this is not pitchfork

SITE HAS MOVED

2008-12-20T08:40:00.000-05:00

This is Not Pitchfork has it's very own home now. No more Blogger.

Thank you to Wordpress for making it so easy to import the posts AND the comments. And thanks again to Host Matters for awesome hosting and service.

Check it out, let me know what you think. The paint is still wet.

Please update your bookmarks if you have this site added.

138. The Police - Outlandos d'Amour

2008-12-20T05:45:00.002-05:00

I see you've sent my letters back
And my LP records and they're all scratched

This album spoke to me. From the moment I heard that line and remembered when Bobby gave me my albums back and yea, they were scratched, I knew the Police knew me. So, I never fell in love with a hooker and I wasn't born in the 50's and maybe I kept saying "Bologna" instead of "So Lonely," but this was the band for me.

Really, no one else was making music like this. This was, in my little piece of suburbia a time of hard rock (Van Halen) and a time of punk (The Ramones). What were the Police? Were they a little of both? Next to You, So Lonely and Peanuts had punk stylings, but there was something more to them, something broader than punk and deeper than rock. It was music. It was the arrangements of the songs that set them apart from whatever we were listening to at the time. The drumming was richer, the rythmns jazzier, the whole sound fuller.

This was and always will be my favorite Police album. I can put this on and still think of Sting as a cool, punky kind of rocker dude instead of the self-important schmaltz factory he began. Plus, there's Roxanne, which is the song we use in our family to torture my sister, whose husband's first wife was named Roxanne. Thanks, Sting.

Favorite song: Peanuts
Police wiki

137. Crowbar - Odd Fellow's Rest

2008-12-17T06:37:00.002-05:00

I thought I'd follow up CCR with a band that really is from the Bayou.

This is true, literal heavy metal. I mean heavy in a "walking through a sludgy swamp in dense fog while wearing shoes made of steel and carrying the weight of the world on your shoulders" heavy.

Odd Fellow's Rest is an album to listen to in the darkest of times or in the angriest of moods. It's slow moving, in a trudging kind of way, and listening to it makes you feel as if you're in one of those dreams where you are trying to get away from a monster and you want to run, but your legs are moving so slow, you're doing a half crawl, half walk while this hideous monster gains on you.

It's in Kirk Windstein's deep, despaired, anger from the soul vocals. It's in the slow churn of bass. It's almost beautiful in an odd, disturbing way and as much as I love Odd Fellow's Rest, I can only listen to it in small doses, lest I venture back emotionally to what made me grab onto this sound in the first place.

Favorite song: Planets Collide (I really think this one of the heaviest song you will ever hear)
Official site
Side note: The current guitarist for Crowbar is the son of Barry Gibb.

136. Creedence Clearwater Revival - Bayou Country

2008-12-17T05:34:00.003-05:00

I heard Born on the Bayou on my way into work yesterday and I thought "I can't believe I forgot how awesome these guys were."

In the late 60s/early 70s, my cousin was in a band. Well, every teenage boy in the earl 70's was in a band. I used to linger around his garage on Saturday mornings to listen to his band play. I liked their sound, I liked the music they were playing. It wasn't until later I realized that Born on the Bayou wasn't this awesome song that my cousin wrote (as he told me), but belonged to the same guys who sang Proud Mary, a song my mother was pretty fond of. So I borrowed her album, listened to it and immediately realized just how crappy my cousin's band was.

I have a thing about getting stuck on first tracks. I listened to Born on the Bayou about forty times. I got lost in it. Something about Fogerty's voice made me picture him as this straggly haired guy with holes in his jeans and some kind of scary knowledge in his eyes. The fuzziness of the sound, the low guitar that was sludgy and bluesy; there was such a depth to this song that was missing from cousin's simple cover version.

For a while, I really believed all of CCR were from New Orleans. I was quite surprised later on to hear they were from California.

The rest of the album was great, especially the slow burn of Graveyard Train and the drawl of Penthouse Pauper. It made a CCR fan of out of me for years to come. I don't know what happened in the ensuing years that made me forget the awesomeness of this band, but I'm glad to rediscover this album and, in a way, rediscover the band.

Favorite song: Born on the Bayou
CCR at Classic Bands

135. X - Los Angeles

2008-12-16T06:07:00.003-05:00

I bought this album on a whim - I'd only heard passing things about it, mostly from the local DJ who was a big Doors fan and pushed the album because it was produced by Ray Manzarek.

I didn't even get past Your Phone's Off the Hook, But You're Not before I started it over again. I listened to that song about five times before I got to the listening to the rest.

Los Angeles is bleak and dark yet there was something X did to that darkness that made it appealing. It made me feel discarded and it made something wild stir inside me, a feeling of wanting to be wrong or bad or worse than I was. What Springsteen's Born to Run did for some people, Los Angeles did for me. It made me want to get out of this place and go somewhere else, where people felt, where people lived and died in ways that became songs.

When I was 14, I wanted to go to California to embrace a hippie culture that no longer existed. And here, at 17, I wanted to go to California to see a place where people lived like this, where sex and drugs and loneliness could make you so poetic and so dangerous at the same time. I didn't want to be a part of it so much as I just wanted to see it, to feel it and grab some of that decadence and despair that could make someone write words that sat in my stomach like a sickness. Words that made me feel.

I think every 17 year old thinks of breaking out, of doing something different and dangerous, something that would make their parents scream, something that they know they would regret later. I wanted to write poetry. I wanted to live a life that would make me write poetry like this. Every time I felt like that, I'd listen to Los Angeles again and think that it made for great music, but maybe I was better off listening to the music than living it.

Favorite Song: The World's a Mess, It's in My Kiss

134. Iron Maiden - Powerslave

2008-12-16T05:38:00.006-05:00

Iron Maiden is like the SchoolHouse Rock of metal. My sister actually passed an English course in high school because her make up work (forced on her after she cut too many classes) was a paper on Rime of the Ancient Mariner, all her knowledge of which she based on listening to the song of that name on this album.

I love Iron Maiden for so many reasons; they are unmitigated cheesiness coupled smug pretentiousness, overlaid with music that makes you want to bang your head while flashing the metal sign. I love that Dickinson strives to make his music work on so many levels at once. He's teaching, he's posturing, he's rocking the fuck out. His music was the antithesis to the mindless hair metal that ruled the airwaves during this era. It was smart, it was complicated, it had nothing to do with getting laid and getting drunk. Not that there's anything wrong with songs about sex and liquor, but sometimes, when Skid Row was making you feel dumb for having listened to them, a little Iron Maiden was all you needed to get a few of your IQ points back.

This is an album that will wear you out if you are trying to play air guitar or air drums to it. Aside from the winded feeling you get when trying to recreate Dickinson's piercing voice, the guitar work on Aces High alone will leave almost too exhausted to kick some ass during Two Minutes to Midnight. But you reach back and find the strength, because there are few things a bunch of drunken 22 year olds found more entertaining than singing the chorus to that song in a dive bar filled with old men trying to get their turn to play Sinatra on the jukebox.

Plus, there's Eddie.

Favorite Song: Aces High
Eddie has his own wiki

133. Korn - Follow the Leader

2008-12-16T05:09:00.002-05:00

I liked this album before I hated it. I liked it for the hardness and I liked it because it made Korn come up with a great tour and I got to see Incubus and Rammstein and Ice Cube all in one night. I hated it because it ushered in a new era in metal, one in which the term nu-metal was born and gave birth to such wretched acts as Papa Roach and P.O.D. This was Korn's last decent effort before they got sucked up into the great lie of nu-metal.

I liked Korn before I hated them.

Every once in a while, when I'm in a certain mood, I'll pull this CD out. I can't listen to the whole thing anymore, but tunes like It's On and Dead Bodies Everywhere can still work me up into a frenzy if the timing is right.

Conversation I had with a friend while listening to this album:
"You're 36 years old, why are you listening to this crap?"
"Because it makes me feel like I'm 15."
"Name one good thing about being 15."
"No one told me I was too old to listen to anything."

Favorite song: Dead Bodies Everywhere
Official site

132. South Park - Mr. Hankey's Christmas Classics

2008-12-15T06:42:00.003-05:00

Let's face it; Christmas is not all Ho Ho Ho and holly jolly and good will toward men. Some of us get cranky around this time of year. Some of us, while we love the actual day of Christmas and while we love our families and gifting them with awesome presents and eating huge holiday dinners with them, sometimes the stress of the holidays get to us. Sometimes we are tired of hearing those damn jingling bells and we are tired of the Trans Siberian Orchestra and we have had it with malls and parking lots and the endless playing of Christmas carols.

And sometimes there is an endless stream of people just dropping by, wanting to share in the holiday spirit and spread some joy and ogle your awesome Christmas tree that nearly took three lives while decorating because the annual argument over ornament placement escalated into a war, and you don't want to entertain anyone, you don't want your kids coming into the living room every five minutes to tell you something else they put on their Christmas list, you don't want another call from your mother asking you what size slippers you wear, you don't want to hear your neighbor's animated, singing lawn decorations go off again, and that's when you put on this album, turn it up full volume and gather the family for a rousing chorus of Merry Fucking Christmas.

Favorite song: Christmas Time in Hell
South Park Spirit of Christmas

131. The Runaways - S/T

2008-12-14T07:41:00.003-05:00

1976. I was 14 years old. My parents had just pulled me out of public school and sent me to Catholic high school for "my own good." One of the first friends I made in that school introduced me to the Runaways and that spark of of teenage rebellion that was lit the year before blew up.

Hello daddy, hello mom, I'm your ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-cherry bomb

Good girl gone bad. Turns out Catholic school girls were the last thing I needed for "my own good."

This album made me realize that girls could rock the hell out. The aggressiveness inherent in this record made me feel full of testosterone at a time I was being overrun by estrogen.

And hence began my fascination with being Joan Jett.

Favorite song: Cherry Bomb
Runaways on wiki

130. Various Artists - AmRep Equipped

2008-12-14T06:55:00.003-05:00

I love compilations, they're a great way to find new music. This is a CD that I came to own by stealing it out of the collection Todd brought with him from California. Sure, it's really still his, but he hasn't seen it since it first made its way into my CD player.

AmRep is Amphetamine Reptile Records. The label has put out records by Helmet, The Melvins, Mudhoney, Steel Pole Bathtub, a bunch of other bands you might have heard of and some you probably haven't. They specialize in noise rock, which is a lot better genre than the name would imply.

Of all the bands on this comp, I'd heard of only Unsane, Supernova and the Cows, the only song I knew was the one by the Cows. But at the time I stole it, I was bored with my music collection and looking for something new. I found it. I literally loved every song on this CD and it remained my driving music for about two months before I made myself sick of it.

Through this comp, I discovered the wonders of the band Gnomes of Zurich. I needed to find out more about them. So I dug into the internet and while I disocovered that the Gnomes of Zurich is a term used by British labor ministers during the 1964 Sterling Crisis to refer to Swiss banks, and they sold their gold and they were involved in something that may have angered the citizens of Switzerland, I found out very little about the band. But I did get a nice history lesson on Swiss finance. And I bought 33rd Degree Burns, the GoZ album featuring their song that appears on this comp.

So you see, compilations aren't just there to help us discover new music. They can teach you things. Fun and educational!

(Part of my goal with this project is to hopefully turn some people on to music they haven't heard before, which is why I really enjoy reviewing the lesser known artists in my collection, and why I proved links to videos/downloads on each review)

Favorite song: Gnomes of Zurich, Big Teeth Skeletal Face
Runner up: Supernova, Vitamins

129. Steely Dan - Gaucho

2008-12-14T06:20:00.002-05:00

I have this weird relationship with Steely Dan, which started with Aja . I tried really hard to like them, because I thought I was supposed to like them, as someone who claimed to appreciate music. And I did appreciate their musicianship; I went through this psuedo, rock/jazz phase for a while where I listened to a lot of Jeff Beck and Jean Luc Ponty, so I enjoyed Steely Dan's jazzy rock style, and I felt like I could smugly say I listened to it for the music and not because everyone else thought it was a great make out album.

Then Gaucho came out and I gave them another try, even though Hey Nineteen was on the radio constantly and I was at that phase where I eschewed radio hits. But hey, they did make a reference to pot in the song and, being an 18 year old in 1980, that meant something to me. So I bought Gaucho and smoked some fine Columbian while I listened to it, fully expecting to dismiss it after one song and go back to Motorhead.

I liked it, though. It was really good "mellow out" music. There's definitely some albums that are made for sitting back, closing your eyes and letting the music wash over you while you come down. You don't think much when you listen to it, and it becomes part of the ambience of the room you're in, like the posters on the wall or a lamp on the desk, it's just part of the whole of what's there.

Listening to Gaucho now, for the first time in many years, it still feels like that. It's not something I'd purposely take out and play, but it does give the room a bit more ambience.

Favorite song: Time out of Mind
The biggest Steely Dan fan I know

site news

2008-12-13T09:16:00.002-05:00

I bought thisisnotpitchfork.com. Some time over the weekend, I will be importing all these reviews over to a new WordPress blog, hosted by the only hosting company I would ever use, Host Matters.

I know some of you have emailed that you hate leaving comments on blogspot, so hopefully this wil make it easier. Also, it will be prettier.

Thanks to everyone who has read, linked, commented, sent requests and all that thus far. I am enjoying the hell out of this.

128. Huey Lewis and the News - Sports

2008-12-13T06:54:00.004-05:00

What can I say? It's Huey Lewis. How can you not love this guy, with his charming smile and skinny tie and earnest pop songs?

I was working in the record store when this came out and I was at the time heavy into buying import singles of post punk bands and working on maintaining my edgy, yet sophisticated personality that was trying to say "Hey, I'm totally 80s without being, you know, totally 80s." Because there were two kinds of 80s. There was the New Order 80s and there was the Huey Lewis 80s.

Worlds collide, Jerry!

I had a dilemma. I liked this album. A lot. So my punk self met my pop self and we had a meeting and decided that we didn't really care what anyone thought of us. If loving Sports was wrong, we didn't want to be right. So we bought the album AND we bought the cassette and we played it in the car and we played it at home and we discovered that there were a lot of other "totally 80s but not totally 80s" people out there who had also embraced their inner pop selves and fell in love with Sports and Huey Lewis.

Favorite song: If This is It
Huey Lewis and American Psycho

127. Sleater Kinney - One Beat

2008-12-13T06:06:00.008-05:00

There are not a whole lot of women in my record collection. I don't know why this is, I guess I just never took to girl groups (or even mostly girl groups) the way I thought I was supposed to. This always made me feel vaguely guilty, as if I was a traitor to my gender by not embracing Heart and then, later on The Bangles, The Go-Gos , L7 or The Donnas. There were exceptions to this rule, of course; there was the Runaways, Drain STH and there was Sleater Kinney.

This was SK's second to last album and, I think, their best. The lyrics have more substance, the music is fuller and there's a resilient energy here that wasn't exactly missing from their previous albums, but was subdued. They find their voices here, they experiment with things that they just touched on in the past and they let it all out, loud and unabashed. From the pop friendly Oh! to the brooding bass (though it's not really a bass, but a toned down Rickenbacker) of Light Rail Coyote, this album is what pushes Sleater Kinney beyond the riot grrl label. And it's that specific song, Light Rail Coyote that encompasses everything good about this band; the musicianship, the harmonizing, the hard rock influence that lies beneath the pop punk layers.

To put it in some perspective if you've never heard the band before: Sleater Kinney is what the GoGos might have been if they based their career on Skidmarks on My Heart instead of Our Lips Are Sealed.

Favorite song: Light Rail Coyote
Farewell to an Iconic Band

126. Fear - The Record

2008-12-12T05:29:00.002-05:00

It's funny how so many people dismiss Fear as a bunch of noise. They probably never really listened to the music. Beneath the sometimes odd (Beef Bologna), sometimes angry (Let's Have a War) and sometimes funny (New York's Alright) lyrics there were some driving rhythms, air-guitar worthy licks from Lee Ving and damn good music.

It's a testament to the music that you really don't care what the band is singing about. Sure, the lyrics can be a bit offensive and you might not agree with a single word they are saying, but there's something so powerfully raw about the music, something that makes you want to shout "Let's have a war!" even though you really don't want to.

This is music that was made to piss people off. Not in a social commentary kind of way, but in a "I want to make you hate me" kind of way. Fear, living up to its name, certainly made people hate them, but they also separated the wheat from the chafe among my friends who claimed to love punk rock. You either embraced Fear, or you went on to become one of those people who later on would say "Punk rock died in 1979."

Favorite song: I Don't Care About You
John Belushi, SNL and Fear

125. Love and Rockets - Express

2008-12-11T05:58:00.003-05:00

Considering this band was made up mostly of former members of Bauhaus, they were surprisingly un-Bauhaus. Which is a good thing. Aside from the goofy novelty of Bela Lugosi's Dead, I never really liked that band or their moody, gothic poetry. Love and Rockets, while sometimes taking pieces of that goth sound, were more a beautiful conglomeration of a bunch of different sounds; they were part new wave, part dance sensibilities and part psychedelic, groovy tunes.

