Lovin’ Wreck: Blindfold Test #7

The most exciting part of these columns, immediately after I listen to all 25 songs (okay usually I’ll make it 26 just in case I mess up and one of my writeups is completely flat and incoherent), is going back and checking the app queue to find out what music I was just taking notes…

A Comicattle World: Blindfold Test #5

Thanks to the playlist that this fifth blindfold test just like its four predecessors is culled from, which playlist I have taken to playing in the background through the day, and which playlist as of this writing totals 4150 tracks adding up to 260 hours and 34 minutes, I now feel the need to confess…

The North is the South

If you’ve been startled by the Confederate flags at Reopen Michigan rallies and unable to rectify the cognitive dissonance of seeing them in such a Northern state, remember that in the mid to late 20th Century, thousands of Southerners moved to the Detroit area to work in auto plants. Which means lots of Michiganders’ ancestors,…

8 Indie 45s From the ’00s

Written in retrospective hindsight, as explained in more detail here. Cococoma “6 ¼ – 125”/”Take My Time” (2006) Recorded December 2005 in their hometown Chicago, so my release-year guess can’t be too far off. Either way, this speedy, muffled nugget is the sort of revisionist garage punk that genre addicts pretend rocks harder than it does…

4 Indie 45s From the ’90s

Excerpts from a short-lived monthly column called “Singles Again” (should’ve been “Singles Again Again,” since I’d previously used the same title at the Village Voice) in the online magazine Blurt (after two installments on the Idolator website) in which I started to comb alphabetically (as you can see, I didn’t get very far) through my…

1-girl:2-boy Amerindie Trio Licks, 2003

CORDELIA’S DAD “Jane”/”Promise”/“Closing Year” Last year, in “Camile’s Not Afraid of the Barn,” these indie-rock-moonlighting Massachusetts folk festival standbys set mysterious words about beached sharks, pellet guns, Chinatown firecrackers, and the smell of dirtbikes to a riff from “Jane Says” by Jane’s Addiction. Their new three-inch CD EP leads, coincidentally, with a traditional upstate-NY ballad…

What is New Wave??

And now, something completely ridiculous for the time capsule: Written in straight grey pseudo-objective journalismese, an attempt to explain to squaresville suburban Detroit weekly newspaper readers what exactly is this new wave punk rock stuff they keep hearing about. Some of the predictions are pretty amusing: “no new wave band will ever achieve the mass…

Celibate Rifles profile, 1986

The mid ’80s saw me unreasonably fixated on post-punk hard rock coming out of Australia (see also: Died Pretty), but then so have other eras, I guess. When I was a little kid I was obsessed with marsupials and monotremes (still am to a certain extent), so no doubt that was one factor. This piece…

Kid Rock review, 2012

I’ve written about him as much as any musical performer out there starting in the late ’90s, including an extremely long Village Voice piece on Eminem and him that was re-printed in my third book. I was even asked to write his authorized biography (can’t say that about any other artist) when I was a…

Bob Seger review, 1991

So now sweet 16’s turned 75; it’s long past the point I’m just glad he’s still alive. And there’s still no official comprehensive Punk Rock Years collection, though Abkco Records did put out the 10-song Heavy Music: The Complete Cameo Reccordings 1966-1967 in 2018. Even better, in 2010 one Myonga Von Bonte compiled Never Mind…