Category music reviews

The Ramones “Hard to Find” bonus tracks

As much as I hate Youtube from a content creator standpoint, I love it as an archive of stuff that I either didn’t know existed or didn’t have the money to buy in the 80’s
To me, “I want you around” from the Rock n’ Roll High School Soundtrack was a “bonus track” that I would put on my personal tapes and mixtapes I made for other people
My first Ramones album was Rocket to Russia but I immediately went out and bought “Too Tough To Die” after seeing them at the
Arcadia Theater
I am not sure if I bought them at the same time but I did buy a 12″ single with “Howling At The Moon”
There was a non album track that was a cover of The Rolling Stones’ “Street Fighting Man” which now became my new “Bonus Track”

street-fighting

I thought it was kind of a ripoff to put two album tracks on the record and only offer ...

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UFOFU Retrospective

1993 was a great time in Deep Ellum because you could walk into a club and see a band like UFOFU
This was a time when alternative music was about to be splintered into a million sub fragments
The largest fragment being grunge
But for a while, there were bands like UFOFU who were exploring different types of alternative music
Most importantly, they were exploring progressive angles without sounding like pretentious Math Rock
I bought their tape and was started playing along with it on the drums
I went to lots of shows and became very familiar with the band
Joe Butcher was a smart ass that I could count on for some good verbal sparring (my favorite moment was the look on his face when I suggested he start a side project called “The Joe Butcher Axis”
Brandon and i talked alot about music in g...

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Disconnect- Review of Gary Numan’s “Replicas”

One of the stronger emotions I encounter on a regular basis is the need to disconnect from the rest of the world
Things happen to frustrate or damage me and I just want to shut everyone out I’m sure that everyone feels like this but my problem is that it happens quite frequently
My recent bout of drama has been particularly painful and it that withdrawl urge has been kicking in again
This led me to listen to one of the most important albums in my collection
Gary Numan always seemed to tap into that  emotion (or lack therof) In an age where electronic artists were humans trying to sound like machines, Numan’s music seemed to assert the exact opposite It wasn’t the precision robot-like music that Devo was performing (which FUCKING RULES!)
It was as if machines were trying to immitate humans
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Disconnect

Originally posted Dec 13th 2007 at 11 am
One of the stronger emotions I encounter on a regular basis is the need to disconnect from the rest of the world
Things happen to frustrate or damage me and I just want to shut everyone out
I’m sure that everyone feels like this but my problem is that it happens quite frequently
My recent bout of drama has been particularly painful and it that withdrawl urge has been kicking in again
This lead me to listen to one of the most important albums in my collection
Gary Numan always seemed to tap into that emotion (or lack therof)
In an age where electronic artists were humans trying to sound like machines, Numan’s music seemed to assert the exact opposite
It wasn’t the precision robot-like music that Devo was performing (which FUCKING RULES!)
It was as i...

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Rasputina 7/19/2010 Varsity Theater + video shoot

Rasputina has the distinction of “being there for me” during a time in my life where I was trying to search for a way to stay relevant
Kat burned copies of “Frustration Plantation” and “Cabin Fever” when I was on tour with the fucking Von Ehrichs and it was a welcome distraction from the hell I was having to endure on that tour

I had listened to Rasputina before but those albums were pretty standard (although better than most) goth
These two albums had very interesting electronic tracks
It wasn’t the garden variety, bludgeon you over the head, NIN/Ministry type of electronics
This was subtle texture
It immediately started my wheels turning when thinking of a way to part from the tradition of 20th century electronic music
Those two albums are what I put in the category of “headphone albums”

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