Top 20 Albums of 2020

My Excel spreadsheet of albums from 2020 to check out is currently at 255, and I still keep adding to it. Of those 255 I’ve probably listened to a little over 100. So that means I could completely overhaul my list of 20 below if I kept right on listening to the albums I haven’t heard yet, right? THEREIN LIES THE DILEMMA. But, if I don’t do this now then I never will! So here it is, as of 12/28/20, my top 20 albums of 2020. The 2020 20, as it were, plus the countless honorable mentions at the top. See you in 2021, which will assuredly be a much better year. Ha!

HONORABLE MENTIONS: Aesop Rock, Airbag, Aksak Maboul, Akurion, All Them Witches, Arabs in Aspic, Armand Hammer, Beach Bunny, Bitch Falcon, Black Curse, Blóm, Charli XCX, Chromb!, Couch Slut, Crack Cloud, Crippled Black Phoenix, Cryptic Shift, Damaged Bug, Dawn of Ouroboros, Dream Nails, Einstürzende Neubauten, Empty Country, Enslaved, the Flower Kings, Fontaines D.C., Frankie and the Witch Fingers, Freddie Gibbs and the Alchemist, Ganser, Gazpacho, Haken, HMLTD, Horse Lords, Intronaut, Junglepussy, Kelly Lee Owens, Kooba Tercu, Kvelertak, Lantern, Lil Uzi Vert, Liturgy, Lunatic Soul, Megan Thee Stallion, Motorpsycho, the Mountain Goats, Nadine Shah, Nation of Language, No Joy, Of Feather and Bone, Oneohtrix Point Never, OOIOO, Oranssi Pazuzu, Pain of Salvation, Panzerballett, Peel Dream Magazine, the Pineapple Thief, Porridge Radio, Pottery, Protomartyr, Public Practice, Pyrrhon, Rina Sawayama, Run the Jewels, Serpent Column, Sex Swing, Shabazz Palaces, Shards of Humanity, Special Interest, Stephen Malkmus, Sweeping Promises, Taylor Swift, Thundercat, Thy Catafalque, Ulcerate, Undeath, Wobbler, and Young Knives.

#20. The Wants – Container

Container dropped on March 13th and it immediately became newest obsession. I was ready to call it my album of the year, but then, as the year went on, listening to Container would bring forth every single fresh, nascent thought and feeling that I had ever felt during the very beginning of the fucked-up Covid times. Nothing else will do that quite like this album will. I ruined my enjoyment of it forever just because I had it on repeat during the extremely anxious uncertainty of early lockdown. And that sucks. BUT, this album meant a lot to me in March so it deserves a spot on my list anyway. That’ll teach me to enjoy music during stressful situations!

#19. Cable Ties – Far Enough

Australian punk trio Cable Ties went to the Sleater-Kinney school of aggressive-yet-catchy feminist riot grrrrrrrl rock and roll! Far Enough jumps around from gritty, to furious, to passive, to pensive, and everything in between. There are some real kickass solos too! I like it a lot! NEXT!

#18. The Tangent – Auto Reconnaissance

The Tangent’s 8,000th album makes my list as the token whimsical British prog album of the year, narrowly beating out the Pink Floyd-ripoff by Arabs in Aspic and the Sting/Smashing Pumpkins/Porcupine Tree dadrock epic by The Pineapple Thief. Auto Reconnaissance drew me in with the many captivating and humorous spoken-word diatribes about modern-day stuff like Brexit, the TV show Lost, Flat-Earth conspiracy theorists, and many other subjects, layered over eclectic and ever-changing musical styles. For me, this album has an adequate amount of self-awareness that I need from my prog rock, and I find myself coming back to it more often than I do with others. So on the list it goes!

#17. Fiona Apple – Fetch the Bolt Cutters

OHHH how InTeREsTinG, a year-end list with Fetch the Bolt Cutters on it. Oh boy, oh wow. That’s original and not at all boring in a year where this album tops every single list! So I listened to a Fiona Apple interview on a podcast once a couple of years ago and she was completely neurotic and anxious and obsessive compulsive. She was absolutely nuts! I totally fell in love with her in a very literal sense. And yeah this album is pretty ok! Not 10/10 worthy, of course. The only album that is a true 10/10 is Kidz Bop 29.

#16. Svartkonst – Black Waves

Roughly 45 million albums come out per year that sound identical to Svartkonst’s Black Waves. It’s some hybrid of death/black metal that leans more toward one end of the spectrum than the other. Nothing about the song structures or the vocals or the riffs are original. Even so, a few albums like this break through the barrier for me every so often and I’m not intelligent enough in my death or black metal knowledge yet to explain why. Maybe it just hits all the right buttons with respect to the speed, heaviness, overall length, who knows? Maybe I’m intrigued by the fact that the whole project is completely created and executed by a single Swedish dude? For some reason, whatever it might be, I kept finding myself coming back to this one and not getting tired of it. So on the list it goes! Also, go fuck yourself, Tom, you’re not fooling anyone by pretending to like this shit. Wakka wakka!

