Hey, it's another Shimmy-Disc release! Apparently I have this unconscious attraction to their catalog. When People Were Shorter and Lived Near the Water is one of those bands whose name I've noticed (how could you not?) and admired for decades, but I don't believe I've ever heard them until just no…
Leave it to the musical pranksters at Shimmy Disc (Review Revue all-stars, to say the least) to release a tribute compilation to a joke band. The Rutles (note the pronunciation lesson below) were a Beatles-mocking vehicle created in the '70s by Monty Python's Eric Idle and Neil Innes, which ended u…
Obviously, my parents did way too good of a job raising me, as I have pretty much no familiarity with the woman who, according to the Internet, was "widely considered the most controversial and radical female singer of her day" – Wendy O. Williams' day being more or less the first twelve years of m…
It's always a good time to celebrate Lucinda Williams, but now is an even better time than usual: She just released a new album, Down Where the Spirit Meets the Bone, which seems to be universally adored and is currently in rotation here at KEXP (she's still got her spot in M). This album has a loc…
Cambridge's WMBR, in addition to being key to the development of my musical tastes in general, is a big part of my fascination with these old records and what a bunch of college DJs thought of them. There was (and I'm sure still is) a lot to love about the station, but Pipeline!, their weekly local…
I know I've tried to think of a name for this phenomenon before – maybe even on this very blog – but what do you call a super group in reverse; i.e., a relatively obscure and unsuccessful band whose members go on to achieve great things? How about a pour grepus? (Think about it.)
There's a lot to unpack here. There's the fact that despite my teenaged fondness for Black Flag, Rollins Band, and Pigface, I completely missed the existence of this project produced by Mr. Rollins, a key member of the first two bands, and Andrew Weiss, a key member of the latter two. There's the u…
I used to have a regular gig reviewing album covers, so I can say with some confidence that D.O.A.'s fourth album possesses one of the greatest album covers ever printed. Look how terrified those rich jerks are, and how the crazy punkers are blowing their minds and smashing their dinners, while sim…
In 2018, KEXP celebrated the 30th anniversary of local record label Sub Pop with a four-month retrospective, "counting up" every catalog number in their vast discography of over 1,200 releases. Dig into the archives of our catalog coverage, featuring in-depth coverage on the history of their releases.
