The Thermals "Here's Your Future" Hutch and Kathy "Infinite Loop" The Body, The Blood, The Machine, this year's release from Portland punks the Thermals, is easily one of my favorite records of 2006, maybe the best the band has produced. While this is something like the billionth blog to big up these guys, I guess I'll go ahead and share the opener off that disc, part one in a prolonged paranoid nightmare about America as a theocracy. (That'll never [...]
Eric B. & Rakim "Juice (Know The Ledge)" Big Daddy Kane "Nuff' Respect" Way back when, there was a time when the best hip hop samplers came in the form of movie soundtracks. Sure, there were some bum tracks-in particular, R&B tracks to go with love scenes could be tireless when they weren't awesome-but you have a couple stone-cold classics like New Jack City, Juice , I think even Menace II Society . Ricochet had a hot title track and of course Snoop Dogg's [...]
Daniel Johnston "I Had Lost My Mind" "Living Life" "Don't Let The Sun Go Down On Your Grievience" Last weekend the little lady and I Netflix'd The Devil and Daniel Johnston, a marvelous and heartbreaking biography of the troubled Austin artist, singer-songwriter and pioneering home recordist who's been a touchstone for a couple generations of indie rockers. The filmmakers truly do justice to a life that is the stuff of tall tales. Picking up the strand from Lindayism like a month ago, I'd highly recommended this [...]
Thingy "O.B.13 Queens of the Stone Age "These Aren't The Droids You're Looking For" Cinema Week! on Paper Covers Rock! Continues! The weekend before, the little lady's cable channels were playing all six Star Wars movies on a loop. (Although we only like to acknowledge the first three.) Leading up to this semi-non-event, there was some blog coverage at places like Sterogum , thanks to the totally awful ads that set selected scenes from the movies to a sappy Coldplay song. Each [...]
Spoon "The Book I Write" Wreckless Eric "Whole Wide World" Stranger Than Fiction soundtrack at Newbury Comics. (and at iTunes .) This is a little different. I want to talk about a movie, Stranger Than Fiction , I saw over the weekend, which is my favorite film this year. I think you should see it too, although maybe this post is more for people who've already seen the [...]
The Secret Stars "Your Life To Live" In the hope of sending you off to yr weekend in a mood full of both hope and wist(?), here's some bedroom-recording whispers from the Secret Stars, the now-defunct Boston boy-girl duo interlinked with more rocking concerns like Karate and Ted Leo/Pharmacists. "Your Life To Live," off their 1996 self-titled tape, floats along on a sweet love vibe, intimating the dazed infatuation of what sounds to me like the early days of a relationship. Geoff Farina breathes out velvety but emotive lead vocals [...]
Jon Brion "CITGO Sign" (Demo) Off of a widely-traveled set of bootlegs from the early 90s, this demo of "CITGO Sign" is my favorite composition by L.A. pop producer, film-score composer and musical polyglot Jon Brion. I've heard this one live probably half a dozen times in the old days, when I used to hit his Friday night gig at Largo-OK, I was the one shouting out the request-and I hope you can hear the magic of this tune beneath the iffy sound quality. The word "favorite" above is really a [...]
Tahiti 80 "Big Day" Phoenix "On Fire" The Push Kings "Sunday On The West Side" I went through a little angst about whether to post about Tahiti 80. The group was brought to my attention by a couple publicist-type folks, and up till now what I write about has been decided pretty much by whim. The apt introduction to the band: "I know you don’t necessarily do new music, but I’ve snooped around your blog a bit and I think you might [...]
Ruins "Reversible Sabbath" It's Tuesday, and it's time to rock. Honestly, I'd be a totally faking it to pretend I'm a Ruins aficionado. The avant/prog stuff generally intimidates me-if you've been paying attention, you can tell I'm much more of a pop fan in my dotage. When I do take it in, I process it as genre music, and really at that point I'd rather throw on some dub or bossa nova or something. On the other hand it'd be pretty damn ignorant to dismiss the long-running Japanese outfit-a [...]
Peter Laughner "Amphetamine" "Life Stinks" "Cinderella Backstreet" Feeling morose this Monday, so gravitated to the Peter Laughner. Briefly, this is the late great guitarist and songwriter for Cleveland's Rocket from the Tombs, a recently resuscitated proto-punk outfit that spawned Pere Ubu and the Dead Boys. Laughner didn't find a lasting place in either group, and flamed out at 24. (For more, take a look at my second-favorite Lester Bangs piece, "Peter Laughner is Dead." ) The sadly out of print Take [...]
