On Desert Island Albums, Pt. 3

If you were forced to live on a desert island with only a record/CD player, what albums would you take with you? I've played this game a hundred times, both online and IRL. I think I have my list pretty well figured out at this point, but since we've got a whole year together on this here blog, I figure this will give me a little more space to explain my picks.


It sure sounds like the Foo Fighters are going away for a while. Dave Grohl has hinted at this already, but anytime you post something like this on Facebook...

Official band announcement tomorrow night. Stay tuned.
Posted by Foo Fighters on Tuesday, March 1, 2016

...you're going to send people in an awful tizzy. (As of the start of this writing, that official announcement has yet to be made. Maybe they're waiting until 11:59, or maybe it's the West Coast thing, or maybe they're still figuring out what to announce. "It is with heavy hearts that we say goodbye...to BORING BAGELS, thanks to our brand-new 'Pat Schmear Bagel Spreads!' Ready to ROCK your breakfast, now in the band store...")

If the Foos do take a couple years off, it wouldn't be the first time; after touring for Echoes, Silence, Patience, and Grace and releasing a greatest hits compilation, the band announced an "indefinite hiatus" in 2009. Grohl banged around in Them Crooked Vultures, drummer Taylor Hawkins started Taylor Hawkins and the Coattail Riders, and the rest of the guys did...well, whatever it is they did. But the quintet was right back at it in 2011 with Wasting Light, my favorite Foo Fighters album.

Yes, The Colour and the Shape is their classic with three of their seminal tunes. Yes, their eponymous debut is the purist's choice. No, there probably isn't one individual track on Wasting Light that I'd put in the top 5 Foo Fighters songs of all time. So overall, this doesn't sound like a good pick by me. I know.

But dammit, I just like this album a lot. Front to back, there isn't a single bad song on it. It grabs hold with "Bridges Burning" and "Rope" and doesn't let you go from the wild ride until "I Should Have Known" and "Walk" finally release you. It's the best rock album the band has made, bar none.

Every song is Foo Fighters to the core, but with individual flashes and flares of other bands and styles. Fresh off his side project with old pal Josh Homme, Grohl howls through "White Limo" like Nick Oliveri used to in early Queens of the Stone Age days. The verses in "Dear Rosemary" dance/shuffle along like Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers. There's even something Beatles-esque about the melancholy "I Should Have Known."

And yet, "Walk" and "These Days" are quintessential Foo Fighters tunes - they could have written them in their sleep, and yet they're so damn good, the perfect combination of . The album was supposedly recorded in Grohl's garage, but Dave Grohl's garage is not like my garage or your garage. It's the Taj Mahal of rock garages. The album is well-produced, with guitars buzzing and shimmering when needed, and the whole effort has that professional snap you get after nearly 20 years of playing together.

If this next Foo Fighters hiatus yields anything close to what Wasting Light did, then dammit, bring on a hiatus.

(UPDATE: By the conclusion of this writing, the "official announcement" came out, and...well, alright, good show, guys)

On Desert Island Albums, Pt. 2

If you were forced to live on a desert island with only a record/CD player, what albums would you take with you? I've played this game a hundred times, both online and IRL. I think I have my list pretty well figured out at this point, but since we've got a whole year together on this here blog, I figure this will give me a little more space to explain my picks.

Coheed and Cambria put out a new album in October, The Color Before the Sun. It was the band's first album set in "reality," which was a change of pace from the previous seven that took place in Heaven's Fence, the setting of Claudio Sanchez's epic (or overblown, depending on your perspective) story called The Amory Wars. Not that there wasn't a touch of reality in each of Coheed's conceptual records, but it was obscured ever so slightly by grand tales of space combat and the love shared between two androids whose son is destined to save the universe.

I've gone deep on Coheed and Cambria before and could easily do it a dozen times over, but that's not the purpose of this post. The purpose is to explain why I'd bring certain albums with me on a desert island, and the reason I'm bringing Good Apollo, I'm Burning Star IV, Volume 1: From Fear Through the Eyes of Madness (*takes deep breath*) is because of all Coheed and Cambria albums, this is the most Coheed and Cambria album.