There are great songs on this album. Kundalini Express is a bizarre train ride with lots of power and a very strange vibe.It Could Be Sunshine starts out all new wave dance bit that builds up into a dark, post-punk love song with an abrupt ending.Yin and Yang and the Flowerpot Man is all 70's psychedelia acid trip. And All in My Mind was a great way to bring about a truce when road trip music fight broke out. We all knew the words, we all drummed out the rhythm, we all got a little louder during the "sometimes you really don't, really don't..." part and then when it was all over we got back to our punk v. new wave argument.

Favorite song: All in My Mind (at the moment. it changes)
Love and Rockets

124. The Kinks - Arthur (Or the Decline and Fall of the British Empire)

2008-12-11T05:28:00.005-05:00

Do you know how many great songs this band had? It's really a shame that so few people mention them when making lists of the greatest rock bands of all time. Look over their catalog - they tried a little of everything; fast, hard, mellow, groovy, conceptual - and almost all of it worked. They were really a brilliant band whose work spanned almost 20 years before I started to wish that they would stop.

The most well known song on this album, Victoria, is everything that was great about 60's music, with none of the bullshit. It's groovy and funky and it's got great harmonizing laid over some cool rock and roll.

I had this awesome babysitter back in the early 70's. Linda let us watch horror movies and made us pancakes for dinner and she always brought her records over and made me listen to them. She talked about the songs as if she was teaching my the meaning of life, and maybe she was. One night she played this album for me and I was so completely taken with Mr. Churchill Says that I decided right then and there that when I was a little bit older I would form a band and I'd be the songwriter and I would write an awesome song like that and one day some girl would be babysitting and play my album for the kids and they'd hear my awesome Kinks-like song and they'd be inspired to......well, you know how that goes. I set my standards for myself way too high. Very few people write songs like Ray Davies.

Favorite song: Mr. Churchill Says
The Kinks photo project

123. Dick Dale - King Of The Surf Guitar: The Best Of Dick Dale & His Del-Tones

2008-12-10T05:51:00.003-05:00

This is my happy music. When I need to find that happy, sunny place where everything is rainbows and fluffy bunnies and kittens, this is what I put on. It's instant sunshine on a winter day. It's "get up and dance" when I want to do nothing but crawl under the covers. Studies have proven that if Dick Dale is playing in my car, I am more likely to let you merge in front of me on the Expressway even though you clearly have no idea how to merge. I put this on my headphones at work because it makes a workplace incident less likely.

This is happiness in musical form. It's light and airy and makes me think of the beach, the sand and the surf and even though I'm really not a fan of beaches or sand and I've never been surfing and I never will, all those things are probably a hell of a lot better than where I am at any moment I'm looking for my happy place.

Favorite song: Misirlou
Official site

122. Lynyrd Skynyrd - (pronounced 'lĕh-'nérd 'skin-'nérd)

2008-12-10T05:25:00.003-05:00

Country rock, southern rock, redneck rock. It was called a lot of things and given a lot of names in the 70s and we stuck with "southern" because it made it seem less like country music and less like we were some hicks from Georgia with confederate flags.

No offense, Georgians. I was 14, ok?

We were big on this phase. Some of us may have even bought suede, floppy cowboy hats to wear to the Outlaws/Marshall Tucker concert. Some of us may even have bought Charlie Daniels albums. Some of us embraced this genre simply because of this album. And, yea, Freebird.

Of course I knew all the words to Gimme Three Steps (which now causes involuntary projectile vomiting upon hearing it) and I cried listening to Tuesday's Gone, but it was Freebird that got the most play.

Freebird was more than an anthem to us. It was the great common denominator. It was what connected with stoners with the jocks, the teachers with the students, the nerds with the geeks. We had a stereo in our school cafeteria for one year (before the disco/rock riots of 77) and we had to take turns playing everyone's favorite music, but when Freebird came on, the whole cafeteria rocked. Everyone sang. Everyone played air guitar. We'd hold up our Bic lighters and sway together when he said "And this bird you cannot change," and WE ARE ALL FREEBIRDS TODAY! Well, something like that.

I dropped the southern rock phase pretty fast and got tired of Freebird not long after. And all these years later, the classic rock stations are still playing this damn song and a whole new generation of kids are playing air guitar to it and even though I switch the station pretty fast if it comes on, every once in a while I'll flip back just for the last ten minutes or so to see if I still remember the guitar parts note for note.

I do.

Favorite song: Tuesday's Gone
Long Island's very own Lynyrd Skynyrd tribute band!

121. Neil Diamond - Greatest Hits: 1966–1992

2008-12-09T06:00:00.003-05:00

I love Neil Diamond. I love him in the same way I like Abba and Air Supply and Death Cab for Cutie. Sometimes four chords or shouting at the devil is not what the day calls for.

I'm a sucker for nostalgia. And nothing makes me more nostalgic than music.

Every person is different when it comes to evoking powerful memories. For some it is pictures, or sounds, or smells. Perhaps it is a combination of all those things. We all have something that triggers the snapshots that exist in our head. Moments in time that are embedded in our mind, sometimes forgotten and then dredged up again by a flash of of memory that triggers our senses. A whole scenario can come flooding back as if it happened only yesterday. Your senses transport you to wherever the memory came from and you ride it again, whether you want to or not.

There is nothing like music to bring back specific moments in my life. One note from a certain song and I am in a time machine. And last night was one hell of a ride in that machine.

Cherry Cherry is autumn; leaves on the ground, some time around Halloween, crisp air and definitely one of my earliest memories. We had this huge stereo in the living room that was more like a piece of furniture than something to play music on. I remember this song on the radio, my mother singing, my aunt dancing.

Cracklin Rosie is an end of summer song, driving home from upstate in my aunt's red Dodge Dart, this on the radio and me and my cousins pretending we knew all the words.

Brother Love's Traveling Salvation Show is a party in the backyard, the grownups with fancy drinks and cigarettes talking about things children shouldn't hear, the kids on the grass chasing fireflies while the hallelujah chorus drifts through the summer night.

The whole album is like that, one memory after another, me getting lost in time and then getting back to the present. Todd and I went to see him this past August and it was really one of the best shows I've ever seen (Todd is an unabashed Neil Diamond fan). Just enjoying being there with Todd and that carefree happiness of my youth catching up with the happiness of right here and now. It was one of those rare times when your face muscles hurt from smiling and everything just feels right and good.

There are definitely songs here I don't like. You'll never hear Sweet Caroline or Song Sung Blue coming from this house, the latter because I had to sing it in sixth grade chorus and when you are forced to sing a song five days a week, five times a day until you get it perfect (and we never really got it perfect) it ends to leave a residue like vomit in your brain. It's the same reason I hate Sloop John B. by the Beach Boys.

But for every Sweet Caroline, there's a Cherry Cherry or Cracklin' Rosie to bring sunshine and a smile to any day.

Favorite song: Cherry, Cherry
Video for Cherry, Cherry, because I want to spread that sunshine.

120. King Diamond - Voodoo

2008-12-09T05:38:00.003-05:00

Sad to say, this is not the only King Diamond record I own. I have no idea why I have these; I only listen to two songs of his, and both in a novelty sort of way. Maybe because I liked his former band Mercyful Fate, I thought I'd enjoy his solo work as well, in the way one enjoys gothic, Danish black metal.

Diamond's albums are like Dean Koontz books set to music. That's not necessarily a good thing being that Dean Koontz is not exactly high literature (I'm pretty sure the author of Twilight would cite Koontz as one of her literary heroes) and Danish black metal, while somewhat enjoyable if in the right mood, is mostly a guilty pleasure.

Voodoo is a story about well, voodoo. And New Orleans. And speaking in tongues. But that doesn't really matter. What matters is just one song on the album, One Down, Two To Go. Have you ever heard King Diamond sing? He sounds like a screaming banshee took possession of an opera singer. If you listen to him without being aware of who he is or what he does, you might think it's a Spinal Tap variety parody. It's something I listen to with part amusement, but part full on, absolute, unironic enjoyment. And this particular song is my karaoke song. If I ever did karaoke, which I never have.

The way I figure it, if I'm going to get up there and embarrass the hell out of myself, I may as well go full tilt. Watching me sing would be like one of those early contestants on American Idol where you sort of squirm uncomfortably as they hit every bad note and key.

Which is why I'd sing this song. The sheer joy of watching the horrified look on people's faces as I sang "You used to be so beautiful, but now you're gonna diiiiiiiiiieeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee" in a wretched falsetto that would make Bruce Dickinson sound like the singer from Cannibal Corpse in comparison would be so worth the ensuing humiliation.

(The other King Diamond song I listen to is No Presents For Christmas)

Favorite song: One Down, Two To Go
King Diamond at Encyclopaedia Metallum

119. Michael Jackson - Off the Wall

2008-12-08T06:22:00.004-05:00

I was rummaging around in my mother's attic yesterday and came across this album. Memories of the Michael everyone loved and adored came flooding back.

First, let's harken back to 1972, when the fresh-faced young boy released his first album, Got To Be There. That face, that smile. You just want to pinch his cute little cheeks! At this early point in his career, Michael had yet to develop the large ego that would allow him to build Neverland later on. This is evidenced by the selection of songs on the album. There are quite a few cover songs. Obviously, Michael wasn't self-assured enough to put out a solo album of his own songs. And it's obvious from the song titles that Michael was ready to embrace life on the wings of love.

And he nearly did. In 1979, Jackson released Off The Wall. Was that title trying to tell us something? Did Michael already feel like he was losing his grip on reality? This album was pure disco. It was Michael strutting his stuff and doing his crazy little dance. Get on the floor, girlfriend and burn this disco out! Jackson started writing his own songs on this effort. Obviously, his ego was growing. And, as his ego grew, so did his popularity and his ability to hypnotize people just by looking into their eyes and saying, don't stop 'til you get enough. Ah, yes. That's a little known fact about Michael. How do you think he got all those girls to scream for him even though he was clearly stealing Jermaine's style? It was at this point that the old, cute-as-a-button, sane Michael Jackson left the building and it was here where we parted ways with Michael Jackson and said hello to the King of Pop. The descent was in full swing. Out came the white glove and red leather jacket, the change in hairstyles, the lighter tone of his skin and all that jumping in the air and waving his hands around like Liza Minelli on a bender.

This album was the last shred of Michael's sanity before he began the slow descent into Peter Pan madness, where he dreamed of building gingerbread houses in which to entice children into his oven.

That might or might not be a metaphor.

Favorite song: Rock With You

118. Billy Joel - Turnstiles

2008-12-07T13:44:00.005-05:00

Liking Billy Joel was almost a prerequisite in high school. Our school, after all, was in the town Joel grew up in. We hung out at the village green made famous on a latter album. We were living in Billy Joel's world.

Truth is, I liked Joel. Later, after The Stranger came out and songs like Only the Good Die Young became overplayed anthems for Catholic school girls and after Brenda and Eddie become symbols of Long Island, I lost whatever taste I had for his music. Or maybe his music just outgrew me. But no matter how far I strayed from Joel, no matter how much I make fun of him now or how much disdain I have for the overreaching pop of Glass Houses or the emptiness of The Bridge or the pretentiousness of River of Dreams, I always come back to this album to remember why I really loved his music once upon a time.

Turnstiles is what being a singer songwriter is all about it. It's not about some melodramatic guy with a guitar or piano singing self conscious songs about love and loss. It's about making poetry out of life. It's about a guy with a flair for words and a talent for making music putting those things together to create something that grasps your heart and makes joy within your soul, even when the words are melancholy. The joy comes in the completeness of the words and music together, in a connection that seems almost spiritual in its beauty.

Summer, Highland Falls is the essence of all that; it's Whitman poetry with modern musings set to a pretty tune. The rest of the album is just as good. Miami: 2017, James, Angry Young Man and New York State of Mind, played out as it is, still makes me smile and remember all the reasons I love living here even when I hate it. I Loved These Days will still make me do an impromptu karaoke when it shows up on my iPod.

I forgot until now how much I adore this album and how much I adored Billy Joel once upon a time. It makes me forget how Scenes From an Italian Restaurant makes me cringe, in a way only someone who spent a lot of time at the village green in Hicskville, Long Island can know.

Favorite song: Summer, Highland Falls
Long Island music hall of fame

117. Talking Heads - Fear of Music

2008-12-07T08:30:00.004-05:00

I loved this album first, because it was Talking Heads and at that point in their career, they could do no wrong. I also loved the album for the cover, which was embossed and felt something like running your hand over a metal plating and yea, I spent hours doing that.

But I loved this album for what it was and wasn't. It wasn't afraid, it wasn't modest, it wasn't shy. It was different, it was weird, it was intriguing and captivating.

I listened to I Zimbra under all sorts of mental circumstances and I can honestly say that it's a tune that, while enjoyed thoroughly under the influence of various illegally bought products, is best listened to with a clear mind and head. I tried to convince so many people that this was artistic brilliance, but metal heads tend to be skeptical about anything that doesn't rock and I often found myself listening to this with my friend Kevin, the only other person who wasn't afraid to immerse himself in the various sounds and textures provided by David Byrne. I Zimbra was, and still is, a song to dance to and to revel in.

And then there was Cities, so new wave before new wave even had a name (though they called it post punk then, but that label is such a lie), with its flourish of sound and jerky beats, and Life During Wartime - a classic song that was was the soundtrack to so many late night parties and gave birth to our catchphrase of the summer of 1980 - This ain't no party, this ain't no disco.

Fear of Music is the epitome of Talking Heads; its everything that was brilliant and daring about David Byrne, and the highlight of a band that went to hell after Remain in Light.

Favorite song: I Zimbra
The name of this site is talking heads

116. Deadbolt - Tijuana Hit Squad

2008-12-07T06:51:00.004-05:00

Imagine, if you will, a bunch of hillbillies drunk on moonshine and looking for trouble. Now imagine they have a band. With two bass players. If "Squidbillies" had a soundtrack, it would be made by this band.

It's part rockabilly, part punk, part drunken cowboys. It's the kind of music that would be playing in that Mexican vampire bar in "Dusk Before Dawn." This album is a drunk, slightly bowlegged gunslinger walking into an almost deserted town in search of long lost enemy, looking to even up an old score. But he gets distracted by the 50 cent beers in the saloon and ends up telling stories all night about murder and mayhem and prison time while his enemy slips out of town. And all those stories are told with some kick ass bass riffs.

They call themselves the Scariest Band Alive. Whatever they are, they kick my ass.

Favorite song: Conductor
Official site

115. Night Ranger - Midnight Madness

2008-12-06T10:24:00.003-05:00

There is only one reason I have this album.

That's right. Sister Christian.

That song is my albatross. There are people who know me solely as "That girl who likes Sister Christian." As if there's only one of me. I know you're out there. I mean, the song was a hit. There has to be people out there who still like it, right? I know, it’s cheesy, it’s bad, it’s everything that was wrong with 80's metal. But. It’s Sister Christian.

Look. There are extenuating circumstances here. Memories.

A party in the park, a keg of beer, me on air guitar, standing on a picnic table. Swearing that guitar was real. Singing. Motorin........

Some club. Tequila. Hair metal night. Tequila. Lots of hair spray and tight jeans. Tequila. Standing on a huge speaker cabinet. Tequila. Swearing that guitar was real. Singing. Motorin........

A bachelorette party. Me with a giant penis on my head and coconut shells over my tits. Drunk as all get out. Swearing that guitar was real. Singing. Motorin........

I think you got the point.

Man, it’s not quite the same without the alcohol. Or the penis on my head. But I still kick ass at air guitar. And I still love this song.

I don't think I have ever listened to anything else on this album.

Come on, admit it. You love this song, too.

Favorite song: As if there was anything else.
It even has its own wiki

114. Cheap Trick - at Budokan

2008-12-06T09:23:00.002-05:00

It doesn't matter what else is on this album. All that matters is I Want You to Want Me and Surrender. Despite those two songs being released on other albums, and despite the airplay they received, these live versions will, for me, always be the versions of the songs. The screaming in the background and the "Let me talk so slow so you can understand me" intro: I want YOU to want ME; that's Cheap Trick.

They never did much for me otherwise (besides my weird, geeky affinity for Rick Nielson) and I love those songs more for the memories they provide than anything else. Surrender is just one of those tunes that I will never turn off when it comes on the radio; I'll sing it as if it's still 1979 and the line "got my Kiss records out" is relevant.

Favorite song: Surrender
30th anniversary edition

113. INXS - Kick

2008-12-06T07:03:00.005-05:00

This album was the culmination of my mental affair with Michael Hutchence. Ever since Shabooh Shoobah and The One Thing, I had been carrying on a sordid affair with him in my mind. Here I was a (mostly) grown woman, and I was swooning like I hadn't swooned since I had that poster of Leif Garret on my bedroom wall. Hutchence was sultry. He pulled off sexy in that smoky, decadent way that is usually reserved for raspy voiced women in cocktail dresses.

Unlike my swooning of the past, this one involved the music as well. It wasn't just him and his hair and the way he looked. It was the combination of his looks, his voice and the music that all together was an orgy for the senses. Seeing the band live was a treat. Hutchence's stage presence was magnificent. He was mesmerizing and entertaining. He was part rock and roll and part lounge singer crooning to groupies. Even the guys were mesmerized by him.

