Somebody Likes It

This week, we spend some time getting to know chaos. Both in the body of The Yeah Yeah Yeahs Fever to Tell, and in Mark’s garage. Both an existential and recorded. But damn, sometimes I think you need to unravel a little bit so you can feel alive!

Courtney Barnett sure is blowing up these days, so of course we had to jump on board, ’cause you know us.

I got a text from Ryan a few days before I had listened to All The Right Reasons by Canadian powerhouse Nickleback. He informed me he was currently listening to “All The Right Reasons” by Nickleback, and it “wasn’t as bad” as he had expected it to be. So, going in, I was expecting something not as bad as I had feared. Well, let me tell you, I now consider Ryan to be a dirty liar and/or a masochistic sociopath.

Well, SXSW came and went, and all of were still of (relatively) sound mind and body, so we decided to congregate in Mark’s garage and do the show. This week we were joined by our good friend Marcus Rice and we graciously allowed him to choose this week’s album, Heaven or Las Vegas, The Cocteau Twins 1990 effort. A fine time was had by all and much spirited discussion ensued.

It occurred to me a little while back that all the rap albums we’ve talked about were all released before 1990. I thought maybe we should step up our game here, so I picked one that came out a few months ago Tetsuo and Youth by Lupe Fiasco.

The history of the world is full of brave heroes. Men and women that took on things that no one else would consider touching with a pole of any length. Well, I think you can add Kevin, Ryan, and Myself to that list. Who else would have had the huevos grande (that’s big balls for those monolinguals) to take on a critical discussion of Bob Dylan’s “Blood on the Tracks”?

This week at the show there’s a bit of a wrench thrown into the works. Namely, Chris (me, who’s writing this week’s text), one of your heroic leaders at OneOfUs.net. I’m a big fan of what these guys do at “Somebody Likes It“ and had been talking with Shane about coming on the show to talk an album up for some time now. And that some time…is now.

I realize that generally speaking the idea has been for the guys to listen to an album they weren’t overwhelmingly familiar with (if at all) that’s otherwise well known. I broke all the rules and brought in one of my favorite records, showing my age, the unexpected 1990 pop masterpiece by Sonic Youth, “Goo“.

For our album this week, Kevin picked “The Modern Lovers” 1976 Eponymous album. All I had known about The Modern Lovers prior to this listen was that Jonathan Richman was the main dude, and all I knew about Jonathan Richman prior to this listen was he was in that movie where Ben Stiller got his dick stuck in his zipper. But I’m sure glad I got the chance to listen to it.

I picked the record this week, and it’s “The Kinks are The Village Green Preservation Society” by…wait for it…The Kinks (wouldn’t it have been wonderful if I dropped in C and C Music Factory right there?). I love the British Invasion, I think the Beatles were the most confounding and amazing band ever, most of my all time favorite bands and records hail from The British Isles…but somehow the Kinks had mostly fallen off of my radar. And that’s not for lack of people nudging me toward them (looking at you Darin Murphy). Long story short, I finally understood all of the comparisons to Blur- Parklife I’ve heard over the years.

I want to start this out with a warning. We had some new developments in the garage this week that both unleashed Kevin from his production role, and encouraged his usage of “Dad Pun Humor”. While this show was extremely fun for us, I can’t really tell you that you will be free from some freewheeling “humor”, a lot of which involves old-dude 80’s sitcom “Newhart”. Which is such an obvious go-to seeing as how we are discussing RUN-DMC’s 1988 mixed bag of tricks “Tougher Than Leather”.