Jane’s Addiction – Ritual de lo Habitual (1990) This album breaks my heart now; it feels so much like a path not taken. The popular nineties narrative is that Nirvana changed everything, but for those of us who were there, … Continue reading Album Spotlight: Jane’s Addiction, Ritual de lo Habitual (1990)
Zen Surrealism. Continue reading Song Spotlight: Pixies, “Daniel Boone”
NameThatBandCeption! Continue reading Name That Band! (By That OTHER Band)
Abandon all notions of sonic clarity, ye who enter here. Continue reading Scene Spotlight: Lo-Fi
Gaze long into a shoe, and the shoe also gazes into you. May be embed-heavy, for mobile browsers. Continue reading Scene Spotlight: Shoegaze (Part 3)
WARNING: Embed-heavy. Mobile browsers proceed with caution. And don’t you want good headphones or speakers anyway? Continue reading Scene Spotlight: Shoegaze (Part 2)
WARNING: EMBED-HEAVY. May drag a mobile browser down.
Also, just plain HEAVY, man. Continue reading Scene Spotlight: Shoegaze (Part 1)
Launchpad graciously said I could post to this column a while back, and today is the day he may come to regret that generosity. I stumbled on A Faulty Chromosome back in the heyday of the MP3 blog. Every few … Continue reading Lo-Fi Hi-Fives: A Faulty Chromosome
Y’all know I have a soft spot for electro. What IS electro? Well, let’s just sample wikipedia and find out: Classic (1980s) electro drum patterns tend to be electronic emulations of breakbeats, with a syncopated kick drum, and usually a … Continue reading Scene Spotlight: Electro
NOTE: As of last week, the Main Room schedule is no longer posted on the Room’s Info tab itself; rather, a link in that Info tab takes you to a Google doc that houses the schedule. That way, you all … Continue reading The Return of the Son of Dubtrack
WARNING: If you are easily offended by juvenile innuendo, or are overly-vexed by musical and cultural miscegenation and questions of “authenticity”, click away now. But if you’ve ever wondered what it would be like to hear a cross between Bob … Continue reading Artist Spotlight: Judge Dread
They are not coming back. Sooner or later, anyone who’s been through a relationship’s end must come to grips with that simple fact. Electronic was a generically-named supergroup comprised of Bernard Sumner (Joy Division/New Order) and Johnny Marr (The Smiths, … Continue reading Song Spotlight: Breakup Songs
The Go-Betweens’ “Cattle and Cane” is an atmospheric reverie composed on a comatose Nick Cave’s guitar and filled with fragments of evocative imagery (I really like “his father’s watch, he left it in the showers”) from songwriter Grant McLennan’s youth … Continue reading Song Spotlight: Go-Betweens, “Cattle and Cane”
The Beastie Boys’ landmark sophomore album Paul’s Boutique is a bit hard for me to write about. It is a dizzying album that I’ve lived with for so long, yet I still feel like I have yet to unlock all … Continue reading Album Spotlight: Beastie Boys – Paul’s Boutique
Now that I have your attention: it’s not that much drama. Not usually, anyway. However, we did have a user delete their WordPress account, which appears to have deleted the only Dubtrack-related post here on the new Avocado, so this … Continue reading Dubtrack Drama!
I like noise. I like big-ass vicious noise that makes my head spin. I wanna feel it whipping through me like a f*cking jolt. We’re so dilapidated and crushed by our pathetic existence we need it like a fix. – … Continue reading Album Spotlight: The Jesus and Mary Chain – Psychocandy (1985)
The debut album by one-half of the Spacemen 3 songwriters (Jason Pierce, AKA J Spaceman), Lazer Guided Melodies continues and deepens his old band’s investigations into contemplative, despairing, or ecstatic states. As with their forbears in the Velvet Underground, those … Continue reading Album Spotlight: Spiritualized – Lazer Guided Melodies (1992 – 61 min.)
The Cure – Kiss Me, Kiss Me, Kiss Me The seventh studio LP by English rock band The Cure, and the one that broke them in the U.S. (reaching the Billboard top 40), 1987’s Kiss Me (x3) is a sprawling … Continue reading Album Spotlight: The Cure – Kiss Me, Kiss Me, Kiss Me (1987)
Welcome to this re-post of an Avocado Artist Spotlight on Chapel Hill guitar heroes Archers of Loaf: four guys who made rock music that was frequently full of off-kilter eccentricity, unbridled aggression (burly, arty garage-punk? Apocalyptic noise-pop?), and a strange, … Continue reading Artist Spotlight: Archers of Loaf
The Stone Roses (1989) were and are Ian Brown – lead vocals, percussion, bongos; John Squire – guitar, backing vocals; Reni (Alan Wren) – drums, percussion, backing vocals; Mani (Gary Mounfield) – bass guitar. Album produced by John Leckie. This … Continue reading Album Spotlight: The Stone Roses – The Stone Roses
“You can never give / the finger to the blind.” And with that bizarre, hilarious non-sequitur dryly delivered over a rubbery, wobbly slow-motion guitar riff, Luna took off. Luna was the successor to songwriter/guitarist Dean Wareham’s beloved cult band Galaxie … Continue reading Artist Spotlight: Luna