This album had the most hits for the band and I think made the best use of Hutchence's voice, showing off both the power and sexiness of it. While songs like Devil Inside and Need You Tonight/Mediate are great reminders of the awesomeness of the band, it was Never Tear Us Apart that left its mark on me. At this point in my life, I had graduated from singing with a fake microphone (broom handle, thumb) in my room to singing with a fake microphone (cigarette, thumb) in my car. I'd put that song on, roll up the windows because nobody but me needed to hear this, turn the volume all the way up and drive, drive, drive until I wore my voice out singing it over and over. I was off kilter and off key and sounded like the bastard love child of Yoko Ono and Kim Carnes, but I owned that song when I was in the privacy of my Mustang.

I think I need to take a car ride now.

Favorite song: Never Tear Us Apart
Michael Hutchence bio

112. Johnny Cash - At San Quentin

2008-12-06T06:57:00.001-05:00

My parents had this album. They played it mostly on Saturday mornings while we were doing chores and I spent a long time dusting the wooden cabinet that housed the stereo while this played, mostly just imagining what it was like to play in a prison.

I must have had a pretty skewed vision of what prison was like, because every time Johnny started singing, I would imagine Johnny sitting in a pit of giant rocks while prisoners in black and white pinstripes, ball and chains attached to their legs, sat around swaying to his music. Maybe I got all my information about prison from exaggerated stories about Alcatraz. I don't know, I just pictured Johnny surrounded by prison guards with loaded guns at the ready in case any of those bad people tried anything funny.

I listened to the music, too. I loved I Walk the Line and Wreck of the Old 97, but I had such a hatred for A Boy Named Sue that I had to leave the room when it came on. That song made me angry. Who the hell would name their son Sue? I listened to the lyrics, I tried to understand it, but my child's mind couldn't grasp much beyond Sue? WTF?

And then I'd come back into the room for Folsom Prison Blues and always, every single time, he would get to that line "I shot a man in Reno just to watch him die," and I would lose interest in whatever I was supposed to be doing at the time to think about what it would feel like to shoot a man just to watch him die. Then I'd wonder if Johnny Cash actually did that, or did one of the prisoners do that and he was singing to him? And I'd imagine the whole scenario in my head, even though I had no idea where Reno was but I imagined it was some godforsaken place in the middle of nowhere, where bad men who killed indiscriminately hung out and murdered each other for kicks.

It wasn't until many, many years later that I would come to really appreciate Johnny's music. But I still to this day think of that same image of rocks and pinstriped prisoners when I listen to this album and I still have a visceral, irrational hatred for A Boy Named Sue.

Favorite song: Folsom Prison Blues
Review of the re-release (Legacy Edition)

111. Genesis - Foxtrot

2008-12-05T06:13:00.005-05:00

Hard to believe there was a time when I thought Phil Collins was a genius, but there was. Long before Sussudio, there was early Genesis and Peter Gabriel and some of the strangest music to ever be put in the rock category.

This was deep stuff. This wasn't the kind of music you'd put on at a party. This was quiet. You put the record on and you studied the lyrics and studied the music because there was going to be a quiz on this later, and that quiz would come as ten of you sat in the dried out landfill on a hot summer night and spent hours discussing the lyrics and the meaning while you passed around bottles of Boones Farm wine.

Unlike a lot of the stuff I listened to in high school where I thought the music was deep and profound and then later on laughed at myself for thinking so much of so little, I still like this album. I still think the story within is a good one and the music is good and I never, ever get tired of saying: A flower? I might not be able to sit through 23 minutes of Supper's Ready in a dumbfounded stupor like I did in the 70's, but I can still appreciate it. The musicianship is superb and is a great reminder of what both Collins and Gabriel were; brilliant musicians with incredible ideas (that's not to take anything away from Banks, Rutherford and Hackett), but both those artists went in different and opposite directions, and neither of those directions give any indication to the creativity and musical intricacy of what they used to do together in Genesis.

By the time I got around to seeing Genesis live, it was July, 1978. Gabriel had long left the band but he showed up that night to join Genesis for an encore. Awesome night I will never forget.

I loved so much of their early stuff, but Foxtrot is like a Neil Gaiman novel set to music. How could you go wrong with that?

Favorite song: Supper's Ready
Foxtrot Wiki

110. Rocket From the Crypt - Scream, Dracula, Scream

2008-12-05T05:34:00.002-05:00

No matter where you are or what you are doing when you listen to it, you'll feel like you're in a darkened barroom in mid afternoon, drinking beers with a bunch of other people who have nothing better to do than hang out in the local dive on a Saturday afternoon and you're ok with that. This album plays while you shoot pool, while you watch a hockey game on the bad-reception tv haphazardly hung on the wall, while you argue with your buddy over the ancient trivia game bolted to the bar. It plays while you eat reheated frozen pizza and while you throw darts aimlessly and by the time Fat Lip is playing there's already been two fights and someone is slumped outside the bar in a heap waiting for his broad to pick him up. And then you all just cool down and drink some more beer and the girls get up and dance a little when Misbeaten plays, and then everyone sings along to Salt Future and you realize that once again you got way too drunk for a Saturday afternoon so you go home and sleep it off so you can start it all over again Sunday and Young Livers plays in your head as you pass out on your bed, in your clothes.

This is one of those albums I think everyone should own. It's pure rock and roll.

Favorite song: Misbeaten
RFTC bio

109. ZZ Top - Tres Hombres

2008-12-04T17:13:00.003-05:00

I was never really sure if I actually liked ZZ Top or not. I had most of their albums, I saw them at least a dozen times, yet I would never include them the thousands of times I wrote a list called My Favorite 50 or so Bands (I've been making lists like that since I could write). I would complain that every song sounded the same. I would complain that I didn't like the direction they took in the 80's. I'm pretty sure the only two things that kept ZZ Top on my list of Bands I Like From A-Z is that sometimes I would put Frank Zappa under "F" and Billy Gibbons.

Then there's this album. And on this album is La Grange. And La Grange will always and forever be on my list of Songs I Never Want to Live Without as well as Songs I Get Speeding Tickets To and Songs That Make Me Feel Like I Have a Penis And Ride a Harley.

It's funny that I think every ZZ Top song sounds the same, yet I could listen to this one solitary song for hours on end and never, ever get tired of it.

Favorite song: La Grange
Billy Gibbons with Queens of the Stone Age

108. Stabbing Westward - Darkest Days

2008-12-04T16:58:00.003-05:00

You know those messy breakups? The ones that leave you drained of every tear, the ones that make you feel like a 14 year old experiencing heartbreak for the first time, the ones where you are so very sure your world can not possibly go on without that person in your life?

When that happens, you take this CD into your bedroom. You turn off your phone, turn off the tv, close the blinds, and crawl into bed. Listen to this on repeat for 24 hours straight. During that time, smoke six packs of cigarettes, drink 2 bottles of gin and write dark, gothic poetry about how your life has no meaning. Think about how much each song means to you. Nod your head knowingly during Everything I Touch, sob in agreement during Sometimes it Hurts, punch the walls during The Thing I Hate and When I'm Dead and then when it all plays again and you get back to the dirge-like Drowning, throw the covers over your head and think that the only thing that makes you feel any better is knowing that somewhere out there, Chris Hall knows exactly how your black, bitter, broken heart feels.

When the 24 hours are up, take the CD out. Break it in two. Take the brooding poetry you wrote and set it on fire. Open the blinds, get dressed, get in your car. Put some Pantera in the CD player and then spend the next hour or so driving 100 mph down side streets, knocking over all your neighbors’ garbage cans and think that while this album served its purpose, now the best thing about it is the cover artwork. Get over your heartbreak. Get over yourself.

And never listen to this album again.

Favorite song: The Thing I Hate
Dave McKean - cover artist

107. U2 - Boy

2008-12-04T06:12:00.003-05:00

1980. I was working at a radio station, answering the phones, taking requests and running contests. This album came in and the station wanted to push it.

I gave it a listen and immediately loved it. Every song was incredible. Every note was mesmerizing. The music was full and lush, yet spare at the same time. And there was a soulful darkness about the album, something that made me want to listen to it alone, to take it home and study it and play it over and over again until I knew every word and note by heart.

The album was not in stores yet. This was a pre-release or something like that and our radio station had ten copies to give away so they could start the big push to get U2 noticed. So they did a call in contest. First ten people to call win the album by this yet unheard of band. I took the calls. Congratulated the winners. All nine of them.

The tenth "call" was from my cousin, whose name, unbeknownst to him, was put on the list of winners along with his address and I faked congratulated the dial tone that was playing the part of my cousin.

The next day I told that cousin to expect a package at his house from the radio station, and that it was really for me. I waited. Two days. Three days. No call from the cousin. Four days. Five days. Finally, I went to his house to see if he maybe got the record, but forgot to call and tell me it was there. His girlfriend let me in and the first thing I heard was that voice. That earnest, sweet voice singing Stories for Boys and I ran into the living room screaming "Hey, that's MY album!" to which he replied, "You are never getting this. I won it, remember? It's rightfully mine." I looked on the coffee table and there was the album cover, gloriously stamped in gold "Not for resale. Promotional use only." I sighed. I reached for it. He threatened to call the radio station and tell them what I did. I left, dejected.

Of course, I bought my own copy, which I still have today. It's one of the few U2 things I kept in the great "I'm poor, let's do eBay" fire sale of 1999. It reminds me of the radio station, of what a brat my cousin was and still is, and of the days before Bono tried to save the world.

Favorite song: Out of Control
U2 wiki

106. The Archies - Record No. 1

2008-12-04T05:37:00.002-05:00

I don't think I still have this. If I do, it's tucked away in my mother's attic somewhere and it's in terrible condition. But I am making an exception and reviewing this anyhow because a) someone requested it facetiously as if I could never be an Archies fan and b) it's great nostalgia.

This wasn't a real vinyl record. It was cardboard and it came on a cereal box. You had to punch it out of the back of the box and I remember being so surprised that you could actually play this thing like a real record. It was all the rage back then (late 60s, early 70s) and all the cool bands were doing it: The Banana Splits, the Monkees, The Jackson 5 and even (sigh) Bobby Sherman.

No one would let me play it on their stereo. Not my parents, not my cousins, not even the next door neighbor. No one would dare let their precious needle touch a piece of cardboard pretending to be a record. I suspect now that it wasn't so much the cardboard as it was the Archies themselves.

I broke down and played it on my Fisher Price record player. I thought of this as a toy more or less, one which played nothing but novelty records and damn it, the Archies were not novelty. They were real. Somewhere out there existed a real Archie and a real Jughead and it wasn't until many years later when I would fully understand the sexual tension and soap opera drama that was Riverdale High school but when I was eight, the people that populated Riverdale were real and pure and awesome.

Anyhow, I played it on my Fisher Price player and it sounded awful. I was very disappointed in the production quality of this cereal prize cardboard record of a fake band. This wasn't even the one with Sugar Sugar.

Which is fine, as that song is when the Archies became total sell outs.

Favorite song: I have no idea, but here's Sugar, Sugar
Cereal Box record discography

105. Neil Young - Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere

2008-12-03T20:14:00.003-05:00

It's 1979. It's summer and there's a storm raging outside, one of those fierce August nor'easters with rain, thunder and howling wind. We're in MaryAnne's basement and the small windows are slightly open. We're all quietly stoned and there's no sound or movement for almost an hour except for the rain, the wind, and the blowing curtains. Then MaryAnne gets up and puts on this album. There's the low hiss and that scratchy sound and then Cinnamon Girl. We sit there still, the rain drowned out by the music, but not the wind, and the garbage cans roll down the street, seemingly in time to the music. The side plays out and it's still raining, still dark in mid afternoon and the humidity is seeping through the walls. I close my eyes during Down By The River and imagine the whole song as a movie I'm editing as it happens.

The song ends, the sound of the rain builds up again and a clap of thunder shakes the windows. Billy gets up and flips the record over. We lay there while the record plays and the storm weakens and we're absolutely quiet until the very last note of Cowgirl in the Sand. As the record ends, so does the storm. The rain stops, the wind stops, the last gasp of thunder is heard some distance away and we can hear the neighbors outside, looking for runaway garbage cans. We think about going outside, not really saying anything but each of us looking at each other, and then looking at the tiny window where the sun bursts through. I get up, flip the record back to side 1, wait for the guitar bursts of Cinnamon Girl, lay back again and prolong the day.

Favorite song: Cinnamon Girl
Type O Negative doing Cinnamon Girl

104. Shellac - 1000 Hurts

2008-12-03T19:32:00.003-05:00

I'm not a huge Shellac fan. Steve Albini is one of those people who walk the fine line between genius and crap. He's done wonders with The Pixies, The Breeders, Nirvana and Helmet, but his own stuff, particularly Shellac, tends to be so minimalistic that it becomes nothing more than pretentious performance art.

I bought this album for one song only, so I'll just go ahead and review that song.

Prayer to God stands out above anything else the band - or any of Albini's bands - has ever done. It's a striking, bare essence song where the music is not as important as the words or the emphatic singing. Basically, it's a song about a guy who wants two people killed, a guy and girl who, we presume, are a girl who cheated on him and the guy she cheated with. So he prays to God to have them both killed.

To the one true God above:
here is my prayer -
not the first you've heard, but the first I wrote.
(not the first, but the others were a long time ago).
There are two people here, and I want you to kill them.
Her - she can go quietly, by disease or a blow
to the base of her neck,
where her necklaces close,
where her garments come together,
where I used to lay my face...
That's where you oughta kill her,
in that particular place.

This is all sung in a plaintive plea over staccato guitar bursts. But it's not until the next verse that the song nails its place in my heart.

Him - just fucking kill him, I don't care if it hurts.
Yes I do, I want it to,
fucking kill him but first
make him cry like a woman,
(no particular woman)

Maybe it's my dark sense of humor, I don't know. But the first time I heard this song and that one line - no particular woman - was sung, I thought, that's a genius bit of writing, there. And Prayer to God became an instant favorite.

Maybe I'll go back and give the rest of the album a try again.

Prayer to God
Steve Albini talks of food

103. NWA - Straight Outta Compton

2008-12-03T18:32:00.003-05:00

I've already professed my love for Eazy E and MC Ren. Throw in my love for Ice Cube (Are We There Yet notwithstanding), and you can figure out how I feel about this album.

This came out in 1988. I was neither angry nor black but I loved this album as if I lived it. And I had to listen to it in secret, because, well, no one wants to see a 26 year old, suburban white girl attempt to rap. No one wants to see her jumping around yelling "Gangsta, Gangsta! That's what they're yellin!" Yelling it like I believed I was, you know, from tha hood.

There was something so decadent yet so profound about this album. It was daring and bold and good. The rhymes, the beats, the different voices, the passion. I thought it was an astounding album - I still do - and I had no one to enjoy it with. No one understood why I loved this so much. Many years later that the people who raised their eyebrows at NWA were suddenly adding this album to their collection. You know, right about the time Rolling Stone or some other magazine deemed it one of the Most Important Albums. It was ok to like it now. I'd hear my neighbor singing along to Straight Outta Compton as he washed his car and he'd be like "Hey, how about this Ice Cube guy, huh?" And I'd look at him all smug and say "I'm OG, baby."

I can still recite every word to Straight Outta Compton and I still feel self conscious while doing it, but at least I know I enjoy rap and hip hop as whole, and I'm not some fanny-pack wearing guy who listens to this because he thinks it makes him look cool in front of the kids in the hood, and he cringes inside every time they say the word niggaz.

Anyhow, you know why this album is really important? Because after Ice Cube rhymed jumbo with gumbo, there were no songs left to write. It was done.

Favorite song: Express Yourself
Awesome cover of Straight Outta Compton (scroll down)

102. Led Zeppelin - The Song Remains the Same

2008-12-02T19:53:00.004-05:00

This album defines the early part of my teenage years. Every memory of time spent in Eddie's fort or Dennis's garage or Julie's bedroom or in the sump or the schoolyard has a song from this album attached to it. Every plan we hatched, every long, pot fueled discussion about what we would do with our lives and the rock star lives we would lead were soundtracked with the wail of Jimi Page's guitar.

Double album. Just nine songs and four sides of music. A side long Dazed and Confused that was so long I knew couples that started dating and broke up while it played, so profound for us at the time musically that the build up of tension in the music left us spent when it was over. The Moby Dick drum solo. John Henry Bonham! Rock and Roll.

We knew this album inside and out. Every note, every nuance, every word that was changed or added from studio versions. We played it in the park, we played it at parties, we played it the dark of night on our headphones, listening to certain parts over and over, pretending we were Jimi Page or Robert Plant or maybe just pretending we were there at Madison Square Garden, like everyone slightly older than us claimed to be. We wore the tour shirts as if we had been there and many years later, my son would be gifted with a genuine tshirt from that tour -not a replica, but a shirt that was actually there, worn and sweated in by someone at those shows, and he put that shirt in a frame which still hangs on his wall and he listens to the album the way I listened to it, with awe and a deep satisfaction.

This album is magic for me. I may not love Zeppelin the way I used to; I barely listen to them anymore. But any song from these discs, just one note is all it takes, and I'm back there in that place where we were young and free and full of impossible dreams that we still thought were possible.

Does anybody remember laughter?

Favorite Song: Dazed and Confused
Album wiki

101. Queens of the Stone Age - Lullabies to Paralyze

2008-12-02T15:15:00.003-05:00

There's not much I can do with QOTSA albums except review them like normal.It's very hard to write about a band you love so much because all you want to do is gush about the songs and force people to listen to them. There's no big stories to go with these albums either, because they are a constant soundtrack. Not a day goes by when I don't listen to at least one QOTSA album in full.

