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The Academy Is.....

on July 05, 2008

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.....typical radio emo punk. I didn't bother for long.

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Bob Mould - Black Sheets Of Rain

1990 1 keeper keeper avg .090 After his relatively folky, introspective solo debut "Workbook" (1989), Mould seems to deliberately 180, tail-spinning into a harsh, thick hard rock soup for most of the subsequent "Black Sheets Of Rain." The lumbering opening title song sets the tone, with a purposeful arpeggiated riff and dramatic cymbal crashes every couple measures. He picks up the tempo a little on the next two songs, "Stand Guard" and "It's Too Late"; the latter is as poppy as the album gets and was actually kind of a big college radio hit, though the intro copies ELO's "Do Ya" (1976) and he's had dozens of better songs before and since (it also resembles "If I Can't Change Your Mind" (1992)). "Hear Me Calling" and "Out of Your Life" are also relatively peppy and wouldn't be out of place randomly plopped on a Sugar album, especially his melodic lead guitar lines. But more than half of ...

Tom Waits - Real Gone

2004 3 keepers keeper avg .200 On his follow-up to the acclaimed "Blood Money" and "Alice" from 2002 Waits delivers his usual assortment of genre studies, including torch songs ("Green Grass"), Irish drinking songs (the atypically political "Day After Tomorrow"), muted cabaret ("How's It Gonna End" and the murder ballad "Dead and Lovely"), a menacing rockabilly ("Hoist That Rag"****) and blues ("Shake It", "Make It Rain", and "Baby Gonna Leave Me). While "Make it Rain" is relatively conventional, "Shake It" is transitioned to the slower passages by a distorted, inhuman scream, and "Baby Gonna Leave Me"**** is filled with noisy percussion, including curious distorted, clanking "belches." "Don't Go into That Barn"**** is rendered as a demonic work song, driven by guttural grunts and including this unsettling dialog suggesting a heinous ...

Lou Reed - The Blue Mask

1982 keepers-3 keeper avg .300 "My House" and "Women" are such a modest start I could see myself being asleep by the title track. "My House" does have a crunchy guitar coda, but both seem too literal and personal to be meaningful except for the die hard. Finally the band rips into "Underneath The Bottle"****, whose deliberate pace and ruefully humorous "ooh-wee, son of a b" chorus bear more than a small similarity to Warren Zevon. Creepy monologue "The Gun" follows, and the brutal crowning glory of the title song***** comes at the end of side 1, setting up whatever follows to pale by comparison. "Average Guy" also has the Warren Zevon aesthetic, though the only thing that isn't half-assed about it are Robert Quine's guitar accents; though ranging from screaming to subdued, his guitar work on The Blue Mask is sloppy and graceful at the same time, both traits heightened by the album's clean and dry ...

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WELCOME

Everyone has opinions - these are mine. If you have a suggestion of something I might enjoy, or if you would like to describe a cognitive difficulty I'm experiencing, any comment is welcome.

FORMAT:
I star all songs 1(*) to 5(*****)

Keepers are either **** or *****

Any information presented is the result of my foggy recollections or skimming Wikipedia. Feel free to fact-check.

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