Music General Music Discussion Catch-All

[Curt McGirt]

Exciter RULES. I bought a 2-on-1 tape of their first two for cheap for a vacation, listened to it and thought it was cheesy. Gave it another try later on, and I specifically remember walking down the street at night from a neighbor's house where my parents were partying on a Friday, listening to it on my Walkman, and "Delivering to the Master" came on. It just clicked. From then on I knew this old '80s metal shit was for me. 

Sirens is okay. Most of their early albums are, but Savatage is one of those bands that I can kind of take or leave; they just never stuck with me like others though they're just as talented and well-written. Hall of the Mountain King is probably my favorite. 

Chaos UK are hugely important to the future of punk from then on out. Together with Disorder they formed a two-pronged attack that inspired everyone in hardcore, maybe not as much as Discharge but close. The Japanese were first to take up their mantle with bands like Confuse and Gai, which segued into the "crasher crust" subgenre of bands like Gloom and Life who combined the D-beat of Doom and ENT with the noise of Chaos UK and Disorder to form a wall of sound. From then on there are lines of pogo-punk, noisecore, and raw punk bands who kept the influence present. Frenzy and Zyanose are two particular denizens of the style these days that are rather good. 

[zendragon]

I saw Exciter twice last year touring on 40 years of HMM. Still a good time

[ohtani's jacket]

Loudness' The Law of Devil's Land... Loudness are probably my favorite Japanese heavy metal group from this era. This was right before their breakout Disillusion album, but it was the album where they made a big leap forward. You can really hear the classic Japanese speed metal sound on this record. Akira Takasaki is the man. 

Tank's This Means War... this was a solid record. Tank appeared to go down a hard rock route with this LP as opposed to the grandiose heights that Maiden were trying to reach. It's a good record, though I'd be lying if I claimed to really care about the message since every rock band in the world in 1983 had some type of song about war or cold war paranoia. 

Junko Ohashi's Point Zero... great record! The mix of city pop and synth funk was genius. Junko died in November last year so I felt it was time to fire this up again. She really was a cut above some of her contemporaries in terms of the sophistication of her records. When this odyssey is over, I want to explore her discography further.

Roswell Rudd, Steve Lacy, Misha Mengelberg, Kent Carter & Han Bennink's Regeneration... I know next to nothing about any of these artists. All I can tell you is that this was a post bop jazz record that was amongst my favorite jazz records from '83. Such a groovy record.

Quintal de Clorofila's O mistério dos quintais... psychedelic folk record from Brazil. Pleasant music for the most part. 

Doji Morita's Wolf Boy... Morita was a darling of the student movement generation. This was her last record before dropping out of the music business. She had a soft, gentle voice full of sincerity. The Japanese folk movement was all but over by 1983, but all of her records are worth listening to from '75 until this final record. Later on, her songs became commercialized and used in television dramas and adverts, which is so often the case in Japan, which is crass but kept her music alive for the next generation.

Anvil's Forged in Fire... if you think about the central imagery of heavy "metal" music, this album has a lot to live up to. It's pretty good, though it's more of a guitar/drums album than the total package. The vocals don't really stand up to the great heavy metal records of the year but the music is good. 

The Romantics' In Heat... at first I was reading to laugh this off, but the more I listened to it, the more I started to think it was actually pretty solid power pop. Won me over by the end. Go Romantics.

Pink Industry's Who Told You, You Were Naked? This was surprisingly good. It was moody, minimal post-punk that stood out from the pack thanks to the pleasant vocals of Jayne Casey. This band came from the same Liverpool scene as Echo & the Bunnymen and The Teardrop Explodes. They never made it big, but their music sounds criminally underrated to me. I really think Casey's vocals make the difference instead of listening to another whiny bloke. 

Laid Back's ...Keep Smiling... this was a fun slice of synthpop! Even the pop reggae tracks worked for me. High Society Girls is an awesome track. Check it out if you're new wave or synthpop inclined.  

[odessasteps]

When doing the pod about Rock Me Amadeus, I didn’t realize there were eventually over 20 remixes of the song. And in just how many countries it hit number one.