This album has it all. It's part wicked fairytale, part deluded romanticism. LTP opens with Mark Lanegan and the creepy, yet mesmerizing This Lullaby and careens through a slew of musical styles until it ends with Josh Homme's melancholy voice on Long, Slow Goodbye. In between you have Everybody Knows That You're Insane, a bluesy piece that invokes a smoky barroom. There's the ominous sounding Burn the Witch which features Billy Gibbons playing some killer riffs (and also includes Jack Black hand claps). The pop-perfect In My Head is everything that was awesome about 70s radio hits. There's the wistful, almost mournful I Never Came and the deep and dark Someone's in the Wolf, which makes me think of being lost in the woods in some warped bedtime story. The Blood is Love is all spacey, like something you should listen to with a bong and a black light in someone's basement, as is the groovy You've Got a Killer Scene There Man. The awesome Broken Box is vulgar spitefulness set to a danceable, ass-shaking, hand clapping beat. Then Long, Slow Goodbye, haunting song in which Homme does an amazing job of conveying the sadness within.

I could say this is my favorite QOTSA album, but that would be true for only today. It varies, depending on my mood.

Favorite song: Broken Box (today)
The Fade

100. Go National - Got My One Good Eye On You

2008-12-02T06:17:00.005-05:00

I wanted to do something special for the 100th review. Then someone on twitter said, why don't you do the first album Todd bought you>

May, 2006. I received a package in the mail from California. It was this CD, with a note that said Happy Mother's Day. It was from Todd. For reasons I won't bore you with, this meant the world to me. That's why this CD is special.

It's also special because it's so good. Go National is a perky little band fronted by Kevin Seconds of 7 Seconds fame and his wife Allyson. The music is straight up pop rock with a hint of punk. It's fun and it's light, and though some of the lyrics can be a bit heavy I think that's part of its charm (like MTX) that they words can still say something heavy while the music keeps you grooving.

It's a good memory album because it's only associated with good times. I must have played this 10 times in a row while reading Todd's note over and over again. I played it on my way to the airport to pick him up and it played on my iPod as we flew to Sacramento. This is my happy place album. This is what I put on when I feel like stabbing the world in the face. But it's also what I put on when I'm in a glorious mood and want to bop my head along to something and soak up the feeling that the world is a wonderful place full of shiny, happy people and it's always spring and always warm and the sun is always shining and I'd like to teach the world to sing.

Listening to this also reminds me of driving past Kevin Seconds' house in Sacramento and going to his coffee house on K Street and then it makes me long to be back in that city. Sometimes I miss that place as if it were my home.

Favorite song: NYC
Kevin Seconds

99. Green Day - Dookie

2008-12-02T05:30:00.003-05:00

Back when Dookie came out, I was only vaguely familiar with Green Day. I dismissed them as another pop punk band that was going to ruin the reputation of punk music and didn't bother with them. Then came this album and suddenly Green Day was all over the radio. I resisted the call of the catchy songs until about a year later, walking through an outdoor flea market with my daughter, who was about five years old at the time. She reached up to a display of cassettes and said "DOOKIE! Mommy, buy me Dookie! Please!" It was pretty obvious she had been influenced musically by her uncle, because she did not learn the name of that album from me.

When your kid is standing in the middle of a very crowded market screaming for dookie, you do the only logical thing. You buy it for her, and bite your tongue on the "this is not punk rock" lecture that would be lost on a five year old who only wants to sing When I Come Around.

She played that cassette endlessly and I learned to appreciate Green Day for what they are: Catchy, simplistic rock music with punk rock roots and pop sensibilities, sung by a guy who sounds like he a nose full of snot. Not that there's anything wrong with that. It wouldn't be until much later in the band's career when someone would point out that they are the Taco Bell of punk rock. But that's another review, later on.

My daughter still has that Dookie cassette, by the way.
Official site

Favorite song: She

98. MDC - Millions of Dead Cops

2008-12-02T05:00:00.000-05:00

Take about ten hits of speed, mix it with a gallon of anger and a pound of pissed off adrenaline and then light it all on fire and stand in the flames. That’s how this album feels.

MDC is brutal. That’s the best way to describe it. High speed, blistering music with lyrics full of rage and anger. Dave Dictor and company pull no punches. They say what they mean. They take on everything that angers them - police brutality, corporations, homophobia, rednecks, John Wayne, capitalism - and pound their ideas into your head and gut in a straightforward way. Where other bands with this kind of stance rely on irony and subtle innuendos and clever wordplay to get their point across, MDC just puts their middle finger up right in your face and spits in your eye. Brutal. But awesome.

Favorite song: I Remember (mp3)
Which was featured in the movie American Hardcore

97. The Jimi Hendrix Experience - Axis: Bold as Love

2008-12-01T05:54:00.000-05:00

Axis is not a memory album. It does not take me to a certain time or place. Axis: Bold as Love is the here and now.

It's what to listen to when your coworker is talking too loud and too much. It's what's in the CD player when traffic is at a standstill and horns are blaring. It's what's playing on a rainy Saturday spent on the couch reading. It is a warm blanket, a dose of Xanax. It doesn't matter if the song is loud and fast (Spanish Castle Magic) or soulful and slow (Castles Made of Sand) or hard and funky (If Was 6 Was 9) or something that makes a wistfulness invade your soul like Little Wing, this entire album is the comfort food of music. It's my grilled cheese and tomato soup.

(Speaking of Little Wing, why is it that everyone loves the Stevie Ray Vaughn version better than Jimi's? Personally, I think SVR is one of the most overrated artists of all time.)

Favorite song: Castles Made of Sand
Official site

96. Grateful Dead - American Beauty

2008-11-30T19:26:00.003-05:00

I went through a Dead Head phase in high school. Almost everyone in the 70's did. But even in the absolute deepest of my Dead Head days, I could not hold a candle to my friends who spent their summer breaks following them around the country, who went to hundreds and hundreds of shows.

I went to about 50 Dead shows all through high school. I enjoyed the shows, but I didn't immerse myself in them the way my friends did. Yes, I got stoned or dropped acid and grooved with the band for the first few songs. It was all well and good until they broke out into Morning Dew and you knew there was a 700 minute space jam coming. I tried to get into the whole "dance like a crazed banshee in the aisle" thing, but there wasn't enough acid in the world to keep me from falling asleep during those jams.

But as much as I distance myself from my Dead days and as much as I try to deny I was a huge fan, if you put this album on in front of me, I will sit there from the first note of Box of Rain to the last note of Truckin' and I will know every word and enjoy every single minute and I will ask to play Ripple at least two more times.

I think it's time to reconcile myself with my 14 year old Dead Head self.

Favorite song: Ripple
Me, in my Dead Head days

95. Smashing Pumpkins - Siamese Dream

2008-11-30T19:09:00.003-05:00

I'm really not sure how I feel about the Smashing Pumpkins. I know that Mayonaise is one of my favorite songs ever and I know that I really don't care for Billy Corgan and I know that I have to be in a certain mood to listen to any other Pumpkins song than Mayonaise. They are just one of those bands I'll always be ambivalent about.

But apparently not ambivalent enough to not sit around drunk one night with some friends, forming a fake band whose sole contribution to pop music would be a tribute to Billy Corgan.

i wanna grab him by the neck
and lick his bald little head
and billy billy oh billy
how does it get so smooth
i've always had a thing for billiards
and licking you is like shooting pool
i'd like to give your head an old fashioned spit shine
because mr. corgan you must know
that you are only mine
billy corgan's head
billy corgan's head
god it's my obsession

i'd smash pumpkins for you
and maybe some watermelons
because i just got out of jail
where i was raped by felons

Yes, I still have that tucked away on a piece of paper.

We were really, really tequila drunk.

Favorite song: Mayonaise
Billy Corgan, Smashing Pumpkins
By request: What if that guy from Smashing Pumpkins lost his car keys? (one of my favorite Stephen Lynch bits)

94. Jane's Addiction - Ritual de lo Habitual

2008-11-30T18:48:00.003-05:00

My favorite Jane's Addiction album. I know most people prefer Nothing's Shocking, but I like the sparse feel of Ritual.

On the surface this album seems like catchy rock tunes, but underneath it's so much more. First time I listened to this I got caught up in the frenzy of Stop! and the groove of No One's Leaving and finally I got to Three Days and I knew it was going to be one of those songs that would stay in my head forever.

You ever dream that you can fly? You're floating aimlessly through the sky and then you're going higher and higher and you feel like you might reach the top of universe and then suddenly you're soaring straight ahead, rushing over trees and rivers and buildings, sometimes swooping down low and then pushing your body to go back up again and the world disappears below you and it's just you and the sky and you do a few pinwheels or somersaults in the air before you glide back down again, feeling refreshed and fulfilled and out of breath? That's Three Days, and it is the feel that encompasses Ritual de lo Habitual from start to finish..

Favorite song: Three Days
Official site

93. Devo - Q: Are We Not Men? A: We Are Devo!

2008-11-29T16:55:00.003-05:00

The first Devo song I heard was Satisfaction. I immediately bought the album and, after listening to the whole thing twice, declared Mark Mothersbaugh a genius. This album made my friends question my sanity and it drove my mother crazy.

Two years, later my mother was singing Whip It non-stop. And then, years after that I'd be watching Rugrats with my kids and Mark Mothersbaugh's name would pop on the screen and I'd think Can't I have anything to myself?

Not that I begrudge him his success. I just find it sort of a metaphor for my youth that the man partially responsible for some of my very weird acid trips while listening to Space Junk and Sloppy is man whose work is listened to by mother and millions of young children.

Then again, my mother's favorite band is Pink Floyd.

Makes you kind of wonder about my mother's postage stamp licking addiction back in the 80's, huh?

Favorite song: Jocko Homo (predictable, perhaps, but such a great song)
Club Devo

92. Allman Brothers - At Fillmore East

2008-11-29T07:39:00.002-05:00

There are a lot of bands I listened to just during certain phases in my life, then were put away like musical skeletons in my closet. The Allman Brothers are not one of those bands. They've been a constant in my life since my cousin's husband Billy - a dirtbag of a guy with a huge beer gut and no redeeming qualities except or his music collection - introduced me to this album. The first time I sat through the entirety of the live version of Whipping Post, I felt spent, as if every ounce of my energy was drained just by listening to it. It was such a defining moment for me, musically, that I can remember what I was wearing (Levis, Grateful Dead tshirt), what Billy was drinking (quart of Miller), that their house smelled like stale cigarettes and the couch cushions had pot seeds all over it, and that my baby cousin Melissa - Sweet Melissa - had a rash on her arm in the shape of Nevada. I hated that house, but loved that Billy let me borrow from his record collection. I never gave At Fillmore East back to him.

The Allmans became my happy place band. They're summer. They're the open road with the window down, they're a field of flowers, a college road trip, a surge of warmth in the middle of winter. And this particular album, especially side 4, is a bunch of twenty something kids and an impromptu keg party in the park, all standing on a picnic table and belting out "Sometimes I feel....sometimes I feel..." in ecstatic karaoke, long before karaoke machines took the joy out of spontaneous singing.

Favorite song: Whipping Post
Album wiki

91. Anti Nowhere League - We Are...The League

2008-11-28T06:47:00.002-05:00

I had this cassette for one reason and one reason only: So. Fucking. What.

You can judge a band’s true offensiveness by how your mother reacts when you hit “play” on the cassette tape in your car, thinking that you had something benign like Pink Floyd (your mother’s favorite band) in there but it was Anti Nowhere League and it was poised right at the point in So What where he snarls “Well I've fucked a sheep, And I've fucked a goat, I've had my cock right down its throat,” and your mom turns and looks at you and says “This is what paying for four years of Catholic school got me?” And she shakes her head and begs you to put The Wall back on.

Ok, but “ohhh I need a dirty woman” is ok, mom? Goat, woman, what’s the difference?

And just an aside, I wish I had a dollar for every time I had to say to someone: This is NOT a Metallica song.

Favorite song: Obviously, So What. I don't think I ever listened to any other song on this tape.
Official site

90. Kiss - Dressed to Kill

2008-11-28T06:07:00.004-05:00

1975. I was 12 years old. I heard Rock and Roll All Nite on the radio the same day I saw my first picture of KISS and nothing was the same after that. I was already listening to a lot of rock music but this. This was different. This was rock and theatrics. This terrified and disgusted my mother. Awesome!

Soon after, the band appeared on some late night rock show, either Don Kirshner or Wolfman Jack, one of those shows I wasn't really supposed to stay up for, but did anyhow. I was completely mesmerized. Rock and Roll All Nite was my anthem.

Soon, I had KISS posters on the wall. I joined the KISS army. It didn't matter that the rest of Dressed to Kill sucked. It didn't matter that these guys were not the best musicians in the world. I was suckered in by the decadence, by the stage presence, by the marketing genius that was KISS. This is why I don't make fun of Jonas Brothers fans. Because I know. I know how easily a young mind can swayed to follow group think in the matters of music and hot guys. What? Peter Criss was too hot, in a "aww let's feel sorry for the drummer" kind of way.

But there comes a time when you realize what you bought into. For me, that time was about a year later when I went to see KISS at the Nassau Coliseum. Just the year before, I had been swooning to David Cassidy in the same arena and I wanted to wash the experience of grown women throwing panties on stage out of my mind. I wanted to experience a real concert. Rock and Roll! Not those screaming women who acted like they would set themselves on fire for David Cassidy.

The house lights dimmed. The stage lights went up. Maybe there were some explosions and laser beams and whatnot. KISS took the stage. Oh Jesus, the screaming. The screaming! Not just the girls, but the guys, too. Girls were yelling out things they wanted to do with Gene Simmons’ tongue. . Bras on the stage. Panties on the stage. Girls swooning. Swooning! This was not what I expected at all. I was confused, lost, frightened. This was rock and roll, not David Cassidy. This was the real deal, the stuff I read about in Rolling Stone. Why aren’t you throwing beer bottles at each other and lighting fires and kicking chairs around? Why the HELL are you swooning? I had this all wrong.

No, KISS had it all wrong. I left the concert feeling dejected. I really think my disappointment in KISS and rock and roll that night is what set the stage for me to fall in love with punk rock soon after.

When my son was seven years old, he took a liking to KISS. It took him less than a year to come to the conclusion that they sucked. I was 16 before I figured that out. But I had fun along the way, I can't deny that.

Favorite song: Rock and Roll All Nite, for the sake of nostalgia
MiniKiss

89. Dead Milkmen - Big Lizard in My Backyard

2008-11-28T05:34:00.002-05:00

Like most people, the first song I heard off this album was Bitchin’ Camaro. As soon as I listened to the intro and heard them make fun of Crystal Ship - a Doors cover band I was once fond of seeing - I was hooked. I love music with a sense of humor. Especially stupid humor. Well, when the actual music part of Bitchin' Camaro kicked I knew I had to give the rest of the album a try and see if these guys were anything more than a novelty act.

I discovered there’s really more to the Milkmen than irreverent lyrics and haphazard songs like Camaro and Swordfish; they manage to get some pretty good lines off and make sense in tunes like Spit Sink and V.F.W. Big Lizard is a pretty well rounded album. If a band can make me laugh out loud and nod my head to the music at the same time, that’s a plus in my book. That I ended buying - and enjoying - all their subsequent albums takes the "novelty" out of their act.

Plus, all these years later, I still get a kick out of Bitchin' Camaro, Bitchin' Camaro, Tony Orlando an Dawn!

Favorite song: Bitchin' Camaro, of course
The Dead Milkmen archives

88. Rolling Stones - Beggar's Banquet

2008-11-27T08:02:00.004-05:00

First - there is now a "what is this and why the hell are you doing it?" page.

I always say I'm not a fan of the Rolling Stones, yet when I look at my record collection, that seems to not be the case. All the classic Stones albums are there. I just don't like more Stones songs than I do like which makes more of a casual listener than a fan.

Case in point, this album. I bought this Beggar's Banquet with birthday money in 7th grade, about six years after it came out. I loved Sympathy for the Devil, and Robert, the most popular, best looking 8th grader, was a huge Stones fan. I was told by Robert's sister that Beggar's Banquet was his favorite album. Learn it, live it, love it. The key to wooing Robert.

I gave it a try, I really did. It just wasn't happening. Every time I put the album on, it would be the same ritual. Side 1, song 1. Then flip it over to Side 2, song 2. Sympathy for the Devil and Street Fighting Man over and over again. I would never impress Robert like that.

I gave up on the album and gave up on Robert. Which was a good thing, as it turns out Robert liked boys as much as he liked the Stones. I wish I knew that before I spent four dollars trying to impress him.

Favorite song: Sympathy for the Devil
Beggar's Banquet wiki

87. Wire - Pink Flag

2008-11-26T17:23:00.004-05:00

Wire was one of those bands where I didn't know what to make of them. Were they punk? It seemed like it sometimes, but sometimes I felt like the music was too rich to be punk. Punk was stripped down, bare bones. Wire was full on sound, rich and deep, though Pink Flag is more punk-ish than the rest of their catalog.

There was a distinct weirdness to this album, an underlying current of strangeness that would stay with me long after I listened to it. There was a certain manic feel present in the music, a subversiveness that a lot of the early punk rock was missing, or was manufacturing. Wire had not a Sex Pistols "look how bad we are" image, but a real, authentic subversiveness about them that was embedded in the music.

