Muscle and Marrow- My Fear (Track of the Day)

A rich percussive wash from Portland Oregon's Muscle and Marrow, this track builds an atmosphere of pulsing tension.
My Fear evokes attitudes of early 80's goth combined in textures of mid nineties Shoegaze and Trip-hop. Lower the lights, take a deep breath and float away on this track.

Playlist suggestions:
Follow with- Chemtrails by Beck

King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard- Gamma Knife (Track of the Day)

Following on Dead Ghosts' tack sharp evocation of 13th Floor Elevators' garage psychedelia we throw it into MC5 Detroit style overdrive. King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard seem to perpetrate the primal mistake of hippie posturing, trying too hard. Their band name aches with "look-at-me-please" desperation and the only way to redeem it would bee to rock so hard the name does not matter because, a rose by any other name...

And they do.

King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard manage to screech and squeal and pulse and rush with fervid punk volume while maintaining a lush psychedelia

Rocky Said by Dead Ghosts (Track of the Day)

The wonderful privilege of creativity is not in providing what people want but in arriving with the thing no one asked for but which everyone needs. To wit, Dead Ghosts' eerily accurate evocation of mid sixties garage psychedelia. The sound of enthusiastic amateurs with a gland full of hallucinogens, an afternoon in an analogue recording studio and some gorgeous old amps with real spring reverb. It's how most of us grew up imagining the passage to another dimension would sound.

Twisted Knife by Black Vulpine (Track of the Day)

-by Tzarathustra

Black Vulpine is fronted by two female vocalists, which, when combined with their particularly 90s influenced take on stoner rock, makes the whole thing sort of sound like the answer to the question "What if Veruca Salt was a sludge band instead?" 

https://blackvulpine.bandcamp.com/

Jangle Me: Five Songs Chiming out of the 80s and 90s

There was a particular guitar tone born in the 1980s on the midwestern and southern independent concert circuit. It can be almost directly traced back to the twin arrivals of REM and The Replacements. It was ringing and bright yet capable of shades of melancholy.


It got picked up and homogenized into the stereotypical mid-nineties guitar sound. It became the gen-ex totem associated with pop-lazy music tastes, bottoming out with the Friends and Party of Five TV themes.

But it is still possible to cycle back and reclaim it, to remember how fresh and enigmatic it could be in the hands of REM or how brash and confrontational when handled by Paul Westerberg et al.
These five songs run from 1985 to 1996 and are like worn flannel with the whiff of incense and old sweat in the threads, energetic memories to animate you right now.

Weekly Vinyl Pt 2 (Caring is Creepy-The Shins)

I seem to remember the early 2000s a little different than some.

Listeners who had been invested in the independent music scene through the nineties often view The Shins with minor distaste because they were a shot across the bow of the lo-fi dry-humored world of Pavement et al. To those whose ear was attuned to Lou Barlow, Stephen Malkmus, and Guided by Voices The Shins could seem embarrassingly sincere and overly polished.

Coming to them from mainstream music, the post-disco shellac of teen pop, the frat boy hyper dirges of Nu Metal, and the sad sack dribblings of Coldplay (the last of which, full disclosure, I was very attached to at the time) The Shins sounded loose, breezy, low maintenance and fantastically bright. They were a breath of cool perfumed air in a stultifying musical climate.

I picked up their first album from the rack in 2001 based solely on the cover and the Sub Pop label on the back. Revisiting it now I can still remember the immediate smile that spread across my face from the first notes of Caring is Creepy and which did not fade until well after the last song ended.

Weekly Vinyl Pt 01 (Coma Girl- Joe Strummer and the Mescaleros)

This begins a weekly feature where I will shoot and post videos from my record collection.

The sound, the physicality, the personal connection with an object not connected to any network and not sending back meta-data to advertisers, its attention is on you and yours upon it. Because music is important. Not anyone's opinion about you, and not how many other people are listening with you. It's the glory of sitting close and watching it spin.

In this case it's the first track from the late great Joe Strummer's last album, Street Core. I discovered this album from a magazine compilation that featured the second track, Get Down Moses. I heard the song and then almost immediately found out he had passed away. This album, apart from being incredible, has a close spot in a lot of music fans' hearts and when it was released on vinyl for Record Store Day back in 2010 I snatched it up greedily.