January 2010
8 posts
7 tags
Today's Vinyl: Queen
When Queen released Jazz, I asked my mom for the album as a Christmas present. She went down to the mall – probably to Hastings or some other now-defunct mall record store – and, as she was paying for the record, the clerk asked her if it was a gift for her kid (I guess this implies that my mom didn’t look like your typical Queen fan in 1978, which is true; I think she was actually going...
7 tags
Today's Vinyl: Pete Townshend (picture disc!)
Pete Townshend’s All the Best Cowboys Have Chinese Eyes almost single-handedly got me through the latter years of high school. Why a record by an aging rock star largely concerned with the tribulations of aging rock stars would have enormous emotional resonance for a geeky high-school student is still beyond me to this day. Might have just been that the minor-key sadness of Slit Skirts...
9 tags
Today's Vinyl: Spoon
Caught Spoon last night at the ACL studios for a KUT taping, and this is a really a band at the top of their form. The show was fun, loose and dynamic; Daniel broke a string on Written in Reverse so we got to hear that one twice (I liked the broken string version better). I’m starting to think these boys might go somewhere.
The first time I saw Spoon was in an office building on Congress...
8 tags
Today's Vinyl: Aztec Camera
Backwards and Forwards is one of those weird 10-inch EPs that my Denon turntable doesn’t understand and tries to drop the needle in the middle of the second track. Aztec Camera were a Scottish, proto/thinking man’s Crowded House fronted by the dashing Roddy Frame, who went so far on this record to list height, eye color and other salient details for all the band members. This is...
5 tags
Today's Vinyl: MC 900 Ft Jesus
Long before the Spike Jonze-directed video for If I Only Had a Brain made him an MTV hit, Mark Griffin was an obscure Dallas MC purveying sample-heavy, mostly instrumental hip hop. I heard Born with Monkey Asses on George Gimarc’s wonderful Rock & Roll Alternative radio show and picked up this self-released EP, which preceded MC 900 Ft Jesus’ full-length debut, Hell with the Lid...
7 tags
Today's Vinyl: Scratch Acid
If nothing else, the Jesus Lizard reunion last year provided a clinic on stage diving, with the nearly 50-year old David Yow showing as little regard for his own health and safety as he did back in the eighties, when Austin’s Rabid Cat released this rude bit of noise. While the Washam/Sims sound isn’t quite the tight, mean power drill to the temple that it would become with the...
5 tags
Today's Vinyl: 9353
I spent a summer in a study abroad program in the former Yugoslavia back when I made the somewhat misguided decision to minor in Serbo-Croation at Texas. There I met a hardcore nut from D.C. named Bill who wore big black ass-kicking boots and brought a box of tapes of some of the most random shit I’d ever heard. I played him Camper Van Beethoven’s Black Flag cover (Wasted) and he...
3 tags
Chub Rock
Why isn’t there a well-defined genre of music called “Fat Guy Rock”? I’ve got it in my head. Obvious candidates include Tad, Bachman-Turner Overdrive, Meatloaf and Screaming Trees. You could throw in the Minutemen and Hüsker Dü since D. Boone and Bob Mould were both big boys during their heyday.
Current fat guy-fronted acts include Fucked Up and Les Savy Fav, both of...