I haven't listened to this album in so long until right now and it's even better than I remember it.

Favorite song: Strange
Minor Threat cover of 12XU
New Bomb Turks awesome cover of Mr. Suit

86. The Eagles - Hotel California

2008-11-26T16:58:00.003-05:00

Let me quote the Dude here. "I hate the fucking Eagles, man."

I guess I had a fling with them back in the day, because I bought their albums. But I never loved them. I never hung an Eagles poster or wanted their album cover painted on my Levi jacket or had fantasies about Don Henley.

As time went on, my tolerance of the Eagles grew to apathy, which later in life turned into abject loathing. Especially this album and especially the overplayed, overrated, over analyzed title song.

Hotel California is another one of those "rock musicians gone poetically awry" songs, in which a lyricist believes he is not just a writer of catchy rock songs, but a poet as well. An allegorical poet, if you will. Ooohhh, dark, mysterious, cryptic lyrics that will, thirty years down the road, still be the subject of "what do you think it means" conversations. Who cares? This song is BORING. It's like watching a horrible movie with false endings, where you keep shifting in your seat thinking, ok, credits are going to roll right.........now! But no, they cut to yet another drawn out, badly acted scene, maybe one in which there are mirrors on the ceiling and pink champagne on ice. Oh, yes, how Hollywood people live in excess, that must be the theme of this song! No, wait, it's about being stuck in a place you can't get out of...no, it's...hey, a guitar solo! Another long, drawn out, masturbatory guitar experience! Pass the bong!

Favorite song: Try the Eagles of Death Metal instead.
I hate the fuckin' Eagles, man

85. Various Artists - Superstars of the 70's

2008-11-26T16:08:00.002-05:00

I got this four record box set as a Christmas present in 1973. Which is kind of weird. Three years into the 70's and they’re already putting out a four disc set of the decade’s superstars? The people at Warner were either very hopeful or manipulative marketers. These are the bands you will love for the next seven years!

There was enough stuff on this album for an 11 year old wannabe rocker to devour for weeks on end. I knew even then what was crap; I skipped over Seals & Crofts, Judy Collins and anything else that sounded like my mother would listen to it, although I secretly loved Gordon Lightfoot's If You Could Read My Mind. Very secretly. And maybe I liked the Bee Gees' Lonely Days. And who doesn't love Dock of the Bay?

But it was the rock tunes that kept these four discs occupying space on my turntable. Alice Cooper, Deep Purple, Jimi Hendrix. There was Led Zeppelin and Yes, but both were shortened versions of very long songs and I remember being surprised the first time I heard the real version of Roundabout. There was Black Sabbath's Paranoid, which I played over and over again, thinking it would somehow turn me bad because everyone knew Black Sabbath was for devil worshippers. But, much to my chagrin, the church did not spontaneously burst into flames as I sang Paranoid under my breath when I crossed myself with the holy water.

I still have this box set. The picture I used here instead of the album cover was taken just a few months ago, when I found the record in my mother's attic. I sat in that hot attic for about 15 minutes when I dug the album out of the box, feeling the vinyl in my hand, remember how it felt to hear some of those songs for the first time.

Favorite song (now): Dock of the Bay
Track listing

84. My Chemical Romance - Three Cheers For Sweet Revenge

2008-11-26T06:41:00.003-05:00

Yea, it’s the guy with the make up. That one from that video. I’m Not Ok. The one with the black parade. He kind of looks like what would happen if Robert Smith ate the singer from AFI.

So you probably only know that one song and you’re thinking, my god Michele, you’ve really gone to the emo dark side. Pop punk new wave emo Hot Topic music. But really. This is no worse than my Cure phase. Or my Bauhaus phase. Hell, it isn’t even emo. It’s not even goth. It’s just good music.

I gotta say, I hate when people judge an entire album on the basis of one song that may or may not sound like radio-friendly angsty pop music aimed at 14 year old girls who like to draw scars on themselves with Sharpies and write MySpace odes to unrequited crushes.

Sometimes Three Cheers makes me feel like I’m 15 years old and sitting in my bedroom, wearing black pants and a black shirt and a black sweater and black sneakers and carving hateful words into the wooden desk by my window, wondering if life gets any better than this and if that guy I was pining for had any idea that my heart and soul were bleeding for him. Bleeding, I tell you! Or was that yesterday?

Ok, so maybe that Cure phase never really leaves you. Maybe there are times when I still want to dress in black (wait, I do that every day) and listen to some depressing love songs (wait, I do that every day) and write maudlin poetry (no, I don’t do that). But I swear to you, I never dated or pined for a guy who wore eyeliner. Goth/Depression chic was ok for me, but it was lame on guys. It still is. Face powder? Lipstick? Mascara? If I wanted to a guy like that I would have stood outside the midnight showing of Rocky Horror and grabbed the first Frankenfuter.

Where was I? Oh, yea. This album is good. It's lyrically brilliant and musically diverse. Get past the whole I’m Not Ok thing and dig into the rest of it. By the third song you’ll have forgotten that this band previously made you feel like Hot Topic barfed up its contents into your radio.

Favorite song: You Know What They Do To Guys Like Us In Prison
MCR MySpace

83. Eazy-E - Eazy-Duz-It

2008-11-26T06:30:00.003-05:00

Eazy-Duz-It is such an awesome album. You've got Eazy E, Dr. Dre., Ice Cube and MC Ren all working together to lay down some pretty killer tracks.

Sometimes I feel kind of goofy cruising around the suburbs with this playing in the car, me and Todd acting all gangsta, shooting off lines like

you wanna rumble with us you can't hang
cause were something like a two man gang

Todd can pull off the gangsta thing. I can't. I can tell this by the way he laughs at me every time we play this CD.

Every time I listen to this I think that, while I dig Eazy and all, MC Ren is really what makes Eazy-Duz-It flow.

Favorite song: Ruthless Villain
Eazy at wiki

82. The Jam - All Mod Cons

2008-11-26T06:07:00.004-05:00

I didn't really fall in love with the Jam until 1983, when Snap! came out and everyone was listening to Town Called Malice and Bitterest Pill. But it wasn't Snap! that did it.My coworker Pat (who at the time was in a band called the Dead Virgins) told me to put the compilation down and listen to all the previous albums. He then handed me his cassette of All Mod Cons and wrote down the words to one song from the album and told me to listen to it.

The first time I heard Down in the Tube Station at Midnight - about a guy trying to get home from work to his wife but gets jacked by some thugs in the a subway station, was when I really fell for the band, especially Weller. It was Weller’s ability to tell a complete, chilling story here, combined with the perfect pace of the song; rise and fall, slow and frenzied, giving the whole thing an air of drama, that mademe see this band for everything they were. The build up as the guy is laying there, beaten and describing his what he sees as he's on the floor dying, (The last thing that I saw As I lay there on the floor Was jesus saves painted by an atheist nutter) and then the lines “I glanced back on my life and thought about my wife cause they took the keys - and she’ll think its me.” That stayed with me. Haunted me. I still to this day - over 20 years later - get that same gut-punch feeling when I listen to this. That, kids, is what turns a good song into a great song and that is what made me a full on fan of The Jam.

Favorite song: Down in the Tube Station at Midnight
JamFan

81. Soundtrack - Forbidden Zone

2008-11-26T05:45:00.003-05:00

Way back in 1980, I was sitting in a little movie theater called the Mini Cinema - the same place you could find me every weekend watching things like Rocky Horror or The Song Remains The Same or It Came From Outer Space in 3D. It was a cult movie house that ran shows until about 4am, a place where the seats were permanently fixated with the stench of pot and cheap liquor. My home away from home.

We were at a midnight showing of the Grateful Dead movie when they threw us a curve and decided to show us a new movie first. The Forbidden Zone. This movie was so bizarre and surreal, that we decided to see it again the next night just to make sure that the mind altering drugs we had partaken of did not skew our viewing of the film. No siree, they did not. Seeing the movie straight was as messed up as seeing it high. Something about a sixth dimension, and heroin, a septic tank and a topless princess and Hervé Villechaize.

This was my first Danny Elfman experience and paved the way for my appreciation of Oingo Boingo.

Favorite song: Well....here's the opening scene to the movie.
Official movie site

80. Radiohead - The Bends

2008-11-25T17:15:00.006-05:00

My favorite Radiohead album. It has more depth, soul and character than anything they've ever done (and that's saying a lot). Musically and lyrically it rises above almost every other album in my music collection.

This is a perfect album. There's no skipping. There's no playing selected tracks. It's on from start to finish. Its beauty encompasses you, its sadness tears at you, its wistfulness makes your heart ache.

It's not just the exquisite music or brilliant lyrics. It's the way Thom Yorke's voice plays on your emotions that makes you go through such a range of feelings with him that when the album is done playing you feel like you've been born, died, been born again and have gone through the 12 stages of death and the myriad stages of PMS in just under an hour.

The Bends is quiet and understated and that is what makes it so powerful. It's almost like Yorke's voice is a meek companion to the music; with layers of self consciousness amplified by his tone shifts, the meekness becomes a strength and you are swept away with the songs, wallowing with them. For that is what The Bends is. It's a long wallow, a journey into self pity slathered with bitterness and yearning.

If Bulletproof doesn't make you weep with empathy, then Fake Plastic Trees will do the trick.

But I can't help the feeling
I could blow through the ceiling
If I just turn and run

And it wears me out, it wears me out
It wears me out, it wears me out

And if I could be who you wanted
If I could be who you wanted
All the time, all the time

It's the abject sadness and wistfulness in Thom Yorke's voice, it's the way the music sweeps up and then drops suddenly, the soul crushing way Yorke meekly pulls the last "all the time" out of his throat.

And yea, it's the words. It's like a sharp stick poking at my brain and my heart. But I will never stop listening to it, because I will never stop listening to this album.

Favorite song: Fake Plastic Trees
Green Plastic

79. Bad Brains - I Against I

2008-11-25T16:57:00.005-05:00

I was working in a record store and this semi-stupid guy I worked with said he was going to put on the new Bad Manners album for us to listen to and I was like, meh quirky ska, who needs it?

But what he put on was this album. I liked their previous stuff, especially Pay to Cum but I wasn't a huge fan.

I listened to the entirely of I Against I and I remember when it was over saying it was the music listening equivalent of multiple orgasms.

Later that night, I Against I was almost ruined for me when the semi-stupid guy had a little house party and to play nothing but the title song for about two hours straight. Finally, we got together, tied him up to a rain gutter in his backyard and someone threw the album in the pool.

Favorite song: I Against I
Answer Bad Brains' "idiotic call" to get them to play Obama's inauguration.

78. Misfits - Walk Among Us

2008-11-25T06:27:00.002-05:00

What you have here is 13 songs in 25 minutes. This album is like viewing every B-movie ever made while tweaking on speed. You hit play on this thing and before you can even catch your breath, you feel like you’ve seen your life flash before your eyes, if your life consists of death, mayhem, zombies, devils, vampires and Martians, and the soundtrack to that is howled by Glenn Danzig. Seriously, Danzig was born to sing this stuff. His voice here is part campiness, part howling at the moon and all deep-throated, gothic posturing. All that, plus the 50's-inspired riffs played in punk rock fashion make this one of the best punk albums ever.

Favorite song: 20 Eyes
Misfits Central

77. Dire Straits -S/T

2008-11-25T06:16:00.003-05:00

Every album - even every song - in my collection evokes a memory; music is my life's scrapbook, as it is for most people. Some songs have stronger memories attached than others. The obvious ones are tunes that remind me of emotional moments in my life; 0heartbreak, happiness, milestones. But there are also those albums that, for whatever reason, lodged themselves in my brain, hanging onto a memory that seems rather insignificant in retrospect.

Dire Straits is one of those albums. Upon hearing the very first note Down to the Waterline, I will be immediately transported to:

Winter, 1978. I'm 16 years old. My bedroom is in the front of the house, looking out onto the street. I have a wooden desk - it's a real classroom desk my uncle brought me from some school he was renovating. There are all kinds of names and designs carved into the wood by many a hand. My desk is right in front of the window. I'm a nosy kid. I like to see what's going on outside my door, especially if I've been forced by my parents to stay in my room because of some perceived wrong I have committed. The windows are covered with Venetian blinds. Not the little, bitty mini-blinds of today, but the old, three inch, comes-in-white-only- aluminum blinds that ended up misshapen from me constantly bending the slats to see what's going on in the world of the un-grounded.

I'm studying for a social studies exam by copying all of my class notes onto loose leaf paper. It's the only way I can study and remember the facts - forced repetition. It's dark out, but not quite night. It's 6pm-during-winter dark. Tonight I have my blinds closed because it's snowing and I know that if I start to stare at the falling snow, I will become hypnotized by the way the flakes swirl under the street lights and I really, really need to study for this test.

I can hear them laughing outside. I hear car tires crunching through the fresh, packed snow and then a skritching, which is the sound that winter boots make when being dragged against snow. My friends were skitching, right outside my window, while I was being held captive by the intricacies of early Greek civilization.

So I turn up the radio to drown out their fun. I'm listening to WNEW FM (102.7), the premiere rock station in the world. Sultans of Swing comes on. I stare morosely at my social studies textbook while singing along. I take a peek or two out the window, bending the blinds back just a bit so no one can see me spying. I watch the snow fall, I watch my next door neighbor grab hold of the bumper of a car, I watch the neighbor's Christmas lights come on and the whole scene is so winter wonderland, so perfectly choreographed that I, being a 16 year old female, instantly feel a wave of self pity wash over me. Sultans of Swing plays on and the music itself feels isolating and stark; a perfect match for my sudden bleak mood.

I push the school work aside and drag the Olivetti over and I type out a piece of over-the-top, morbid, morose poetry.

And that is my history with this album; it reminds me of snow, of winter's beauty, of Greek history and awful teenage poetry. I swear that when I hear this song, I can smell the polish on the desk and hear that skritching sound of boots on snow.

Favorite song: Down to the Waterline
Dire Straits wiki

76. Linkin Park - Hybrid Theory

2008-11-25T06:10:00.003-05:00

This makes me feel sort of...guilty. Maybe because so many people think of Linkin Park as the band that made nu-metal radio friendly (a bad thing). Maybe because, when it comes down to it, they are nothing more than NSYNC with guitars and without the dance steps. Maybe because they are known as the band kids listen to when they are curled up in a ball in their bedroom closet, wishing away the world and crying that nobody loves them and life isn't fair. Angsty, melodramatic rock. Nirvana without teeth.

So why do I like this album so much? I have no idea. I don't know what pulls me into listening to it.

I really don't feel all that guilty about owning/liking Hybrid Theory. Just like they say you can't help who you fall in love with, you can't help what kind of music you like. It just happens. Really, I've come clean about my Justin Timberlake fascination, so there's nothing derisive you can say about my Linkin Park listening that's worse than I've already heard.

Favorite song: With You
Official site

75. Elvis - Aloha From Hawaii

2008-11-25T05:52:00.003-05:00

Everyone owns at least one Elvis album, right?

I grew up on a steady diet of Elvis. In the homes of my friends, they worshiped Jesus or Mary or Moses. In my home, there was Elvis worship. I was schooled in all the songs. I was forced to watch all the movies. Elvis in Hawaii. Clambake. Some movie where Mary Tyler Moore is a nun and Elvis seduces her. I think. I think he has to battle Jesus for Mary's heart or something.

I figured out a very young age that all the movies were the same. Elvis meets girls. Elvis sings to girls. Elvis makes out with someone. What happens in between all that doesn't matter. It's like watching the old Star Trek shows. You just wait for the moment when Kirk bangs an alien chick. Then the episode is complete. When Elvis sings at some swooning girl, the movie has reached it's climax. The rest is just filler. Elvis. Kirk. Same thing. All you needed was an episode of Star Trek where Kirk swiveled his hips and crooned something like "hunka hunka burnin love" to some chick with blue skin and three arms, and you'd have Elvis in space.

Now that I think about, Elvis in Hawaii was via satellite. Look at the album cover - Elvis in Space!

My mother listened to this album a ridiculous amount of times one summer. She'd prop the stereo speakers up by the back windows and we'd be outside all day, in the pool, on the deck, sunbathing, eating, whatever we were doing there was this constant soundtrack of Hound Dog and Suspicious Minds and It's Over. Mom and her friend Noreen sitting at a picnic table playing Pinochle in the hot sun and talking about Elvis's hips and Elvis's love life and what they would do if they ever met The King. Sure, I felt the same way about Leif Garret, but I was a kid. They were adults. They weren't supposed to swoon.

I've grown to fully appreciate Elvis. Maybe it's something that comes with entering old age. Maybe it's because of the Velvet Elvis hanging in our computer room. Maybe it's because Elvis built the pyramids.

Favorite song: Suspicious Minds
Story about me, my mom, Elvis and death

74. Joan Jett - S/T

2008-11-24T17:35:00.002-05:00

I wanted to be Joan Jett. I wanted to look like her and dress like her and talk like her and be able to rock the fuck out like her. Then I grew up. And I still wanted to be her.

This was a tequila album. Meaning, you were in small, sweaty club and you just did about ten shots of tequila and you ask the DJ to put "Do You Want to Touch Me" on and suddenly you're standing on a table screaming out the lyrics and swinging your bra around and you end up doing some drunken version of dirty dancing with some guy you wouldn't normally get within ten feet of and in the middle of the dance you feel a hand slide up your skirt. I did want you to touch me. Just not...there.

