The Birthday-Holiday Haul

Well, now that the holiday season is officially behind us (and gift return season is in full swing), it’s time to show off some of my presents. Time for a Colin’s Collection post!

I haven’t done one of these in a while — not since around the middle of June, actually. And not because I haven’t had my eye on any new music. It’s mainly because my birthday is within three months of Christmas, so I figured I’d hold off on this until after the holidays. (For purposes of this post, or at least based on when it was posted, “holidays” includes New Year’s and birthdays for my mom and my sister.) The result is what could be one of the longest Colin’s Collection lists ever, as I ended up getting eight new albums over the last couple months. The list is coming up after the jump!

#100: The Album That Started It All

It’s fitting that I write my 100^th post on this blog on New Year’s Eve 2011, the third anniversary of its creation. But there’s another reason why the date seems appropriate. Next year marks the 25^th anniversary of the release of an album that I credit with kick-starting my lifelong love affair with music. And that love for music was what led to me getting a radio show on WMUC2, starting this blog to promote that show, taking up multiple instruments, and even writing and recording my own music as a personal hobby.

That album was released at a time when soft rock was all over the charts (Kenny G has a song on the ’87 year-end Hot 100 – seriously). Hair metal had transitioned from its hard-rocking virtuoso beginnings (think Van Halen) to cheesy party rock stuffed with aimless shredding and mandatory power ballads (think Poison). Bruce Willis scored a hit single back when he was probably better known as a singer than an actor (he hadn’t even made Look Who’s Talking yet, let alone Die Hard). A teenage singer from Hawaii won a local talent contest and got a nationwide hit single basically via word of mouth (Glenn Medeiros, “Nothing’s Gonna Change My Love For You”). An Australian new wave band became a one-hit wonder by covering a one-hit wonder (Pseudo Echo, “Funkytown”). And yes, I got all of that from Wikipedia and Todd In The Shadows. Still, it was an odd time for music and the alternative rock boom of the early ‘90s was a few years away.

But none of that stuff really mattered to me. I was about six months old when the album in question was released. And by the time I was around five years old, I was listening to this record so much I practically had it memorized. So what was that album? The Joshua Tree by U2.

The 2011 “Listen Up!” Awards: Handing Out The Harleys

So here we are, entering the home stretch of the year 2011. And if you actually believe that whole stupid Mayan apocalypse theory, we’re entering the home stretch of the human race. On that happy note, we’re going to be seeing some year-end lists popping up some time in the next couple of weeks. I figure I might as well submit my own, but just as I did last time I’ll be looking at unconventional categories (read: totally arbitrary distinctions that I made up myself). It’s time for the 2011 Harleys!

Who's a good little award statuette? YOU ARE! Come here and let me scratch you!

The fun begins, as always, after the jump. Bring on the first award!

The 15 Most Disturbing Illustrations From “Scary Stories To Tell In The Dark”

Oh man. I am going to hate myself so much for doing this. But not right away. I’m going to hate myself while I’m lying in bed tonight trying and failing to fall asleep.

You see, Halloween is just around the corner so I figured I would do some kind of Halloween special, or at least the Internet blog equivalent of one. The question was what I was actually going to do. I’ve already done a post about the scariest songs in my collection, and since I’m doing my Top 5 lists in the same order in which they appeared on my show, the Top 5 Songs To Scare Trick-Or-Treaters Away From Your House is still a long way off.

And then it hit me: Do a post about the Scary Stories To Tell In The Dark series.

Watch That First Step, Mac – It’s A Lulu

I’m not entirely sure how eager people were to hear the results of a collaboration between Lou Reed and Metallica. To just about anyone outside the studio in which Lulu, the fruit of this collaboration, was conceived, this seemed like a mismatch of epic proportions. Reed is a long-tenured experimental art-rocker from the Velvet Underground and is also known for solo hits like “Walk On The Wild Side” and “Perfect Day.” And Metallica – well, who isn’t familiar with Metallica on some level? They’re titans of heavy metal who need no introduction. The artists themselves seem pretty excited though – they decided to work together after performing at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame 25^th Anniversary concert and have been hyping this record as one of the highlights of each of their careers.

I’m not familiar with the work of Lou Reed. I know him as the guy who did “Walk On The Wild Side” and inexplicably thought it was a good idea to release a double album filled with nothing but guitar feedback; I wouldn’t know a Velvet Underground song if it pulled a Mike Tyson and bit my ear off. Meanwhile, I see myself as a casual fan of Metallica. I dig their first five records, I like a few of the Load/ReLoad era singles, I think St. Anger is irredeemably flawed and yet still an honest artistic expression, and Death Magnetic is a step in the right direction. I was only somewhat curious to hear what Reed and Metallica would sound like together. But that curiosity was especially piqued when early reviews proclaimed that Lulu was now officially the worst thing Metallica’s name had ever been attached to – yes, St. Anger had finally been bested (or is that worsted?). I simply had to experience this thing for myself.

Let’s get my verdict out of the way right now: Lulu is an absolutely terrible album. It’s still streaming online as I write this, but please take my word for it. Don’t listen to this.

BLAST FROM THE PAST #4: Linkin Park

A recent episode of South Park posited that there comes a time in your life when everything you once loved as a kid starts looking like crap once you’re older. While I will certainly admit to growing more critical and cynical as I’ve grown, I’d like to think people don’t change that much. Some things in life never get old – I’ll probably always have a soft spot for U2 and Green Day, for the Three Stooges and Looney Tunes cartoons (and South Park, for that matter), for Super Mario Bros. 3 and Final Fantasy VII. Then there are things that give you little to no sense of pride or nostalgia, things that make you look back and wonder, “Why the hell did I ever like that?” And for me, sometimes I look back to my teenage years and try to figure out why it took me so long to grow out of nu-metal, though I do give that particular phase credit for helping me get into heavier music.