#15. The Cool Greenhouse – The Cool Greenhouse

I’m a big fan of Mark E. Smith and his band The Fall, so when I first heard this album and realized that it was nothing more than an incredibly dry British guy rambling inane nonsense over repetitive non-musical post-punk beats I was FLABBERGASTED that anyone had the audacity to completely rip off The Fall. And then this album grew on me, because I love The Fall and I guess that extends to the cheap imitations! I’m only human, after all.

#14. Mr. Bungle – The Raging Wrath of the Easter Bunny Demo

I’ve been a giant Mr. Bungle fanboy for a quite long time, but I was lukewarm about the news that they were going to come out with a proper re-recording of their 1986 thrash metal demo. Well fuck me sideways, sir, this album slaps! I didn’t expect these geezers to pull off something that sounds so lively, competent, and legitimately angsty. I don’t even miss the oddball hurricane of genres that you would usually get with a Mr. Bungle album. You can tell these guys had a ton of fun doing this too, I hope they come out with more stuff soon. Or else!

#13. Jerskin Fendrix – Winterreise

Little is known about Ferpsin Grenbinx except that he’s some rich over-educated kid from the London area who spent a lot of his free time as a young man being a weirdo shut-in with weirdo interests. So, of course, I couldn’t wait to dig right in! This is, as it turns out, a very weird album. It brings to mind thoughts of Ween or a poor man’s Zappa. Porpchin Vernstix bounces around a million different genres and styles in 40 minutes, which is BORING AS SHIT if done incorrectly but this ain’t incorrect! It was underwhelming at first, but after quite a few spins this album solidified in my mind as something that was completely unlike anything I’ve ever heard before! And I’ve heard a lot of weird shit! I’m looking forward to the future offerings of Mr. Skerfjin Cornchex for sure.

#12. Open Mike Eagle – Anime, Trauma and Divorce

Mr. Michael Eagle is a huge insufferable nerd, so of course I was going to like this. Also, while I’m not a very big fan of anime, I’m a very big fan of both trauma and divorce so two out of three ain’t bad! The whole album covers his terrible 2020 without forgetting the sense of humor, which I found pretty damn relatable except for the part where I forgot my sense of humor this year entirely! One of the best songs of the year is “The Black Mirror Episode”, which is a very vague semi-autobiographical recount of how watching Black Mirror ruined his marriage. Funny! This album would’ve been a 10/10 just like Kidz Bop 29, but the omission of an Oxford comma in the title cost him a few points overall. Sad!

#11. Grimes – Miss Anthropocene

I once saw Grimes described as the world’s most famous and public Invader Zim fan, and that nicely solidified my perception of her from that point forward until the next three eternities. Miss Anthropocene came out in February while the world was still relatively normal and she was still making the news regularly with her Elon Musk-induced pregnancy. It must have destroyed her that Covid pushed her out of the news cycle. Even giving birth in May and naming her child after a Star Wars robot didn’t keep her in the spotlight for too long. Anyway, this album is pretty good and “Delete Forever” is up there in my top tracks of 2020. Good for Grimes!

#10. Hen Ogledd – Free Humans

Once upon a time, way back in the day, there was a certain EXCITEMENT that came from wading through countless indie rock records. Now I’m cranky and old and jaded and it seems like every indie rock record I ever listen to these days sounds like something else I’ve heard before already. And then FINALLY I felt that UNADULTERED EXCITEMENT again for the first time in a long, long time after listening to Free Humans! These four talented musicians come from some backwoods Scottish town and they sing with their adorable rural Scottish accents over some deeply interesting and varied melodies. This is a long album but it sure doesn’t feel long at all. Fuck Phoebe Bridgers, fuck Perfume Genius, fuck Waxahatchee, fuck Fleet Foxes and Adrianne Lenker and Laura Marling and Sufjan Stevens and Tame Impala and Soccer Mommy and any other dreary critically-acclaimed indie artist that put out indie rock that sounds like all the other indie rock that keeps coming out and haha whoops sorry ok I’m done now

#9. clipping. – Visions of Bodies Being Burned

I wish I could find more hip hop albums like the ones that clipping. have been putting out over the last 10 years. Cold, sharp, smart, dense, and calmly aggressive. Aggressive, like, in an industrial way, not in a “I’m gon’ kill you bitch” way. But it’s aggressive in that way too! It’s aggressive the way your grandmother is aggressive with her Catholic-guilt bullshit. It’s aggressive like this album isn’t mad at you, but it’s disappointed. I’m not making any sense! Hip hop album of the year right here! It’s rife with cheesy ’80s horror tropes and interesting, noisy slasher sound effects. Don’t listen to it, you’ll hate it.

#8. Neptunian Maximalism – Éons

Oh hell-and-a-fuck yeah! This, right here, this is the good shit. This 130-minute-long album is a brutal, unrelenting torrential downpour of heavy, drone-y avantgarde punk jazz metal. It’s exciting in a way that only a giant slab of boundless free-improvisation can be! I love this kind of shit to death. It reminds me of those 2+ hour Swans records that I can only listen to once in a while since they tend to be these giant sensory onslaughts. Éons could easily be at the very top of my 2020 list, and maybe some day it might be, but right now I have to be honest with myself and say that I’m just not going to spin this one that often. It’s a demanding listen. And that’s ok. I wouldn’t change a thing about it. Sometimes you need a demanding listen once in a while.