T. Rex "Raw Ramp" Before I'd heard "Raw Ramp," it'd been described to me-fondly-as "like the most misogynistic song ever." It might've been up there at the time it was released as a b-side to "Get It On" in '71, but I'll lazily vote for "Bitches Ain't Shit" as usurping that title in the meantime. (Maybe that one was just plain misanthropic?) So yeah, glam godfather Marc Bolan is mixing up his come-ons ("baby I'm beggin' off ya please") with his euphimistic/gynecological putdowns ("you think you're a champ/but, girl, you ain't [...]
The Bee Gees "Craise Finton Kirk Royal Academy Of Arts" I'm all false starts today, and finally settled on sharing a Bee Gees tune. These aren't the Bros. Gibb of white suits and testicularly-constricted falsetto-although, for the record, the official Paper Covers Rock policy states that disco does not, in fact, suck. In 1967 on the aptly titled 1st, it seems the boys' highest ambition was to make a really good psych pop record mimicking their heroes the Beatles. It worked. Because "Craise Finton" seems [...]
Big Daddy Kane "Raw" (Remix) Big Daddy Kane feat. Kool G. Rap "Raw" (Remix) I'm feeling a little uninspired today, so we're gonna go on a brief nostalgia trip. ( Marley Marl's House of Hits has been on heavy rotation in the car, for what it's worth.) Big Daddy Kane's my favorite rapper of all-time, which sort of gives me away as an old fart with a Golden Age of Hip Hop fixation. His time in the sun was kind of brief by [...]
The Zombies "This Will Be Our Year" (Demo) "This Will Be Our Year" (Mono) I'm in the relatively unusual position of working in an office one floor up from a lounge with an upright piano. When it's time for a break, I regularly case the room, and if there's no one there, I hack away at my rudimentary versions of songs I love. Yesterday I had a "gotcha!" moment. Folks walked in just as I was fumbling my way through the second verse of the Zombies' "This Will Be [...]
Bishop Allen "Corazon" Starlight Mints "Sugar Blaster" NYC rockers Bishop Allen are already darlings of the blogiverse; in fact I was turned on to them by the postings of the B.A. superfan at You Ain't No Picasso . Two things hooked me on these guys: (1) 2006 finds them releasing an EP every month, the kind of ambitious project that impresses me; and (2) their song from January , "Corazon." So this post is (at least half) for those [...]
Pernice Brothers "Grudge F*** (2006)" Scud Mountain Boys "Grudge ****" Stop the presses! Two days in a row with 2006 content! (Well, sorta.) Massachusetts native Joe Pernice has a smooth and increasingly smoky voice that recalls the Zombies' Colin Blunstone at time, a bad attitude and a gift for insidiuosly catchy melodies. In the mid-90s he applied these tools to a usually mellow country-rock, in retrospect really eschewing the "alt," as frontman of the Scud Mountain Boys . His songs [...]
The Mae Shi "Miss Philistine" (Live on KXLU) For balance, another retelling of the Samson-Delilah affair by the Mae Shi. (Disclosure: dudes are friends of mine.) This comes from their set at KXLU a couple years back and used to be available free on their Web site. "Miss Philistine" rides a nicked classic-rock verse riff through an account of Samson, lion-slayer and horny teenager. It's one of my favorite songs by these guys, and it's too bad this never jelled enough as a recording to make it to official release. "Philly girls ain't got no [...]
Regina Spektor "Samson" I didn't trust Regina Spektor at first. The first I'd heard of her was singing on a Strokes single, and while I actually like the Strokes' music, I don't trust them. Does that make any sense? And then everything I heard about her was comparisons to Tori Amos. We can all agree, right, love 'er or hate 'er, that we don't need a copy of the woman? Right? Once I opened my sometimes-jaded ears this year to her smart and bouncy ace pop tunes "On The Radio" (swear I got [...]
Sugar "Your Favorite Thing" (fu:el) My Blood Valentine homage as desperate plea from Bob Mould and his post Hüsker Dü buzzsaw pop outfit. That riff is gigantic, ironically happy sounding. Sloan "Sugartune" (peppermint) A veneer of shoegaze on this one too, but even on their first EP, Sloan's a pop band at heart. In the inspirational vein, this song is ostensibly about itself ("I wrote for you a sugartune"). The [...]
The Misfits "She" (Blank Records 73 Version) "Skulls" (Master Sound Sessions) "Night Of The Living Dead" (Lost Recording) Happy Halloween, dear fiends, uh, friends. Y'all knew the Misfits post was coming, right? As I said earlier, they're probably my favorite punk band (Minor Threat's up there too). On the surface, the Misfits were sort of the ne plus ultra of American trash culture: kids from Jersey hyped up on b-movies, Elvis and too much caffeine, regurgitating the plots of horror movies and conspiracy theories as too-fast-too-loud [...]
Paper Covers Rock
HAERTS – All The Days
iTunes Leaks Kanye West’s Yeezus tracklisting??
PREVIEW: Hyperbits – Karekare (Original Mix)
