Month: July 2016

Another day, another album! This time around, Matthew Sweet’s 1991 power pop / alternative rock masterpiece Girlfriend....

At the intersection of glam rock and grunge, you’ve got Mother Love Bone, a band that burned out before its first and only studio album was released. Mother Love Bone, a compilation that includes the full album from 1990 (Apple) and 1989 EP Shine is a fitting tribute....

Today’s album was discovered by rummaging through the Magnatune catalog. This one is The Depths of a Year by Ehren Starks. Magnatune lists Depths in several categories: jazz, instrumental, neoclassical, piano, and cello. It’s the last one that grabbed me. I realized sometime in the early 2000’s that I...

Spike features Elvis Costello’s highest-charting single, “Veronica” – co-written with and featuring Paul McCartney. That’s just the cherry on the sundae for this album, though....

Today’s pick is a look at the early work of The Cure. Standing on a Beach and Staring at the Sea are co-sharing the pick for #76, because the titles are almost the same album. Let me explain…...

Free, the second album from LA-based Concrete Blonde is today’s pick for my top 100 favorite albums. Concrete Blonde sits in the 80s/90s “Alternative/Indie” bucket, which means they’re not exactly top 40, not exactly hard rock, and they didn’t have a major label behind them for their first few...

There are many sins in programming music on radio stations, but here are a few biggies: “Train wrecks,” where the second song is jarring and takes the listener out of the moment; “Ramps,” when the deejay talks over the instrumental lead of the song; and failing to program Journey’s...

On the off chance that anyone is actually playing along at home, I feel bad about listing records that you can’t easily find on Spotify, Google Play, or other digital music services. Yet, like Prison, I can’t really leave Ekstasis off the list. (You can find it on Bandcamp,...

Liz Phair‘s Whip-Smart is a perfect Saturday afternoon album. By happy accident, that’s when I’m re-listening to Whip-Smart and writing this post. Whip-Smart is not a radio-friendly album, unless the radio station is an early 90s alt-rock station with a penchant for pissing off the FCC. Unusual at the...

Hack may, in fact, be the only album to sample a Walt Disney read-a-long album and James Brown on the same track. The fact that it works is just the icing on the cake. The follow-up to their self-titled album, Information Society put out Hack in September of 1990....