HEAVY TUNES: Records I Listened to This Week or So, As of July 17, 2020

June 30, 2020

1. Wand, Golem
   Shredder. Right up there with Plum!
2. A Winged Victory for the Sullen, A Winged Victory for the Sullen
   Was I awake during this? Was the band?
3. Explosions in the Sky, The World Is Not a Cold Dead Place
   ...if you say so.
4. Helium, Ends with And
5. Trans Am, Trans Am
6. Windhand, Windhand
7. Bongripper, Glaciers
8. Funkadelic, America Eats Its Young
9. Starcastle, Citadel

July 12, 2020

1. David Bowie, Outside
2. Guns & Roses, Chinese Democracy
3. Wolf Parade, Cry Cry Cry
4. Madvillain, Madvillainy
5. Quasimoto, The Unseen
6. Deltron 3030, The Instrumentals
7. Red Sparowes, Every Heart Shines Toward the Red Sun
   Quick note on this band: I do not think they every recorded a bad note, and I love them. This has been: a quick note on Red Sparowes.
8. Steve Morse, High Tension Wires
9. The Nocturnes, A Year of Spring

I came late to Bowie—or, more accurately, I started late to come to Bowie—there's so much of it, and finding this late-career excellence reminded me that some great figures don't stop being great after people stop paying attention. It's not perfect, track for track, but there are some amazing songs here, and I look forward to learning more.

June 13, 2020

1. Black Sabbath, Live Evil
2. The Palace Brothers, There Is No-One What Will Take Care of You
3. Blood Incantation, Hidden History of the Human Race
4. King Geedorah, Take Me to Your Leader
5. fIREHOSE, "fromohio"
6. Screaming Trees (no, not that one), Beaten with the Ugly Stick (EP)
7. Elvis Costello & the Attractions, My Aim Is True
8. Blue Őyster Cult, On Your Feet or on Your Knees
9. Pelican, City of Echoes
10. Monster Magnet, 25....Tab

July 15, 2020

1. Galaxie 500, This Is Our Music
   Could it be that the only essential Galaxie 500 record is Copenhagen?
2. MF Doom, Born Like This
   This has one of my favorite tracks on one of my favorite CDs Noodles ever made, but I probably won't listen to the album again, b/c I don't need to hear or support "Batty Boyz" again.
3. Sebadoh, Smash Your Head on the Punk Rock
   Man, "Mind Meld" sure holds the fuck up. So good.
4. Spoons, Static in Transmission
   Right around here this week I started to lose my mind and pursue depths of Can(adian)Con(tent) that I am not sure are good for me, exactly.
5. Wolfmother, Wolfmother
   This is bad, and I like it. I don't know what to make of anything anymore.

July 16, 2020

1. Swervedriver, Mezcal head
   "Last Train to Satansville" is a great song title. Shoegaze is just prog with pop vocals, but you aren't ready to have that conversation.
2. Spoons, The Best
   "Nova Heart" rules extremely hard.
3. Kim Mitchell, Akimbo Alogo
   I think I wanted to be in the car, driving fast, again. This record gives a good vibe of that.
4. Max Webster, Universal Juveniles
   I told you the CanCon was getting pretty real around here.
5. Finger Eleven, Finger Eleven
   "Finger eleven" is a fucking sentence.
6. John Carpenter, Anthology: Movie Themes
7. Mike Watt, "Ring Spiel" Tour '95
8. Kiss, Music from "The Elder"
9. Dramarama, Hi-Fi Sci-Fi

July 17, 2020

1. Jesu, Never
2. MF Doom, Vaudeville Villain
3. Hawkwind, Quark, Strangeness and Charm
4. Baroness, The Red Album
5. Miles Davis, Bitches Brew
6. Spoons, Stick Figure Neighborhood
   I like this! Sort of the Joy Division guitar album to the later Spoons' New Order keyboard albums.
7. Lana del Rey, Born to Die
8. Blue Őyster Cult, Blue Őyster Cult
9. Deltron 3030, Event 2

