Jesu - Conqueror

This band is okay, I guess. People call it metal, but this is just about the fruitiest metal I've ever heard. Apparently, it's what the kids refer to as "shoegaze metal" or "shoedoom" or shit like that, and yeah, it kicks the shit out of pretty much all other metal that you could describe as being "slow and beautiful" like Isis or Pelican. But while those bands are just kind of boring in their attempts to craft epic-smart-people-soundscapes out of their heavyass guitars, Jesu ends up churning out some of the most disgustingly sugary melodies I have ever heard in my life!

Plus, the dude's vocals are way the fuck up in the mix. Steve Albini would not like this because he doesn't like people trying to be the Beatles by making their vocals louder than everything. And the dude isn't a metal screamin' scream machine. He sounds more like Adam Franklin of Swervedriver fame. 'Cept he's singing over a bunch of Swervedriver songs that have been slowed down. So if you thought Franky sounded bored before, wait 'til you hear him rock these glacial jams! Whoo!

To me, there is a fine line between "shoegaze" and "totally ass fuckingly gay." This album is both of those things! Get it if you like that stuff, and be like, "omg Justin is teh shit and for the last time it DOES NOT sound like Jawbreaker asshole." Just know that you're a fairy! Doot dit dooooooo!!!

Rating: Shit!

Song: Reagan Youth - A Collection of Pop Classics

Sally Shapiro - Disco Romance

Move over, sluts. I'm writing a review now. It's about a young man named Sally Shapiro, Sally enjoyed rock music and synthesizers. Look at the cleavage on the cover of this record and you'd agree with me that this is one hot ticket!

(cricket cricket)

That joke was so bad I oughta picket (in front of DC for regime change etc down with capitalism)!

But anyway, back to the music. Sally Shapiro is a duo or something, I'm not really all that clear on it. I like this album because it sounds like it was made like 20 years ago but it has some sick dance beats. I mean, these beats are nearly rude, they're the kind of beats that would eat your father and then raw dog your girlfriend.

I'd give this album a perfect score if it weren't for the fact that there are no guitars on it. Because there aren't any guitars, I have to give this album an incredibly low score. I hate electronica, I'm much more of a Jazz guy. You know, Dean Martin, Bikini Kill etc.

Special thanks to that one yellow guy i know on the internet for letting me download this.


SCore: You know what? This is probably the best album I've heard in at least an hour, until I put on Blink 182 - Enema of The State, in which case it will no longer hold that title. I watched Keeley Hazell give a blow job last night.

Song: I can't up a fucking song right now, I'm downloading this huge porn torrent and it's eating up all my bandwidth.

DJ Shadow- Endtroducing

So apparently I've now become the Dance/techno/electronic+instrumental reviewer on this little bit of musical Plymouth Rock we call Solid Little Rock Jams. Since musical snobs who are into RAP and other forms of electronic music probably already know of this seminal (Hahahah, consisting of semen, hahahahahahaha!) record, this review is probably more oriented towards FANS OF ROCK AND POP who don't understand the beauty of electronic beat oriented music. In case you don't know, DJ Shadow is this GUY who did a lot of collaborations and shit, especially some with fucking black people and the anti-black person Thom Yorke. Bearing the mark of Radiohead's frontman and seratonin-lacking singer, this album to ME, is one of the most biggest advances in progressive ELECTRO-SYNTHESIZED MUSIC of all time. Get bored listening to Underworld, Squarepusher and Orb? Get this album! He also did stuff with the MO' WAX label and if you're really curious just go to allmusic.com, seriously, what the fuck are you doing here!!! Oh wait, he did shit with Thom Yorke after Endtroducing, well, what I MEAN TO WRITE THEN is that you can easily tell, WITH THIS ALBUM, why the two would want to fucking work together! When I was working at Best Buy, some dude told me to purchase it, but instead of listening to him I put some Rush and Led Zeppelin on and rocked out. Oh, how foolish I was, because seriously, this album is amazing. Much more "progressive" then anything out there today, I would rank this along with OK COMPUTER as one of music's most influential albums of the NINETIES. If you tied nine ties together length-wise you'd also get the length of my goddamn dick!

