Random Music Reviews

As you may or may not already know (or care, for that matter), i am a bit of a music junkie. Being as ridiculously addicted to beats as i am, i thought i would share with you all some of the stuff i've been feeling lately. Click images for iTunes links.

Honeycut - The Day I Turned to Glass

I love the seventies. I only spent three brief years of my life in them, but memories of wicker furniture, grandma's rain lamps, and Pong are strewn about the basement floor of my psyche, images stained yellow-brown by time like old polaroids. I am nostalgic for a time just before i was born, a time which, in my opinion, produced some of of the most amazing sounds ever recorded. There was a sort of post-hippie urban grittiness, disillusioned yet naive as ever, as "flower power" morphed into survivalist weeds growing through cracks in the concrete. It was all a recipe for a very particular flavor of funk that will forever remain impossible to recreate--sadly, no one will ever sound like Curtis Mayfield again.

Well, Honeycut is not a 70's band, but more than anyone else i've recently heard, they have a way of bringing the spirit of 70's funk into the 21st century, infusing it with contemporary hip hop and electronica stylings. I love these guys.

Pigeon John - And the Summertime Pool Party

This is one of those albums that simply makes me feel good. With intelligent lyrics, chilled out beats, amazing production, and a certain sense of purity that hails back to the pre-gangsta rap era of 80's hip hop, i can't stop playing this record. What amazes me about this album is how it can be at once so ebullient and so melancholy, a celebration of some of the more precious moments in life (Higher?!, Freaks Freaks, Brand New Day), while simultaneously mourning the ever-increasing weight of time that separates us from our most cherished memories (The Last Sunshine, Weight of the World, Growing Old).

Peeping Tom - Peeping Tom

I was in 7th grade when i bought music for myself for the very first time, a cassette tape from the gas station at the end of my driveway. It was called The Real Thing by Faith No More. I had no idea at the time that i had just discovered an artist i would be pathologically infatuated with for the rest of my life: Mike Patton, vocalist for Faith No More, as well as Mr. Bungle, Tomahawk, Lovage, The Dillinger Escape Plan, and Fantomas. While his previous work may not be suitable for the more delicate cochleas of the world, this is probably his most accessible album yet, featuring some amazing collaborations with a wide range of artists, including Massive Attack, Norah Jones, Dan the Automator, Amon Tobin, and Bebel Gilberto. "I don't listen to the radio, but if I did, this is what I'd want it to sound like," Patton says of the Peeping Tom album. "This is my version of pop music. In a way, this is an exercise for me: taking all these things I've learned over the years and putting them into a pop format."

Nine Inch Nails - Year Zero

I've been a Nine Inch Nails fan ever since high school, and my fascination with Trent Reznor has only, um, spiralled upward in the past 14 years. NIN's music has always represented for me the perfect blend of sex, anger, and loneliness--just what the doctor ordered for my various masculine passions and pathologies. His first four albums can be effectively summed up as: "I hate myself and want to fuck" (Pretty Hate Machine), "I hate myself and want to kill," (Broken), "I hate myself and want to die" (The Downward Spiral), and "I'd hate myself, but there's no more self to hate" (The Fragile). I am still trying to figure out what the hell With Teeth was all about.

But Year Zero, his sixth album, might just be his most ambitious yet. It is completely amazing--it is a very complex concept album, complete with it's own ARG (Alternative Reality Game) decyphered from binary codes in the album, font styles on concert t-shirts, patterns in white noise recordings found on USB cards after NIN shows (!!!), and various other forms of digital esoteria. It basically tells the story of a future dystopian American society dominated by a fundamentalist amber military/religious regime and rendered complacent by propaganda and drugs in the water supply. There's even a special guest appearance from a mysterious awe-inducing entity known only as "The Presence," which takes the form of a giant hand reaching down from the sky. It's essentially a brilliant 21st century post-industrial Web 2.0 upgrade of A Brave New World, and i cannot stop listening to it! Talk about the evolution of album art.... Here's a compilation of all the album-related webpages that have been found, which is presumably all of them.