#7. Jehnny Beth – TO LOVE IS TO LIVE

IS ANYONE ELSE OUT THERE FOLLOWING JEHNNY BETH’S CAREER? NO? JUST ME? The frontwoman of the excellent Siouxsie and the Banshees-style punk band Savages put out her debut this year, and I like a whole lot yes I do! It’s a brutally personal and emotionally intense record full of heartbreak, lust, anger, depression, and confusion. BUT ENOUGH ABOUT ME, HOW ABOUT THE ALBUM??? HA HA! Goddamnit! Of course, indie darlings Phoebe Bridgers and Perfume Genius put out emotionally-charged records too but those albums were super boring and this one wasn’t at all! That’s the difference!

#6. Hey Colossus – Dances / Curses

I call this kind of stuff “slacker post-punk”. It’s the kind of music you got a lot from the disgruntled young people of the late ’80s and early ’90s. It’s music that chugs along at mid-tempo and sneers through its teeth with menacing passive-aggressiveness, but never actually raises its voice at you. It gives you hypnotic 16-minute long krautrock-style tracks that DARE you to actually sincerely enjoy it and, honestly, it won’t give a shit if you don’t. Like early Sonic Youth. I love that kind of music. No one really makes that kind of music these days, but Hey Colossus did and they did it very well this year. And that 16-minute track is the best part! There’s even a 3-minute reprise track immediately after it! Now that’s funny.

#5. Hum – Inlet

I ain’t know nuthin’ about the band Hum, but Inlet is their first album in 22 years and their fifth album overall. Without listening to even ONE NOTE from any their previous four efforts I’m going to make a sweeping, baseless claim that Hum picked up right where they left off since this album sounds ’90s as fuck with its shoegaze-y, grungy, unhip alt-rock. I must say, though, this music does everything right for me. Very melodious and hypnotic drones, a nice balance between light and heavy, clean post-hardcore (AND non-emo) vocals, and a surprisingly unique cohesion among all the various styles. I hear elements of My Bloody Valentine, the Jesus and Mary Chain, Sonic Youth, Hüsker Dü, Spacemen 3, and even newer stuff like the War on Drugs or Kurt Vile. And I like all that stuff a lot! So there you go.

#4. Pharaoh Overlord – 6

WHO WOULD HAVE THOUGHT that combining growling death metal vocals with cheesy ’80s synthwave and post-disco beats would end up working so well? I don’t think there are any guitars on this album! Very weird and very satisfying! It’s like superimposing incomprehensible, guttural growling over some of the more ethereal music from Super Mario 64 or something. It became an instant classic, like I heard this music already years ago. Check it out immediately if, like me, you have no respect for your own taste in music!

#3. Poppy – I Disagree

POPPY PEED ON THE SOFA!!! Fun fact: The guy who played Poppie on Seinfeld died this year on the same day my second daughter was born, August 1! Other fun fact: Poppy the musician didn’t die, but in fact put out a crazy album that’s a slurry of J-Pop, heavy metal, and industrial music. And guess what? It works very well! I like to think that this YouTube star, who started out making saccharine-y sweet bubblegum songs for pre-teens, suddenly put out this fuck-you album of semi-aggressive and creepy music to alienate her fanbase on purpose. It won me over though! This album is fun as hell and I can’t think of much else like it. She sounds like an even nuttier Grimes, which is really saying something since Grimes named her baby after a license plate this year.

#2. The Ocean – Phanerozoic II: Mesozoic | Cenozoic

Vast. Heavy. Sprawling. Dense. Suffocating. Intimidating. That’s the ocean, baby. Every album by The Ocean is really good and this direct follow-up to their 2018 album is no different. Listen to both back-to-back and crush a dang can against your head! This one in particular is a very immersive experience with its hypnotic and atmospheric electronic pulses and ambient wall-of-noise soundscapes as a backdrop to the sludgy heavy metal riffage! And it just gets better with each listen. It’s a great way to experience the scary dang ol’ ocean from the comfort of your bean bag chair, hippie. Highly recommended!

#1. Melt Yourself Down – 100% Yes

100% YES, INDEED. Melt Yourself Down’s third album is exactly what I fucking needed in 2020. Track after track of upbeat jazz funk with a DIY punk aesthetic, strong afrobeat and Middle Eastern rhythmic influences, and swirling tinges of electronic psychedelia thrown into the mix as well. Energetic from beginning to end, I can’t think of another album this year that took me somewhere else quite like this one. And trust me, no matter where I was I often wanted to be somewhere else anyway. I want to be somewhere else right now, but instead I’m typing these words that no one is reading. Hello! Thanks for playing! See ya in 2021 unless we’re all dead!


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Oingo Boingo – Dark at the End of the Tunnel (1990)

OK, really? Can Danny Elfman make it any more flagrantly evident that his heart just isn’t in the Oingo Boingo project anymore? BLLLAAAAHHHHHHH. Why should I care if he doesn’t care?! HHHHHHRRRRRGGNNNNN.