So what does this album soundlike? Well, I could be like Pitchforkmedia (Incorporated) and shit a thesaurus onto your face but you'd still have no good idea of what to expect. The album begines with some VOICE (I have to be very careful using that word because apparently any instrument could be a voice, and not necessarily the vocal performer of a piece! I don't want to mix anyone up!) samples spinning and being manipulated and then Building Steam with a Grain of Salt comes in and you're treated to a pitter patter rainy minor piano OSTINATO that gets driven around by a sweet little ominous chorus thing, which then gets beaten around by a bunch of electronic drums and shit! The Number Song is an intense bass and drum driven NUMBER, culminating in a bunch of cool samples that sounds like a free-style psychedelic jam with samples bouncing back and forth against one another. What Does Your Soul Look Like has a bass line fatter then Orson goddamn Welles that slowly moves and caresses you, before leaving you for a sexy young, film noir. The texture on Midnight in a Perfect World is eerie, sounding like a slowed down Idioteque complete with sullen female vocals over an amazing drum and bass lament and that has a light keyboard motive dancing around it. Everything that's exciting about good texture music, be it experimental jazz or electronic music or rap samples is bandied around on this album, as DJ Shadow seamlessly combines lush (Like your fucking mom!) urban soundscapes over patterings of keyboards, guitars, samples and some synthesized instruments. I'd like to think of this as a more focused, less dancey Thievery Corporation album, with each song having a solid group of ideas that DJ Shadow manipulates and exploits to their full effect. This is a pretty technical review, as you can tell!

Anyways, get this fucking album, today, if you have to! Unlike marijuana, EXCELLENT MUSICAL ALBUMS are often a gateway to harder, more addictive music. One of these days I'll go back to writing joke reviews about famous albums that everyone has already heard of, but I can't rest until I know that everyone has heard of this beauty!

Rating: Giving an album a rating is like labeling a person or making some sort of stereotype, which is a completely stupid approach to music, even if it gives you the abiliy to compare and contrasts albums to one another and determine which of an artist's albums are the best. Therefore the rating for this album is a naked Lindsey Lohan.

Download: DJ Shadow- Stemlong Stem

The Misfits - Walk Among Us

You mustn't fear this musical group known as the Misfits! Just because punkers the world over drench themselves in spooky Misfits brand memorabilia bearing images of skulls and shit like that does not mean that this is "extreme" music whatsoever. And just because the songs have titles like "Angelfuck" and "Mommy Can I Go Out & Kill Tonight" doesn't mean that they're anything other than catchy, catchy, catchy. Hell, even "Last Caress," with its tale of baby killing and mommy raping, is sugarier than a lollipop butterscotch sunshine funsicle!

I mean, this shit is POP-PUNK, for crissakes. And there's one thing I'm curious about... how come the Misfits aren't frequently cited along with the Ramones, the Descendents, and the Buzzcocks as major innovators of the pop-punk that bands like Screeching Weasel and the Mr. T Experience have made a fortune off of by selling out to the majors and releasing pretentious rock operas? Sure, the 'Fits (as I call them) had turned all hardcore by the time of Earth A.D., but before then, with this album and the various songs scattered across Legacy of Brutality and Static Age, they combined 60s Beach Boys/"girl group" melodic shit with super mega gobs of fucking loud distortion in an equally skillful way as the Ramones did! Shit, the Descendents were practically Flux of Pink Indians' The Fucking Cunts Treat Us Like Pricks compared to this shit!

