attention, I think that’s a feature and not a bug.
Overall, the album is brash, unsubtle, and immature, but not without points of interest and not without redeeming features. Probably worth a listen, if you’re feeling nostalgic for 2003, but really, I have to wonder.. who is?
In this episode, Dylan teams up with Dylan Clark-Moore of the Netflakes Podcast to climb the mammoth mountain that is Hollerado‘s 111 Songs. Created for fans who helped fund their album White Paint, these 111 songs represent two years of work, so we’re doing to dive in and see what this is all about.
My thoughts on what I’ve listened to in the car this week:
Monday May 18th: No late-night listening at all! Victoria Day holiday meant I didn’t have to work, so I was asleep in the wee hours.
Tuesday May 19th: Blink 182 – Dude Ranch. This album hits a sweet spot for me, both musically and nostalgically. While I didn’t actually get a copy of this album until my early twenties, most of the best songs on it were also my favourite songs on the live album, which I did get for Christmas when I was probably fourteen. This album is immature, no doubt, but it manages to come along after they got a handle on their instruments and before they realized that singing songs about fucking dogs in the ass was what delighted many of their fans. It’s still the work of nerdy punkers, most evident in the song A New Hope, which is half love song to Princess Leia and half anthem for lonely, nerdy teenagers. If you like 90s pop/skater punk, this is probably the Blink 182 album you want to hang your hat on, despite the commercial success of Enema of the State.
Wednesday May 20th: The Clash – London Calling. This is just an utterly fantastic album; I didn’t even choose it tonight, I got in the car and Mum had switched the Blink 182 out for this one, and I was pleased. Wikipedia notes that Rolling Stone listed this #8 on its list of the 500 greatest albums of all time (put out in 2003, so who knows where it might rank today). If your experience of the Clash is all I Fought The Law, Rock The Casbah, and Should I Stay Or Should I Go, this album will likely surprise you. I remember it catching me off guard, especially because the first couple songs on the album sound more like the punk stuff you might expect. The album then goes sideways into a fantastic track called Jimmy Jazz, probably my personal favourite, and from there it’s a romp through reggae, ska, R&B, and all manner of styles. If you’ve never listened to this album, you really should: It’s one of the ones on my list of “perfect” albums.
Thursday May 21st: Blimp Rock – Sophomore Slump. Hey, how did this get in here? I can’t tell you about this now. Wait for the episode, I’ll have lots to say then.
Friday May 22nd: Violent Femmes – Why Do Birds Sing? Another album I love, this one particularly good for keeping oneself awake while wandering about in the middle of the night. There is nothing that sounds like the Violent Femmes. Wikipedia calls it “Alternative Rock,” but somebody I read once described them as Folk-Punk, which I think is a better look at how unique the music styling is. Brian Ritchie is credited on the album for playing a number of instruments, including, “…bouzouki, banjo, ukulele, Jew’s harp, didgeridoo, glockenspiel…”, and the percussionist Victor DeLorenzo has an ever larger list, which culminates in, “Fire extinguisher.” So there’s that. I’ll probably keep this in another night, so I’ll talk more about it tomorrow.
Saturday May 23rd Violent Femmes – Why Do Birds Sing? So, I kept listening to this one on Saturday too, because there’s a ton of great stuff on it. You’ve got a cover of Culture Club’s “Do You Really Want To Hurt Me?” which is in all ways superior to the original. You’ve got More Money Tonight, a great song if you feel like you got the short end of the stick in highschool. You’ve got Flamingo Baby, which is not particularly deep, but musically fascinating. You’ve got my personal favourite, Hey Nonny Nonny, which uses for its lyrics a 17th Century poem by Anthony Munday. There’s nothing that sounds quite like any of this sounds, so if you’ve never listened to this album before, this is definitely the one to listen to.
In this bonus episode, Jesse and Dylan take a look at songs that encapsulate the soul of the bizarre country in which they live. This episode is Canadian to the bone, but well-worth listening to no matter where you’re from. Let us know what you think of Canada!
As a result of my current employment (newspaper delivery), I am awake at difficult hours, driving around for over an hour every, well, technically it’s the morning, but I start early enough that I still think of it is as night. This series, which will be weekly despite my doing today by itself as a proof of concept, will chronicle what I’m listening to while I’m out and about, what I think of it, and what it drives me to think about.
May 15th, 2015: Yeah Yeah Yeahs – Fever To Tell. I put this in at the start of my day, and kept it in for the whole go-round. Initially I was struck by how much they sound like Metric, probably drawing from a common ancestor or two, given that this album and Metric’s Old World Underground Where Are You Now came out within a few months of each other (spring 2013 was a good season for this kind of music I guess). Where Metric goes full-bore into the synth, Yeah Yeah Yeahs embraced their low-fi roots, with a bit more of a grungy sound. Towards the end of my trip, I was pegging the band as Metric and Pixies in some sort of interestingly unholy union. It’s a pretty good album, though not, I think, one I’ll keep in for days and days. I listened through every track once, but there was some extra time towards the end, and I ended up listening to Y Control a number of times, it was, for me, the catchiest thing on the album. If you like Metric, or Pixies, or shoegazey-garagey-type-stuff, it’s definitely worth a listen.
Jesse and Dylan head metaphorically out into the sticks to cover alt-country group Big Otter Creek‘s first EP, “The Orange Takes”, named after the studio in which it was recorded (there’s a precedent for that). There’s all kinds of talk about instrumental depth, lyric-writing and musically-inspired emotion, so this is definitely worth a listen.
Jesse and Dylan take on three big albums (each) from their lives. First, we talk about albums we’ve moved past. Second, we talk about albums that were formative for us. Finally, we talk about an album we find indispensible.
In order to save space, we had to take this episode down from SoundCloud, but you can download the file from our DropBox, at least until we get fully settled into our new digs. Join the conversation, let us know what you think. What are your big three?