One of the hilarious consequences of the almost total abandonment of the CD format, smashed between the analog resurgence of vinyl and digital moving to streaming, is that CD’s you actually can actually find (neighborhood record stores usually have shelves of the bastards) and want to buy now cost about what you’d pay for them back in the day. Actually, more. I never paid more than $20 for a disc in the 90’s, and that was the ceiling, not the common price. I’ve seen them on the store for as much as $45. It’s nuts, until you reflect that the coming vinyl reissue will be $60 at minimum. Deindustrialization is a bitch.
In any case, what’s floating around my six-CD-changer is a combination of recent purchases and old favorites, and the common theme is pushing things to aesthetic extremes.
Queens of the Stone Age – Self-Titled
This came out in 1998, and only people who were plugged in knew about it. I didn’t hear about them until their third album, when everyone was calling them “stoner rock” or “desert metal”. I didn’t buy those labels then, and their subsequent history has proven me right. QOTSA is a post-grunge rock band, which means they can do whatever they want. This album, and Rated R that followed it, is Millennium party-punk, with tight riffs and cool songwriting. It’s great for this time of year.
Danger Doom – The Mouse and the Mask
If you’re not a Late Gen-Xer or Early Millennial who watched a lot of Adult Swim in the aughties, you will not the laugh at the funniest parts of this, which are various AS characters having delightfully bizarre freakouts, trying to rap and failing. But it’s fine, because MF Doom is able to push this format to amusing depths. He raps about AS Characters, and it becomes a study of Pop Culture and TV as we understood it, while Danger Mouse whirls old-timey samples for maximum impact. If this doesn’t appeal, well, you ain’t the demo.
Big Black – Pig Pile
Rare live album from the punk-industrial giants. Yes, punk-industrial, i.e., an acquired taste, aggressive and abrasive without being intricate enough to be metal. You throw this on after a Carly Simon album and it will hurt. It’s like getting into a cold pool: you step in easy, acclimate, dive in, and find it surprisingly refreshing.
Miles Davis – Bitches Brew
The most famous of Miles’ fusion-era albums, which doesn’t make it the best. Comparatively speaking, this one is bolder than In a Silent Way, less focused than A Tribute to Jack Johnson, less aggressively shocking than On the Corner, less miserable than Get Up With It, and more expansive than Big Fun. It’s a burst of creativity for its own sake, and you like it, but it won’t blow your mind unless you listen to it before the others.
Mastodon – Blood Mountain
Mastodon gets called “sludge-metal” by folk, which as a label is fine. Their real vibe, however, is mining the concept of myth for metal songs. Not any specific myth, mind, just ideas and themes. Their band name is perfect for what their doing, is my point. This one is far less sludgy than Leviathan (a Moby-Dick song cycle), containing lighter and melodic change-ups that wouldn’t be out of place on an early Black Sabbath record. I was surprised by how comfortable I was with it.
Bitches Brew is a 2-CD set, so that’s all we have going right now. I expect to right this well into the summer, when I expect I will revise my classic Summer Mix.
Content Blues 