They carried the torch of the Ramones better than any punk rockin' melody lovers of the time (along with GG Allin, I'd say... again, the lyrics are gross, but a lot of the songs are just fun pop-punkers), let me tell you that. This album is just a fucking swell testament to that! 24 minutes of kickass punk rock jams featuring lots of "WHOOOOOA-OHHHH-OHHHHHHHH!!!!!!"s. They play lots of generic, ultra-happy pop-punk chord progressions that are constantly recycled by bands with nowhere near the songwriting talent of these fellas. Normally, these progressions would just sound dumb and sissyish, but in the Misfits' hands, they sound fuckin' ace! And you can shout along to those "WHOOOOOA-OHHH-OHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!" choruses, too. So grab that crusty senior kid at your high school who wears that jacket covered with studs and A Global Threat patches and rock out to this album with him after holding a delightful vintage horror movie festival in your very household! Cool beans?

Rating: This is just a great fucking album. Listen to it while you're fucking! You and your partner can shout along to "I Turned Into A Martian" as you penetrate their moist land of delectable juicy jum jums with your fleshy rod of baby forming sperm loads to be blown all over the unsuspecting face of a stranger or family member! "I TURNED INTO A MARTIAN!!!!!! WHOOOOOOOOAAAAAAA-OHHHHHHHH-OHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!"

Song: "Skulls"... I should have uploaded "I Turned Into A Martian," but you've probably heard it already if you've ever fucked before or are a woman because vaginas are known to emit this song from their murky depths about once a month. THIS IS A GOOD SONG, TOO, THOUGH.

Girl Talk- Night Ripper

Well, well, well, after a good month of rest and relaxation I'm back on the indie music beat ready to review either all your favorite prog albums by talking about dicks and pussies, or writing about how fat Orson "Lipitor Can't Save me Now" Welles is. What a whale. Anyways, if any of you have more irony then blood in your bodies, you'll realize how funny it is that right after I RAILED upon Dan on how BLATANTLY HE DISREGARDED THE BLOG, I decide to go on a month hiatus from your wonderful bleak and murky lives. Well, I had fucking finals, and shit. It was pretty terrible, but I am ALIVE AGAIN, ready to instill the fear of God in every single person who reads this blog. God is actually a black Tom Cruise look alike who votes Republican. Isn't that some scary stuff????????

Anyways, in case you haven't been around the music scene wrap-up of 2006, the album Night Ripper by Girl Talk has been thrown around a lot. I first heard of this compact disc around August, and it pretty much caused the irony pressure to increase by tenfold when I heard it. Girl Talk is a techno/glitch-rap/dance ARTIST who's actual name is Gregg Gillis (Kind of like Greg Ginn). With Night Ripper, he seemlessly blends and warps every genre of music from gangster rap to indie rock to rock and roll and back to crunk in a dazzling array (We are the cliche police) of loops, samples, mash-ups and tunes. The album is the perfect embodiment of our ADD generation; 25-40 seconds of focus on one particular mash-up that quickly mutates into another mash-up building off of either the previous one or becoming a whole new monster. Each song runs about 2-3 minutes of this genre-bending beat-splicing, with the occaisionally drummachine segue between them. The sheer amount of samples on the album is ludicrous to even begin to count; however, if there's any ironic hipster asshole in you, it'll explode out of your eyelids when you hear the multitude of ways that Girl Talk's blending of various genres explodes into ironic danceable bliss. Just when you think that you've heard some of the greatest song collaborations that could never happen, Girl Talk's next song is cut with another great mash-up, sometimes to hilarious effect.

I won't give away the names of the artists or some of the more intresting juxtapositions because half the fun of the album is listening to them happen without any prior knowledge. Some of the music can seem a bit gimmicky, especially towards the end where I was mostly unfamiliar with the samples being used and it just sort of became the denouement of an ecstasy fueled dance rave for me. This album embodies the some of the reasons why rap is so great, that is interesting, flowing beats that really create a sense of dynamics and accentuate whatever else is going on. Unlike most rap music, since the mash-ups are usually short I don't find myself getting tired of any sort of particular beat or feeling like its worn out its welcome.