This is one of those albums that will never go out of style for me. I have it on vinyl, cassette, CD and it's on my iPod for those days at work when I want to pretend I'm 18 and badass.

Favorite song: Do You Want to Touch
Joan Jett MySpace. She is still HOT.

73. The Dwarves - Blood, Guts and Pussy

2008-11-24T17:08:00.003-05:00

I can't even count all the ways in which this band is offensive. But there's something so disturbingly fun about these guys and even though I almost feel guilty for liking them (really, just the early stuff), there's a satanic satisfaction about enjoying their music, the same kind of feeling I got when I palmed my communion wafer as a kid and fed it to the dog when I got home.

You know that kid your mother always warned you about, the one she told you to stay away from because he was nothing but trouble and his parents were drunks and he would probably grow up to be a serial killer?

That's the Dwarves, and this is the album that epitomizes it. Songs like Let's Fuck Back Seat of My Car and Insect Whore are all bad, bad news. In a good, good way.

Favorite song: Back Seat of My Car
Dwarves member who used to be in Queens of the Stone Age

72. Fleetwood Mac - Rumours

2008-11-24T12:06:00.004-05:00

Damn, I loved this album. It was 1977. I was a metal head who was falling in love with punk, yet there was something about Rumours that grabbed me. This was an album my mother loved, my teachers loved, radio stations loved. I would listen to it and think that they just weren't getting all of it. They heard it as radio music. The songs were catchy. I heard something more. While it seemed like pop music on the surface, it had an underlying darkness.

I remember sitting in my room one night listening to The Chain while under the influence of some mind altering substance. The song freaked me out. I put the album away.

It wasn't until many years later that I heard about the messy stories behind the songs. And it wasn't until many more years later that Stevie Nicks became a cross between Shirley Maclaine and Cyndi Lauper. Which has nothing to do with this review. I just always feel the need to point out Stevie Nicks weirdness whenever I can.

Favorite song: The Chain
Play the Stevie Nicks song jumble!

71. Steel Pole Bathtub - The Miracle of Sound in Motion

2008-11-24T06:09:00.004-05:00

I've been talking up this band for years, but very few people seem to take to them the way I have. Their style is kind of punk, their sound is noisy and layered and sometimes disjointed. It could be unnerving to someone who likes their music all flowing and nuanced.

Last night, I realized that the band is featured in the new ad for the video game Left 4 Dead (which we are totally buying this week). The song on the ad is Train to Miami, my absolute favorite tune on this album.

Like most of the album, that particular song is surreal, noisy, weird, disturbing, haunting and addicting. The repeated chorus of “these are my friends now” over a staccato bass, the cacophony of sounds in the background, the whispers about church burning and satan, the short scream; it’s what the circus might sound like if you smoked a bowl of crack before entering the big tent. You’d think that putting all these sounds together might make a mess, but Steel Pole Bathtub makes it work.

The whole album is at once disturbing and riveting. Bozeman, Carbon, Waxl, I could try to define each song for you but it would take far more words than anyone wants to read. The only song on the album that doesn't require an acquired taste is the remake of the Pogues' Down all the Days, which is a bright and airy spot in an otherwise deep and complex album.

Miracle of Sound in Motion is one of those "desert island discs" I never want to live without.

I hope being on this Left 4 Dead ad gives Steel Pole Bathtub some recognition.

Favorite song: Train to Miami (really, download this, listen to the whole song)
SPB at Trouser Press

70. Deep Purple - Machine Head

2008-11-24T05:41:00.002-05:00

My friend's older brother had a Deep Purple poster hanging in his room. On the poster were the lyrics to Smoke on the Water. Steve, the brother, would always take the time to tell us the story behind the lyrics. Except the story changed every time. The more he told it, the more embellished it became until Steve was actually there when it happened, even though he was only about 16 years old and Swiss cheese was the closest he ever got to Switzerland.

This album has some really good, heavy songs. I love Space Truckin and Highway Star but, let's face it, this album is Smoke on the Water and for that I will always hold a slight grudge against Deep Purple.

If you've ever had a kid who plays guitar, you know what I mean. It's the first rock song they learn. No, not even song. It's the first riff they learn.

E-A-B-E-A-B-A-E-A-B-E-A.

Over. And over. And over.

And then your kid gets good and he learns to play other songs and he's moved on to Pink Floyd and Pantera and you take him to Guitar Center every Saturday so he can sit around and try out all the guitars and amps you can't afford to buy him and there are twenty other budding guitarists in the store, ranging in age from ten to 70, and they are all playing Smoke on the Water as if they invented it.

It echoes in your head. All day long. Every day. You tell your kid you'll give him ten bucks for every time he doesn't play it and then his friends come over and they start playing it and finally, your kid gives up the guitar for his Xbox and you think you never have to hear that song again and then one winter night, you hear a familiar sound coming from the neighbor's garage and your hair stands on end and your heart sinks because the neighbor's kid got himself a guitar and you know what the next couple of weeks are going to be like, so you announce on twitter:

Neighbor's kid needs to knock it off with the E-A-B-E-A-B-A-E-A-B-E-A or I'll beat him with his guitar til he's a nice shade of Deep Purple.

And then you make a silent vow to yourself to never buy your nephew a guitar.

Favorite song: Space Truckin
Album wiki

69. Circle Jerks - Group Sex

2008-11-24T05:31:00.002-05:00

Talk about anthems. I was 18 when this album out. When you’re 18 you fluctuate between feeling like you're going to live forever and feeling like you want to die. Those two things kind of lend themselves to each other when you spend every night doing some sort of damage to your body and your brain cells and your life expectancy, and you really just don’t give a damn about growing old. So you sit around thinking. what is the point when the world is going to shit anyhow? And you pop Group Sex into the cassette player and you spend the next hour screaming live fast, die young and you think, hell yea. That’s what I’m gonna do. Live fast, die young!

We see how that worked out.

This whole album is a blast of adrenalin. It starts off with 28 seconds of speed with Deny Everything and Keith Morris takes you through at this frenzied pace. Each song is a perfect example of the punk mantra, which is that you can say what you have to say in just about a minute. Short, fierce and to the point.

Favorite song: World Up My Ass
Official site

68. Kid Rock - Devil Without A Cause

2008-11-23T13:55:00.004-05:00

I got this CD for free, from a friend who was in the music business at the time. There's really a good explanation of why I still own this.

It started one rainy week some time in 1998 or so. We had intended to go to the park just about every day, but the storm that came in the beginning of the week never let up. By Thursday, my kids were stir crazy and I was ready to kill them. I needed something to help them blow off steam and energy. I needed something to keep them from killing each other with Power Ranger imitations.

MTV was showing a video. I don't remember what band it was, but the lead singer had just jumped into a sea of fans and was going back onto the stage to dive into the crowd again.

DJ was enthralled. I explained the concept of stage diving to him. He thought it was the coolest thing ever. Natalie must have too, because she was standing on the couch, ready to launch herself to the floor. She wanted to stage dive.

Hmmm. Hmmm. Yes. Bad idea. Very bad idea. But....but......excess steam......pent-up energy.....bored out of their minds.

I took the cushions off the couch and put them on the floor. I threw a blanket over the pillows for good measure. Then I told the kids (8 and 5 at the time) to each pick out a CD.

This is what DJ picked out. We listened to I am the Bullgod about 50 times while my children perfected their stage diving techniques. By the time they were tired of the song, they were tired enough to chill out quietly until dinner time. And a rainy day tradition was born. The downside being my son's inclination to shout "MY NAME IS KIIIIIIIIIID ROCK!" at the most inappropriate times.

And that is the ONLY reason I still keep this CD around. Sentimentality is the bane of my music collection's existence.

Favorite song: Bawitdaba
This headline makes me giggle

67. Pantera - Vulgar Display of Power

2008-11-23T13:08:00.004-05:00

There are gonna be times in your life when you feel like kicking someone in the face with a steel toed boot. There are going to be days at work that could drive you to murder, road rage incidents that make you feel like you could overturn a Hummer with one flick of your wrist, arguments with a significant other that make you want to eat someone's soul.

That's what this album is for. Mouth For War, Walk, Fucking Hostile, This Love. Vulgar Display is about 50 minutes of pent up anger, frustration, hurt and rage ready to be unleashed by just pressing play. You put this on when no one is home, with the curtains closed and the door locked and the stereo cranked to 11. You play air guitar, you kick the couch, you scream til your throat is raw, you jump off the couch and use a broom as a mic stand and you purge yourself of every ounce of hatred that entered your soul in the past week. It's an exorcism. It's a cleansing.

Sure it was so much easier to jump around like that when you were younger. And maybe the hate came easier and the anger was closer to the surface. And maybe saying RE-SPECT. WALK. doesn't carry the same authority it did when you were young and drunk and hanging your car window*. But it still feels damn good, doesn't it?

*That was my sister, not me. I was 30 when this album came out. Already too old to hang out the car window. But I was driving.

Favorite song: This Love
Official site

66. Squeeze - Cool For Cats

2008-11-23T07:08:00.003-05:00

Unlike some other bands of that era that got famous because of their style or gimmick or just because they hit the right place at the right time, Squeeze was oozing with talent.

Difford, Tilbrook, Holland and all those other guys who didn't matter as much as those three combined to make some of the greatest songs to come out of an era when great songs were not nearly as numerous as their overstyled, synth pop counterparts. Not that there's anything wrong with that; I loved the whole synth pop-new wave thing. I was just able to recognize that while most of the music of that genre was filled with fun beats that you could bop your head in time to after a few shots of tequila in a grungy-on-purpose club, Squeeze was different.

While a lot of people joined the Squeeze fan-wagon when East Side Story (1981) came out, I had a head start on the band due to my employment at a radio station in 1980. Ok, I wasn't an employee so much as a phone volunteer, one of those people who answered the 24-7 request line and handled the contests and listened to a lot of heavy breathing and requests for sexual favors that were unheard of in my little, naive corner of the world.

An advance copy of Cool for Cats made it into my hands in early 1980. The record had actually been released in '79, but New York radio was slow to pick up on it.

It was love at first listen. It was different, so far apart from anything I was hearing at the time. I grabbed a copy of the album and spent that night listening to it for hours, flipping the disc at least ten times. The lyrics to Up the Junction were simple, the rhythm almost monotonous. But somehow those two parts together formed a riveting song. Even Cool for Cats, with its machine-gun presentation of the lyrics was just so out there that I couldn't help but love it.

Sometimes I pine for the days when Cool for Cats was considered exciting and new. When that happens, I put this album on, close my eyes and relive the glory days of night clubs, spiked hair and torn, black stockings.

Favorite song: Cool For Cats
Squeeze wiki

65. Mr. T Experience - Revenge Is Sweet, And So Are You

2008-11-23T06:21:00.003-05:00

When I was young I had dreams of being a songwriter. We had a fake little band called Pond Scum and me and my sister and a couple of friends would write these amazing lyrics and and think about how much money we would make if we actually had a real band. That is, if any of us could play musical instruments. Then the fake band broke up when we had an argument about our fake direction. They wanted heavy handed songs about death and destruction. I wanted pop music cleverness. I wanted ironic poetry. I wanted to write songs that could make people smile at my turn of phrase, grin at my witty use of rhyme schemes, chuckle at my wry humor, yet, when the song is over, think well, that kind of hit me in the gut. But no one can do that, right.

Yes, someone can. Obviously, it's not me. (save the whales/save the whales/send your money in the mail/ is NOT clever). But there's Dr. Frank, of The Mr. T. Experience, and this album, for me, is the pinnacle of his songwriting. It's the album my 15 year old self wishes she wrote.

Revenge is Sweet is at once so sad (I Don't Need You Now) and so happy (She's Coming Over Tonight) that you don't exactly know what you feel when you hear the songs, all you know is that you do laugh or grin (Swiss Army Girlfriend) and you realize afterward that you were actually laughing or grinning (Lawnmower of Love) at yourself and the angst and tremor (When I Lost You) with which you pursued love (Our Love Will Last Forever and Ever).

It's hard describe this album as a whole. It combines all the great things about pop music with all the perfect things about punk. It's like doing the Lindy in a mosh pit. Everyone is going to look at you like you're nuts, but eventually they'll join in the fun.

Favorite song: And I Will Be With You
Dr. Frank's blog
Did you know that Dr. Frank also wrote a best selling book?

64. Spawn Soundtrack

2008-11-22T07:35:00.003-05:00

This movie sucked in ways few movies do. But the soundtrack is an interesting concept take some metal bands and some techno artists and mix them together. This is a bit like mixing Rooster Sauce with peanut butter, but you’d be kind of surprised how that works out. Tastes like angry peanuts! And this album is kind of like....angry peanuts.

Yes, the peanuts are angry. But they are dancing, too. See how that works? Ok, let’s take that Rooster Sauce analogy to its ultimate limit (and probable demise) and use it to review the entire album. (You might have to understand my love for Rooster Sauce and my contention that it goes with ANYTHING to even begin to comprehend this review, but just try to follow me anyhow - when you're reviewing so many albums every day, you have to find new ways to make it amusing, even if just to yourself).

1. "(Can't You) Trip Like I Do" - Filter & The Crystal Method
This is like Rooster Sauce and Chili. Destined to be together. Makes for a song that leaves you wanting a second helping.

2. "Long Hard Road Out of Hell" - Marilyn Manson & Sneaker Pimps
Rooster Sauce and tomato soup. See, you would think this would be a really odd combo. I’m not really fond of tomato soup in general, and I wouldn’t eat Rooster Sauce on its own, but put the two together and you got something that’s pretty palatable.

3. "Satan" - Orbital & Kirk Hammet
Rooster Sauce and anything from Taco Bell. Just a waste of Rooster Sauce. Kirk Hammet adds nothing to Orbital’s block rockin’ beats. You’d be better off just guzzling the Rooster Sauce.

4. "Kick The P.A." - Korn & The Dust Brothers
Rooster Sauce and fast food fried chicken. Sure, you may not admit to liking or eating the fast food chicken, but when you throw some Rooster Sauce on it, then it’s ok to say you ate it. And enjoyed it.

5."Tiny Rubberband" - Butthole Surfers & Moby
Rooster Sauce and tofu. See, tofu tastes like whatever you put on it, so you can’t go wrong with it. It doesn’t matter that Moby exists within this tune because it’s really all Butthole Surfers weirdness. Which is good.

6. "For Whom the Bell Tolls (The Irony of it All)" - Metallica & DJ Spooky
Rooster Sauce and plain oatmeal. Not even Rooster Sauce can hide the fact that plain oatmeal is boring as all hell. Bland, tasteless, boring. Spooky’s presence does nothing to spice up the repetitive Metallica contribution to this tune.

7. "Torn Apart" - Stabbing Westward & Wink
Rooster Sauce and pizza. You just know it’s going to be good from the get go. One of those things that when you get around to putting them together you think, why didn’t I do this sooner?

8. "Skin Up Pin Up" - Mansun & 808 State
Rooster Sauce and scrambled eggs. Not a taste everyone will like or even try, but I promise you it works. Just try it once and you’ll be thinking about it all day.

9. "One Man Army" - The Prodigy & Tom Morello
Rooster Sauce on a peanut butter and banana sandwich. I know, I didn’t think it would work, either. But it does, I swear. You have to keep tasting it to make sure you tasted it right the first time. It’s the angry peanuts, man. They own you. Second best song on the album.

10. "Spawn" - Silverchair & Vitro
Rooster Sauce and grilled American cheese on white bread. I know what you’re thinking. Meh. Grilled cheese. How...plain. How generic. But add a little Rooster Sauce and you have yourself something with a nice bite to it. Who knew grilled cheese could get all down with its bad self like that?
11. "T-4 Strain" - Henry Rollins & Goldie
Rooster Sauce and caviar. Ohh, look at me. I’m eating caviar. I am pretentious and full of myself! Really, I dig on Rollins, but sometimes he makes me cringe. Not even a good dose of Rooster Sauce does anything for me here. In fact, it’s just a reminder that THIS SONG SUCKS.

12. "Familiar" - Incubus & DJ Greyboy
Rooster Sauce and chicken soup. It’s smooth. It’s a tasty blend of warmth and wellness with a nice kick to it. It’s comforting and familiar yet sort of kicks your ass about five minutes after you’ve eaten it. Best song here.

13. "No Remorse (I Wanna Die)" - Slayer & Atari Teenage Riot
Rooster Sauce and habanero peppers. Oh yea, that’s gonna hurt. But it’s gonna hurt so good. You’ll either bang your head in sheer hot-throated joy or go home crying to your momma.

14. "A Plane Scraped Its Belly On A Sooty Yellow Moon" - Soul Coughing & Roni Size
Rooster Sauce and granola. You’re just gonna puke it back up and you know what? It will look the same as it did going down. Kind of useless.

Overall, the album rates four bottles of Rooster Sauce, because even with the songs that bring it down a bit, it still kicks your ass from here til next Wednesday.

But skip the movie.

Favorite song: Familiar
You know who else loves Rooster Sauce?

63. Nirvana - MTV Unplugged

2008-11-22T05:49:00.006-05:00

When Nevermind came out, I was one of those people who jumped on the Nirvana bandwagon. But I didn't ride it very long. I hated the hype surrounding them, I hated all the little kids in their flannel shirts, I hated that everyone seemed to be in love with two songs and basically ignored the awesome Drain You. And I hated - really, deeply hated - the idolization of Cobain.