HEAVY TUNES: Records I Listened to the Last Couple Weeks, As Of June 19, 2020

Rough Couple Weeks ... At Least We Have Music

June 8

1. Hawkwind, Quark, Strangeness and Charm
   (This version had a LOT of mostly pointless and eventually exhausting extras—"Damnation Alley" rules p. hard, tho)
2. Carole King, Tapestry
   For a record I had never knowingly listened to, I sure knew a lot of these songs!
3. Neko Case and Her Boyfriends, Furnace Room Lullaby
   There was a time when I loved few things more than this record. This day, it didn't really hold up for me.
4. Sir Lord Baltimore, Sir Lord Baltimore
   Wow, "Man from Manhattan" rules.
5. Miles Davis On the Corner
6. Black Sabbath, Past Lives
   Another past favorite that I didn't love this time around... :(
7. Slave, The Hardness of the World
   The great Curtis Harris said the following, and that was all I needed to hear
   

   Dear white friends who enjoy late 70s, early 80s (post-)punk and new wave, you should listen to Slave.
   
   A lot of the fat bass utilized by Gang of Four et al derives from that funky Dayton outfit.https://t.co/HqoL1H0jnZ

   — Curtis Harris (@curtismharris) June 8, 2020

8. Eddie Hazel, From the Bottom of My Heart
   "Lompoc Boogie" is incredible: wonderful musicianship, incredible melodies, and just fun energy.

June 13: Apparently, we're getting funky (while cooking a bunch of food)

1. Parliament, Motor Booty Affair
2. Miles Davis, Bitches Brew
3. Eddie Hazel, Game, Dames and Guitar Thangs
4. Band of Gypsys, Band of Gypsys

June 15

1. Slave, Slave (1977, Cotillion)
2. Parliament, Funkentelechy vs. the Placebo Syndrome (1977, Casablanca)
3. Funkadelic, Funkadelic
4. Miles Davis, In a Silent Way

June 16: Dancin' in the Ruins (?)

1. The Drop playlist: my dumb streaming service, which will NEVER understand me properly, thought I'd be interested in ... Phoebe Bridgers, Roman Circles, Tangerine Dream and a lot of other stuff I really really liked ... Great job, algorithms. Lousy job being interesting, Fat.
2. Operators, EP 1
   Still SO good.
3. Jaye Jayle & Emma Ruth Rundle, The Time Between Us
   Essential.
4. Wooden Wand, Harem of the Sundrum and the Witness Figg
5. LCD Soundsystem, LCD Soundsystem
   I saw a podcast called this band "If Zoolander was a band" which suggests strongly somebody either hasn't heard the band or hasn't seen Zoolander (both of which are fine: it's a long life, there's plenty of art we can skip), and it made me want to listen to this. Mostly now I only like the bonus disc, but it's a pretty fun listen whenever.

This was a hellacious work day. The only time I had for music is after I got back to my place, exhausted and scraped clean, needing to cook some food and pass out. I spent quite a while making vegan "hot wings" out of cauliflower and more than half a cup of Sriracha, and it was messy, lengthy, and pretty great. Comfort music helped a lot.

June 17: Retrenching, Searching for Silence

1. Hawkwind, Hall of the Mountain Grill
2. Miles Davis, On the Corner
3. Funkadelic, Cosmic Slop
4. Starcastle, Starcastle
   Pretty much all I listened to last year was this bizarre Yes knockoff with heavy REO Speedwagon dad-radio vibes. I've been trying hard to listen to Not The Same Thing Over and Over Again, but today ... I was tired, you know?
5. Vektor, Black Future
   Been trying to keep things mellow, but sometimes one does need to get more intense and aggressive.
6. Deltron 3030, Event II
   Wow, the beats on this really did it for me! I like this a lot better than the first record, which I like(d) a lot.

Experimenting with funk and things with as few words as possible has been really helpful and heartening, even if I should probably just be listening to Tangerine Dream and munching edibles all day.

June 18: A Certain Craving for Novelty

1. Mekons, Fear & Whiskey
   People like this band? Seems cool for them.
2. MF Doom, ...Mm Food
   What if MF Doom but beats?
3. Vektor, Outer Isolation
4. Killer Mike, R.A.P. Music
5. Deltron 3030, Deltron 3030
   Not sure why, but Deltron is what I really wanted to hear all week.
6. David Bowie, Diamond Dogs
7. Aesop Rock, Bazooka Tooth
8. Alice Cooper, Billion Dollar Babies
   My buddy calls Alice Cooper "ugly David Bowie", and that fits, and this record is, while not without spots I desperately wish to skip every time, incredible. Nobody comes up with bigger melodies than in "Hello Hooray" or "Elected".
9. Obsequiae, The Palms of Sorrowed Kings
   Another record I basically listened to all of last year to the exclusion of anything else. I really love this record.