Translation: Become the hero of the next hipster party you go to and play this album.

Rating: 9.1

Download: Girl Talk- Once Again

Neil Young - Trans

So lots of people hate this album! Neil Young was an all-American Canadian country folk grunge pioneer guy. 70s singer/songwriter acoustic guitar dude! When he plugged in, he really brought the gobs of heavy sludge distorto that people worldwide enjoyed all the live long day. Even when he decided to be a 'lil bit uncommercial, ditching the poppy radio jams for drunken piano death dirges, his music was still pretty damn normal (besides all the missed notes and voice cracking and such.)

Following that 70s period, he put out a really shittily produced album of really, really mind-numbingly dumb "RAWK 'N' ROLL" called Re-Ac-Tor. I'm sure that his fanbase bought it and was all like, "Huh... okay. This isn't as good as that other stuff, but whatever." But THIS... whole other story. This shit sounds like Kraftwerk, but at some points even weirder than Kraftwerk! And I doubt that many of Neil's fans had even heard of Kraftwerk, let alone listen to them regularly and claim to be FANS of said band's music!

That's the main reason that this album is so derided, I gather. I'm sure that Neil had a good chunk of fans who were way into stuff like James Taylor, the Eagles, Bruce Springsteen, who fucking knows. More Jann Wenner than Lester Bangs, see? We are readers and writers of this blog, and we are open to new ideas in music (not that this album was particularly "innovative".) We have a higher tolerance for artists' desires to surprise and experiment and all that shit. This new wave vocoder shit freaked the fuck out of his fans, and they had every right to be freaked out by it, frankly. I actually really like this album, but I also like Futureworld by Trans Am. That thing has vocoder vocals all over it. When I listen to it, I don't constantly find myself thinking, "WHY DON'T THEY JUST USE NORMAL VOCALS, GODDAMNIT???" which represents the thought process of many rock fans who would much prefer a good 'ol Bob Dylan album instead.

It's like Metal Machine Music in a way, really. Can you imagine being a Lou Reed fan in the 1970s who got on board with Transformer and "Walk On The Wild Side," and then suddenly buying the new Lou Reed album, and finding out that it's just a bunch of NOISE? Like, it's REALLY just a bunch of noise??? Mainstream rock fans in the 70s weren't exactly buying up Merzbow albums by the sack (a magical sack that has been transported through time by Doc Brown's Delorean, of course.) They weren't into krautrock, and they had probably never heard of AMM or Les Rallizes DeNudes or whatever. Hell, they probably didn't even know that Lou had been partly responsible for something called "Sister Ray"! We all surely enjoy an occasional Whitehouse or Kevin Drumm album, and if Keven Federline or somebody released a ridiculously innovative noise record, we would most definitely hail its greatness. But Kevin Federline's fans would be like, "WTF???"

I'm just fascinated that an album like Metal Machine Music that is almost unanimously despised by a certain contingent of rock critics can simultaneously be something that a whole other type of music fan can find great appreciation in. Sure, it's not a very good classic rock album, but a fairly kickass noise record? Why not! And then we have Trans. If you're a hardcore fan of "Heart of Gold," you're probably not going to give half a shit about this new wavey robot shit because new wavey robot shit scares the crap out of you. Well, this is pretty good new wavey robot shit! So there.

Rating: I guess I didn't really talk about the album that much. It's fun as shit! The songs are really good! Some of them don't have robot vocals. The 80s production really doesn't sound horribly dated. "Computer Age" is so fucking awesome. If you like synth pop, or electronica, or whatever, you might very well dig this. If you're my mom, stay away. That's right, mom. YOU WILL NOT LIKE THIS ALBUM. WHY ARE YOU READING THIS. PLEASE CLOSE THE WINDOW IMMEDIATELY.

Song: "We R In Control"... so awesome. This is like "Buttsex: The Song." Okay, it's not really like that. Still pretty smelly, though.