Drive Like Jehu "s/t"

Home of the Hits closing is one of the biggest losses in my life. That statement may sound absurd to anyone who is not a passionate, obsessive music fan. That record store was my church, it was my cultural hub. It was where the magical mysteries of music touched the earth. I miss it's smell, I miss the creaky floor, I miss the rows of incredibly provocative band t-shirts on the walls, I miss the layers of flyers on the bulletin board next to the door and I miss the pastors who worked there. To name them "pastors" is no stretch, they sold me salvation, they offered me guidance and mentoring and I felt really weird running into them in public away from the holy building. As I ebbed and flowed through my musical taste the guys working there paid attention to my purchases and often made suggestions to guide me to new CDs. Sometimes this guidance was fruitless and sometimes they were magical seers of binary sound. I can vividly remember holding this disc and Parasites "punch lines" and musing aloud that I could only afford one. The record store dude walked up and snatched the Parasites CD out of my hand and walked it back to the "P" section and muttered "you're welcome". So I went home with this #drivelikejehu  disc. It's a true watershed moment in music for me. Chaotic, percussive, melodic and interesting. It's a fantastic fucking album and one I believe is essential to anyone who has ventured into music beyond passive radio. My clergy had come through for me and had shown me the light. Fuck, I miss that place so much. Oh and I went back and bought that Parasites disc as soon as I had the money

Spectral Wound "infernal decadence "

In my car I have a handful of rotating CDs. These are mood specific and get swapped out every couple of weeks. During the transition period between these changes I tend to play music on my phone through bluetooth in my car. With a collection as large and ever expanding as mine I have found it incredibly convenient. I purchased 256gb memory card for my phone and have turned it into my media hub. Having this accessible hub has made me more likely to buy music digitally without purchasing an actual physical copy. I have certain rules to what I buy in this manner and given the finite space I have to store new CDs it is increasingly less likely I purchase actual discs. This #spectralwound  album got played during a shuffle session with my phone. It really sounded great driving around the grey city (raw, awesome black metal from Quebec, so it has that french je ne sais quoi I love so much) so I played the album as I finished driving my errands. When I got home I looked to see if it was one of the physical purchases and I was thrilled and to find it nestled in my black metal section of shelving. I pulled it off the rack and was even more excited to find the booklet contained lyrics so I did something I don't get a chance to do much anymore: i parked my butt in front of the stereo and read lyrics along to a CD. It felt comfortable and soothing (despite the hate emitting from my speakers) and reaffirmed what is obvious to everyone else: I freaking love compact discs!

Cyndi Lauper "she's so unusual"

Growing up one of my chores was washing dishes after dinner with my sister. After settling the endless debate of who would wash versus who would dry we would set to work. Next to the kitchen sink in our cramped little suburban house was a big grey boombox. It was typically tuned to the top-40 radio station and the variety of pop songs would radiate from the kitchen throughout our small home all day. I dont remember there being any moments without music in the house when we were young. Occasionally my sister or I would pop a cassette from our personal collections into the radio during this chore. This album was one we blasted often. On the nights we weren't trying to argue each other to death we would both sing along and it made the task almost enjoyable and brief. This is from a golden age of pop records when artists just seem to tap some magical muse and released albums jam packed with singles. There isn't a clunker on this whole album. I listened to it on headphones today while half-napping on the couch while my kids played and watched unwatchable television. I could smell dish soap and damp drying towels. I could see my sister's massive flipped wing hair. It turned out to be a definite time capsule.

Velvet Cacoon "genevieve"

Sometimes the lore surrounding an album makes it irresistible to me. #velvetcacoon  have polarized people due to the mythology they created about themselves. Almost all of the rumours they started turned out to be exaggerations or just plain falsehoods. These ranged from members being committed to asylums, acts of eco terrorism in their native Pacific northwest and claiming to have built guitar amplifiers that ran on vegetable oil. Caricature of black metal= flame; Joel =moth. This CD itself is a pretty awesome hypnotic version of black metal, the kind of stuff my ex-wife used to say sounded like someone vacuuming pennies. The vocals on this are more gurgling whispers than harsh screams and that adds a whole element that I like. It has been pointed out to me recently that I like repetitive music. And while on the surface that may seem apt, I think what I really enjoy is the hypnosis of riffs. The tension that gets created waiting for the change or shift in the song. It's a tendency that I think I've always had but never quantified or even realised until it was pointed out. After it was identified I seem to find it in all the music I choose. It definitely explains my love of funeral doom metal, and these hypnotic black metal albums and shoegaze/post-rock. Now I have an inner conflict of do I search this kind of stuff out and rodeo the tendency or do I try and listen to stuff that turns on a dime every fifteen seconds? Which then leads me to ponder: why do I think so much about this shit? Do I have to analyze all this stuff and strangle the last gasps of mystery out of the artform I love so much? Or am I just looking for a new sub-sub-genre to search out and collect (horde)? Sometimes I think I forget to just listen and enjoy without the extraneous pressure of being a music snob. The good thing is this album is bathing my kitchen in it's cold, fuzzy din while I'm writing this and it sounds awesome.