HEAVY TUNES: Records I Listened to Over the Past Week or So, As Of June 7, 2020

last week had ... a lot.

June 2: you can probably guess this theme

1. Vince Staples, Hell Can Wait (2014, Def Jam)
2. Black Sabbath, Heaven and Hell (1980, Warner Bros.)
3. Iced Earth, Days of Purgatory (1997, Century Media)
   Christ it's embarrassing to like this record.
4. Helium, The Dirt of Luck, (1995, Matador)

June 3: flailing

1. Charles Mingus, Pithecanthropus Erectus (1956, Atlantic)
2. Molly Nilsson (Top Tracks)
3. Makthaverskan, Makthaverskan (2009)
4. James Gang, Live In Concert, (1971, ABC)
   My uncle had this, but it was scratched to shit, so I haven't heard it since the late 80s. "Tend My Garden" and "Ashes the Rain and I" both rule. Everything else...
5. Operators, Radiant Dawn (2019, Last Gang)
6. Russian Circles, Memorial (2013, Sargent House)
7. Jeff Beck, Wired (1976, Epic)
   This was one of the first tapes I bought when I started buying music. Some days it holds up. This day ... it really did not. But I can still whistle fairly long parts of "Led Boots".
8. Future of the Left, Curses (2007, Too Pure)

June 5: long days, long weeks

1. Oozing Wound, Earth Suck, (2015, Thrill Jockey)
2. Can, Ege Bamyasi (1972, United Artists)
   Question of the day: Hey, so, do I still like Can? Answer? Not today, no.
3. Run the Jewels, Run the Jewels 4
   Well, they can't all be winners.
4. Neil Young with Crazy Horse, Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere (1969, Reprise)
5. Roxy Music, Manifesto (1979, Polydor)
6. The Magnetic Fields, Quickies (2020, Nonesuch)
7. Screaming Females, Live at the Hideout (2014, Don Giovanni)
   It had been a really long time since I had played this. That was a big mistake.
8. Joy Division, Substance (1988, Factory)
   A cassette that changed my life.
9. Soul Asylum, And the Horse they Rode in On (1990, A&M)
   I remember liking this a lot in high school. Apparently I was wrong about at least one thing in high school.

Fat's High School Records

On social media, a million people are listing their Top Ten Teenage Records.

But I think number-constrained lists are asinine, and I don't want anybody to see this, so I'll do my list here.

I've been thinking about this for a couple days, off and on, and I think I've finally got it somewhere close to comprehensive—at least, comprehensive with respect to the things that didn't turn out to be complete dead ends, so forgive me for not owning up to trying like a bastard to like the Soup Dragons or whoever, or leaving out the week we all pretended to like Urban Dance Squad or my brief, bad Nitzer Ebb phase or whatever. (Also I'm leaving out my guitar-weenie period, so go ahead and add Joe Satriani and Steve Morse and Ronnie Montrose and whatever back in. MAN was Ronnie Montrose's The Speed of Sound a great record.) And this isn't my teens: this is just what I was into in high school, and maybe a little bit before. So 88-89 to 91-92. Finally: you're right; all I was listening to was white guys yelling over clatter. I did grow up a little and discover things like "black people and women making music" but I'm not trying to gloss up my history.

