Hey, I heard that I’m taking a break on the frequency of my Newer Release Roundup new music writeups. Someone told me this, and the rumors are true! The new update will be next Wednesday instead.

So, then, that must mean I’m listening to other stuff incessantly. What might that be these days?

Meat Puppets

Sit back, relax, and enjoy the Good-Time Charles Manson Cover Band.

I followed the Ween/Butthole Surfers route to Meat Puppets. Having only listened to the first two albums initially, I was pretty unengaged for the longest time. Meat Puppets, the self-titled debut, is an out-of-control display of raucous, drunken hardcore cowpunk unlike anything else released afterward. Meat Puppets II, the aptly named II-nd album by the Puppets ov the Meat, was a hazier, psychedelically dreamy slab of alt-country. In both cases, the thought of an entire discography of this stuff sounded exhausting and, stupidly, I didn’t listen to anything else until years later.

This happens a lot, right? You start digging into a band with a sizeable catalog, you listen to a couple records, you go “screw this!” and then you return to it six years later?! Just me then? I do that! It’s worth it, though; you never know whose whose sound is malleable and whose discography is eclectic. Meat Puppets only sorta made the same album twice, on occasion, but their progression is something to behold. From lo-fi countrified punk to lo-fi countrified psychedelia to ULTRA hi-fi blues, jazz, and countrified roots rock, to countrified grungy alt-rock, to countrified…country. As you can see, they tend to stand firmly within country and throw a rock to some other genre as time passes.

Fun Fact! The Bad Boy brother Cris Kirkwood went to prison for 21 months because he tried to beat up a post office security guard with his own baton! Per Kirkwood, his time in prison was “actually pretty tolerable”. Let this be a lesson, kids: drugs are good.

Bardo Pond

Sit back, relax, and enjoy all the swirling colors, maaaaaaan.

Speaking of drugs, Bardo Pond comprises some of the biggest, most impossibly high slacker stoners that the early ’90s had to offer. And that’s saying something! These layabouts graduated college with little to no ambition to do any actual work, so they all got together to start playing music. And even that is giving them too much credit. As the band describes it, they just jammed together playing improvised sounds. Not even music! “Improvised sounds”. It took them four years to learn how to write actual songs. Until then, they were all just baked out of their brains strumming and tooting away vaguely on their instruments. Each one barely even knew the others were in the room with them during the jam sessions, I’m sure.

Bardo Pond is incredible psychedelic drone-y space rock for people who don’t really like drone-y space rock. I’m not the biggest fan myself; usually I need to be in the right mood for it. OR, more likely, most of this stuff is relegated to background music. Hawkwind, Can, Ozric Tentacles, Ash Ra Tempel, Flying Saucer Attack, Earth, Acid Mothers Temple, Amon Düül II, these somewhat dissimilar bands of varying styles all follow the same approach. For my money, they’re all tough to listen to actively.

Bardo Pond wormed into my brain recently. The run of albums between 1996’s Amanita and 2006’s Ticket Crystals has been on a steady rotation, especially during work hours and my off-time spent writing. The fuzzy-guitared, weighty drones are deceivingly melodious, especially with Isobel Sollenberger’s otherworldly flute passages. She provides all the lead vocals as well, which are often, if not always, slurred, sleepy, and dreamlike. There’s also a wide range of tempo, intensity, and sometimes even technicality. You don’t really find a drone band with a drummer wailing on his kit like he’s in a jazz combo. I suppose all these elements combined is what makes this particular band so damned interesting to me. They take me to another place entirely. I haven’t found much else like them.

As far as I know, no one from this band clubbed a security guard with his own baton!

Other Quick Thoughts

Arcade Fire is not fire in 2022. Not fire at all!

-The new Arcade Fire album, WE, is totally neutered, edgeless, and uninteresting. Reviews have called this effort “a return to form”, implying that there was anything wrong with Everything Now from 2017 (there wasn’t). At least there was some vitality with that one. WE‘s energy is completely fabricated, skirting the line of dreadfully embarrassing adult contemporary cheesiness without much self-awareness. I don’t like it. I think it sucks!

-The more I listen to For the first time by Black Country, New Road, the more I seriously consider it a 10/10 album. According to my Last.FM stats, I’ve spun both “Science Fair” and “Sunglasses” more times than any other track by any other band since I made my account in 2011. That’s a lot of times in one year, you guys. That’s what makes Ants from Up There such a bitter pill to swallow for me. I must be the only person on Earth who finds their sophomore record a painful disappointment. More than half that album loses me, and the entire 20+ minutes after “The Place Where He Inserted the Blade” is disposable. I’m sorry.

-2022 stuff I’m still looking forward to? New album from Kendrick Lamar this Friday. New albums from Porridge Radio, Decapitated, Flasher, Porcupine Tree, and Zola Jesus by the end of June. New albums from Viagra Boys, black midi, Superorganism, Ty Segall, Stella Donnelly, Built to Spill, and Behemoth by the end of September. New albums at some point, possibly, from Backxwash and Björk. And that’s just the stuff I know about! I’m optimistic that at least some of this list will elevate the dispiriting below-average feel of 2022.

That’s all for me today, chumps and chumpettes! Tune in to the next AudioBiography installment where I discuss the sociopolitical ramifications of Peppa Pig’s music over the course of 100,000 words. Or more if I decide to go further than just the introductory paragraph! Am I joking?? Time will tell!