Music Recs Column 0002

RSM is insanely prolific, he probably has 1000+ songs going back 50 years & going into his discography is pretty daunting with a lot of his albums mixing great songs with weird jokey interludes & tape experiments. This is a good introduction to his music curated by Ariel Pink who honestly owes his whole sound to RSM, lofi but catchy & creative pop songs by a genius songwriter & maybe the pioneer in DIY music.

gloomy post punk that’s lyrically pretty depressing but hooks me in with how dreamy the guitars are & singer Craig Lorentson’s vocals, an interesting link between 80s post punk & what would become shoegaze.

i’ve been listening to a lot of old 80s EBM recently and this is maybe the only modern equivalent of that type of music i’ve found, some good ass industrial dance music. This isn’t related to the album but I watched some DJ sets he did too for boiler room and they go really hard so i recc that too.

yeah it’s not as good as Spiderland but it’s unfairly written off, i love the instrumentals on this so much they’re still some of the most impressive musicians to come out of any punk scene & the weird recordings of conversations & the sounds of some guy eating for one song as vocals i thought was charming + more great Albini production. 

maybe my favorite “lofi” indie album, about evenly split between acoustic numbers & fuzzy noise pop, lyrically almost all are about love & heartbreak, the drummer is a beast on this & I always feel warm & comforted listening to this