bubblesandgutz

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Every Record I Own - Day 857: The Rolling Stones Goats Head Soup

I've already talked about The Rolling Stones at length, so rather than making you go back through old posts, let me just say this... my trajectory from adolescence to middle age was a journey from being a Rolling Stones hater to a Rolling Stones mega-fan.

If you're a hater, you probably think the Stones have always sucked. But even if you're a fan, you'll probably admit that the Stones lost the plot somewhere along the way. Maybe you think they took a downward turn after the '60s. Maybe they started to suck at the tail end of the '70s. My personal take has shifted over the years... first they started sucking after Exile. Then the winning streak ended when Mick Taylor left. Or maybe it was after Some Girls.

For a lot of people, Goats Head Soup was the first sign of a decline. Sure, every record had its detractors, but there seemed to be a pretty thorough consensus that Goats Head Soup marked a dip in quality. And I was in the same boat. Goats Head Soup always felt like a bit of a drag. "Dancing with Mr. D" is a downer of an opener. The big single "Angie" is a decent enough song, but it doesn't really exploit the Stones' biggest assets. The rest of the album just seems kinda like standard issue late '60s / early '70s Stones without any real highlights.

But @zonecassette was kind enough to send me a proper LP copy and after a few spins around the house, I began to latch onto its charms.

Their previous album, Exile on Main St, felt like a defiant celebratory middle finger to the private turmoil plaguing the band in the early '70s, but with Goats Head Soup, they finally acknowledge the difficult stretch that had followed them since Brian Jones' departure. "Dancing with Mr. D" addresses the drug casualties surrounding the band. "Coming Down Again" grapples with addiction. "Doo Doo Doo Doo Doo (Heartbreaker)" deals with police brutality and other social failures. Even the album artwork, with the band members draped in a death shroud-like material, has a grim overtone.

The song sequence front loads the album with the bleaker material, while the flip side finds the band returning to its trademark jubilant defiance with songs like "Star, Star." And while that tracklist choice might undermine the band's general festive spirit, it's in keeping with the social and political commentary that surfaced in their late '60s work. The Stones would continue to touch upon social issues into the '80s, but Goats Head Soup feels like the final album that really reflects the rebellious spirit of the '60s and the fallout of the early '70s.

The more I sit with it, the more I'm convinced that Goats Head Soup isn't just a good album, it's one of the Stones' best albums. Sure, the tone is darker, but the Stones were at their best when there was a palpable sense of anger and irreverence in their work. It's almost hard to remember that the Stones refused to smile in their press photos until the cusp of the '80s. We're so used to seeing an older Mick and Keith hamming it up for the camera that we forgot how sinister they were in their younger years.

And here's what I really love about the Stones: it's hard to love everything they did, but the larger arc of the Stones is so compelling that even the missteps become interesting. We know the Stones started to suck at some point. But when? And why? And did they ever really completely lose the plot or did they just age out of their relevance to young people? Did the debate between Mick and Keith regarding whether to evolve with the times as opposed to remaining true to their roots just mean that sometimes the pendulum swung in a less-desirable direction? Am I going to start trying to convince people that Undercover and Dirty Work are actually good records?

Maybe what made the Stones so great is that they were so visibly flawed. They made mistakes, both in life and art. And to love part of the Stones' catalog is to always remain curious about the maligned work in their discography. And to remain curious means you occasionally get to reassess an album and fall in love with it.

[bubblesandgutz]

Looks like I was trying to hide my face, but I was really just wiping the sweat off my brow.

[bubblesandgutz]

I’m going to Chicago to see Thou in a couple months. What’s the best Chicago record store for heavy stuff?

Hey!

Strangely enough, despite spending a lot of time there every year, I haven’t done much record shopping in Chicago. That said, I picked up the Life’s Blood and Neanderthal reissues at Reckless Records a few years ago. And I’ve heard good things about Bucket O’ Blood but have never actually been to it.

I’m kinda embarrassed that I play in a heavy band based out of Chicago and can’t be a better resource for record store info!

[bubblesandgutz]

I think I remember you saying a while back that Necrophones was the only Lungfish LP you didn't have. If you didn't know, Dischord just did a repress

https://dischord.com/release/119/necrophones

You’re a peach for making sure I knew about the repress! Bless yr heart.

A friend made sure to alert me when Dischord first posted about it on socials so I ordered that shit right away. Haha!

