Minor incoherency, capitalization, and punctuation issues aside, I'm kind of impressed that you could type that many words. Keep at it and maybe one day you'll be able to understand basic social issues, human empathy, and when you're being duped or buying into hateful manipulation aimed at people like you!
I kept expecting each tweet (I didn't read them, just scrolled down) to be the last, but they just. kept. coming.
Obviously it has lots of good uses and has helped coordinate, educate, and expose lots of things that needed attention, but all the same...what a wretched platform.
Jesus Christ, are they going to pre-release every song on there? I actually plan to listen to the album (questionable as that might be given their last decade), but I guess I'm just not a fan of this kind of overwhelming rollout. I listened to one or two and have no intention to listen to any more until the album is out. But I guess that's probably an antiquated approach on my part.
Well the only one I can comment on is Catclysm from March and it's quite good. Much more guitar-focused and grittier than Ratchet. There's still plenty of Prince influence, but it's rock Prince rather than pop Prince on Cataclysm. The first three tracks hit the ground running for sure.
I hadn't kept up with Shamir since Ratchet (which I liked), but I checked out Catclysm and imagine my surprise to learn it kind of rocks! It was totally outside my expectations and better than I expected!
I'm leaning towards reading it as him saying we should just get on with it and start doing full-capacity shows again. Which is of course the unfortunate, disappointing way to take it.
That said, I saw him play the Outlaw Music Festival in 2018 and damn if him and his band didn't still slay! He even stuck to like 2/3 post-80s material and blues covers (granted, he did lead with "Astral Weeks" into "Sweet Thing", work in "Moondance" and "Wild Night", and close on "Brown Eyed Girl" [which I didn't think he liked playing] into "Gloria") and it was still incredible.
So props there for someone I always heard was mercurially unreliable on stage from night to night.
I mean why not in terms of being cinematic? Leader of the boss-dog band of the pre-Nevermind Seattle scene, so you get to show cool, sweaty, powerhouse club shows then shift to touring with GnR and then household name status with Superunknown, then he gets a whole second run at filling arenas in the 2Ks and kills himself - there's plenty "cinematic" in there. It's just that musician biopics are shit, so it doesn't matter because it wouldn't be good and would really just wind up embarrassing.
I mean a Chris Cornell biopic that in any way takes pride in being tied to Walk the Line or any other big-studio musician biopic is a bad idea regardless. And making it about his last days seems like just one more bad idea on the heap.
I don't think he had the range for something like that. Hence he applied the 300-style slow-motion ultraviolence and made the characters, who in the book were very human (well aside from Doc Manhattan) for a reason, be able to smash each other's heads through marble, knock each other through ceilings, and keep fighting.
I didn't know the original had been slated as the lead single. Good call shelving it if it meant unleashing obvious mega-classic "TBABIT", but I've always thought it was an underrated album cut.
Snyder is as one note as they come - all overly stylized ultra-violence and super dark, brooding masculinity.
Batman should be dark and brooding, but the DC in general shouldn't, but that's exactly what he did with Batman/Superman & Justice League. Totally tone deaf (and even as far as Batman goes, it's pretty fundamental to his character that he doesn't run around massacring bad guys), total trash.
I was just gonna say - maybe whatever perceived damage Phil and people who are agreeing with him was talking about was already done just by Ten and Nevermind alone, but In Utero and Vitalogy are both pretty weird albums.
It's weird that people are pushing the narrative that the success of the Seattle bands ended the chances for quirky alternative music in here. Isn't the more common narrative that all the weirdos got major label deals & pushes once the grunge guys started picking up steam? That's always how I see people talk about it for bands like early Ween, Butthole Surfers, Melvins, Primus, Flaming Lips, etc plus all the guys who had less lasting success (and yes I know most of them pre-dated Nirvana, but that's part of the point).
I don't think I ever really knew many facts on some of the...unpleasant aspects of the band's dynamic and the other Farrell stuff in the write up, but there aren't many musicians out there that it would have surprised me less to hear about. I feel like it's always been right there under the surface even for someone viewing at distance.
That said, rock solid album. I know it makes me a bad music fan, but I think I've always liked it more than NS. I don't think either is a front-to-back killer, but they've both got monster tracks. "No Right", "Been Caught Stealing", and "Three Days" are my three favorites here; "No Right" never gets any love and I think that's lame, I've loved "Been Caught..." more and more as the years have gone on, and while I think the art rock side of the album is a bit tedious as a whole, I think "Three Days" is the best of it and pretty riveting unto itself. "Classic Girl" is a good comedown track, too.
Hmm, interesting choice - Wareham's gentle, whispered vocal style is so different from Verlaine's snarky punk delivery.
And hey, what about Richard Lloyd?! He soloed on the original too!
It's cool that Bjork is in it, but I'm mostly just stoked to know what Eggers' next movie is and that it sounds awesome (just like the last two were; The VVitch is my favorite horror movie of at least the last decade).
Bad Reputation is the other studio album that could be a worthwhile starter (that little run of songs from "Opium Trail" through "Dancing in the Moonlight" is so good), but really for studio albums the basic answer of Jailbreak is the right one.
Bad call - Jailbreak & Black Rose in particular are worth a dive (I don't love their earliest stuff, but once they found that muscular double-guitar attack sound it was on). Or at least check Live & Dangerous.
Not to read too much into it, but that was kind of an odd list of artists/songs to pull & mention for Stereogum. Does this site and its readership really pay more attention to Drake, Mac Miller, and Nas (granted, it's an Illmatic cut) in 2020 than to Moses Sumney, HAIM, Jason Isbell, Litte Simz, etc?
Comments