Reviews - 6/20/09

The Have Mercy's - Great! - More great stuff from the Have Mercys this time in the form of a 4 song, green plastic cassette. A cassette...fucking beautiful. A couple of rockers and a couple of slower dirgy tunes and...and...oh shit, I am just far too distracted by the beauty of the packaging of this EP to even talk about the music. I mean, it's a cassette and it's green and, and, and the artwork is a drawing of a giraffe and sketches of the band members. And then the artwork has been xeroxed and presumably put into all the other tapes that they made.

Don't get me wrong, I very much dig the tunes. Go ahead and scroll down to a post from March about the Have Mercys. The opinions stated there pretty much apply to this release.

I guess the only complaint at this point would be to urge these cats to go ahead and put out a full-length. Preferably on a cassette. Fuckin' A! (www.myspace.com/havemercys)

Reviews - 6/3/09

Stella Peel - LP - (www.stellapeel.com) - Years ago there was a book written about the influential independent bands of the 80's and 90's. One of the chapters was about Big Black and therefore, basically about Steve Albini. We learned how he eschewed the title of "producer" when he recorded bands. When I first read this chapter at a younger, more impressionable, yet less-wise age, I thought it was this some super-cool stance where Mr. Albini refused to get too big for his britches and refused to take too much credit for the bands he worked with who are actually making the music.

And this is probably true.

However, as I get older and wiser (and more cynical) I feel that, without a doubt, the flipside of this stance is for the Stever to be able to freely wash his hands of the sub-par stuff that ultimately comes out of his studio.

Well, Albini recorded this group of tunes and sadly, I think this album falls into that latter, sub-par category. It's 10 or so tunes featuring a decent singer, a guy playing guitar and a drum machine. Not the worst songs you'll ever hear, but if you're using a drum machine, you REALLY have to know what you're doing. And even then, it's usually a recipe for shittydom.

At least in our opinion.