And then every once in a while you find a record that garners unfettered adoration from seemingly all corners. Going through the comments on Savage Republic's 4th LP (please don't make me type the title again), I kept waiting for the other shoe to drop - for someone to cry "overrated" or "pretentio…
Writing these pieces often causes me to reflect on how lucky I am to have grown up in a town with multiple college radio stations playing obscure, often difficult, music. It didn't hurt that it was also a town that produced brilliant bands such as Mission of Burma, Morphine, and today's subject, Bi…
Guitar wizard/singer/songwriter Adrian Belew (remember him?) has popped up in the music news quite a bit lately, partly for things he is and will be doing, and partly for things he won't be doing. He plays all over the excellent new Nine Inch Nails album and was going to play guitar on the current …
Armand Schaubroeck has quite a back story, and as far as I can tell the best way to get the whole thing would be to listen to his debut album, this self-released triple-LP. (You might imagine he funded such a grandiose release with money stolen during the teenaged crime spree detailed on the album …
History seems to have mostly forgotten the London band Birdhouse - or The Birdhouse, depending on whom you consult - with references to their work turning up at baseline music information sites such as Allmusic and Discogs, but not much analysis or information beyond that. The only way I even found…
A little internet detective work, combined with reading between the lines in our DJs' comments, leads me to believe that this is not the first LP copy of Sandra Bernhard's double LP Without You I'm Nothing to grace the shelves at KCMU. There's no date on this record, but it was originally released …
It's hard to know where to begin with a legendary rabble-rouser like Jello Biafra (still rousing the rabble with his new band Guantanamo School of Medicine, whose White People and the Damage Done came out this year - actually, that band name and album title probably tell you a lot more about Jello …

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.