Posts by Bob Lange

Mick Jones’ last three albums with the Clash were genre-mixing explorations that pushed the limits, not only of punk, but of rock and pop as a whole. With the exception of London Calling, these efforts were both uneven as well as underrated. Big Audio Dynamite not only continued that tradition, but also expanded on it. Considering that such a broad palette would be considered commonplace in the next decade, This Is Big Audio Dynamite doesn’t get its due for for the part it played in laying out the landscape for many of the alt rock bands that exploded into the 90s.

Girl in a Coma’s latest release, a series of 7" EPs titled Adventures in Coverland, is their stab at this critically (though not always commercially) dangerous plan. So, how do they fare? Well, with selections ranging from Richie Valens to Joy Division, they certainly succeed in laying out the influences of what has become, in a very short time, a remarkably rich musical palette. The selection is also culturally diverse, spelling out the trio’s cultural history as well. In conjunction with their last album, 2009’s Trio BC, these EPs make the source of Girl in a Coma’s rapidly expanding vision quite clear. Taken as a whole, there is no question that Adventures in Coverland succeeds where similar albums, often by bands with far more experience, fail.

Last year, I showed up at Sound Garden, in Baltimore's Fells Point, about an hour after they opened.There were a few people in there and some of the more desirable titles had sold out, but I walked right in and found a lot of what I was looking for with no crowds and no hassles.  This year was a different story.  I got down there right before they opened and the line ran for about two blocks outside of the store.  When I finally got in the store about an hour later, there was still probably 30 people waiting to get in behind me.  Sure, I would have loved to have walked right in, but the bottom line is that Record Store Day was a much bigger event this year than last year and that alone more than made up for the wait.

Recent months have given us some fine vinyl releases and I'll recap some that I've picked up from Side One Dimmy, No Sleep Records, Tiny Engines, Blackheart, Dischord

Fans of Chad Smith's other endeavors, the funk/punk of Red Hot Chili Peppers and the generic hard rock of Chickenfoot, will find his Bombastic Meatbats project to be a surprise to say the least. It owes more to 70s fusion artists John McLaughlin and Herbie Hancock and jazz-oriented prog than it does to any mainstream rock influence.

Before even listening, Sonic Boom suffers from some degree of disingenuousness just because they dressed Tommy Thayer and Eric Singer up as Ace and Peter. C'mon guys, at least Eric Carr and Vinnie Vincent got their own Kiss persona. And gee, the cover art looks a little familiar too.

Nashville.  Music City USA.  The Country Music Capitol of the World.  The home of Sound & Shape, perhaps the next big thing in prog rock.  What?  If that last one doesn't seem to fit, it's not just you.  It's just as well, because there is plenty about this band that doesn't really fit, so to speak.  In some ways that's been a blessing and in other ways a curse, but always a challenge to make the best music they can.

So much stoner and doom rock tends to be an exercise in heaviness alone. While that certainly has its place, few people can take the steady bludgeoning that it offers even as it fills that need in all who really love heavy metal for the mind-numbing weight of slow, trudging riffs that take Tony Iommi to the extreme. Sometimes, however, a band offers such crushing power in a more dynamic form that respects the song as well as pushing the limits of the heavy in metal.

The Mars Volta is a band of mystery.  They're detached, they're impersonal…they're brilliant.  It's commonly accepted that a concert should involve some connection between band and audience.  By conventional thinking, this is often accomplished with a bit of friendly banter between songs or sing-along parts that blur the lines between performer and audience.  But the Mars Volta is anything but a conventional band.  They do things differently.

Now, fifteen years later, Soul Coughing is long gone, but band leader Mike Doughty is on his third "official" solo album with the recent release of Sad Man Happy Man and, while he's changed i some ways, he's still enjoying both the fickleness and enthusiasm of fans and critics.

They're okay as a short term fix, but, like their older peers, they won't take long to wear thin.

There's a handful of bands out there whose influence has been felt far and wide decades after they made their mark, yet they never enjoyed significant commercial success. The Velvet Underground comes to mind. So does Nick Drake. There are others, but in heavy rock circles, one of these bands rises above all others – Blue Cheer.

Jeff over at Imagine Echoes is a music fan with wide-ranging tastes who, until a year or so ago, had never owned a record.  Now, he has over 150, and in addition to building his collection, he's also the auther of the well-respected blog, Imagine Echoes.

Anomaly is the latest release from Ace Frehley, but it's also a good description of Space Ace himself in a sense. After all, he's the only member of KISS to make any good records on his own. So, score one for Ace. On the other hand, it's been twenty years since he's released a studio album. A long layoff from recording alone raises questions, so it's hard to predict what we'll get.

Coming two years after their promising debut, Trio BC shows a young band that has done some significant maturing as musicians. The album maintains their early punkish edge, but expands the sound well beyond that. Nina Diaz elevates herself to a rough-around-the-edges Patsy Cline, particularly on the yearning, tender melancholy of "El Monte."

Trapped Animal is the first studio album from the Slits since 1981 and comes 30 years after the seminal punk/reggae fusion of their debut, 1979's Cut.

This five song EP, in classic punk fashion, clocks in at just under eight minutes, but we all know it's quality, not quantity, that counts. These tracks, culled from two different shows, reflect GI's hardcore heyday in 1982-83.

Essential Jazz Classics has recently released a set of CDs that collects some of that period's best albums along with some interesting bonus material.

Cheap Trick.  Poison.  Def Leppard.  It's an odd billing to be sure.  Poison and Def Leppard seem reasonable enough, with careers that rode the hair metal explosion of the 80s to multi-platinum success, but Cheap Trick, an 80s power ballad aside, were churning out power pop gems (that continue to influence bands today) five to ten years earlier than their tour mates.  Oddly enough, the tour's oldest band chronologically is its youngest spiritually and that is part of the magic that still makes Cheap Trick matter.

Back in 1985, I bought JFA's Live 1984 Tour LP. It's energy was as unbounded as the possibilities of my new found favorite genre and it quickly found itself in steady rotation on my turntable. Nearly a quarter century later, a new piece of live JFA vinyl is spinning in my basement and it's hard to believe that it still has much of that same thrashy skate punk energy.