Double Agent Double-crossed: Blindfold Test #13

Recurring themes this time out: Catholicism, nonsense syllables, bands whose music here didn’t come out until decades after it was recorded (including a different Red Asphalt than the one in Test #2 though both were evidently named after a graphic scare-you-sober ’60s Drivers Ed film series produced by the California Highway Patrol), Central European art-rock…

Walkman Ist Kaputt: Blindfold Test #4

Astute observers and/or regular readers will note that, just like on my previous blindfold test, my favorite song on this one is also the oldest song here. You could blame that on my own impending dotage, I suppose, except that this installment’s song in question was recorded in 1935, 25 years before I was born,…

I Like Cows: Blindfold Test #2

In the initial installment of this sonic experiment and/or semi-educated guessing game, I blindly played myself 25 songs out of a random shuffled playlist of 1699 I was curious about, and people kept joking that 1699 is an awful long time ago to pick 25 songs from har har. But more importantly, four different bands…

Hopeless on Juice: Blindfold Test #1

Here are 25 songs culled randomly on shuffle from a 1699-song, 104-hour and 24-minute Napster playlist of generally pretty obscure or at least slipped-through-the-cracks mostly ’70s and ’80s songs/albums/compilations I was vaguely curious about which I’ve been playing in the background while living my life these past couple weeks. Music nobody talks about, and that…

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…

Loud Rock EPs reviews, 1986

A regular column for Creem‘s monthly metal magazine — ostensibly “metal” “singles,” though these are all EPs, mostly by noisy post-hardcore indie art bands that might theoretically appeal to some extremely open-minded metal fan of my imagination. Kind of doubt any other metal mag on the racks was stretching the genre’s definition this far in…