[Curt McGirt]

There are two really good Anvil records out of like 10,000 and those would be Metal on Metal and Forged in Fire. The first one is better because nothing touches "Mothra"  

I'm not hugely familiar with This Means War. There aren't even any tracks from it on the Armour Plated comp! Then again, there aren't any tracks from Honour and Blood on that one either. I'm interested in what you would think of Honour. It's a little less rockin' but a really strong album in its own way... hard to explain. It's the first time I ever heard Tank, snagged from the awesome 2nd Chance Records in Carbondale, IL (along with A LOT of other awesome records) before they closed up. I put on This Means War via Youtube and am through about 2 1/2 songs and man, it's just as good as anything they ever did. 

And then we come to Loudness. What an awesome band that I caught way later in life. The only one I own is Devil Soldier, and after recent price increases I doubted I could find Devil's Land or Disillusion for less than an arm and a leg... and I WAS WRONG. Now I've got leads on affordable copies of each! Thanx for making me go and look. 

[Dolfan in NYC]

 

[zendragon]

Mark my words Ringo will be the last Beatle

[Curt McGirt]

Well, NWN! Productions founder/head Yosuke is starting a new vinyl pressing plant in Texas called Helios Press (which is good news for EVERYONE who buys vinyl, because they will be printing all genres for anybody, domestically and internationally) so he decided to drop some used stuff on the NWN mail order site to help with costs and I got... Loudness - Disillusion for $20~! Cool follow-up to our conversation above. Anyway, there will be a Kickstarter coming later in the year for the boiler and cooler needed to run the plant and I will post a link to that when it lands. Considering how few pressing plants there are worldwide (100 total with only 10 capable of serious mass production) this is something well worth supporting. 

[odessasteps]

 

[ExcellenceofAirPollution]

https://apnews.com/article/music-pitchfork-gq-conde-nast-wintour-media-ecaef9445b5d9f86d9990c181306cb71

This makes me pretty sad.  Pitchfork had a utility for me in the 00's for discovering new music.  I'm not the type of person who was into Surfan Stevens, Joanna Newsome or other stuff like that they heavily pimped, but I remember discovering Burial's Untrue, Flying Lotus, Animal Collective and some under the radar rock music (Crocodiles, Dum Dum Girls and stuff like that) there. 

Haven't gone there regularly in a long, long time but this is definitely bad for musicians and for music journalism.  Another brick in the wall.

[HarryArchieGus]

3 hours ago, ExcellenceofAirPollution said:

https://apnews.com/article/music-pitchfork-gq-conde-nast-wintour-media-ecaef9445b5d9f86d9990c181306cb71

This makes me pretty sad.  Pitchfork had a utility for me in the 00's for discovering new music.  I'm not the type of person who was into Surfan Stevens, Joanna Newsome or other stuff like that they heavily pimped, but I remember discovering Burial's Untrue, Flying Lotus, Animal Collective and some under the radar rock music (Crocodiles, Dum Dum Girls and stuff like that) there. 

Haven't gone there regularly in a long, long time but this is definitely bad for musicians and for music journalism.  Another brick in the wall.

The early Pitchfork was a last ditch celebration of gatekeeper pre-internet pretension. It could be a lot of fun if more than a little irresponsible, but definitely a opportune place to discover new sounds. They seemed to drain much of their credibility with the emergence of the quietly paid articles. Not long after they were sold to Conde Nast and pushing the same agenda and Indie Pop as their competitors. Further merging into the Conde Nast family doesn't seem all that significant. 

[ExcellenceofAirPollution]

Yea, I was so out of the loop I didn't even know they'd been sold to Conde Nast before this article.  All these websites are gonna be AI all the time soon anyway

[Curt McGirt]

Ugh. Now THAT is a horrifying vision of the future that I hadn't had yet. Bots writing and running websites, controlled by corporations to push their product. As Keith Morris once said "Where's the gun, here's my head"...

[ExcellenceofAirPollution]

2 hours ago, Curt McGirt said:

Ugh. Now THAT is a horrifying vision of the future that I hadn't had yet. Bots writing and running websites, controlled by corporations to push their product. As Keith Morris once said "Where's the gun, here's my head"...