I was never a hardcore fan of that whole late-‘90s, early-double-0s scene, but I did get my feet wet. I liked Korn’s singles back then, but never bought any of their albums. I could never really get into the Deftones (and still haven’t, even though I’ve heard lots of good things about them) or P.O.D. I flat-out didn’t like Disturbed at all (and still don’t). System Of A Down? They were okay, though for some reason I thought Serj Tankian kind of looked like Osama bin Laden. I didn’t hear anything by Slipknot for the first time until long after the nu-metal craze had hit its peak, though I’d seen plenty of their merchandise around school. There was a brief period where I actually considered getting that Crazy Town album with “Butterfly” on it – yes, I once thought the guys who horrifically mutilated “New Noise” by Refused were at least competent musicians. I was totally ready to buy Kid Rock as an “American Bad Ass” until I found out that he took that riff from an old Metallica song (for the record, I’m usually OK with sampling as long as you make interesting alterations or additions to the sample; leaving the sample as it is comes off as lazy, like all you did was make up new lyrics to someone else’s song). And who the hell were Primer 55 and Ill Niño? I certainly didn’t know.

Really, there were (and are) only a handful of albums in my collection that probably qualify as nu-metal at all: the first three Limp Bizkit albums, Infest by Papa Roach, The Lonely Position of Neutral by Trust Company, and of course the required soundtracks for any angsty teenager’s life from 2000 to 2004, Hybrid Theory and Meteora by Linkin Park.

Picks Of The Week #8: The Ps Have It

Hey everyone. It’s been a while since my last post. And I have my reasons. Last week I was away from my computer because I was vacationing with my family at our house in Ocean City, Maryland. I spent the week working on my tan, chilling in a nice warm swimming pool, and actually going into the ocean for once. There are lots of broken seashell bits in the sand as you enter the water and it just really annoys me and kind of hurts my feet a little (I have nice and delicate feet, dammit).

The week before that I went to volunteer at the Philadelphia Union match against Everton and ended up hospitalized with heat exhaustion, which is a pretty crappy experience that I don’t recommend for anyone. I had to stay inside for a few days during the recovery process, but I wasn’t really in the mood for blogging. It made me miss out on the Union’s match against Real Madrid, which sucks because I really wanted to go to that one. But enough about my, um, awesome life. This is a Picks of the Week post, and this week’s picks are all brought to you by the letter P.

And it’s not even like I specifically chose this letter for a POTW post. When I was putting together this little list, I noticed that the songs on it were all by bands whose names began with the letter P. So I figured I might as well make that the theme. But first, check out a couple new tunes from Radiohead and Mastodon.

 

The Picks of the Week are coming your way after the jump, as always.

Top 5 Lists I Didn’t Get To Do On My Show

During my tenure at WMUC2 as the host of Listen Up!, I did 34 shows. Only two of them ended without a Top 5 list – three if you count the Top 20 Shortest Songs list, which I did as part of an experiment to see how many songs I could squeeze into two hours – and only one of those was because I didn’t have an idea for the week. The other was because my show was cut short by a Maryland baseball game.

Terrapins baseball: Interrupting my radio shows since 2009.

Of course, along with the 32 lists that made it to the airwaves, there were several list ideas that I never got to do. Most of the time it was because I had a hard time thinking of five songs with which to fill the list, which kind of defeats the purpose of the whole “Top 5” thing. But that’s what happens when you try to classify songs into excessively specific categories, especially because my brain isn’t quite the encyclopedia of music knowledge that I would have liked for it to be. It certainly would have made filling these lists a lot easier!

As always, the fun begins after the jump.

The Search for the Song of the Summer

Every summer is often defined by that one massive pop hit, that one song that so thoroughly dominates the airwaves that it will lurk in your memories of that summer for years to come whether you like it or not. And as much as I would love for the Radioheads and My Morning Jackets and Minus The Bears of the world to dominate the summer with a monster hit, I’ve accepted that it’ll probably never happen. Not unless I one day gain the power to reshape mainstream culture to fit my own taste. There’s probably an X-Men character who can do that.

Last year the title was pretty much handed to Katy Perry’s “California Gurls” the instant it was released. This left me to wonder if I was the only person on Earth who realized that “California Gurls” was a blatant rewrite of Ke$ha’s “Tik Tok,” a song that already irritated the crap out of me the first time around. Hell, I still have memories of being the only kid alive in 1996 who didn’t want to learn the stupid Macarena. And if I ever hear “Livin’ La Vida Loca” or “All Star” again, it will be too soon. I guess the lesson is that no matter what the song of the summer ends up being, by the end of that summer simply hearing the first new notes of that damn song will be enough to drive you utterly mad.

So with the summer of 2011 officially underway, let’s take a look at some randomly chosen contenders from this week’s Hot 100. The fun begins after the jump!

A Quick Update Because I Was Away

Hey everyone. Just got back from a weekend in Ocean City, Maryland. In between looking to see whether or not My Morning Jacket has announced any tour dates in the Philly area (answer: no) (EDIT: The answer is now YES — they’re playing the Mann Center on August 23) and any updates on whether or not a new Radiohead tour has been announced at all (answer: also no), I noticed that I haven’t updated this blog in a while. So much for that whole “new post every week” schedule I’d been trying to stick to. So here’s a nice quick Colin’s Collection update to get me back in the swing of things. As always, the list can be found after the jump. Or if you prefer, you could always just listen to this song that inspired the title of today’s post (and also much of Green Day’s post-Warning career).