• AC/DC, Highway to Hell, Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap, Blow Up Your Video; my first favorite band of my own, and, yes, I do still think Blow Up Your Video is a good record
• Voivod, Dimension Hatröss; I think I heard this before I heard Black Sabbath and it broke me permanently
• Screaming Trees, Invisible Lantern, Sweet Oblivion; two records that absolutely bookended my high school listening and living; Invisible Lantern changed what I thought music was: I first heard it and thought "this is the worst thing I have ever heard in my life", and kept listening because it was so awful, and then I looked up one day and said "this is brilliant". Sweet Oblivion was a record I thought was actually about me: half its songs seemed to limn my life exactly
• Ramones, Leave Home; I'd been given a book about rock and roll for Xmas 1987 or 88, and I read about punk rock, so when I saw this tape at Sound Warehouse for 3.99, I picked it up. It did the trick (and Halfway to Sanity and Pleasant Dreams rocked my shit as well, later)
• Metallica, The 5.98 Garage Days E.P.; which I never owned, but borrowed off a kid at an Alateen meeting. Still the best Metallica record, still where I first heard the Misfits, still the last moment where Metallica seemed to have a sense of humor
• Jimi Hendrix / Otis Redding, Live at Monterey Pop; was one of the first tapes I bought, and I wore it out—the Hendrix side, anyway, because I was too young and dumb to like the Otis Redding part
• GWAR, Scumdogs of the Universe; which I think I memorized one year—I still remember being asked to stop playing it in a car on one road trip...
• Pop Will Eat Itself, This Is the Day, This Is the Hour, This Is This; I still know most of the words to this record
• Minutemen, Paranoid Time 7" / fIREHOSE, flyin' the flannel; probably the best artistic decisions I made in high school
• Soundgarden, Louder Than Love; because if you're a theater kid who will probably never have sex, "I know what to do / I'm gonna fuck fuck fuck fuck you fuck you" is the best lyric you can imagine
• R.E.M., Dead Letter Office; at a summer camp for smart kids, I turned a kid onto Screaming Trees and Black Sabbath; he turned me onto R.E.M. and Joy Division, so, you know. Win-win
• Joy Division, Substance; I used to cry most times I'd hear "Transmission"
• Black Sabbath, Paranoid; the funny thing about turning a kid onto Black Sabbath is that I'd bought the tape like three days before I played it for him
• Blue Őyster Cult, Secret Treaties, Agents of Fortune; Treaties was a grade-eight discovery, a record I genuinely thought was evil, because every time I bought it, something bad would happen to me; Agents came later, and I remember a summer where I basically only listened to it and Hüsker Dü for months (ETI and Debbie Denise meant a lot to a doofy white kid who liked HEAVY TUNES and sentimentality)
• Hüsker Dü, Flip Your Wig, Warehouse: Songs and Stories; gol DANG are these songs good—and the guitar sounds! Dang were these records good
• Televsion, Marquee Moon / Richard Hell and the Voidoids, Blank Generation; like I said, I learned about punk from a book
• Frank Zappa, Hot Rats; guitar solos rule, I thought ("the Gumbo Variations" sounds pretty good back to back with Marquee Moon)
• The Who, Quadrophenia; I mean, if you like Hüsker Dü, you like the Who
• Sonic Youth, Daydream Nation; remember tape clubs? I got this along with five other records: Tin Machine, Tom Petty's solo record, and a couple I no longer remember. I didn't really get this record, but I had read a little Dick, and a little Gibson, so I knew I was supposed to like it, and I did
• Patti Smith, Horses; because when you get a lot of records out of your uncles' crates, sometimes you get lucky (and your mind gets blown)
• the Big F, the Big F; the best hard rock record of 1989, maybe
• Game Theory, Lolita Nation; the best pop-rock double album ever, maybe
• Screaming Blue Messiahs, Totally Religious, Bikini Red; gave me much of the best guitar tone and wittiest post-blues songwriting I ever heard, and no matter how much I loved it then, it took me decades to catch up with this
• Caterwaul, Portent Hue; because it turns out that I'm a goth weenie, when the guitar player is noisy and brilliant enough
Dinosaur Jr., Just Like Heaven 7", Little Fury Things cassingle, Bug, Green Mind; but maybe I knew that already, because I already knew that I loved a couple Cure songs, especially when they were played by mutely hostile jerks from Massachusetts?
• Mudhoney, Every Good Boy Deserves Fudge; bought this the same day as Nirvana's Nevermind; listened to 'em both, put Nevermind away and listened to this a lot for a year or so—Dan Peters is still one of my favorite drummers, based on "Good Enough"
• Flesh Eaters, Dragstrip Riot; why did I get into Flesh Eaters before X? Well, because I bought most of my records from SST Records mail-order and the first X song I heard was "Fourth of July", which turned me off that shit until like 2003 (also this record is amazing)
• Paranoise, Constant Fear; you know how idiots like to say "the internet has all human knowledge on it"? This record has essentially no internet presence whatsoever, but I have intense memories of its bizarre jazz/industrial metal riffs and horribly yelpy Cold War paranoia lyrics (the thing on Spotify is terminally bogus, do NOT try to tell me it's what I'm talking about, because it fucking isn't, it just isn't shut UP)