Thanks for looking out!

[bubblesandgutz]

Every Record I Own - Day 856: Steve Miller Band The Joker

Yeah, I can spend all day talking about my collection of Japanese noise albums, krautrock obscurities, and tour-only crust punk releases, but in many ways I'm a total normie. I collect Starbucks city mugs. I watch HGTV shows. And, perhaps most incriminating of all, I love "The Joker."

I'm not gonna apologize for it. "The Joker" is a heaping dose of serotonin as far as I'm concerned. Every time I hear it, I'm transported to my summer college job painting campus houses. It remains one of my favorite jobs I've ever had. Zero stress. Fun coworkers. Extremely chill boss. We got to go through all these student houses and scavenge things they'd left behind in the rush to move out at the end of the school year. We listened to college rock radio all day, took long lunches and frequent naps. "The Joker"---as much a classic rock radio staple in 1997 as it is in 2025---embodies the relentlessly casual, sunny, and upbeat vibe of that summer.

Look, I know it's a ridiculous song. The dumb "wah--WAAahh" on guitar. The saccharine "lovey dovey" verse. The nonce word "pompatus."

But you know what? I don't care. Its absurdity is part of its charm. He's a space cowboy. A midnight toker. A sinner. There's just enough irreverence and subversiveness sprinkled throughout the lyrics to make it a study in contrasts. He's a bad boy, even if the song itself is about as chipper as a pop song can be.

The rest of the album? Also great. Definitely worth the buck I spent on it.

[bubblesandgutz]

[bubblesandgutz]

Any Matȟó Thípila / Bear Lodge photo is an instant repost.

Devils Tower is a butte located near the Belle Fourche River, Wyoming, USA - Author: DewdropPixies

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Every Record I Own - Day 855: Sense Field Killed For Less

Revelation Records went through a weird period in the mid '90s. They went from being the titans of straight edge hardcore in the late '80s to operating one of the leading catalogs of post-hardcore in the early '90s to... well... whatever this era was.

Like most bands on the Rev roster, Sense Field had a hardcore pedigree. Vocalist Jon Bunch, guitarist Chris Evenson, and bassist John Stockberger had all been in the melodic hardcore outfit Reason to Believe. But Sense Field was hardly a hardcore band. Like fellow Rev artists Whirlpool and Shades Apart, Sense Field had more in common with the alternative rock you'd hear on corporate owned FM radio stations in the wake of the grunge explosion than the youth crew styles of Youth of Today or the heavy post-hardcore of Quicksand or Orange 9mm.

As a general rule, radio-friendly alternative rock was not my bag in 1994. I was at the peak of my hardcore elitism, and I only gave Sense Field a chance because someone gave me Killed For Less on CD. I figured Revelation had some general sense of taste even if I was growing increasingly leery of their new signees, so I approached it with an open mind.

Killed For Less quickly won me over, even if its slick recording and clean singing was at odds with my tastes at the time. Here's the thing: the songwriting on Killed For Less is great. The instrumentation is more clever than your average alt-rock band from the early '90s. The musicianship never feels like showboating, but there's enough musical aptitude that the songs have some actual dimension and nuance. And while this style of music generally sounds like either the band wrote some riffs and the singer is trying to find a melody to go on top of it OR like the singer came to the table with a vocal melody and the band is trying to find something more interesting than just barre chords to play underneath it, Sense Field has that interesting balance where both the vocals and the instrumentation seem like focal points. Whereas you can generally listen to alt-rock of the early '90s and easily ascertain which member of the band came to the table with the song idea, Sense Field's songs seemed so carefully developed and nuanced that there was no trace of their origin.

I played my Killed For Less CD until it got scratched and became unplayable. I got another CD of it and carried that around for a couple of decades until it disappeared in a move. And then I finally ordered this used purple vinyl version for $8 off of Discogs a few years back. Now it goes for $150. So apparently I'm not the only weirdo out there that keeps coming back to this gem of an album.

[bubblesandgutz]

Imagine the dystopian scene: You live in a world where the 810 cab was never invented, and you can only have one 410 cab on stage. The gods have been kind and have allowed a rotating pool of three choices. What are you going for?

I honestly haven't had enough experience trying out other cabs to have a good answer to this, so I'd probably just use an Ampeg 410 or a couple of Darkglass 210s since I've played on 'em before and know what they generally sound like.

