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 Contradiction on HEAVY TUNES: Seven Sounds of 2013, Year of the Plummeting Guillotine Blade

Ed Note: This was supposed to run over at Up the Pucks, but it's been four months, so I gather that they are no longer interested, if indeed they ever were. Ah well.

Chris Collision Fat Contradiction on HEAVY TUNES: Seven Sounds of 2013, Year of the Plummeting Guillotine Blade

In 2013, I was mostly not listening to music from 2013; it is, after all, Never Not the Seventies, and I was occupied most of the year with looking back, looking in, and looking angrily at the stupid garbage circumstances given and transmitted from the past, circumstances weighing like a nightmare on my brain (and everything else). But still these are revolutionary times, and a few new creations did attract my attention. Please enjoy these brief, anxious flares of the new, so bright against the darkness of the walls ever closing in.

Uncle Acid and the Deadbeats, Mind Control
This is metal that is frequently inspired-by, but is never merely referential. Uncle Acid mines the past without spinning its wheels...in a rut. (I could go on like this for a while.)

Future of the Left, How To Stop Your Brain In An Accident
The world's funniest angry post-punk band, their best-sounding album, and, in moments, one of their catchiest. Get behind the punch-stomp of "future child embarrassment matrix", then slip into the hooky screeching of "the male gaze", and remember that all the world's vile powers can be remade into something better for us all.

Lord Dying, "Greed Is Your Horse"
The rest of the record hasn't really sunk in yet, but this song was one of 2013's most savage beatings. Perfect music for raving against the agonies of existence.

Snailface, Snailface IV
For the lighter side of HEAVY TUNES, here's a dad-metal concept album about...camping. I came back to this record incessantly: great for bike rides, drinking alone, and other situations where you need something like a campfire singalong but don't have a fire or friends.

Carton/Alpha Cop, Fingertips/The Low Flags Split 7"
Full Disclosure: I first heard this because I help out with copy for the label that put out this single. I would have loved it anyway: Carton is joyous post-grunge with loud guitars and Alpha Cop wrote the song of the year.

Power Trip, Manifest Decimation
Best thrash album I've heard in years. Best breakdowns I've heard in years. Missed them when they opened up for Fucked Up because life is fundamentally a barely-leavened lurch from atrocity here to indignity there and I don't deserve good things. But this album is intensely good.

Russian Circles, Memorial
Another soothing balm against the flensing knives deployed by civilization's onrushing self-destruction: drone-grooves. Honestly, I spend most of my time listening to stuff like this anymore, always chasing the next Red Sparowes (RIP) or trying to find a Pelican with a drummer who can...drum. This is like that and it makes me as less-unhappy as anything else.


Bio:
Chris Collision Fat Contradiction writes about sports, sometimes, for The Classical and The Classical Magazine, podcasts about other things, and rabble-rouses about hockey, coffee, mescal, bikes and justice on Twitter.

rad bands on Bandcamp

Further to yesterday's post of my HEAVY TUNES OF 2013, I thought I might dump a bunch of good Bandcamp links out there, stuff I mostly like but haven't really given a full listen to just yet.

Credit where it's due: a lot of these came straight from the dome of Mr. Chris D., in an interview he was gracious enough to do with me for No Headline AudioZine. If you want to read a list unmediated by me, that's more pure full-on Chris D., you can do do at the Negative Fun Records tumblr. Dude's got good taste; he should start a label or some shit.

From Chris D.

• Swearin'
• Ghostt Bllonde
• Phantom Glue
• Make
• Midnight Plus One
• Positive No
• Solar Halos
• No Other
• The Ghost Ease
• Snowy Owls

From other sources:

• Russian Circles
• Buildings out of MPLS
• Hawks out of ATL
• Windhand
• Le Force (members of Lord Dying)
• At the Spine out of Seattle

Happy hearing!