alice donut

Now I have loved these guys for a long time. I have a good chunk of their discography, so I'll break it down for you by album.

revenge fantasies of the impotent is probably my favorite. Besides being great classic west coast newschool punk, they have an incredible horn section. This album also has the trademark talking-over-crazy-riffs type of trak on it, lisa's father, which was funny the first time I heard it and CONTINUES to be funny, even til today! Unlike some other alternative tentacle artists...ahem, jello.

bucketfulls of sickness and horror is the other album I'd highly recommend. This one is a bit cleaner, since they apparently got tighter at some point. It also has some of their stronger music on it.

Unless you are a fan of live albums, in which case theirs is great, these are the only two alice donut albums you'll ever need. the rest are a bit overproduced, and I like my punk rock rough.

alec empire

The album I have is called Intelligence and Sacrifice. I know he's supposed to be a very iconic sort of guy, but somehow this just sits wrong. Maybe I'm jaded from being a big tchkung fan for so long but whenever someone makes some kind of "statement" without any humor to it I get bored pretty quickly- no matter how nice the music is.

That said, this IS very hard music. It's fast, crunchy, and lives up to all the love I felt back in the day for atari teenage riot. Except that it's just him with the vocals- and his voice cuts like a cheese grater after a while.

In a random mix, or in the shuffle setting, this album is awesome, but on its own it's a big horse pill and hard to get all the way down.

acid mothers temple

This band is the kind of music I imagine my mother hearing as a soundtrack to her acid flashbacks. They shift from some kind of wild japanese thrash frenzy back to slowly tinkling river noises; they swoop out into space and make some kind of weird jazz rock; they chant and bang on stuff.

If you like any kind of psychedelic music or even old 60's acid rock you'd probably find at least one track to like here. But if you like structure in your sounds you may want to steer clear.

They're pretty much the happy, japanese version of fantomas. I really like "No more red nightmare"; the album troubadours doesn't seem as good. but I also really ebjoy about the first half of Have you seen the other side of the sky?, which has more of the loopy kind of sounds. If you do something like tattooing, painting, or creating things for a job, that last album makes excellent work music-just enough to make you think but not enough to have to pay attention to.

alamaailman vasarat

aside from the incredibly hard-to-spell and -pronounce name, these guys are great. Sometimes hard and fast, sometimes mellow and soft...they've got what sounds like some kind of turkish brass band mixed with a dance funk section...amazing. amazing. If you liked the hawka and a hacksaw I was talking about earlier you'll probably like these guys. Their softer stuff sounds like a good film soundtrack.

I have two of their albums, both of which are impossible to remember the spelling of.

accompong maroons

call-and-response african drumming group. It's pretty good background music for gardening, but by itself it is just not as lush or exciting as I like to listen to when the music is the focal point.

It would be good background music for any housekeeping task, I imagine.

abruptum

I belive this is actually black metal that I like, for a change. Most of the black metal I hear sounds like some fairy nonsense with a guy whining...or some kind of bad soundtrack. But this is good, because it has a very gruff cookie monster voice, and it also is juuuust heavy enough to actually be hard at times instead of flowy.

It's probably not quite firmly in doom, black, or death metal genres, but seems to bridge the gap.

The recording quality on evil genius is a bit bad, but that might be my copy of it and not the album itself. I would include this in any death metal listening session, but probably not listen to it just for itself.

a silver mt. zion

This band is so gorgeous. Very sparse at times: they sound almost like the kind of classical music that I make in my nightmares. They are vaguely related to godspeed you black emperor in my memory but I am not sure how.

At any rate, the instrumentation is very odd. They use what sound like found sounds, strange electronic devices, as well as cello/viola and drums. Really really beautiful music, the album I have, born into trouble is gentle enough at the end to fall asleep to, after having sex to the stronger, more intense bits. And there is also no vocals that I can discern, just instrumental sound.

a hawk and a hacksaw

a hawk and a hacksaw

These guys were constant on my ipod til I wore them out! Accordion or concertina or something, loads of weird eastern european folk melodies re-arranged, and some fast songs. I guess they are like folk-rock technically, but they sound better than that would imply. The self-titled album has more variety than darkness at noon, but I also really like delivery room.

the A'z

The A'z

hyphy. It's some new kind of rap/hiphop that's being made into a genre just for tis lyrics. But all this hyphy shit also has a very raunchy sound to it too, so it is actually a genre beyond the lyrical content. I like thius band because they have less repetitive chorusses than most, and the vocal harmonies add a hell of a lot to the sound.

7 seconds

7 seconds

If you have never listened to these guys you probably will never understand half of my jokes about hippies. The time and place where I came of age was a very strange zone indeed. The straightedge scene was fairly new, peace punks and unity in the scene were big deals back then. Bigger than now and everyone got very excited and enthusiastic to scream "whoa whoa whoa" for a good cause. We even got into fights about this stuff, real fights that the riot cops had to come and break up because so many people jumped in. 7 seconds was one of the first bands I ever saw live.
Later on I got to meet and be friendly with Kevin Seconds, who is a really cool guy and has great taste (he loves the wrestler Mankind, and likes to read the op-ed section with his lady Allyson over coffee on sunday mornings.) They have a new band but it's too pop-punk for me at this time in my life- the older I get the more I wanna hear anger and the less hopeful I am. Take a listen to "here's your warning" or "fuck your amerika" to get a taste for this band.

45 grave

45 grave

Butt metal at its finest. I know they're technically "horror metal" whatever the fuck that is, because they like to sing about zombies and crap ... but honestly I think sound determines genre much more than subject matter of the lyrics. If you've ever seen the movie return of the living dead then you have heard one of their songs, "party time". The rest is about like that- some even better. They have a little plasmatics feeling to them too, with the nice interludes of the chick talking and screaming too. Very great butt metal.

2.5 children

2.5 children

one of my old favorite punk bands. This guy dogfood dennnis I knew way back in the day is in this band. Their recordings may be hard to find but they're pretty good- standard east coast diy anarchy punkers. Really good sounds, dirty recording quality on everything, and you can actually hear what they're saying sometimes. If you like old "new school" punk (like early 90s) you'd love these guys.

16 hp

16 horsepower

These guys are hit or miss for me. Some of their stuff has that loose, raw sound that I like in my folk/bluegrass/country (? did I just say I liked country? because honestly, I don't.) but a few of their albums are too slick or overproduced to make me happy.
I like the rough edges on folklore and low estate but sackcloth n ashes and secret south are just too clean for my taste. If you're gonna fiddle, make it scary how rough it is.

1349

1349

Oh my freaking shit. Nice and hard. It's a bit rough around the edges, as if they are still getting used to recording (I could be very wrong about whether or not this is intentional) but if you like the heaviest fastest scream metal then this will do it for you. Not as structured as maybe arch enemy, but still really fucking good.

chk chk chk

!!!

This band is great. I am an old punk rocker, from the before times. Therefore I was very cautious of the rave scene, dancing dayglo crap that was around a while back- who wants peace and harmony and fucking strangers on E when you could get in a pit and fight bare-chested macho hardcore guys instead?


I've found !!! to be a good happy medium for me. I hate dancing but their shows make me break a sweat every time. And they have the right sensibility to keep me from feeling all stupid about it. They are also friends of a good friend of mine, from back when they did punk music.

It's very upbeat stuff; but it is also intelligent. A good combination.