We played Let's Dance in JoyDog. While it was a nice groove it just kind of sat there...whereas, I wanted to do Modern Love as it grooves and pushes in a great way.

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An unjust law is no law at all--St. Augustine of Hippo

Cause tried and true
I see the light in you
Oh, can you dig in my soul?
Could you smell my whole...
life?--Gener and Deaner

I agree completely. Let's Dance as a whole is a step down from the all-time-great Hunky Dory through Scary Monsters run, but "Modern Love" is one of Bowie's best songs. I never cared for the title track or "China Girl," which, like you said, are kind of repetitive and inert.

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Stevie Ray Vaughan is not worthy of "due respect." He's right up there with Eric Clapton on the glorified studio musicians list.

john reis ("swami") has some new stuff out that's pretty good. went into a deep dive into his bands/discography. pretty good. lots of stuff i get introduced to is through college radio station wmxm 88.9.

Hello new Internet link!

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I have to admit, I never got Stevie Ray. He could play guitar, sure, but he just aped Albert King or Hendrix or whoever.

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General Jim wears Fort Bragg down... to get it!

This guy gets it.

Area artist Macie Stewart put out a new album a couple weeks ago, mostly prepared piano. I went through a John Cage phase like every annoying person, so I was happy to check this one out. Not a masterpiece, but it scratches my itch for modern chamber music or whatever you want to call it. She played Constellation tonight but I couldn't make it, and the venue is a minor pain for me to get to, anyway.

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I went down the rabbit hole over the past two days. The song (from some other album) "Garter Snake" is a good one. Others are good, too, but a little too shoegazy-indie-etc. for me. She seems like she'd be great to see live (at least if she was playing a guitar).

Also, given the forum we are on. . .

Wouldn't.

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There are some good songs on that album. I though the singer's voice sounded familiar, but had to look it up to find it was the guy from Death Angel. I still listen to Frolic Through the Park once in a while.

Yeah, Mark Osegueda....he was a really good selection to handle vocals. Not as a good of a full album, but Death Angel's "Seemingly Endless Time" is heavy metal perfection.

One of the opening bands was "Municipal Waste". Holy Shit were they awesome....total surprise.

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I gave Learning to Flinch by Warren Zevon a spin for the first time tonight. I'm a Zevon fan, but I've never bothered to pick it up because I have most of the songs on their original albums, but it was a treat. I'm a sucker for piano in rock songs, and his solo piano renditions of some of his classic songs are terrific.

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Hey, I listened to Loaded today, always trying to give it one more chance to grow on me. Still hasn't happened after 20 years of trying.

The debut is still their best. John Cale without Lou Reed can get overly precious and self-indulgent, but Reed without Cale just gets boring. "The Black Angel's Death Song" is what I always felt was the purest expression of Reed/Cale collaboration, but people write it off as a filler track. Not fair.

I think "Stephanie Says" is my favorite VU song if I'm being serious, "The Gift" if I'm not.

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new metal stuff i've heard: cadaver shrine - "into the horrible depths", uninhibited - "reign of the unholy". good stuff.

also heard the new this is lorelei/snail mail collab "two legs". better from her, after her last album was a bit off. snail mail is better when she's emulating the 90's seattle sound. her cover of "tonight, tonight" was pretty good, as far as recent offerings.

Loaded has its critics for sure. A bit of a different band after the first two albums. As I get older, that & Nico album just gets better and better. I sort of get it more. "Venus in Furs" is probably my favorite song by them.

Check this out: I had a chance to steal a Nirvana/Melvins single (the original record, Nirvana covered "Here She Comes Now," which is a great song by either band, and the Melvins covered "Venus in Fur.") Stupidly, I did not steal the record.

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Really? Loaded seems by far the most accesible to me. It really is loaded with hits.

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General Jim wears Fort Bragg down... to get it!