[bubblesandgutz]

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RIP Sly Stone

[bubblesandgutz]

Nitzer Ebb

Industrial band running from something was a definite motif in the late 80′s early 90′s

[bubblesandgutz]

"ICE not welcome in the central district"

Posters seen in Seattle

[bubblesandgutz]

Every Record I Own - Day 854: Seaweed Weak

Sometime in early 1992, MTV ran a short feature on the Pacific Northwest music scene, including a brief segment on this band called Seaweed from Tacoma. They stood out from all the grunge bands in the feature as they had some obvious hardcore leanings in their sound, style, and philosophy. I made a mental note and bought their Weak CD at a record shop in downtown Honolulu a few weeks later. They weren't as heavy as Soundgarden or as catchy as Nirvana, but they had an obvious affinity for the Discord Records sound of the mid-to-late '80s, and that was enough for me to be a fan.

A couple of months later my dad got assigned to Fort Lewis, WA, just south of Tacoma, WA. It was the summer before my sophomore year of high school. Coincidentally, my older brother was going to college in Tacoma at the time, and a few weeks after we arrived on the mainland, he invited me to see Seaweed at the historic Temple Theater in downtown Tacoma. The full line-up was Seaweed, My Name, Flop, and Sage---a very stacked bill if you knew anything about all ages shows in the Puget Sound area at the time, but a pretty nondescript bill for the rest of the world.

The Temple Theater holds 1600 people, and my memory of the night is that it was a packed house. It was a rare all ages show in the Puget Sound area headlined by a hometown band that was riding the grunge wave, and it was happening in a seated venue. Consequently, by the time My Name played, the first three rows of seats had been ripped out of the floor by patrons to make room for a mosh pit. Before Seaweed's set, the promoter came out on stage and pleaded for the crowd to respect the venue so they could continue having shows in the future. He was booed off stage.

And then Seaweed went on and the crowd erupted. It would be nearly a decade before the Temple Theater hosted another show.

My first year on the mainland was tough, but I was stoked to live somewhere that a band like Seaweed called home. I liked that they had hardcore energy with an introspective lyrical depth. I liked that they only played all ages shows. I liked that they seemed like ordinary people. Their subsequent albums Four and Spanaway were even better than Weak. The melodies were stronger; the riffs were smarter; the production had more punch. And consequently, Weak slid out of rotation and I'd get my Seaweed fix from their later records.

But this LP arrived in the mail yesterday after trading some 7"s with a friend, and it gave me the opportunity to revisit this gem from my adolescence for the first time in several decades. And while, yeah, Four and Spanaway are my favorites, Weak is still a solid album. It just leans way more into the melodic hardcore aspect of their sound. The songs seem more focused on live energy and momentum than vocal hooks and polished production.

I can understand why vocalist Aaron Stauffer ranks this one below their later records, but there are earnest, youthful, anxious, and forlorn elements unique to Weak that resonated with me at 15 that still translate 32 years later. Stoked to have this one back in rotation.

[bubblesandgutz]

Went for a quick dunk on our hike yesterday.

[bubblesandgutz]

Every Record I Own - Day 853: Jesu Silver

I was on week five of a Russian Circles tour last fall and had been hearing the title track off this record on a nightly basis as it's on a playlist we play over the PA once doors at the club open. I've had Silver on CD since it came out back in 2006, and here I was 18 years later, still hearing it on a regular basis and enjoying it every time. So I ordered a vinyl version of the EP off of Discogs.

"Silver" is easily my favorite Jesu track in their extensive catalog. It contains a lot of the project's signature components: lurching mechanized beats, layers of dense guitar, buried atmospheric vocals, morose melodies, etc.. Yet there is a grandiosity achieved on "Silver" that is unparalleled by anything else in their discography. Every time the 4:33 mark hits I get goosebumps.

The song's chorus, "silver's just another gold / when you're bitter and you're old," only reinforces its power. Is it a lamentation on aging? Or is it commentary on our culture's obsession with youth? Or is the song about failing to meet expectations?

I reckon it's a little bit of all of the above. I always thought the song was a push back against the notion of fading into irrelevance, whether that fade was due to aging or to other's ambivalence. But as far as I'm concerned, Silver still carries all the emotional weight it did upon its initial release eighteen years ago.