Another Week, Another Seven Albums I've Never Heard Before from Start to Finish
The third installment of a February music writer exercise.
This should have been posted this past Monday. Sorry for the delay. Some season maladies and too many hours at the day job threw curveballs and wrenches at me. Here’s week three of listening to records I haven’t heard before from start to finish.
Saturday, February 15th, 2025
HONEY RADAR Ribbon Factory • One of the many downsides of so much music coming out and instantly available these days is that bands you like may have a new release and it gets lost in the shuffle. I dig me some Honey Radar. They released this last year and I only became aware of it the past week or so.
For the uninitiated, Honey Radar could be considered a bedroom psych band. Fried lo-fi, hazed out vocals and trippy little guitar riffs that resemble a Monkees hook scorched black at one moment, Syd Barrett manning a rocketship the next. If the band records in an actual bedroom they're told to turn it down a lot because they do like to blare things loudly often. Their songs are rarely overbaked or get longwinded. If it takes less than 60 seconds to get to the point and noise across, that’s fine with them. Like many of their releases before, there are quite a few tracks that clock in around a minute (give or take.) It’s not their low budget but cleverly economical. And when they do decide to stretch things out, it’s not all prog licks either, it’s floating in the atmosphere, examining the space junk that passes by to see if it still has some usefulness to it.
Sunday, February 16th, 2025
WINGS Wild Life • I'm not a super Beatles fan or am I in a hate the Beatles camp. I don't have a favorite Beatle. This was Mcartney's follow up to Ram. I liked Ram. I still like Ram. I have a lot of sentimental attachments to it. It was also the first album with Wings. My wife is a confessed Beatles fan. She doesn’t have a favorite Beatle either but she knows the solo albums better than I do. I told her I was picking this for the exercise. She said never heard it either. “There wasn’t a single on it?”
”Bip Bop maybe?”
”I kinda remember that song. I never had the record though.” Then she says “Is it a lot of it ‘I’m Paul McCartney. I got all the music fuck you money?” and went into another room.
Yeah. Kinda lotta. Did the world need a six minute white reggae version of Paul and Linda dueting “Love Is Strange? Well, ya got one. ”Bip Bop” is a better Black Keys song than anything the Black Keys wrote.
I dunno. This record did not get the best of reviews when it came out. I understand why but it’s not that bad. If you’re a McCartney with Wings fan (and haven’t heard it), it’s a blueprint for what would go into some of the band’s hits on future albums.
Monday, February 17th, 2025
The FALL Levitate • Being a Fall fan is a thankless task. Seriously, if you saw Mark E. Smith in a bar, he'd expect you to buy him a drink (even if he already had seven too many) and wouldn't thank you for it. In fact, he'd probably start insulting you after finishing it.
Being a Fall fan is a bit of an arduous task as well. An enormous catalog with a bunch of classics amongst it. And a bunch of not so well liked albums too.
Things were not very rosy for MES in 1997 when Levitate was released. He had the taxman on his tail. Mix this with his stock surly and erratic personality devices going even heavier into turbo mode. This would also be Burns and Hanley's last album as his longtime rhythm section.
The Madchester scene had gone dim a half-decade before but he seems still drunk on it (or, at the very least, wallowing in its hangover) here. There are lots of heavy BPMs in many places. Perhaps it was provincial pride thing. Of course, the record got panned, but panning albums from the Fall (or ignoring them completely) had become a heritage sport by then.
The thing is though, it is a Fall album and one thing MES did do was keep his psychosis in motion. And, every Fall album is worth hearing at least once. Had I heard this the year it came out, I’d probably say “Oh, so it’s the Happy Mondays now ?” And, I’d be wrong for saying that. The drum-n-bass bottomed “Ten Houses Of Eve” is laden with pharma induced anxiety and cheesy retro-futuristic keyboard lines, “Ol’ Gang” predicts shitgaze, “The Quartet of Doc Shanley” resembles militaristic funk and 4 1/2 Inch is full of swamp horns and blues deconstruction.
Tuesday, February 18th, 2025
ELECTRIC PRUNES Underground • In 1966, this west coast band who gave the world two definitive US garage rock monsters; “I Had Too Much To Dream Last Night” and “Get Me To The World On Time.” In 1967, they released their 2nd album Underground. They were given a bit more freedom in the studio, allowing them to experiment and expand more. The album did not garner such touchstones. The label could not find a hit for AM radio and FM rock radio was embryonic at best at the time.
”Wind Up Toy” teeters finely between noisy fuzz guitar/Vox organ buzz and the soft whispery vocal thing that psych bands (especially west coast psych bands of that era) love to do, the lust sounds more than just a simple teenage kind on the slithery “…I Happen To Love You”, “It’s Not Fair” is total proto cosmic country and “Long Day’s Flight” does have a snarl familiar to their well songs.
Wednesday, February 19th, 2025
WINDY & CARL Antarctica: The Bliss Out, Vol. 2 • I grew up in the Great Lakes region so snow is part of the way of life. I live in the southeast now where snow is a novelty. Accumulating snow even more so. Many things come to a stop until it clears. Today is a snow day for me. Watching the fluffy flakes fly from my apartment window, I thought of something wintry that I had not listened to all the way through. This aptly titled offering from this Michigan drone/ambient/space rock duo seemed fitting.
The 20+ minute title track is moored by a snipped, eerie loop that resembles the noise ice cracking on a pond below your feet. A simple baseline conjures images of how skies look leading up to the minutes before a blizzard rolls in. The sound gusts swell and shift north to northeast and back again. They subside and whoop up again. It’s glacial and mesmerizes dizzily. “Traveling” could be voyaging by spaceship or train with the landscapes shifting from starbursts, deep hues and dark desolations and I plan to incorporate Sunrise into a future dawn where I watch Ra summon this along a horizon.
Thursday, February 20th, 2025
LITTLE RICHARD The Rill Thing • Returning to playing Rock-n-Roll in 1970, this is considered a comeback record for Little Richard and was considered akin to those records Muddy Waters and Howlin’ Wolf did with Rotary Connection for Chess a year or so earlier. Unlike those records though, Little Richard was never on Chess and Rotary Connection are not backing him up. There’s no dank wah wah or anything like that going on. It’s Mr. Penniman trying on the different soul stylings at the time. Some New Orleans Toussaint/Meters here, some Memphis Stax/Hi there. Some occasional backhanded winks at James Brown. A few Sly Stone funk cops. The opening track, “Freedom Blues”, peaked at number 47 on the Billboard Top 100 that summer.
Friday, February 21st, 2025
The DRIN Elude The Torch • Going to end this week’s installment the way it started. The Drin released their 4th album last year and somehow, I completely missed even giving it a listen.
Sometime after the 2nd album, Drin’s prime mover Dylan McCartney formed an actual band around the project and the garage goth/Rest Belt motorik/final stage capitalism psych got more expansive. On Elude The Torch, the band sounds a lot like a post-punk/weird new wave Hawkwind. Not like Hawkwind when they went post punk/weird new wave on albums like Quark, Strangeness and Charm and PXR5 but like some damaged new wavers/dosed post punkers informing the world that they all should be listening to albums like Doremi Fasol Latido and Hall Of The Mountain Grill more often instead of propping up some band like Tame Impala’s descent into being the Doobie Brothers for millennials.
The final installment of this Music Writer’s Exercise for February 2025 will appear later this coming week. Thanks to all who have read it so far and for your patience.