There were few guideposts for when I decided to “go punk” a few months after my mother’s death. It was a spur of the moment decision made during a fit of melancholy boredom and the need to regain control of my personal narrative. What remained of the scene barely generated any media heat, even among […]

Thanks to the current wave of reissues or general lack of interest in the older material that I’ve been seeking out, I’ve had pretty decent luck with assembling a library of favorite and personally significant albums that somehow escaped me in LP form. Even indie label oddities (such as King Missile’s early albums) or formerly […]

It’s time to ditch the chronological structure of this feature, which I had hoped to avoid from the beginning yet still managed to fall into in short order. The conceit served no practical purpose, except to ensure that the write-up of any given record would end up getting posted months after the initial flush of […]

In the spring of 1985, my mom and dad took us on a Sunday drive along the Mohawk Trail in western Massachusetts. The trip was one of many we took that year as a way of reestablishing ourselves as a nuclear family during one of the (all-too-brief) stretches where it seemed our home life might […]

The mid-Nineties were a boom time for promotional CD compilations. Unholy alliances between record labels and other commercial concerns were nothing new, but they did attain a distinctly plaintive quality during the generational marketing shift of the Alt-splosion Era. From the labels’ standpoint, these deals meant some easy licensing revenue and a passing chance at […]

After putting in a couple of years at UMass Boston, Lil Bro transferred to the Amherst campus because they had a far more robust earth sciences program than their coastal cousin offered. It was the first time we’d been separated since his birth (if you don’t count the month he spent living with my aunt […]

Music fandom has been a constant in my life since my pre-teen years but my love of individual artists has always been a fickle and fleeting thing in terms of their output. Loyalty to the creator is less important than love for to a specific song, album, or hot streak. The Clash and The Byrds […]

This week’s featured record is the third platter sent my way by my good pal (and occasional collaborator) Daniel Butler. After I complained about the asking prices of used vinyl, Daniel asked me to shoot him a wantlist to check against the inventory of the place where he worked. Most of my requests were the […]

When I started assembling my list of “essential” albums to seek out on vinyl, Lush’s Gala was one on the first entries I added to it. The 1990 debut (actually a compilation of singles and the Scar “mini-LP”) by the shoegaze scenesters possesses all the qualities I look for in a record — a consistently […]

Oh, sure, you claim to be a fan of Danfourg, but can you name any other songs he did besides “Mothreer?” I bet you didn’t even realize he was the frontman for horrorpunk legends The Misfivets, who recorded such classics as “Astro Zerombies” and “Last Careights.” They played their first shows at C8G8′s in NYC, […]