It wasn't until MTV Unplugged that I fully appreciated Cobain. While a lot of the songs played that night weren't his, I was still taken aback by the pure honesty in his voice. You could hear everything; pain, wistfulness, sorrow. And I loved that the band did their lesser known songs, and that the covers they did were of bands mostly unknown to the kids who first sunk their teeth into Nevermind. The best word I could use to describe the whole performance is intense. You listen to it, and look at it and you see and hear perhaps what Nirvana might have been if Nevermind didn't blow up like that. They weren't meant to be a hit machine. They weren't meant to be pop idols. This was a band meant to say something, to mean something. It's in the way he sang those Meat Puppets songs, especially Plateau, but you can also hear it in Something in the Way and on On a Plain, and I can't fully describe it because it was a personal experience for me, but I listen to this album and I hear Cobain the superstar, Cobain the idol, stripped away and you're left with Cobain the person, and the band that Nirvana might have been if they didn't become "the voice of a generation" with Nevermind.

I became a bigger Nirvana fan after this, but it wasn't until recently, when I pulled this CD and Incesticide and In Utero and Bleach out again, that I actually fell in love with them. I think I needed the distance of years and the absence of flannel shirts to fully immerse myself in the band.

Favorite song: Oh Me
I Dream of Kurt Cobain

62. Justin Timberlake - FutureSex/LoveSounds

2008-11-21T06:08:00.003-05:00

I'm going to come out to you right now and say it. I love him. Not in a "I want to be your concubine and have your love child" way. More like, I just dig him. I think he's talented and funny and charming and his music makes me shake like I've got ants in my pants.

I really like this album. It's a good disc to have in the car on a warm summer night, when you're maybe running errands or doing something mundane and you want to pretend that you're in some stylized music video and everything, including you, is sleek and sexy and beautiful in an MTV sort of way.

It's groovy. It's funky. It's got a good beat and god damn it, I can shake my ass to it. I'm not going to be embarrassed by this CD because listening to it makes me feel good. Justin Timberlake makes me feel good.

Did I just say that out loud?

Listen, you know damn well that you have musical skeletons in your closet. At least I bring mine out for everyone to see. You may want to say snarky things to me about my love of JT, but I don't see you coming clean about your Air Supply albums. I don't see you raising your hand when I ask who was into Damn Yankees back in the day. So don't you be making fun of me when you hide your shame underneath a pile of blankets in your bedroom closet.

Maybe you love JT, too.

Maybe you are glad sexy's back.

Maybe you can join hands with me and say:

If sexy never left, then why's everybody on my shit?

Favorite song: Sexy Back, of course
Dick in a Box
Beyonce parody
On weekend update

61. GBH - City Baby Attacked By Rats

2008-11-21T05:49:00.003-05:00

(The band is also known as Charged GBH)

I was working at a record store in 1983 when a co-worker played this album for me, asking me to settle a debate with another co-worker. “Is this punk or speed metal?” I listened to the first four tracks or so, shrugged my shoulders and said “Why can’t it be both?” They looked at me weird and the one guy said, “Well, you know, it’s got that whole fast guitar thing going on, so I’m thinking it’s more metal than punk....” Yea, well, Yngwie Malmsteem plays a fast guitar too, but we’re not going to call him anything other than a wanker, ok? The world isn’t black and white, guys. It’s not an either/or premise here.

Label? Call it what you want; thrash, punk metal, whatever. City Baby - and GBH by extension - doesn’t need no stinkin’ label. Violent, offensive, dark, dirty, crude, mean and faster than hell, City Baby - framed by Abrahall’s guttural vocals and Blyth’s blistering guitar work - is an attention deficit’s delight. Blasting through the songs at an average of about two minutes, each tune does what it has to do and then quits. It grabs you in, gets your heart pumping, slaps you around and then drops you on the floor. Then you get up for another. By the time the album is done, you’ll wonder if you just went through some Yngwie nightmare, where it’s proven that masturbating with your guitar may get people to call you a genius, but pounding your way through some punk-rock-on-speed and leaving people breathless, worn out, scarred and begging for more counts for a hell of a lot more than having 14 year old kids with used Fenders trying to mimic your licks. It’s when the 14 year olds with used Fenders break shit in their garage while going crazy trying to play "Bellend Bop" that you know you kick some major ass.

So, if you’re in the mood to get your heart pumping, get your throat burning, and maybe jump off your couch a couple of times and move around like you’re still 18 years old (I see a recurring them here today) and can take a musical beating, then crank up City Baby and prepare to feel that familiar surge of power and excitement like you had the last time you were at a show. And then prepare to feel the agony of defeat as you lay on the ground holding your knee and cursing father time. Not saying I did that, but...yea.

Favorite song: Sick Boy

GBH at allmusic

60. Anthrax - Among the Living

2008-11-21T05:24:00.002-05:00

I was 25 when this album came out and listening to it made me feel like I was 18 and invincible and could kick the ass of everyone in the world.

It had everything. References to Stephen King stories and Judge Dredd. It had anger and violence and death and the usual Anthrax sarcasm combined with an almost surreal speed.

This album is the equivalent of 10 cups of coffee. If you are ever in a situation where you need to jumpstart your day and you are totally out of caffeine and you need something to get you going, put on Among the Living. You heart rate will soar, your hair will stand on end, you'll find yourself jumping around the room shouting TALKING TO YOU IS LIKE CLAPPING WITH ONE HAND and by the time you get around to crying for the indians you're on this natural, speed metal high that you don't want to come down from.

Listening to this now, at 5am, it still makes me feel like I'm 18 or even 25 and I'm ready to take on the world. Except at 18, I'd be just rolling in the house now, instead of waking up and getting ready for work. And at 25, I wouldn't believe you if you told me that Scott Ian would become the face of VH1.

I'm gonna go have a cup of Anthrax now.

Favorite song: Caught in a Mosh
Official site

59. Dead Kennedys - Fresh Fruit For Rotting Vegetables

2008-11-20T12:17:00.003-05:00

It was 1983. I was working in a record store, which just happened to be one of the busiest record stores in New York, in one of the busiest malls in New York, at the beginning of the Christmas shopping season.

So, here we were on the anniversary of Kennedy's assassination and one of my co-workers remarked that, unlike most days of remembrance in the U.S., no one had yet declared Kennedy Assassination Day to be a holiday of sorts; the kind where you see store-wide sales and clearance items going for bargain prices! I mean, how would one advertise such a thing? Come to the JFK Clearance Sale, where you'll get more bang for your bucks!

And then we came up with a brilliant idea. We could combine the death of JFK with the start of the Christmas shopping season - a way to commemorate Kennedy but bring the customers in as well.

So we put up a Dead Kennedys display on the carousel in front of the store. We grabbed all the copies of Fresh Fruit we had in the store, plus a few copies of Plastic Surgery Disasters and put them on the carousel, which was just a few feet from the wide front door of the store, which people traveling through the mall passed by all day long.

Needless to say, the display was down within twenty minutes and we were reprimanded, with big, inky, black spots splattered on our permanent records.

Oh yea, despite the fact that Jello's voice sometimes grates on me, and despite the fact that Jello himself always grates on me, I do love this album.

Favorite song: California Über Alles (sentimental pick)
Official Site

58. Metallica - Master of Puppets

2008-11-20T05:34:00.002-05:00

Yes, I am one of those people. Before the Black album...Lars is a pussy...... Bob Rock..If Cliff were still alive....Load was garbage....blah blah blah. I think I covered it all.

Even though I lost my taste for almost all Metallica - what seemed genius back then seems mostly boring to me now - there are still a few songs that will get my head banging and my hands drumming and bring me back to a time when James still knew how to growl without sounding like he lost his balls in a freak accident involving Jason Newsted and a butt plug shaped like Dave Mustaine. Battery is one of those. A song that can make my head move faster than the speed of light and have my son roll his eyes and tell me to leave the head banging to the kids and I say something like I WAS LISTENING TO METALLICA BEFORE YOU WERE EVEN BORN, YOU UNGRATEFUL LITTLE.....

...eh. This shit makes me feel OLD.

Master of Puppets was the second to last album Metallica would release before they made the transition to the the spit-and-polish sound on the Black Album (Metallica) and, years later, the intensity-lacking Load and Re-Load.

One only has to put on Master and listen to Battery or Leper Messiah and then listen to Hero of the Day from Load to realize that Metallica did not age well. Hetfield just can't make those guttural groans like he used to. Metallic fans, most in their 30's by now, have moved on. And the new kids just don't want to bang their head to an old man singing about anger and angst. Being a heavy metal star is like wearing a tight miniskirt; you can only do it until a certain age until people start keeping their distance from you.

Metallica wanted to change direction (after twenty years) and play a kinder, gentler heavy metal. The kind that gets played on all the radio stations, the kind that gets you an invite to TRL. Like, say...Nickelback.

Let's just all sit back and listen to Master of Puppets or Kill 'em All and reminisce about the days when Metallica had a raw edge and James could make those scowling faces without looking like his pacemakers just blew a fuse.

Favorite song: Battery
Encyclopedia Metallica

57. Cypress Hill - S/T

2008-11-19T18:42:00.003-05:00

1991. I'm standing in the parking lot of a supermarket, examining a scratch on the door of my Mustang. A scratch that was not there before I went into the store. I'm pissed off. A car rolls through the parking lot, windows down, bass thumping and I hear the words "Here is something you can't understand, how I could just kill a man." And I'm thinking - mind you, I'm standing there with a baby on my hip and a grocery cart full of diapers and formula - but I'm thinking, fuck yea. I do understand that, man. I drove straight to Mr. Cheapo's Record Store and said "What's this song?" and I did that annoying thing I really hated people doing to me when I worked in a record store and I sang that line to him. Mr. Cheapo smiled knowingly and two minutes later I was in my car, me and my infant daughter bopping our heads to Cypress Hill.

Yesterday. I'm driving home from work. It's been one of those days. What kind of day? A "sawed off shotgun, hand on the pump" kind of day. So I've got Cypress Hill playing and I'm yelling those words pretty loud, kind of glad that it's cold out and my windows are up because really, no one wants to hear a 46 year old white woman singing "All because a nigga tried to play me on the trigger."

What I'm saying is, this album never, ever gets old. Ever. It's my go-to bad mood album, but it's also my "I feel kinda funky" album, which is when I play Hole in the Head over and over again.

Favorite song: Hand on the Pump
B-Real at MySpace

56. Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds - Murder Ballads

2008-11-19T17:25:00.004-05:00

Nick Cave is one of those things in life that people either loathe with unbridled hatred or love with all their heart. I never met anyone who was "meh" about him. Me, I'm in the "love with all my heart" camp.

I was debating which Nick Cave album to do tonight; this or Boatman's Call. So I put Murder Ballads on (for the first time in a while) and as soon as his voice kicked in on Song of Joy, there was no turning it off. I remembered instantly what it is I love so much about this record, and Cave's music in general. There's so much involved here; you can't just listen to it as background music because it grabs you and pulls you in and there's no escaping it. It's dark and mysterious and morbid and dangerous. But it's melodic and captivating, too. Every song is a story, every note a masterpiece, every word full of passion. Listening to disturbing Henry Lee (feat. PJ Harvey) or the manic Curse of Millhaven or the chilling Kindess of Strangers, you are taken on a creepy ride of murdery and mayhem, but the ride becomes thrilling, because the haunting, beautiful music and Cave's voice weave these ballads and crazed stories together in an incredible tapestry of talent.

Also, if you have the chance to see Nick Cave live, do it. The words "stage presence" do not do justice to the ego this man brings onto the stage with him. He commands your attention and mesmerizes you into believing you are living the song with him.

Favorite song: Henry Lee
Official site

55. Bon Jovi - Slippery When Wet

2008-11-19T16:21:00.003-05:00

I figured I'd get the two Jersey boys out of the way on the same day.

I don't like this album. I didn't like it when it came out and I don't like it even more now. I don't like Jon Bon Jovi. I don't like his hair. I don't like any music from New Jersey except the Bouncing Souls and maybe Glen Danzig, depending on my mood (Ok, that's a lie, there's a lot of good music out of Jersey).

But, you say, this is a collection of reviews from the music you own, right? If you hate Bon Jovi so much, why do you own this album?

Because.

Oh come on, you know why. Don't make me say it.

Fine.

It's because of Dead or Alive. This is how you measure a guilty pleasure song: does it make you burst out singing even when your heart and soul are yelling a big Darth Vader “Noooooooooooooooo!"? When this song comes on I am a fucking cowboy. Riding a steel horse. And when he gets to that part, oh yea you know what part, it’s all I can do to keep from pumping my fist in the air.

Cause I’ve seen a million faces.

And I’ve rocked them all.

Favorite song: Obvious.
A band from New Jersey that's not Bon Jovi

54. Weezer - Blue Album

2008-11-19T06:36:00.002-05:00

It was when Maladroit came out that I stopped saying I'm a Weezer fan and instead saying I'm a fan of the Blue Album.

This is perfection. From start to finish, it's one of those rare albums that I can play in its entirety over and over, never skipping a song, never getting tired of it. It's brilliant, it's earnest, it's light, it's heavy, it's silly, it's perfect.

Remember when you were 12 years old and you made a list of every attribute the perfect guy could have, from his awesome personality to his romanticism to his musical tastes to his blond hair and blue eyes and ability to play the bass? Ok, maybe that was just me. But the Blue Album is the musical equivalent of that guy. It's the perfect date, in vinyl form. There's not a song I would skip, not a thing I would change.

And that perfection is all wrapped up so exquisitely with the the last song. Only in Dreams clocks in at 8:04 and not a second of that is wasted on anything extraneous. From the opening bass line to the final fade out, Dreams is a sweeping, melodic piece of wistfulness. It's a heartbreaking tale of unrequited love but, oddly enough, it's not the earnest yearnings in River Cuomo's voice or the sweetness of the backing vocals that breaks your heart; instead the final, instrumental five minutes or so of the song carry you away on alternating waves of build ups and let downs that really kick you in the gut. It's the embodiment of the entire album wrapped up in one song and perfect way to finish off a perfect disc.

Favorite song: Only in Dreams
Album wiki

53. Bruce Springsteen - Darkness on the Edge of Town

2008-11-19T06:23:00.007-05:00

Yes, I own Bruce Springsteen albums. Quite a few of them. They are relics from another time in my life, a time when I actually liked the Boss. I was never quite as rabid a fan as my friends, who wanted to have his babies, nor I was quite a fan like my first husband, who also would have had Springsteen's babies, given the chance. I think he still would.

While I will admit that I did enjoy his music at some point, and I really did enjoy seeing him live, somewhere along the line I developed an outright disdain for the man and his music.

I'll be more honest than that: I have a personal, visceral hatred for Springsteen that goes beyond the usual "oh, he sucks" kind of hate.

I can't stand his strained voice. I can't stand his underbite and the way he grimaces when he sings. I can't stand the oh so meaningful lyrics about life as a down and out Jersey cowboy (wait, I think that's Bon Jovi).

Every song reads like the same Joyce Carol Oats short story. "Me and Janie went down to the boardwalk to talk about our lives and well, the boardwalk was kinda empty because this town is just dyin', man and me and Janie said like, yea, we gotta get out of here. This town is just gonna kill us man. We can't spend all our lives drag racin' and fuckin' and takin' long walks on the beach contemplatin' shit. And Janie's pregnant, man and her old man is gonna kick her out of the house for not lovin' Jesus enough and her momma done spent all the milk money gamblin' in Atlantic City and we just work hard, you know? We work hard, man. We put on our blue jeans and work boots and go to the factories and mills and we work our fingers to the bone and we got nuthin' to show for it 'cept teenage pregnancy and drug overdoses and depressed kids with nothin' to do and the streets are on fire baby. Let's make out."

That's not to say that Candy's Room isn't a decent song. Just that I wish it wasn't sung by him.

Favorite song: Frankie Goes to Hollywood doing Born to Run
I won't suck up to the Boss

52. Black Sabbath - S/T

2008-11-18T13:26:00.003-05:00

My older cousin schooled me in metal with this album when I was just eight years old. I liked it, but didn't come to fully appreciate it until a few years later when I snuck into my cousin's room to steal his cigarettes and spare change. All I got was the stale butt of a Kool and three dimes, but I found this album on the floor and took it home with me.

This time, I really got into it. The songs were long and murky in a sludge-rock sort of way and the music was somewhat trippy. Even all these years later, listening to this album is like walking through an acid trip while wearing boots made of cement. Sounds weird and maybe off putting, but there is no denying that as a whole, it works.

While The Wizard (and last night at a hockey game, Todd thought that would make a cool intro song for the team to come out to) is what stands out for me as most defining the Sabbath I knew and loved (read: the first three albums), it's N.I.B. that really takes me back to those days of looking for loose change and choking on Kools. It's a testament to the timelesness of this album that I can put this on in the car and not feel silly singing "My name is Lucifer, please take my hand" because it's followed by such an awesome guitar riff.

Favorite song: N.I.B.
Album wiki

51. Danzig - Danzig 4

2008-11-18T12:48:00.003-05:00

This album opens with

I am a walking
screaming hell
a thing of torture to behold
this vivisection
splits my soul

and then the music kicks in and you get Danzig's surly, throaty voice and pounding drums and I remember why I used to worship this whole album.