All right, let’s get through this. Elfman had sorta been informally and amateurly involved with film scoring before with his brother, but shit had really started taking off once Tim Burton asked him to score Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure in 1985. Needless to say, the thrill of having a full orchestra play his compositions was overwhelmingly life-changing and he’s been very busy making music specifically for giant feature films ever since. It’s no coincidence that 1986 was the very first gap year for an Oingo Boingo studio album since 1981’s debut, and it’s no coincidence that Dark at the End of the Tunnel came out after a three-year break.

The problem with 1990 is that IF you’ve already been around a while AND your music wasn’t at all inspired by heavy metal, hardcore punk, or hip-hop, you were likely not making any music that really mattered anymore (I said “likely” goddamnit, there are a lot of exceptions but it’s mostly true). Dark at the End of the Tunnel is very much an album created in the vein of the type of music all the tired old dinosaurs of the classic rock era were cranking out in the late ’80s and early ’90s. Sappy, saccharine-y, adult contemporary pap with less teeth than your withered old grandma. I expected better from a really-good-at-making-music kinda guy like Danny Elfman, since an effort like Dark at the End of the Tunnel really showcases the unfortunate reality that he was beginning to lose touch with the trends and the times.

The biggest shame of this album is that, quite literally, all the humor is gone. Even the previous album had a one big cunnilingus joke with “Elevator Man”; this album is so goddamn serious it’s unnerving. Is this supposed to be maturity and growth? It feels more like a completely neutered Oingo Boingo with nothing relevant to say anymore. Most of these songs evoke no more than, I don’t even know…ennui? The heaviest anthem on the whole disc is the opener “When the Lights Go Out”, and while it certainly has that trademark Elfman vocal fry delivery and the staccato brass punctuations during the chorus, it comes across and limp and lacking any real energy. And from there it’s just song after lackluster song, tepid and insincere sentiment permeating the lyrical subject matter that, I think, is supposed to be poetic and deep and from the heart? I really don’t know. I’m not used to this from Boingo, why am I supposed to suspend my usual expectations now through this half-hearted effort?

Songs like “Skin” or “Long Breakdown” are fairly egregious offenders of this fence-straddling emotional ambiguity. Are they supposed to be these sad, depressive ballads? Is the music supposed to be happy? Somber? Uplifting? Melancholic? Wistful? And why? I feel nothing from these songs. The melodies are plodding, like one big itch that I can’t satisfyingly scratch. But all the while I’m hearing the complexity and the flow, I’m admiring that they’re at least competently structured and have nice little bits here and there. I like the fanciful mallet percussion of “Skin”. I like how Elfman’s voice fits nicely with the tone of the music. But there are no real hooks. Nothing to draw me in. Same with “Dream Somehow” or “Is This”. All these songs sound different from each other, but it’s all awash in this bland dad-rock sameness. It’s indescribable how frustrating it is to listen to these well-crafted songs and feel absolutely nothing from it.

I almost really like “Glory Be”. It has a strong melody, and it’s cool the way Elfman bends his voice around the minor-key shift at the end of the chorus (“They follow me, they foll-l-l-l-ow me”). Certainly no skimping on those horns. The problem here is the medium tempo and the runtime at just over five minutes. And if you really listen to the lyrics, its juvenile melodrama causes some serious cringing (“Like a bad dream I once had/Where everyone but ME knew something“).

I also almost really like “Flesh ‘n Blood”. It has a strong melody, I like that the rhythm is a little on the funky side, and I like how all the instruments take turns as they wrap themselves around the funky rhythm. Elfman’s delivery doesn’t sway too hard toward the melodrama either, or at least not at the wrong moments. The problem here lies entirely again within the lyrics. Man, are these lyrics terrible. “Every cloud has a silver lining/And every soul is tender to the touch/We are made of stone, we are made of steel/And we’re all the same when we return to dust“. Gross. Come on, man.

I actually do really like “Run Away” though. It’s the catchiest track on the album by a long shot and it brims with some of that lost old-school Boingo energy! It’s packed with musical ideas, two distinct infectious melodies, and check out that sexy saxophone too, whoa mama! If the whole album was like this one track we’d be in business!

But it’s not! “Out of Control” is so fucking full-of-shit over the top with its “don’t commit suicide, life is great” after-school special message that I’m literally having a heart attack right now as I type this and I wish I could just go kill myself! “Try to Believe” is some phony-baloney white-as-hell positive piece of second-rate gospel music and it’s the worst album closer in the history of people and albums. “Dream Somehow” is some preachy, crooning, sickly sweet sort of new age tune where Elfman belts out all he’s got like he really believes this positivity shit. It’s unreal to me that he sat down and wrote all this stuff and had the nerve to keep the wry snark out of the music around it. It’s completely embarrassing and frustrating.

And as you will now see, I’ve come right back around to the beginning on the whole overarching problem with this album: his heart isn’t really in it anymore. With respect to Elfman’s established genuine songwriting talent, an album like this is a complete waste of his time. I wouldn’t be surprised if Dark at the End of the Tunnel was merely a fulfillment of a contractual obligation with MCA records, since the next and final album Boingo on a new label, four years later, will show an obvious uptick in the effort. Completely skip over this one, it’s not worth it.

