Sharon Jones & The Dap Kings "100 days, 100 nights"

In 2007 I walked into New World Record's last location before closing (miss that place) and this #sharonjonesandthedapkings album was playing. It immediately grabbed my attention with it's pulsing rhythms, vintage sound and Sharon Jones velvety and brash vocals.  I had fallen in love with Amy Winehouse's "back to black" album and this sounded like the precursor.   Turned out I was half right, the dap kings played on Winehouse's album but this record was a new release a year later.  Interestingly the label it was put out on was sort of a Brooklyn collective that was releasing and reviving a stable of vintage sounding soul music. To this day it's a label that I buy their new releases sight unseen and am never disappointed.  Do yourself a favor and catch any of them live.  Incredible.
I've liked soul music for a while, I would add to my cd collection occasionally if I found used stuff by artists I already liked.  Always enjoyed hearing deep album cuts from artists who I was singles-friendly with but was naive to the wealth of the genre. Discovering this disc and the record label that put it out ignited a love for this style of music that lead me to research the genre in a workmanlike way.  Reading online articles and purchasing books about soul and R&B music. I started quickly amassing a formidable collection of soul gems.  When I get obsessive like this over styles of music I tend to collect first, usually giving each album a cursory listen and then going back methodically and rediscovering the discs I've purchased.  Sharon Jones and the dap kings CDs immediately live with me for a while, they ride shotgun in the car, they get ripped to my beloved MP3 player (still have 2 functioning Zunes) and they get played many consecutive Sunday mornings.  Just like today.

Gang Green "you got it"

Summers were long when I was a teenager.  In the years before cell phones and Internet access you had a lot more time to kill.  Many of our days were spent wandering around passive aggressively searching for friends/stuff to do.  You'd make a phone call in the morning and if you didn't reach anyone you headed out to likely meeting spots and waited to see if anyone else arrived.  While I don't resent this age of technological immediacy I do sometimes miss the simpler times because often on those wandering days you discovered adventure.
In 1988 if I wanted to see my friends I headed to one of our suburban skate spots. Sometimes I'd carry a boom box and often that summer it would be playing #ganggreen .  I was 17 years old and my friends and I loved drinking as much as we loved skating.  Gang Green provided a great soundtrack for both of those endeavors.  At this point in their career they played a melodic and heavy brand of skate-punk.  With anthemic songs like "LDSB (let's drink some beer)" we ate this shit up.
One day I was waiting around the steps to the junior high where we used to no-comply and acid drop off the ledges. Some of my other friend's turned up soon after and we lazily skated in the heat.  A shitty car pulled up and out stepped a punk rock goddess with a silver fluffy mohawk and asked us what was up.  This legendary creature (who became known in reverence as "Punk Rock Jen") had seen us skating, heard the music and decided we were cool and stopped to talk to us.  She was a few years older than us and had a car.  She was worshipped by my whole crew.  On this, our first meeting, she asked who was playing on the radio, I told her and she said she liked it.  I yanked the cassette out of it's saddle and eagerly offered it to her. She flashed a smile that would have snapped my tony hawk deck in half.  She drove us around looking for our other friends listening to this album.  We found everyone and ended up drinking on "the dykes" (a concrete drainage embankment) and Punk Rock Jen pierced my ear with a filthy safety pin from her clothes.  Those were the days.

Nico "Chelsea girl"

In 1991 I was working as a dishwasher in an Italian restaurant as I attended college.  The job paid shit but I could eat all I wanted so it was a trade off I could live with.  The head chef was a bohemian who loved Bob Dylan, the Velvet Underground and surrealist art.  We hit it off and became friends, I'm pretty sure he liked to live vicariously through my youthful enthusiasm for anything subversive. Some nights after work I would skateboard to the house he rented with his wife and child and we would sit in his living room and paint and draw.  He would buy me cheap bottles of Wild Irish Rose (jack kerouack's poison) and he'd disappear to his driveway to smoke weed.  He'd play records and whistle out of tune to vocal lines.  One of his favorites was the first Velvet Underground album, it was sort of like hearing punk or metal for the first time again. A style of music that was unique to itself.
There was a head shop in that small town that resembled a small flea market.  Amongst the incense and bongs they also sold comic books out of boxes and used records and CDs.  One day I was digging through the boxes of discs and recognized Nico's name from that VU album.  I snagged it for a couple of bucks (all I had ) and brought it with me to the Chef's house that night after work.  He was unfamiliar with it and we listened to the album as we pushed paint around on some plywood he found in his basement.  The record is a strange melancholy affair and #nico germanic deep vocals washed over us. We played the cd too loud and were scolded by his wife.  We played it a second time immediately so he could tape the album for himself.
Ten years later a couple of these songs turned up in the soundtrack for the movie "The Royal Tenebaums". I remember I had to rewind the movie because hearing the songs brought me deep into a nostalgic trance.  Sure wish I had saved some of the paintings I had done with chef at that time.  They were experimental and free from self-conscious editing, and it was also when I began to really search music out and listen to unique things that my peers didn't know.  Like this gem of a sad album.