I love Glen Danzig. I know. He's a bit cheesy. A bit over the top. But that's a lot of what I love about him. The mix of metal riffs with with lyrics about death and pain and evil are everything I ever loved about death metal, without the pain of actually listening to death metal.

This album kills. And I don't mean that ironically or anything. It is all killer, no filler. I've listened to this so many times from start to finish that I know every single nuanced fluctuation in Danzig's voice. And while singing I give the black sun/to sear off your tongue makes me feel really self-aware in a "dude, you are 46 years old, should you still be singing this stuff?" kind of way, there's a perverse enjoyment in doing so, especially when you get to Let It Be Captured and you listen to Danzig make sweet, sweet love to his own voice.

Favorite song: Going Down to Die
Danzig on Aqua Teen Hunger Force

50. Clutch - Transnational Speedway League: Anthems, Anecdotes, and Undeniable Truths

2008-11-18T12:11:00.004-05:00

I wanted the 50th to be special. Clutch is special.

Whenever I'm asked to describe this band to someone who has never heard them before I say, imagine early Black Sabbath combined with Frank Zappa. They're heavy and grungy and full of funk and metal and irreverent, smart lyrics that mix pop culture with literature and history with nonsense.

Some time in the mid 90's I was in my favorite local record store that doesn't exist anymore and the owner, whose name was I think Jerry but whom I called Mr. Cheapo, as that was the name of the store, said "I got something for you." He always had something for me. And he was 99% of the time right about choosing music for me. Except for that time with Kiss's Psycho Circus, but I think selection was more for my son than me. But this particular day, he put on this Clutch CD. He played A Shogun Named Marcus. This were unlike anything I had heard before, virtually undefinable. After the song was over Mr. Cheapo said "What do you think?" And I said. "It makes me think of ninjas driving a combine."

And I was hooked forever on Clutch. They quickly moved up the ranks on the "bands I can't live without list" and still remain there at number two.

One time I drove to Pennsylvania playing nothing but A Shogun Named Marcus over and over the whole way, and decided that if they ever made a movie about my life it would be called Check It Out, I'm Like A Buzzbomb.

Side note: The first real conversation I ever had with Todd was about this band - he had gone to see them the night before and was gloating to me in the forums on fark.com about having been to the show. We became instant friends that day. The rest is history.

Favorite song: A Shogun Named Marcus (go on, download it if you never heard it. let me know what you think)
Clutch Discography

49. The Sex Pistols - Never Mind the Bollocks, Here's the Sex Pistols

2008-11-18T05:37:00.003-05:00

Everyone owns this album, right? Even my 15 year old son owns the CD and he's not much of a punk fan. He just thought he should own it. It's one of those things you have, just to have, if you're a music fan. Kind of the way you have some Ewok thing hanging around your house if you are a Star Wars fan. Even though the Ewoks suck and you hate them, they're just a part of the whole, right?

The Sex Pistols were the original boy band. Manufactured for maximum attention whoring potential by Malcom McClaren, the band really had nothing to offer, talent wise. But they blew up and to this day people define punk rock by the Pistols. Which is really a shame. That's not to say I don't like a few of their songs, but let's face it, they sucked, musically. Then again, punk's not supposed to be pretty.

If you look at the Sex Pistols as just another band instead of the face of early punk rock, the album is ok. I'll still listen to it. Songs like Holidays in the Sun, Problems and Bodies are not bad. I think it's just the whole mystique of importance that bothers me so much about this album, and the band. Sure, it influence thousands of punk rockers after them. Sure it defined the genre for a while. But the Pistols were everything punk was not supposed to be: contrived, phony, commercial. Pretty Vacant pretty much sums up what the Sex Pistols were all about.

But yea, I still listen to it.

Favorite song: Holidays in the Sun
God Save the Sex Pistols

48. The Vandals - Peace Through Vandalism/When in Rome, Do as the Vandals

2008-11-18T05:11:00.004-05:00

I was going to do When In Rome, Do As The Vandals, but because the only Vandals I really love is the stuff with Stevo, I decided to do this, which is a combo of their first album and first EP, and the only Vandals recordings with Stevo as the lead singer.

The songs pretty much cover the gamut, from being in a punk band to being a fly, from anarchy to Nazis, to being in Disneyland tripping on LSD.

Which reminds of a story that Todd told about being in Disneyland on LSD.

Anyhow, I really dig the old Vandals. Not that I didn't like the later stuff (mostly I enjoyed the Christmas album and Hitler Bad, Vandals Good), there was just something about the Stevo music that had an edge to it. Sure, it was all goofiness and weird fun, but there was a certain punk to it that disappeared later on.

Plus, this albums contains Rico, which is sort of an ode to California; a soft, acoustic bit that Todd used to sing to me on the phone when he lived in the Land of Sunshine and Perfectness.

That may or may not be sarcasm, depending on if you know anyone from California.

Favorite song: Rico
The Vandals at wiki

47. The Police - Synchronicity

2008-11-17T06:14:00.002-05:00

This whole album defines the summer of 1983 for me. Everyone I knew was listening to it. The punks, the metalheads, the disco geeks - even my mother was in love with it. It was at times beautiful and at times dark and ugly. But the entire album from the funky Oh My God to the darkly melodic Tea in the Sahara - even the songs a lot of people write off like Miss Gradenko and Mother - were perfect musical specimens, showing off the talent of each individual band member and bringing everything together - music, lyrics, stories, emotion - in what I always described as a masterpiece (the overplayed and misunderstood Every Breath You Take notwithstanding). For me, the pinnacle of the album came on Synchronicity II, a tale of the darkness that looms under the surface in the life of a suburban family; how all the little things become big things when lived day to day, every single day of your entire life and sometimes it's enough to turn you into a monster that slowly creeps toward madness (my take, anyhow).

I really wish Sting didn't go off and fall in love with himself after this album. Then again, the band put out five near-perfect albums. Maybe they knew enough to quit while they were ahead.

Favorite song: Synchronicity II
Rolling Stone review from 1983

46. The Doors - S/T

2008-11-17T05:48:00.003-05:00

I still own every Doors album in some form or other, so it's best to just start at the beginning with them.

I was, at one point in my wayward youth, the Biggest Doors Fan Ever. I have since come to terms with the fact that Jim Morrison really didn't speak to me from the poster on my wall. You can see how I was easily swayed into believing so, though. There he was, in glorious black and white, shirtless, arms outstretched like a scarecrow martyr. His eyes followed me around the room [Yes! That's the one!] He used to tell me things, whisper to me in the dead of night when the only light in the room was from the red-tinted bulb that pointed towards my Morrison shrine. When Jim whispered, he said things like You cannot petition the lord with prayer!

I was probably about 14 when my fascination with the Doors began, and it started with this album and one song in particular. Yes. The End.

Now, I'm not denying that the Doors put out some decent music and that Morrison wrote some interesting lyrics, but when you look at this stuff from the distance of 30 years or so, you wonder what life may have been like without the drugs. Well, I do.

The End is probably the most quoted Doors song of all time. It’s quoted by pretentious potheads who think they are being deep and meaningful; by retro beatnik poets who carry tattered paperback copies of On the Road in the back pocket of their faded jeans; by psuedo-intellectuals who claim that Adlous Huxley’s Doors of Perception is the single greatest thing ever written by man; and by despondent, razor-weilding, confused, emotional teenagers who think they have this connection with Morrison, a connection with the sixties, man and hey, the blue bus is calling us.

Ride the snake, ride the snake
To the lake, the ancient lake, baby
The snake is long, seven miles
Ride the snake...he's old, and his skin is cold

Do you know that otherwise intelligent people have spent entire weekends drinking vodka and deciphering those very lyrics? Here’s a news flash: It’s nonsense. No matter what you want to believe, no matter how allegorical and deep you think those words are, no matter how much Freud you studied or Smirnoffs you drank, those words are the magnetic poetry of the Age of Aquarius.

I’m not saying the Doors sucked in general. I was a big fan and I still dust off the albums once in a while. But if you’re over 18 and not hindered by drug addiction or alcoholism that may cloud your thinking and you still believe these words are the most powerful thing you ever heard, you might want to rethink your life path.

On a side note, I spent about 200 hours of my life watching a Doors cover band play in shitty clubs. The very same cover band the Dead Milkmen mocked in the opening to Bitchin' Camaro.

It sucks when the haze of youth clears away and you realize your idols were nothing more than phonies. You hear that, Jonas Brothers fan?

Favorite song: Alabama Song
Holy crap, that cover band is still at it!

45. Nomeansno - Why Do They Call Me Mr. Happy?

2008-11-17T05:24:00.004-05:00

There's so much going on with this band. There’s heavy doses of funky jazz and funky doses of heavy metal. There’s weird timing changes, jagged rhythms and lyrics that seemed to have been penned by someone who has traveled through Dante’s circles of hell while on acid.

I’m not gonna lie; this is some weird shit. It’s an acquired taste. This is not an album to listen to casually in the car or while doing some other work. Maybe later on, after you’ve studied it and buried yourself in it and picked up every single nuance within. But your first couple of listens? Devote yourself to it. Just you and this album. In the dark. With headphones. Turn off the rest of your life and submerge yourself in the music and words. You need to become one with this. And here’s the thing about this album: you either get it or you don’t. There’s no in between. Either your mind completely rejects it or your soul clings to every note.

So, why do they call me Mr. Happy? Takes you the whole album to find out the answer to that. And it’s worth the trip to get to that point. It’s like you are on a boat, no, a ship, a huge ship that’s out in the middle of vast, churning, dark waters. Think Poseidon Adventure. Not Titanic. Leonardo DiCaprio has no place here. No, we’re talking Ernest Borgnine and Richard Dawson as your captains. And you’re Mr. Happy. The ship starts rocking. The ocean rises and falls, rises and falls, and one minute you’re partying, thinking you’re on top of the world and then it all crashes and you’re upside down and everything has gone to hell and you wonder if the devil has boarded this ship and is just having some fun with you. Your life flashes before your eyes and every dark secret spills forth, every ounce of bleak emotion you ever experienced - all the sadness, depression, despair, regret, hatred, fear - surrounds you like dark water but you push through all that, come up for air, fight off flying glass and fire and zombies eating human flesh and screaming people yelling at you to save them and you just kick all that out of the way, because you can. You can. You get to the end, you see the light and you’re standing on the deck and breathing in fresh air and that little kid is there and asks you : Why do they call me Mr. Happy?

Because. I’m. So. Fucking. Smart.

(Rarely in these reviews will I implore you to listen to something, but this is one of about three bands that I will try to force upon you)

Favorite song: You get two from this album.
The River
Cats, Sex, Nazis
Nomeansno discography/side projects

44. The Clash - Give 'Em Enough Rope

2008-11-16T18:18:00.000-05:00

1977 was a watershed year for me. Punk rock arrived in the USA and it forever changed the way I listened to music. Though I didn't pick up on it until the following year when I heard the Ramones on a college station, I still recognize 1977 as the year the music changed.

Christmas 1978, a friend gave me a cassette of Give 'em Enough Rope. Safe European Home and Tommy Gun were staples of my days and night for the next year or so.

So many hot, sticky summer nights, sitting in my Nova, drinking beer and listening to Joe Strummer's impassioned voice.

I had my first major break-up with this cassette playing in the background.

When I threw up that entire bottle of Boonesfarm wine, Julie's Been Working for the Drug Squad was blasting from the speakers we had set up in the park that night, before the cops came, before we were chased through the woods by snarling dogs, smelling of puke and Miller Lite. Every time I hear that song, I can recall the taste of warm beer vomit.

This is a different Clash than what materialized with London Calling. This is the Clash I mean when I talk about great bands. I'm not saying they were bad after this, but London Calling is a whole discussion unto itself. Give 'Em Enough Rope had something to it that makes me cling to it the way a person will cling on to that last good memory before life straight to hell.

Favorite Song: Julie's Been Working For the Drug Squad
The Birth of the Clash

43. Sparks - Kimono My House

2008-11-16T17:00:00.001-05:00

In 7th grade (circa 1975) We had a bus driver that just might have been the prototype for Otto. Long haired, constantly red-eyed and completely ignorant of everything that was going on in the back of the bus. The smoking, cursing, fighting, dry humping, drug dealing, seat kicking, hair pulling, name calling, lunch stealing, money grubbing, and fighting that went on from one end of town to the other seemed to never fall on Otto's radar.

I sat in the middle of the bus, far enough away from the back to not be bothered by the noise and far enough away from the front to not be called a nerd.

Otto had a cassette player that he brought on the bus. James Duncan, 8th grade Electronics Freak, also had a portable radio. Each day would bring a duel. James tuned his radio in to 99x. Every morning he'd be blasting songs like Seasons in the Sun and Billy Don't Be a Hero and Otto would be blasting things like Lou Reed and David Bowie and every time James would turn up his radio to try to drown out Otto's music, Otto would stop the bus, turn around, call James a faggot (had way different connotations back then) and then put in his tape that played nothing but Spark's Kimono My House, especially the song This Town Ain't Big Enough for the Both of Us, over and over again. I'd lean forward in my seat and concentrate on the weirdness and the awesomeness that was Sparks hard enough so that Hall and Oates or whatever the hell was playing on Duncan's radio would fade from my head.

And that's pretty much how I spent my one year on a school bus. Getting a contact high, being introduced the wonders of Sparks and learning how to drown out the crap music for the good stuff. Thanks, Otto.

Favorite song: This Town Ain't Big Enough For the Both of Us
Sparks wiki

42. Meatloaf - Bat Out of Hell

2008-11-16T14:02:00.000-05:00

Ok, I'll be honest with you here. I bought the album. It was 1977. Elvis had just died. I was momentarily blinded by heartache. No, I was trying to revolt against the constant crush of Eddie Money songs being played on 99X. I was trying to drown out the disco craze. I was looking for an alternative to my friends' constant playing of Billy Joel's The Stranger. My local department store where I bought my records didn't have Elvis Costello's My Aim is True. I was suckered in by Meatloaf's amazing turn as Eddie in Rocky Horror.

I could come up with a million more excuse, you know. But the fact is, I liked Bat out of Hell when it first came out. Don't look at me like that. Like you didn't lay in the dark with the headphones on and just wait for the part...

Then I'm dying at the bottom of a pit in the blazing sun
Torn and twisted at the foot of a burning bike
And I think somebody somewhere must be tolling a bell
And the last thing I see is my heart
Still beating
Still beating

That was beautiful, man. Genius. See..he was telling a story. But set to music. It works on two levels! And you had to sing it just like Meatloaf, as if you were on a high school stage in the midst of some overwrought musical about love and loss and umm...motorcycle accidents.

Ok, that one hasn't really stood up to the test of time. What about...

On a hot summer night, would you offer your throat to the wolf with the red roses?
Will he offer me his mouth?
Yes

I'm sitting here wondering how I ever thought that was good. Maybe when you're drunk on Boones Farm wine at a party in someone's basement that's decorated to look like some kind of art deco cave and that Canadian kid you have a crush on is mouthing the words to you...well, that's hot when you're 15 and stoned on fermented strawberries. Now...now it just makes me cringe.

Favorite song: No. I'll just let you read about my now infamous hatred Paradise by the Dashboard Light
Meatloaf recipes

41. White Stripes - Elephant

2008-11-16T09:15:00.001-05:00

The whole White Stripes/Strokes/Hives thing baffled me. I suppose one could make the argument that the embracing of garage rock was in direct response to the proliferation of overproduced teeny bopper bands and flaky, yet hot, blonde singers and/or the rise in popularity of 30 year old men in nu-metal bands writhing in agony, still angry at their mothers for grounding them when they were 12. Who knows?

But the Stripes grew on me. So on the basis of just how much Dead Leaves and Dirty Ground rocks my world, I gave Elephant a try. Songs like Ball and Biscuit, I Just Don't Know What To Do With Myself and The Hardest Button To Button remind me of what I first liked about rock and roll all those years ago. The spare sound and riffs are reminiscent of sitting in Pat Henley's garage on summer evenings in the 1970's, listening to the band with no name play the same songs over and over again, but enjoying every chord, every beat. The simplicity of Seven Nation Army is its beauty; there's hardly anything to the song, but yet it makes me want to do something - dance, or drum my pencil on the desk or tap my foot at least, much like the repeated chords in the Henley garage did. The band with no name's sound was born of pure desire to just play some music, and that's what I get with the Stripes.

However (there's always a however with these things), White Stripes are not the saviors of rock and roll. They are not the greatest thing since MC5. Elephant isn't so much a triumph of the simple sounds of rock and roll as it is a triumph of style over substance. The album is too simple to be anything more than a big, fat candy bar. Jack White's efforts to be everything to everyone in the re-emergence of pure rock bands is admirable; but his reliance on Meg White's mediocre drumming skills and his penchant for trying to do too much with too little overwhelms the sincerity within. It's a good, fun album. It's good background music for cleaning the house or pretending to do yardwork while you're just drinking beer and neighbor-watching or driving through rush hour traffic with one hand out the window and one hand on the horn. And there's nothing wrong with that. It's good music. It's rock and roll. But it's nothing that's going to change the world. Not even the music world.

But damn, I like it.

Favorite Song: I Just Don't Know What To Do With Myself
Official Site