KINDA BAD


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Ween – Chocolate and Cheese (1994)

Ween - Chocolate and Cheese

So how about that! Elektra didn’t drop Ween even after the 55-minute tender jerk-off session that was Pure Guava! Good for them, I like to think that Ween made Chocolate and Cheese as an apology for Pure Guava and that they promised to start playing nice.

Chocolate and Cheese is Ween’s rock and roll album. And that succinct description, my friends, is something I’m not happy with, but it’ll have to do. Ween’s fourth record is absolutely impossible to nail down in two or three words; for the most part, it’s a maturely-crafted collection of sixteen fleshed out tracks of music spanning equally as many styles, tones, and genres. Unlike the first three albums, or even at least the next three albums, there is no overarching theme, no overarching feeling, and no two songs are the same. It doesn’t even do it justice to describe Chocolate and Cheese in words, really, but I’ll try anyway.

First of all, Ween decided to finally use a real studio for their recording purposes so Chocolate and Cheese will prove to be their first highly-polished and professional-sounding offering ever! It’s amazing what kind of magic they’re able to perform with just a guitar and drum machine. Reasons for the decision to use a studio are unclear, since they had access when they signed onto Elektra a year earlier for Pure Guava, but you can’t complain about the results. Cheap recording equipment worked ok before, but I believe that these songs would not be as powerful as they are if they were muddied in lo-fi recording artifacts. Case in point is the opener “Take Me Away”, which would completely lose its charm if it sounded like a bedroom recording, but I’m ahead of myself already. Better production = big win!

Second of all, starting with Chocolate and Cheese the already-fuzzy lines become even blurrier when it comes to trying to understand Ween’s songwriting intentions. Before, their sense of humor and their antics were pretty much laid out on the table. Now it’s harder to tell a lot of the time, and I believe, without a fraction of doubt, that this is also the result of the increased production values. You’ll start to ask yourself questions like: Are they being serious or are they being funny? Are they paying tribute earnestly or are they poking fun? Do they actually like the music they’re playing or are they just being derisive? Are they putting a lot of effort into this or did they barely try? Are they geniuses or are they getting lucky? The answer to all these questions is: Yes! Case in point is the opener “Take Me Away” which would come across as completely insincere if it sounded like a bedroom recording, but I’m ahead of myself yet again! Better production = mysterious intent! And as a dyed-in-the-wool asshole Ween fan I adore this aspect of the band, because no other band in the world meshes together so seamlessly the jokey, sarcastic, satirical shit with the heartfelt, genuine, musically competent shit. This particular album is where the band really starts to become something special. This particular album is where Ween finally carved out their lasting identity.

Enough of that, though, let me finally talk about “Take Me Away”! This song sounds exactly like some Elvis or Tom Jones-style Vegas act. The lyrics are carefully crafted to lack profoundness (“She took my love away/She took it to another man/Now I gotta get away from that girl/Before I go craaaaaaaazy!“), the singing is carefully delivered to sound like some washed-up, soulless Las Vegas stage veteran giving it all he’s got, and the studio track is even punctuated with fake smatterings of polite applause and Gener saying “thank you!” between verses. Had this been recorded using their shitty 4-track cassette these additional touches wouldn’t have at all made a difference; it wouldn’t have sounded authentic, plain and simple.

To me, that’s where the real charm of Chocolate and Cheese comes from. All these authentically-recorded tracks make the record sound like a grab-bag compilation disc of the best singles from 16 different artists. You get all the chocolate AND all the cheese! “Freedom of ’76” is a Philly soul track which honors Philadelphia and showcases Gener’s incredible un-altered high-pitched vocal range, “A Tear For Eddie” pays tribute to P-Funk guitar hero Eddie Hazel with some of Deaner’s own emotional guitarwork, “Baby Bitch” continues the saga of Gener’s breakup (see “Birthday Boy” off of GodWeenSatan: The Oneness) with a beautiful melody and bitter, somber lyrics (“Fuck you you stinkin-ass ho“), “Joppa Road” has a hazy, indie folk-style serenity with some tasty-ass bass! And these are just four tracks of emotionally-sincere music.

Other highlights include the creepy, psych-pop fever dream of “Spinal Meningitis (Got Me Down)” complete with backwards guitar licks and distorted dying-child vocals (“Sticky vaseline, mommy!“), the snake-y, hypnotic Middle Eastern-tinged “I Can’t Put My Finger On It” with its trippy, dreamy beach sounds between verses, and the seven-minute murder ballad epic spaghetti-western saga of “Buenas Tardes Amigo”, which has zero progression over its duration (except for the dramatic and kickass showdown-at-the-O.K.-Corral instrumental bridge) but is all the better for it! There’s also the super slick, over-produced pop-happy “Roses are Free” and the mesmerizing “Voodoo Lady”, both are my personal picks for the two best tracks.

