Album Reviews

 Yes you read that that right. Spacehog. As in: 'Our lands are greeeeen and skies are bluuuue.' If my review of this album is much of a surprise to you as it was to me then you are also guilty of writing this band off as a 90's one hit wonder. And to tell the truth, I don't even know if this labeling has been earned by Spacehog. I honestly have never heard a Spacehog song other than In The Meantime. Who the fuck am I to judge or stereotype? So when Joel gave me this CD on our lunch date earlier this week I laughed and accepted the album. Coincidentally, I have actually been listening to In The Meantime a lot lately....ever since Girl Talk sampled it on 'All Day.' It really is a an excellent song. Possibly one of the best to make it out of that time period. Thus, I'd be...

I think that one of the things that saved me from slipping too far into self-destructive alcoholism while I was dicking around in Buenos Aires was the fact that there were so many hot Porteña chicks down there that I didn't want to completely embarrass myself in front of. You should hear the way they talk. They speak fluent sex. I didn't get laid much, because the sex I speak is fractured and unforgivably sloppy. I cry when I masturbate. Anyway, lovely Argentine hipster girl Marina Fages' voice is near the epitome of sexy cuteness. Even though you, you ignorant monolingual Yankee pig, probably won't understand a single Spanish word she spits, oh damn, you don't need to (and honestly, her lyrics aren't exactly profound anyway). The tone of the music on Madera Metal is dreamy and...

When I was young, I stayed with my dad every other weekend until my mom moved us to California when I was about ten. At that point it was underage plane trips complete with Delta wings pinned onto our matching shirts and the knowing nods and voices of overcompensating stewardesses. My little brother and I would spend a month or two every summer in New Orleans before heading back to LA. My dad used to be big on brushing teeth. I didn’t realize it then but my dad is very self-conscious of his teeth. Now his front four upper teeth are all implants. You’d never be able to tell that they were knocked out when, as a kid, his face smacked hard against concrete during a particularly violent pillow fight with his older brother. But when I was a kid, technology, or the lack thereof, required my dad...

I have a pretty methodical way of listening to a shitton of new music. While it's fragmented/regimented and fucking OCD as hell, it has served me and SYFFAL pretty well over the past three years. I stopped playing favorites over two years ago, and I treat every chance I have to sit alone for a half hour or more as an opportunity to be blindly introduced to a band or artist with absolutely no bias. I get in the truck, or merely plug the Fuck in, and start where I left off, in playlists organized by date of receipt, and I listen until I either love something or I hate something. This puts music into a sort of literary perspective, as I'm not judging anyone based on the cover, or the band name, or if I've heard something from them before. I'm just offering up my holes for penetration. If I'm...

Fat Jon the Ample Soul Physician used some of the drums on the opening track Minor Cause on his song Talk To Me. 10 stars bro. Thanks for reading guys, that's a wrap brosepfs. Tee hee bros. Emancipator is fucking beastly in my opinion, as his first album Soon It Will Be Cold Enough was on constant repeat back whenever the Fuck that dropped. (It was 2006 bro, I googled for you bro.) The guy just has this penchant for making calmingly headnodding beatscapes that even assholes you don't like personally are fond of, and it does a swell job of partially culturing those fuckernuters too. Emancipator takes instrumentation familiar to the genres of classical or jazz and slyly slips them into his tracks, and it's gorgeous. Emancipator's latest album is titled Dusk To Dawn and it's another...

Ever wonder what would happen if Serengeti and Open Mike Eagle, after a game of Cranium over hummus and dolmas (dude, the dolmas was so leafy and oily, bro), did the dirty? No? Me neither. But that’s what it would take to genetically reproduce the artist known as Milo. My friend Jonathan posted a video for “post hoc ergo propter hoc (for Schopenhauer)” on my timeline and then promptly pestered me to watch it. I was like yea, yea bro. I swear I’m on it. I really did have intentions of checking it out. But I was just caught up in the synapse overload known as “this time of year”, which really mean I was too busy shoveling food and whiskey into my holes and loosening my fucking belt to listen to music. But as usual, that dickface (er, Jonathan) was fucking right. Milo, and his new releases,...

Every so often you hear something that kind of ruins everything else in your life. One minute you're a full fledged contributing member of society, the next minute you're a fucking zombie who can do nothing but think about what you heard and plan your new life around finding time to listen to it. Trying to fight the urge to listen to it will only piss you off, because no matter what's in front of you, you'd wager throwing everything else into the air while throwing this specific sound into your ears would be the most enjoyable. This happens more often than I'd like to admit, but as a music nerd, it's a welcome plight. Normally I'll go weeks without physically fiending for music from anyone. Usually it's the same process: try out some new shit for a while, but then settle on an old standby...

BMSM might be one of my favorite bands on the planet. With a horn section to kill for, a drummer that can put me in a beat coma instantly, and a knack for hitting grooves in a pantsless stride, they aren't easy to ignore. Even if you are a piece of shit with no musical taste and a penchant for using the word penchant. Big Mean Sound Machine make music that's palatable as fuck, combining funk nuggets with dub gluten inside of rasta pasta on the corner of a jazz avenue I can not only enjoy, I would baste my shirtless self in their steel meals on a daily basis if given permission. And if that previous sentence is confusing, you try describing how fucking disgustingly erotically inspiring they make you feel. Putting in their latest album Marauders is like throwing a sepia toned...

The first favor I must ask of you is to imagine me as Garfield the hideously unfunny cartoon cat. If currently active bands were food I like to eat, then Krallice would be my lasagna. Everyone knows Garfield likes lasagna. Allow that statement settle in for a brief moment. Once the aforementioned sentiment has had proper time to stew (hint: Garfield's consistently unimpressed demeanor truly emphasizes that he detests just about everything except lasagna), prepare yourself for more blabbing about how these whiteboys in Krallice killed it once again with their latest record Years Past Matter... These years of living as a Midwestern urbanite have undoubtedly ravaged me inside and out. My boyish features have been chiseled away to the point where my body resembles nothing more than a...

I've been adamantly pro-P.O.S. since his first solo album, Ipecac Neat, completely dominated my manpod for the better part of 2004. His method of getting weirder and weirder and fucking weirder has not only kept me on my fucking toes as a fan, it's actually made me a bigger fucking P.O.S. fanboy, if that's even possible. Maybe it's his voice, maybe it's his meter, maybe it's his subject matter, doesn't fucking matter, I fucking love the dude in a semi-cree-, ok fine mostly-creepy way and I'm not afraid to put this dude at the top of my shortlist for go to rappy rappers bro bro. P.O.S. exudes a confidence over beats that makes muthafuckers think the beats are banging before even giving them a second spin, and while they usually are in my opinion, dude can put shit where I wouldn't expect...