the bleeding horse, avenged: January 2018

Monday, January 29, 2018

SMASH THE PIG, THIS PORK IS MINE

HEAVEN UP HERE introduced me to a whole new world of uplifting technicolor anthemic gloom. It was the band at their collaborative best. PORCUPINE was more fragmented, but brilliantly chaotic and schizophrenic. These 2 albums were their peak, but everything up to the self-titled 1987 album was amazing. One of the all-time great cult bands.

ONCE WE KNEW WE WERE LOST

Sunday, January 28, 2018

The place to be exists only in your head

Amazing from beginning to end.

THE FAN AND THE BELLOWS is early, punky, nervous guitar overdrive.

SCRIPT OF THE BRIDGE refines it immensely. Taut, driving, edgy and moody. Their best.

WHAT DOES ANYTHING MEAN? adds a shitload of effects pedals and a few layers of keyboards. Power in a more oblique way.

STRANGE TIMES ends up their initial run with their most polished album. Nostalgia, anger and unease. The guitars chime, the band interplay is (as always) amazing.

And then the reunion album. Not a stone cold classic like the previous 3, but still damn powerful.

RIP John Lever.

YOU, UPON REFLECTION

Thursday, January 25, 2018

In her honey-dripping beehive

An old high school friend of mine wrote a few days ago to tell me he was In Bed, Bath & Beyond when he suddenly heard the Jesus and Mary Chain’s “Just Like Honey” playing over the store’s PA. I told him it was odd to think that middle-age weirdos such as myself were suddenly a demographic being targeted by stores. He, on the other hand, wondered how many of our contemporaries who had shunned these oddball bands back in the day (back when Prince, Michael Jackson, Madonna, Hall & Oates and the Culture Club were all the rage) were hearing this song and convincing themselves that they’d always liked it (Retro-active Pop Culture Wannabe-Cool, I suppose).

And I remember those people. If you lived in my little shithole home town and liked a band that others were unfamiliar with, you were a freak. If you liked A LOT of bands that people were unfamiliar with (and these bands had goofy names like Dead Kennedys, Killing Joke, Echo and the Bunnymen, etc etc), you were mocked on a daily basis.

Until the Normals all went off to college and found out that the world was actually full of people their age who had different tastes from them. And maybe the Normals liked some of these people, or maybe they suddenly found themselves to be the minority and just wanted to fit in, or they maybe they just cracked their minds open a tiny bit. And then I would run into them when they came home for the weekend, or for break or whatever, and they would say to me “Wow! My roommate/pledge brother/boyfriend/girlfriend just got me into that music you always used to listen to! It’s really good!”

Fucktards……

PSYCHOCANDY was a musical high point in a 5 or 6 year span that was jammed full of them. It was melodic, abrasive and over-the-top. It sounded like nothing else done, and it’s aged incredibly well.

The Jesus and Mary Chain rule. Just ask the good folks at BB&B. Why would they lie to you?