Honestly, I can’t just sit here and name all of it. Every single song on here has something to offer except for a couple of minor gripes. “Candi” is largely superfluous, and it feels like a polished-up cutting room floor version of the type of antics you’d expect on The Pod or Pure Guava (a plinky, stagnant melody with monotone delivery of lyrics like “Candi…/Custard and berry…/Candi…/Peaches and cream…“, ho-hum, been there done that). “The HIV Song” is immaturely cute, but more of the same (a plinky, stagnant melody with monotone delivery of “HIV” and “AIDS” in the dead air between the instrumental phrases. The song is catchy! Get it?!?!). Other than that, it’s all very enjoyable! The melodies are all extremely simple, but the strength is phenomenal. Most of these songs could get stuck in your head for years.

Future releases would be more cohesive with themes, but Chocolate and Cheese is probably the best album out there of its kind. You’ve got your David Bowies and your Frank Zappas and your They Might Be Giantseseses, of course, but find me an album by any of them, or anyone else, as simultaneously consistent and diverse as this one! You can’t! ……hey, did someone out there say The White Album by the Beatles?? GRRRR! FUCK YOU! I like this one better anyway. It’s weirder and funnier.

Plus this one’s got titties on the cover.

VERY GOOD


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Nomeansno – Mama (1982)


RAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAPE! Now that I’ve got your attention…rape! Hahaha! Now that I’ve REALLY got your attention, rape is not funny. But Nomeansno is a band named after rape, so that certainly got MY attention. Hold on, let’s start over…

Nomeansno is a serious musical band with serious musical ambitions, and they’re named after rape which isn’t funny. The band is Canadian though, which is funny! It started out as just two brothers, Rob Wright and John Wright: the Wright Brothers! Rob and John didn’t invent the airplane, oh no sir, but they did basically pioneer a very specific style of punk rock that I may or may not talk about eventually. That part’s not important right now! What’s important are the peculiar beginnings: Rob played bass and John played drums and that was it. That was the band. No guitars. What is this, Lightning Bolt? What is this, Morphine? What is this, a third thing? Ben Folds Five? I dunno.

Anyway, reading about the early Nomeansno days it was certainly clear that the brothers saw the guitar as a crutch that they wanted to avoid. This obviously didn’t last, but their self-released debut Mama is about as bare-bones as you’re going to get from them with respect to both instrumentation and production. Bass and percussion, vocals, and an occasional guitar or keyboard overdub, it very much replicated the live sound from their early gigging days as a dynamic duo! Of course, this live sound replication has its pros and cons. One can’t help but feel that the album suffers a bit from its thin sound. But more on that later.

FOR THE DEFENSE, having no lead guitar means having to make up for it with more interesting bass and drums, correct? Yes! Rob and John are very accomplished players of their respective instruments. Rob treats the bass guitar like it’s SUPPOSED TO BE played lead, just like my other favorite domineering bassist Les Claypool, and (just like Claypool) he has a virtuositic fast-fretting technique to keep those bass notes a-movin’. John holds his drumsticks like a dang ol’ military man and can rattle through complicated, head-spinning syncopated rhythms with robotic accuracy. Both brothers take their cues from jazz greats such as bassist Charles Mingus and drummer Art Blakey, and, as such, incorporate into their sound a whole hell of a lot of jazzy rhythms and textures. Being a punk band first and foremost, this approach leads to some seriously original and satisfying results. No one should be talking about “progressive punk” without name-dropping Nomeansno since they pretty much created the whole idea of “progressive punk” and everything, never mind the fact that the term is one of the largest oxymorons in music. I guess I did end up talking about all this after all! Nomeansno basically pioneered “math punk”. And fuck them forever for it.

FOR THE ANTI-DEFENSE, and I’m going to jump right into talking about Mama here, if punk was the whole point then this record, in that respect, fails. That’s probably a little harsh, but honestly, the essence of punk comes from fast, hard-edged aggression. It comes from a complete subversion of rock music’s excesses. It comes from being a big fat Fuck You to society. Here’s the old saying: “Punk is what you play until you learn to play the guitar”. So these guys are great at playing their instruments and they’re incorporating artsy riffs and nuanced drum fills and interesting progressions and off-the-wall vocal deliveries, that sounds like wimpy art school “punk” to me. That’s Talking Heads and Television and The Clash and shit. That’s what this record is to me, it’s a weak art school punk record. It’s mostly cerebral and unassuming, and the parts that AREN’T cerebral and unassuming (the stuff that is actually punky) is undercut by the thin production and the scrawny bass ‘n drums instrumentation, so it’s hard to take seriously. Basically, compared to their later stuff, there’s not nearly enough ass-kicking going on throughout Mama. A lot of the ideas are good, in fact a lot of them are REALLY good; the potential is there, but the execution is underwhelming. And when it comes to both punk and art punk alike, the execution is everything.

A good example of everything I’m talking about so far is the track “Red Devil”. It’s not even a punk song in the first place, the intro is a very Black Sabbath-y mood-setting eerie drone that leads into a repeating tribal bass/drum cadence. On top of that, Rob’s goofy voice sets the tone further with his creepy spoken-word lyrics (“Red Devil bites your neck/Your tongue’s stick out, your cock’s erect“). As the song progresses, his voice becomes more desperate bouncing between high-pitched Satanic prayers and ghoulish, guttural mutterings. Punctuated throughout are superimposed background yelps and shrieks. It has all the trappings of a great creep-o fuckin’ early industrial or noise rock song, kind of like a less mechanized version of Swans or Suicide, but…I don’t know, the components don’t add up nicely. The creepiness is cheesy and there’s not enough MONSTER FUCKING RIFFAGE to elevate it. The production sounds like Rob’s snarling through the verses in his childhood bedroom. Any profound effect that the song attempts is ruined by the amateurish execution. And lot of the album feels this way. And it’s a shame.