It's already started.  Sports Illustrated, Business Insider, Men's Health and others have been busted with AI generated articles riddled with errors, written by AI generated "authors" with fake bylines and pictures from one of those huge libraries.  A lot of it was pushing bullshit products with referral links under the guise of an actual product review

The future is here and it stinks!

[Curt McGirt]

Thankfully the media I consume isn't consumer-oriented. Too bad for everybody else. 

[Travis Sheldon]

3 hours ago, Curt McGirt said:

Thankfully the media I consume isn't consumer-oriented. Too bad for everybody else. 

I wish I could embed the meme-gif of Eric Wareheim mind blown.

Just imagine I did that.

[Curt McGirt]

Okay, goddammit. What I MEANT to say is: the shit I like is art made for art's sake. 

[ExcellenceofAirPollution]

14 minutes ago, Curt McGirt said:

Okay, goddammit. What I MEANT to say is: the shit I like is art made for art's sake. 

*insert PENTA gif*

[Curt McGirt]

You would say that to the one person on here who probably hates him as much as Natural does

Edited January 24 by Curt McGirt

[RazorbladeKiss87]

The Pitchfork news was a bit sad. I don't read it like I did in college but I still enjoy the reviews. It's not as sad to me as when MRR stopped printing though. 

On a more positive note, new Robert Pollard project!

https://youtu.be/INEfWdZm3nA

[Curt McGirt]

What made me even sadder (I still have my last issue of MRR with the Discharge face cover and have never read it) is that MRR never actually went back into any kind of form online beyond the radio show, which was always there, and record reviews. They scanned a handful of early issues but there aren't even NEW INTERVIEWS anymore. I still read the reviews and find out about a lot of cool shit, but there not being a really active online version is so depressing. 

[Cobra Commander]

I never really paid any attention to Bieber things so I didn’t know until just now that Justin Bieber married into the Baldwin family or that his wife’s grandfather is Deodato

[RazorbladeKiss87]

On 1/25/2024 at 10:55 PM, Curt McGirt said:

What made me even sadder (I still have my last issue of MRR with the Discharge face cover and have never read it) is that MRR never actually went back into any kind of form online beyond the radio show, which was always there, and record reviews. They scanned a handful of early issues but there aren't even NEW INTERVIEWS anymore. I still read the reviews and find out about a lot of cool shit, but there not being a really active online version is so depressing. 

Yeah, they implied or outright said at the time that they'd be moving everything online so I was hoping for a complete archive and new interviews. It was one of my favorite magazines just for the sheer amount of bands you could find out about in each issue. 

[Curt McGirt]

Reading those last issues, and their kind of half-assed defenses and reasoning in the personal articles, I got the feeling that not only was there massive burnout there was almost a revolt-like turnover in staff to where people were ready to split and restart their lives outside of SF period, especially if they'd been keeping up with the house and the stacks. It felt like they said that shit about the webzine but didn't really mean it. And go figure, they didn't. 

Then again, independent adults don't have free time away from work to do anything anymore so I'm not hating, just stating. 

[Curt McGirt]

You also gotta think about people not just leaving but dying, like Bruce Roehrs. That had to be an almost fatal gut-punch to some of the staff.

Something that makes me sad just as much was Profane Existence being transferred to new ownership and the zine shutting down permanently around the same time. It was going so hard in the aughts -- glossy print, thick issues, and they'd already came back from one big closure. Then Dan decides to give it up for his life in Legoland (literally), hands the reigns over to the cats in War//Plague, and now all we got is a half a record label.  

However! Thanks to the Archive we've got quite a few issues of both MRR and PE if you wanna read them here https://archive.org/details/zines?query=Profane+Existence Don't ask me why a bunch of Nazi shit like Der Landser has also been scanned and archived right alongside this stuff, I haven't the slightest. 

EDIT: Huh, now that I checked it again, all the Nazi stuff is gone. Maybe that's all those blank pages, or a different search pulled that up. It was like, issues of Boiled Angel and anarchist stuff right next to white power zines. Really bizarre.

Edited January 31 by Curt McGirt