Jets To Brazil "orange rhyming dictionary :

I never got to see Jawbreaker live.  Always bums me out when I think about that.  I heard the singer/guitarist Blake had a new band and we're playing their debut gig in NYC so I purchased a train ticket and headed east.  The new band #jetstobrazil sounded amazing and pretty much where his old band had left off.  Not long after the show the band released this debut in 1998.
While I've always absolutely hated this fucking album cover and "orange rhyming dictionary " is such a forced wordsmith title, the actual music it contains is really great.  Plenty of guitar hooks and a rock solid rhythm section.  It's the sort of album that pundits would refer to as "mature" coming from the band's punk roots. Dashes of accent keyboards precede the instruments more central role on the band's later releases, but here it is still regulated to flavoring the songs rather than carrying them.
I got to see this band again on this tour cycle as the played Discovery Records in a suburb of Buffalo.  I had brought a demo cd of the band I played in and wanted to give it to Blake.  I didn't want to give it to him with any motives of "helping my band" I just wanted him to hear some music that his work helped inspire. Pay it back sort of thing.  I mean if he wrote me and said he loved it I would have been super into that, but honestly I just wanted him to have it. Even if he never listened to it I got to stammer a quick "thanks for all your inspiration" and know he received the cd because I handed it to him.  I do wonder if he ever popped it into a player, or if it got trampled in their van. The secret life of that cd.

Zombi "cosmos"

I just finished binge watching the show "Stranger Things".  I loved the '80s set piece and it made me feel very nostalgic for a pre-cell phone world. One of my favorite aesthetic parts is the series opening credit sequence graphics and music.  It reminded me alot of those old Goblin scored movies on vhs in my youth, which in turn reminded me of the contemporary band #zombi .  Zombi are a two piece instrumental band originally from Romero country. They play progressive rock that is based on vintage synthesizers and polyrhythms. I remember going to check the band out at a small defunct Buffalo venue called Soundlab in 2009.  I was amazed that the band replicated their songs live. The two multi instrumentalists calmly performed these long dynamic songs building dynamic tension and dissolving them masterfully, it really was something to behold.  The vintage keyboards give the songs a very eerie quality that they owe to all the sci fi/horror soundtracks of the '80s which created that tonal perspective. It's really cool how the band straddles the line of vintage/contemporary sound and this stuff is interesting enough where it doesn't relegate itself to "background" music (no small feat for instrumental outfits)
If any of the producers of the show #StrangerThings stumbled across this blog I would implore them to have the band score future episodes. And to use a colloquial ism of the period:  Man, that would be radical.

No thesaurus was harmed during the making of this blog.  I pride myself on vocabulary.

16 "curves that kick"

In the early nineties I joined the Pushead fan club.  Pushead is probably the single biggest influence on my art ( @hyperstoic ) when I first saw the metallica t-shirt for "damage inc." It was like a bell tolled in my head.  Poetics aside it really changed my life, it was like an even scarier Derek Riggs (the dude who did all those awesome Iron Maiden illustrations )  as a member of pushead's fan club I received all kinds of prints, stickers and vinyl.  The 10" for the band #16  "curves that kick" was actually one of the few bands I liked on his Bacteria Sour record label.  The album cover is pure Pushead awesomeness (through its a bit obvious he didn't want to draw the figure's hands or feet)  the music is  a rhythmic sludgefest with barked vocals.  This record was released in 1993 and is akin to the stuff bands like Crowbar and Eyehategod were doing at the time.  There's some cool use of effects pedals to add some flavor to din.  I ordered the cd from his label directly since I didn't have reliable access to a record player, I still have both copies.  I've remained loyal to their career over the years and they have continued to their path of hazy sludge.  They re-released this album a few years ago with inferior non-pushead artwork, but the remastered disc does sound a lot better.

Elvis Costello "spike"

Waiting for coffee to brew after a stressful and embarrassing morning.  I put this CD on for cormfort.  #elviscostello silky smooth croon and the lush arrangements on this album have always soothed my mood.

You know what?  Fuck it.  The joy was sucked from this today and instead of writing a scathing blog today I'm going to just skip it.

No thesaurus was harmed in the making of this blog.