So what’s good? With Mama it’s more enjoyable if you revel more in the technical effort and less in the presentation. “Living is Free”, the album opener, displays a lot of the type of technical effort to look forward to: complicated bass arpeggio workouts, crisp and clean drumming, pretty keyboard overdubs, and singing and songwriting that’s brimming with personality. However, the actual chorus is an awkward speed bump; suddenly the song shifts on dime and Rob’s electronically warped, barely-intelligible voice declares, with barely much of enthusiasm that immediately preceded it, “Living is free/Free and at ease/Living is free/Free and at ease…“. Bah! Stuff like “My Roommate is Turning into a Monster” and “Mama’s Little Boy” are similar slow-build jazz numbers, with groovy, sinister and snakey bass lines and more cool, unsettling vocals. However, both songs meander, they chug along endlessly on one or two chords, there’s too much tension without much release. Especially “Mama’s Little Boy”, at nearly six minutes, doesn’t deserve to go on this way for that long.

But the good stuff among it all is really good, honest! Like “Rich Guns”, full of hooky stops and starts and punky, politically-charged lyrics! Or “We Are the Chopped”, which has a neat, desperate atmosphere to it that actually works in this case to pair up with the minimalist emptiness (like with the echoed “We are the chopped – the chopped!” lines). I even like “Living in Détente”, which has no pretense whatsoever of a punk song. It’s a piano-driven lounge jazz number! And it works will as a surprise, straightly-played pleasant proper album closer, still sinister in the lyrics but barely betrayed by the music. These guys are smart and, thankfully, it already shows this early on.

Tacked onto the end of the 1992 CD reissue are the four tracks from their 1981 Betrayal, Fear, Anger, Hatred EP. Noticeable here is the guitar on the forefront, especially with hard-rockin’ “Try Not To Stutter” and “I’m All Wet”. “Approaching Zero” sounds like the precursor to “Living in Détente”: lead piano, bubbly lounge jazz, depressing lyrics! “Forget Your Life” is gothy and drone-y and even lower-fi than the lowest-fi parts of the album proper. They did this song better later. If you didn’t know that these last four tracks were part of an earlier EP you wouldn’t even really tell the difference, the band’s growth isn’t stark enough yet.

The end product is an atypical offering in the Nomeansno canon. Look to literally everything that they released after Mama for a better experience. Adding Andy Kerr on guitar added a much-needed layer of sound that–good for the Wright brothers for trying something different–ended up making the band way more interesting. Rob’s voice gets deeper as time goes on too, which helps tremendously to add texture to his already-charismatic singing. All the talent was already there, it just needed a little more time to thrive. This was my first Nomeansno record, and it didn’t scare me away, so all these years later I’d still recommend it to anybody who likes, you know, wimpy-ass art punk. Just listen to some of the other albums first.

JUST OK


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The Beatles

Figure 1. Four Asexual Nerds

Welcome to Artist Appraisal! This is my brand new idea that won’t stand the test of time because I give up on my ideas very quickly. Artist Appraisal is where I talk about musicians and bands that I either don’t know well enough to formally review (yet) OR musicians and bands that I find too intimidating to make an attempt to review for various reasons (extremely famous, extremely overwritten already, critically acclaimed beyond my understanding, hard to write about, etc. etc. etc.). Take it as a very in-the-moment snapshot of my feelings about these musicians. The feelings are subject to change over time and, honestly, my whole goal in life is to skew my opinions over to the positive side in every case…eventually. Even if it takes decades.

So it’s only fitting that the fuckin’ Beatles has been chosen as my very first Artist Appraisal feature! Fuck the Beatles!

Not really. But I oh-so very much hated the Beatles for the first 22 years of my life until I decided to get the stick out of my ass, go through all their albums in chronological order one-by-one, and give them a real open-minded critical listen. I did this in spring of 2010. The verdict? Yeah, I kinda like the Beatles. They’re ok.

I’ve got a lot of problems with them, though. They are so ubiquitous that it’s impossible to approach them with a completely fresh perspective. If you’re not necessarily predisposed to enjoying their brand of music you can easily grow to despise them after hearing “Come Together” and “Penny Lane” and “Strawberry Fields Forever” and “Love Me Do” and “Ticket To Ride” and “Drive My Car” and 50 others on the radio constantly year after year after year. Every person born after 1965 has had all these songs drilled into their heads from infancy, so if you’d rather listen to Black Flag or Judas Priest you’re going to have a tough time being able to train yourself to become a Beatles fan, let alone fanatic. From that point of view, I find myself completely unable to be fully wowed by their charms or their pop culture status or their talent. The combination of being too young to understand, and I mean REALLY understand, how they changed the world in the ’60s and the tendency to better enjoy other music styles has left me appreciating the Beatles as nothing much more than a historically significant milestone in music’s history.

