RIP David Bowie

The world after you is as hard to imagine as the world before you.

Top 30 Albums of 2015

30. Los Kowalski - Sputnik EP

29. Aphex Twin - Computer Controlled Acoustic Instruments Pt2 EP


28. Buick 6 - Plays Well with Others

26. Metric - Pagans in Vegas

25. Deerhunter - Fading Frontier

24. Dana Falconberry - The Lowering Night EP

23. Custard - Come Back, All is Forgiven

22. Chvrches - Every Open Eye

21. jennylee - Right On!

20. METZ - Metz II

19. Motherfucker - Confetti

18. My Morning Jacket - The Waterfall

17. Tame Impala - Currents

16. Wire - Wire

15. Low - Ones and Sixes

14. Death Grips - The Powers That B

13. Richard Thompson - Still

12. Alela Diane & Ryan Francesconi - Cold Moon

11. Erase Errata - Lost Weekend

10. No Joy - More Faithful

9. Battles - La Di Da Di

8. Lower Dens - Escape from Evil

7. Viet Cong - Viet Cong

6. Le Butcherettes - A Raw Youth

5. Julia Holter - Have You in My Wilderness

4. Spectres - Dying

3. Pond - Man It Feels Like Space Again

2. Torres - Sprinter

1. Lady Lamb - After

Related:

Lady Lamb - After

Motherfucker - Confetti

Custard - Come Back, All is Forgiven

Custard - Come Back, All is Forgiven

Custard didn't announce Come Back, All is Forgiven until it was recorded and a few months away from release, which was smart; enough time to adjust to the reality that 2015 will see a new Custard album, but not enough to build up unreasonable expectations.

The first thing that struck me about Come Back, All is Forgiven was how much like Custard it sounds like, which wasn't a given after 16 years away from the studio. It's an older Custard, obviously, and sounds like it. While the familiar wit lingers in the lyrics, a certain world weariness has crept in, while musically, a lot of the immediacy has been traded in for a more slow burning approach. It's a trade-off, but a worthwhile one. A younger Custard simply couldn't have conceived "We Are the Parents (Our Parents Warned Us About") and "Get In Your Car" among others. More than one song on Come Back, All is Forgiven addresses 90s nostalgia, but the album is far from an exercise in it.

Related:

Top 30 Albums of 2015

Kurt Cobain - Montage of Heck: The Home Recordings

If you have to ask yourself if you need this, you don't.  What was I supposed to do, not buy it? Not bloody likely.

For only two more dollars than the regular version would have cost me, I bought the deluxe edition - that's 31 tracks instead of 13. With 8 minutes of running time left, it's a wonder they didn't include a recording of Cobain scraping the bottom of a barrel with a guitar pick. It's natural to want a window into Cobain's mind - the global audience Nevermind gave him, whether he wanted it or not, had only two and a half years to get to know him, and many of his lyrics, even under the inevitable intense scrutiny following his death, remain oblique and elliptical. Home Recordings, however, is no magic cipher that will suddenly cast everything in a whole new light. It will not, as the fictitious Blaine DeBeers of iZombie claimed, fill gaps between Fecal Matter and Nirvana you didn't even know existed. While some of it is of academic interest, to claim to be able to draw a straight line between it and even Bleach would be like watching heretofore unseen footage of Jackson Pollock squeeze sauce onto a hotdog and claim the pattern to be a precursor to Blue Poles.

A good percentage of the tracks on Home Recordings are montages (duh) and monologues that don't bear repeated listens. "Aberdeen" is an anecdote about an abortive sexual encounter, one that Buzz Osbourne insists is spurious, along with most of the rest of the Montage of Heck documentary. Presented out of context, there's nothing to suggest it purports to be true. Little of the actual music is especially portentous either. The oft-released "Been a Son" gets yet another go-round in a version that makes the With the Lights Out recording sound polished and meticulous by comparison. Surprisingly, there's no version of "Polly", the most ubiquitous song in the Nirvana catalogue, to be had here, although there are plenty of four chord wonders that could have become a "Drain You" or "Smells Like Teen Spirit" had Cobain revisited them. There are a couple that did grow into something more substantial - the aforementioned "Been a Son" and a similarly inauspicious-sounding "Sappy". The With the Lights Out curio "Clean Up Before She Comes" appears here - a demo of a demo. Minus the pithy lyrics, harmonies and counter-melodies that form the song's hooks (I think there are four Cobains duking it out in there at one point in the better known version), it just doesn't connect. Some of the more abstract sketches might have had potential as well, such as "She Only Lies", which is just Cobain and a surprisingly clear-sounding bass. Perhaps the phone call that interrupted the dirgey "Burn the Rain" robbed us of a classic. One of the few songs I've revisited so far is the instrumental "The Happy Guitar". Known erroneously on bootlegs as "Black and White Blues" for years, it may be a tribute to Leadbelly, but it's closer to Lonnie Johnson, whose name you normally wouldn't associate with Cobain - therein lies the appeal.

I won't be the only one to quote that prescient line from "Aero Zeppelin" (from the genuinely valuable odds and ends collection Incesticide). "all the kids will eat it up if it's packaged properly". Just don't expect them to keep it down.

RIP Scott Weiland

RIP Scott Weiland

October 26 1967 - December 3 2015

Weiland with Stone Temple Pilots for MTV Unplugged in 1993

Motherfucker - Confetti

It would have been enough for Motherfucker to merely wake you from the pathetic stupor that most music seems determined to keep you in. Hell, if it was just good for a giggle because its name is a naughty word, that would have been better than nothing. Motherfucker's name is not an exercise in puerility or superficiality, however, but a portent of Confetti's unrelenting post-whatever-noise-rock-something-something - think the blunt assault of METZ delivered with the laser focus of Erase Errata. Confetti packs a lot into its 30 minutes, but has no time for moroseness, self-indulgence or half-assed bullshit.

Motherfucker on Bandcamp

Spotify Playlist: Blame Canada