Month: July 2018

Let’s Eat Grandma I’m All Ears Transgressive I love Let’s Eat Grandma’s name.  I love even more that Let’s Eat Grandma are two teenage girls.  First, the name.  It’s a comment on the importance of punctuation, noting the difference between ‘let’s eat Grandma,’ and ‘let’s eat, grandma.’  As an educator, I can tell you, I appreciate it when the younger generation gets it.  The two young women behind the band are Rosa Walton and Jenny Hollingworth.  Walton and Hollingworth are 19 now, and have known each other since kindergarten. Their first album, the absolutely bloody brilliant, I, Gemini, came out in 2016 and was close to the greatest thing in music that year.  It was deep and dark, and twisted.  It also prompted Walton and Hollingworth to purposefully cultivate a public image based on what music critics and journalists read into their music.  This just makes me like them even more. So, two years on, they come back at us withI’m All Ears.  My first go through of this album, I wasn’t all that impressed, I have to admit.  I was listening to teeny-bopper music. But, I went back.  I gave it another chance, which was a smart move.  I’m All Earsis both musically and lyrically more accessible than was I, Gemini.  It’s also more mature.  They note the mundanity of life, but they also challenge gender and femininity, particularly...

Container LP Spectrum Spools I’ve been digging on Container now for a few years, Ren Schofield, the man behind the name, makes some immediate, in-your-face, pounding electronic music. Schofield is from Providence, RI, but has spent a long time in Nashville, which makes me just like him more. Nashville has a burgeoning, exploding music scene, as anyone can tell you.  But Nashville’s music scene is more attuned to country and roots rock, not techno. There is, of course, a thriving scene in the city, but it’s underground.  Way underground. Schofield is getting clever with LP. This was also the title of his last release, in 2015.  It was brilliant, by the way.  Reviews of that album talked about moshpits and hard-rocking beats, like I was reading reviews of the Crystal Method c. 1997.  That does Schofield a disservice.  He is most certainly not the second coming of the Chrystal Method, nor even of the Chemical Brothers.  He is something else entirely. On 2018’s LP, he ratchets it back just a tiny bit.  There is more melody overtop of the fuzzed out, syncopated beats.  The distortion remains just as heavy.  On some tracks, though, like ‘Peppered,’ he even slows things down a bit to give us a bouncy, loopy and even trippy beat, over which the distorted noises skitter and dance.  But, for the most part, it is the same unrelenting battering. Container are...

From the Vaults: The Charlatans – Tellin’ Stories The Charlatans have long been one of my favourite bands, if not my outright favourite. Though they’re not from Manchester, they burst onto the scene with the Madchester Sound in the late 80s/early 90s, together with the Happy Mondays, the Stone Roses, Inspiral Carpets, and the like.  Unlike all those bands, which imploded/broke up/etc., the Charlies have kept on trucking for the past 30 years.  They recently celebrated their 30thanniversary in their hometown of Northwich, hosting the North By Northwich festival. This summer, I was living in an extremely rural area, no cell service, and about a 20 minute drive to find a signal.  The car is where I do my serious music listening; I usually just stream it. Not an option that far in the boondocks.  So I dug up a bunch of CDs and threw them in the car.  But the one that remained in the disc drive (my car model year was the last to have a disc drive) was the Charlatans’ 1997 album, Tellin’ Stories. This album is a moment in time for the band.  Founding member, keyboardist Rob Collins, died in a car accident whilst recording the album in Wales.  But it was also the band’s most successful album, hitting #1 in the charts in the UK and Ireland and yielding 3 Top-10 singles in the UK,...