Even the third album still has some vestigial Cale/Nico/Warhol weirdness to it, like "Pale Blue Eyes," "I'm Set Free," or "The Murder Mystery" (another one of my favorite VU songs), but you can feel the mediocrity setting in on the other half.

I will steal that single now (digitally).

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Well, I love "Sweet Jane." Everyone does. I just happen to flip back and forth between whether I like the one on Loaded or Take No Prisoners best. "Rock and Roll" and "Who Loves the Sun" are fun. The rest? It bores me.

Lou Reed as "tortured poet who pushed rock into the avant-garde" was usually better in theory. I think he nailed it on Berlin and Street Hassle, and Transformer is Hunky Dory Part II, but he didn't really live up to it otherwise. Or maybe I just wasn't in on the joke. Maybe Sally Can't Dance being total crap is the point. I much prefer John Cale's solo work as a whole (though Berlin is my favorite of any post-VU album), but I got into all that stuff during a particularly dark stretch of time and I have trouble revisiting a lot of either.

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Magic and Loss is pretty intense as well, but it packs such an emotional wallop I'm almost never in the head space to listen to it.

I picked up VU & Nico in 2003 without listening to a single note of it in advance and was absolutely stunned. I thought it was one of the coolest damn things I ever heard. It's been in my Top 5 ever since.

Songs for Drella is a great record.

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General Jim wears Fort Bragg down... to get it!

Yeah, that's another one he nailed. And agreed, not a regular listen. Cale's Music for a New Society, which he just rerecorded a year or two ago, is the same way.


100%, though it's funny that the "small town" Warhol supposedly lamented was Pittsburgh.

To finish off the late '80s Lou Reed renaissance trilogy: New York has a few songs I really like ("Dirty Blvd.," "Last Great American Whale," "Dime Store Mystery") but too much of the album slips into generic bar-band backing. I'm guessing XRT played it a lot when it came out; it does hit all the right Tasteful Adult Rock notes.

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Yeah, Pittsburgh is very Catholic and I guess for a gay guy in his time it was probably really provincial.



New Sensations comes off as more Tasteful Adult Rock than New York to me though it's typical subversive Reed in its own way. I wonder if "My Friend George" is a about a real guy. I like both records. I wore out a couple copies of New Sensations. The Blue Mask is a very underrated album.

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General Jim wears Fort Bragg down... to get it!

In the spirit of Shark Sandwich, my two-word review of New Sensations is "Marshall Crapshaw."

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That was a cool discussion. Am gonna listen to that later stuff.

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Some John Cale songs I'm particularly fond of:

Paris 1919
Bamboo Floor
Spinning Away (this one's a collab w/Eno)
Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night
Ship of Fools
Andalucia
Gideon's Bible
Child's Christmas in Wales
Fear Is a Man's Best Friend
Chinese Envoy
Barracuda (he just played this on Mulaney's talk show)
Ship of Fools
Gun
Amsterdam
Graham Greene


Really can't go wrong with any of Fear. It's basically Roxy Music minus Ferry plus Cale and Eno. Sugar Ray, of all bands, covered "Spinning Away" around the same time that they were polluting radio with that song about the four-post bed.

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Met up with Douchebag to see Giraffes on Saturday night. Great show. Jagger level frontman.

Anyway, it got me to thinking about why I dislike what people call "pop punk" bands and why I like Giraffes and Lollygagger.

I have a friend who loves pop punk and he's always going on about stuff like Gaslight Anthem and the Menzingers. I've listened to that stuff a lot, and I don't hate it, it's just not something I seek out or get excited about listening to.

I started a conversation on the subject with my wife. I said I can't really put my finger on what it is that I don't like about, say, Blink-182. We happened to have just eaten at Red Robin. She said, "It's like that lunch we just had." She didn't need to say anything more.

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General Jim wears Fort Bragg down... to get it!

man you've never really felt the emotional punch of a pop punk power ballad until you've heard "Untitled" by Simple Plan.

Classic ytmnd song. you BROKE my LIFE

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