Samiam "soar"

While many of my CDs conjure up memories some of them inspire sensations. This #samiam  disc puts the taste of cheap home brewed coffee in my mouth. It also reminds me that feeling of laying in a warm bed near a frost covered window, feeling the chill radiate towards my face and hands as I study lyrics in this CD booklet. In fact it is this exact well worn booklet. I bought this exact compact disc in the fall of 1991 and it became my companion in my small, dingy college apartment in a small college town near the Pennsylvania border. At the time my collection of music was pretty small but well used. I couldn't afford much, and I would easily sacrifice food money for a new disc of music. So the discs I had I became intimately familiar with. Because being that broke also created a lot of alone down time. Time I spent memorizing and fantasizing about music and the mystical lives the bands must lead. A friend of mine who was really in touch with music turned me on to Samiam and it became a tandem with Nirvana's "nevermind" as two of the Most Important Things in the World. Over time I've grown weary of the overplayed and over analyzed king-of-grunge album, but I've never tired of the sincere and thoughtful downer punk of this album. Today is a dreary cool October day and a perfect day to revisit this album, it was a draining weekend of my youngest son falling ill and I'm welcoming the comfort of a grey autumn monday. I dont imagine this record was written in that spirit and I wonder how many artists would be suprised by the ghosts individual copies of their albums hold for different people. Many years after I absorbed this CD my wife and I caught them live while she was very pregnant with our middle son. The singer suggested that we name the baby after himself. I never told her but I actually mulled that over that night, I liked the romantic connection to my younger life and this discography. I decided to keep that selfish inclination to myself.

Violent Femmes "s/t"

There was a time in my life where I believed this album was standard issue to all women. Upon inspection it may have been more of a period piece (I swear I didn't intend that pun) since any female under the age of thirty looks back at me puzzled if I ask them about #theviolentfemmes  . For a solid decade of my life you could bet that any girl I found interesting had a beat up cassette of this album on the floor of their car. I imagine that for a lot of girls who hung out with arty skater boys that most of the testosterone fueled bands really didn't address their own personal angst. I'm not saying that they couldn't appreciate the anger as an energy, but let's face it: it gets pretty neanderthal at times. Then I imagine some college radio station played this record and the combination of super intelligent wordplay over frantic acoustic guitars struck a chord with them (another unintentional pun). But this is all conjecture. Every woman I found interesting loved this disc. So I bought a copy to try and infiltrate their headspace. It's a damn good album. I was at a place in my life where I was very open minded to music (especially if it was recommended by a collegiate siren) so the lack of electric guitars didn't faze me, neither the the nasal vocals but it's the lyrics that get one. Sophisticated and innocent sounding, clever and vulgar. This has turned out to be a lifelong favorite. It leads me to wonder though: what are the art school ladies listening to these days?

Rainer Maria "look now look again"

I was in an indie rock band for a few years in the late '90s- early '00s and our spirit animal was #rainermaria  . We were never nearly as good but we consciously and unconsciously emulated them. Listening to this CD even now gives me chills and fills me with nostalgic angst. They were a female fronted trio that played hyper emotional intelligent rock music that was lovingly elitist with rich, poetic lyrics and earnest delivery. Yeah, I love them. It is difficult for me to listen to this and not think of shows on the road with my old band because their discography was always in permanent rotation during the hours spent in that van. I have three favorite shows we got to play: 1) opening a sold-out show for Frank Black in Syracuse 2) playing with Helicopter Helicopter and Tugboat Annie at a sold-out show in Boston at the Middle East and 3) opening for Rainer Maria at our beloved Mohawk Place back home. The show was packed, we shared equipment and Caithlin wrote their contact info in one of my sketchbooks. They killed it that night. It was back when it was just the small stage and the place was packed from the cigarette vending machine to the vinyl jukebox. They say you always love the music from the best time of your life. I've led a charmed life and had quite a few of those eras and each one has a distinct soundtrack but this band owns the year 2000 for me. Salad days. (If you want a glimpse of the period at the start of this band google "palomar sky survey interview" it is cringeworthy in it's awkwardness and I have hardly any tattoos, or beard)