Month: April 2016

MusicLeave a comment

College Countdown: CMJ Top 250 Songs, 1979 – 1989, 214 – 212

Dan Seeger

214. Modern English, “I Melt with You” After the Snow, the second album from Modern English, represented a very deliberate stab at creating big pop hits. The band’s debut full-length, Mesh & Lace, released one year earlier, was very much in the gloomy, agitated post-punk mode perfected by Joy Division. When it came time to follow it up, they wanted to do something markedly different. At the time, lead singer Robbie Grey explained, “We could have easily carried on with the Mesh & Lace formula. We could have played the barren landscape, the heavy drumming, distorted guitars, and wailing vocals game … Continue reading College Countdown: CMJ Top 250 Songs, 1979 – 1989, 214 – 212

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One for Friday: The Godfathers, “Birth, School, Work, Death (Live)”

Dan Seeger

There’s an interesting choice on Texas Chainsaw Massacre, the live album released by the U.K. band the Godfathers, in 1989. To the best of my knowledge, this full-length wasn’t issued for sale in record stores, at least not in the United States. Instead, I believe it was a promo-only release, largely targeted at college radio, Epic Records’ means of keeping the band in the minds and hearts of fickle student programmers, many of them already coming down from the energized highs of the group’s debut release, Birth, School, Work, Death. That album’s title cut served as the perfect angry anthem, after all, for … Continue reading One for Friday: The Godfathers, “Birth, School, Work, Death (Live)”

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The New Releases Shelf: Patch the Sky

Dan Seeger

On Silver Age, Bob Mould reclaimed his history after several years that could reasonably be characterized as messy (which doesn’t mean altogether bad, but his explorations sometimes verged on aimlessness). He followed that with Beauty & Ruin, expanding the scope of his productively nostalgic creativity to deliver music that sounded like every skipped stone ripple of his career gathered together to formulate something just new enough to turn heads anew. Now we come to Patch the Sky, which feels like the end of a trilogy. This time, Mould is settling into a comfortable mode, or as comfortable of a mode as his somewhat … Continue reading The New Releases Shelf: Patch the Sky

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My Writers: Kelly Sue DeConnick

Dan Seeger

  I possess no inside information about how Marvel Studios executives land on the characters that will move from the comic book page to the big screen, but I am totally convinced that there would be no Captain Marvel movie in the offing without Kelly Sue DeConnick. By the time it was announced that an adventure featuring the superheroic alter ego of Carol Danvers would be part of the Marvel Cinematic Universe’s Phase Three, DeConnick was well into her transformational run on a character who’d been around since the late nineteen-sixties and taken up a more significant role beginning around a decade later, when … Continue reading My Writers: Kelly Sue DeConnick

Everything Else1 Comment

Beers I Have Known: Pisgah Valdez

Dan Seeger

This series of posts is dedicated to the many, many six packs, pony kegs and pints that have sauntered into my life at one point or another. Trivia is pending. My annual excursion into pop culture minutiae and sleep-deprived revelry, primarily grounded in a reunion of my oldest and dearest friends, is a mere ten days away as I type this out. For the first time in fifteen years, I am not making arrangement to cross multiple states in order to get to the camp my team calls its temporary home. The muscle memory of my soul is thusly all … Continue reading Beers I Have Known: Pisgah Valdez

Everything Else, Television1 Comment

Laughing Matters: George Carlin, “The Planet is Fine”

Dan Seeger

Sometimes comedy illuminates hard truths with a pointed urgency that other means can’t quite achieve. Sometimes comedy is just funny. This series of posts is mostly about the former instances, but the latter is valuable, too. I was certain I had George Carlin all figured out. I’d been a fan since I was a little kid, when I’d do my best to blend into the furniture at adult parties I got dragged along to with the goal of listening along as the older attendees played Carlin’s comedy records. The mounting haziness and boisterous laughter of those adults thankfully prevented them from … Continue reading Laughing Matters: George Carlin, “The Planet is Fine”

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College Countdown: CMJ Top 250 Songs, 1979 – 1989, 217 – 215

Dan Seeger

217. New Order, “Love Vigilantes” “Love Vigilantes” was widely considered a significant departure for New Order and something of a statement of purpose, or at least against reflexive pigeonholing, when it notably led off the band’s 1985 album, Low-Life. Though there are familiar sonic signatures throughout the track, it is distinctively lean and even a touch twangy. More strikingly, the lyrics actually tell a story, which was rarely the case with the jagged merging of words and music on earlier New Order songs. According to Bernard Sumner, the song’s lineage begins with a U.K. tour undertaken with the Buzzcocks in the … Continue reading College Countdown: CMJ Top 250 Songs, 1979 – 1989, 217 – 215

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From the Archive: Death Warrant

Dan Seeger

Shortly after the debut of the radio show The Reel Thing, the film review program I co-hosted from 1990 to 1993, it felt like we were inundated with Jean-Claude Van Damme movies. We weren’t, but there were two within our first few months on the air. That felt like punishment enough. As a general rule, even the worst movies got one star on our four-star rating scale. If I dropped below that, I was really serious about how much I hated it. Deran Sarafian, the director of this film, went on to be a prolific, respectable television director. The screenplay is … Continue reading From the Archive: Death Warrant

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One for Friday: Close Lobsters, “My Days Are Numbered”

Dan Seeger

Continuing to draw inspiration from the recently posted autumn of 1989 90FM album chart, we turn to a band that was one my favorite discoveries upon landing at the college radio station. Close Lobsters hailed from Scotland and played a brand of punchy pop laced with tender paisley twinkling and brutal cynicism in roughly equal doses. In my late teens, nothing could have pleased me more. Headache Rhetoric, the band’s sophomore LP and final full-length release until a reunion some two decades later, landed in rotation during my first summer as a student broadcaster, and I gave it loving attention (though … Continue reading One for Friday: Close Lobsters, “My Days Are Numbered”