This leads into my other problem: everyone and their two dads has already said everything there is to say about the Beatles. They are the most written-about, discussed, analyzed, critiqued, and documented band in the history of creation. There is literally NO available unique point of view. Other than my own personal shitty opinions, there is nothing I could talk about that you can’t find written elsewhere (and more intelligently presented anyway). So, obviously, the part of me that wants to start reviewing Beatles albums wants to strive for an off-the-wall gimmick-laden approach to keep it interesting. Like, what if Homer Simpson reviewed Yellow Submarine hahahahahaaahaa lol d’oh d’oh!

And then, my final large problem: because everyone and their molesty uncles have said everything there is to say about the Beatles, you need to be a complete Beatles historian to even tackle them competently or else the average joe will be wise to your lack of enlightenment about these saviors of modern music. You need to have extensive, encyclopedic knowledge of the trajectory of the band, as well as all their extensive solo careers, to allow your subjective opinions to hold any water (or to CARRY THAT WEIGHT, as it were!) lest you look like a big ol’ dumbass fuckface. It’s the only band I can think of where each member is extremely well-known and each member is significant to shaping contemporary rock and roll. That’s some heavy shit, man. And guess what, I am NOT going to power through a bunch of Ringo albums just to understand how his meager contributions to the band mattered (it didn’t).

Figure 2. The Founding Members of the Mustache Club

I’ve listened to the entire official core catalog of 13 UK-released studio albums, but nothing more. No bastardized American-released albums, no live albums, no compilations, no rarities collections. Going literally in chronological order, the very first song that made a legitimate positive impression on my jaded, sneery disposition was “It’s Only Love” off of Help!, so five albums in. I still don’t know exactly what it was, but perhaps the melancholy minor-key Lennon delivery struck a chord with me at that particular moment. The very first song that I truly adored, the song that really smashed my deliberate Beatles-listening grumpiness, was “Love You To” off of Revolver. No-brainer here: this was the first song in the canon to display George Harrison’s newfound obsession with Indian classical music. Me likey! As far as I’m aware, “It’s Only Love” and “Love You To” are never played on mainstream radio stations, and I think the lack of exposure had helped me appreciate these songs more than if I had heard them both eight trillion fucking times. The next song I adored, and is still my all-time favorite, is “Tomorrow Never Knows” from the end of Revolver. Now, this was the first time I had heard the original version of this song and I know I’ve heard it on the radio since, but my initial exposure to “Tomorrow Never Knows” was actually the cover version from the Phil Manzanera/Brian Eno live supergroup project 801. The Beatles version is much weirder. If I recall, this is the first truly out-there weirdo song in the Beatles discography. Psychedelic as shit. At the time I didn’t know they had it in them. I was floored. After this, honestly, no other song chronologically had made as much of an impression on me. I had hit the peak.

As for the albums themselves, I consider the first four (Please Please Me, With the Beatles, Hard Day’s Night, and Beatles For Sale) to be disposable, cutesy, shallow, and almost completely interchangeable (Please Please Me is even more noticeably lower in quality than the other three). I think Help! is similar to the first four, but it’s a step in the right direction for maturity and making actual use of their progressing creativity. Rubber Soul is the first album that brings a distinct personality and identity to the table, with Revolver being the first truly exceptional Beatles album (and the only one that I legitimately love). I found Sgt. Pepper’s to be an incredible disappointment. I found Magical Mystery Tour to be too similar to Sgt. Pepper’s. My most mixed feelings come from the White Album, which has a few of my favorite songs (“Back in the U.S.S.R.”, “Happiness is a Warm Gun”, “Birthday”, “Helter Skelter”) with some real filler (“Glass Onion”, “Don’t Pass By Me”, “I Will”, “Revolution 1”), but, being 90 minutes long, I’d think it’s a tough album to get through for anybody. I actually kind of like “Revolution 9” though, the most hated Beatles song ever, but even I think it’s overlong and pretentious as absolute fuck. Yellow Submarine is garbage. I hate to say this, but Abbey Road just doesn’t do it for me. Even with all its historical context, even with the miracle of the four of them hating each other by this point and still cooperating, even with its pinnacle of artistic maturity, I just don’t really like it. Let It Be I’ve only heard once, I don’t remember any of it anymore.

Figure 3. The Only Good Beatles-Related Thing

So, yeah, my major hangup here is that I like the Beatles, but not as much as I’m supposed to. In a vacuum, I’d give Please Please Me a Kinda Bad and I’d slap Yellow Submarine with a big fat red Sucks rating. Revolver would be my only Very Good. Abbey Road would get a Just OK. Does all this sound fair? Considering everything that’s been pounded into my head about the band, about their genius and their influence, about the way they completely took control of global cultural trends in the ’60s and altered the course forever, about the way things still are in the world to this very day because of them, I’d say absolutely not. But my gut says they aren’t as great as everyone says, and until I’m comfortable enough with my disconnected opinions about the Beatles I’m going to stay far, far away from reviewing their work through my unenlightened lens. That is to say, I respect them just enough that I don’t really want to slap mediocre ratings on half their discography, so take that for what it’s worth.


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