Prior to Good Apollo I, one of the coolest things Coheed and Cambria did well was create huge-sounding records without a whole lot of extra atmosphere or background effects. The combination of Sanchez's high vocal register  and the band's impressive musical dexterity created the expansive universe they aimed for - all with the added mystery of whatever story could be interpreted from Sanchez's cryptic yet relatable emo poetry. When you can just add a whole bunch of guitar reverb and soaring vocal harmonies, who needs a whole bunch of synths and strings?

Hey wow cool, check out those synths and strings! And the OVERDRIVE!

C&C probably started overdoing it with the keyboards and effects and such on the two albums that followed this one (Good Apollo II: No World for Tomorrow and Year of the Black Rainbow), but on Good Apollo I, they hit the sweet spot of musicianship, production and songwriting. A string quartet opening gives way to a lovely, spare acoustic number, which in turn leads into...well...this. Nobody is going to confuse "Welcome Home" with a stripped-down, raw piece of garage rock, but it's also not overcrowded with stuff as it churns ahead in all its grandeur.

That trend continues throughout this musically diverse track list. "Ten Speed (Of God's Blood and Burial)" creates tension through its winding guitar riffs and powerful chorus. Same for "Apollo I: The Writing Writer," which opens with an eerie synth-and-keys soundscape but mostly thrives on its knotty interplay between the guitars and rhythm section. "The Suffering" is a classic Coheed pop song with better production, as is the quintessential emo love ballad "Wake Up." The whole of the Willing Well suite is 28 minutes of excellent guitar work, catchy vocal stretches, creative drumming, and well-placed electronic flourishes, concluding in a desolate-sounding number that sounds like an apocalyptic Pink Floyd.

You have to be willing to take some steps backward in maturity to enjoy Coheed and Cambria, in particular this album. You're about to absorb a mass of music that sets the stage for the third chapter in an unabashedly geeky space opera that, essentially, is about the lead singer getting dumped. If you can accept this, or choose to ignore it, you'll be rewarded in spades with a fantastic set of songs that is all over the musical map, and one of the best guitar albums of the new millennium.

On Desert Island Albums, Pt. 1

If you were forced to live on a desert island with only a record/CD player, what albums would you take with you? I've played this game a hundred times, both online and IRL. I think I have my list pretty well figured out at this point, but since we've got a whole year together on this here blog, I figure this will give me a little more space to explain my picks.

1. I Get Wet - Andrew W.K.

I'm not putting this first because it's my favorite album of all time. I'm doing it because I forget about it sometimes, and I refuse to do that this time, because I Get Wet is far and away the most fun album I've ever heard.

This is the first CD I bought that didn't include the words "Now" or "Radio Disney" in the title. I heard "Party Hard" on Madden 2003; after playing the game hundreds of hours and allowing AWK's pure adrenaline rush to bludgeon me for months, I finally made the leap: I asked my mom to take me to Target to buy it.

In the decade and a half since I Get Wet's release, Andrew W.K. has proven to be a far more eccentric and interesting fellow than the brain-dead self-wounding party animal that appears on his debut album's cover. But public persona aside, AWK's musical philosophy is much the same as his life philosophy: do what you want, live your life, and love pretty much everything. 

He's a purer, goofier, less nuanced version of a stereotypical hippie, and his unrelenting positivity is all over I Get Wet. Even "Ready to Die," with its chorus of "You'd better get ready to die/You'd better get ready to kill/You'd better get ready to run/'Cause here we come," blazes ahead as if our untimely demise was just another part of the all-night rager - which, given that cover photo, it very well could be.

I have listened to this album countless times and am 99 percent certain that not a single minor chord is played at any point. Maybe that was a conscious decision, but if it was, it's the most subtle artistic decision made on I Get Wet. There isn't a whole lot of room for subtlety on an album with eleventy billion guitar tracks stacked to the heavens and an army of party gremlins shouting along to every chorus. From the rocket-fueled opener "It's Time to Party" all the way through the closing anthem "Don't Stop Living in the Red" (although to be fair, pretty much every song on I Get Wet is designed to be an anthem) each note is an adrenaline rush coated in sugar, dipped in a 5-Hour Energy, and finished with a splash of 4 Lokos.

Like any candy high, too much of I Get Wet and you might get a headache. But for a half hour at a time, nothing will change your mood for the better/wilder the way I Get Wet will. And if I'm going to be stuck on a desert island for an infinite length of time, that's something I'm certainly going to need.