Growing up as a millennial was tough. The internet came along and changed the world, and our parents were too self-absorbed and lead-poisoned to ever show any real interest in our development. My dad never sat me down to tell me about the birds and the bees, but he would drop me off at the mall by myself when I was 11 so he could go drink at Walter’s Pub on the weekends. My sex education came from the novelty items lining the shelves at Spencer’s, and it’s served me well.
One thing I kept hearing about during my teenage years was “safe sex.” Gotta be safe. Gotta use protection. I remembered Spencer’s had condoms. But I have no idea what flavors are good. How do you choose a flavor? I was never brave enough to ask the cute goth girl working the cash register for a sample. Do you ask your partner beforehand what flavor they want? And how do you find a size? I’d only see comically small and comically large, and unfortunately I was with endowed with a unit that is comically average. This crippling condom anxiety prevented me from having sexual relations well into my 30s. Man, I wish they covered that in school.
Also, apparently you graduate from underwear? I’ve had a few girlfriends and I keep asking them when they will be wearing that candy underwear. They tell me that it’s a joke, a gag, that if they actually wore that they would get a terrible infection. But Spencer’s would never sell something that isn’t safe. Their fart detector was one of the best gadgets I ever purchased. I’ve been wearing leather underwear from Spencer’s for years, and yeah, it caused a few rashes at first, but once my skin callused over I was in good shape. Maybe I should buy one of those rad leather harnesses. That’ll for sure attract the ladies.
Spencer’s also had a lot of sex games which I’ll often bring on first dates. The game “Lick, Suck, or Swallow” acts as a subtle icebreaker and gives me a good idea of what sort of lover my date might be. Or I suggest we play Twister. Nothing sets the mood more than a game of Twister. But nothing beats the sex dice. That way, if I don’t know what I’m doing, it’s all on the dice. I’ll look like an idiot without the sex dice.
Without Spencer’s I wouldn’t be the man I am today. I was lucky enough to memorize at least 15 pages from the book about sex positions and someday I plan on trying each one of those. To date, I’ve tried two, I just need to find the right woman who also had negligent parents.
The worst goregrind ever committed to tape.
Look, Dickens is the greatest novelist of the 19th century, no contest, we admit it. But there’s just no way. Even his most grim novels are full of whimsy and pluck, traits that only have a place in power metal (ew) and Dickens was way too busy coming up with weirdly apt names for his antagonists and diving Scrooge McDuck-style into that sweet sweet serialization and lecture circuit money to be bothered with tour planning or recording sessions. He’s got to make sure little Nell dies in the most absurdly melodramatic way possible at the end of “The Old Curiosity Shop,” there’s no time for this “heavy metal” nonsense.
Milton can’t front a metal band; he’s too busy writing political tracts, shilling for Puritanism, and then narrowly avoiding being killed by the restored King Charles II for that whole thing where he had been an enthusiastic supporter of beheading Charles’ dad back in the 1640s. It’s too bad, because “Paradise Lost” is maybe the most metal book ever written. However, Milton does not want us to listen to metal. Milton wants us to think about sin and feel bad.
Franzen sometimes listens to folk black metal while he birdwatches, and his general “damn kids these days” view of the world is definitely compatible with elder metal performers like Gene Simmons and Glen Benton, but he’s really more of a post-punk guy, and his funeral doom bandmates are going to be really confused when he has them rehearse a song that sounds like Interpol.
Wrote all of his best-known work in prison and was a hardline culture warrior, so the comparisons with Burzum are inevitable and will haunt his band until they break up and/or murder each other.
Wallace was famously socially anxious. I mean, he went on an all-expenses-paid cruise and barely left his cabin. So definitely a bedroom recording project. It’ll start out sounding like 2nd wave black metal, because of course Wallace can basically reproduce the core sound of De Mysteriis dom Sathanas after just listening to it for an hour or two, but once that starts to feel too evil (hideous, even), he’ll shift to post-metal soundscapes. His insistence that anyone who listens to his demo must also read his heavily-footnoted artist’s statement was scorned by everyone except the members of Liturgy.
Shakespeare wrote a roughly equal number of comedies and tragedies, which means he’s willing to shift on a dime from the existential horrors of “Macbeth” or “King Lear” to the freewheeling zaniness of “As You Like It” or “A Midsummer’s Night Dream.” In other words, he’s a Cannibal Corpse fan, and although he can’t do a decent hair-whip to save his life, he’s gonna start his band any day now.
Her band is really hoping the debut album’s moody cover art of misty moors and tortured lovers makes up for the narrative mess of the story, sorry, I mean music.
Lahiri’s characters are mostly neurotic strivers who drink good wine, go to Ivy League schools, read Gogol and Tolstoy for fun, and attend the opera. Their idea of rebelling usually involves listening to the Doors while drinking Budweiser poured over ice. Lahiri knows how to develop a dynamic character like no one’s business, but she also considers Metallica’s Black Album “too intense” and would basically be the worst metal frontwoman imaginable.
Wycherley doesn’t take anything seriously. His most famous work, “The Country Wife,” is basically a five-act joke about impotence and adultery. Even when a character threatens to carve up his own wife’s face, it’s somehow played for laughs. Wycherley will record a demo that most reviewers will diplomatically say sounds more like hard rock than metal, then try to pivot into a stand-up comedy career, which will also go badly.
Once “The Babysitters Club” became so successful that she could rest on her laurels and hire ghostwriters to crank out more installments about a group of middle school entrepreneurs in an impossibly utopian Connecticut suburb, she figured “why NOT start a thrash band?” She is still trying to learn the riff to “Hangar 18” and is starting to regret dropping five grand on a custom-made Jackson that she affectionately calls “The BSC Bruiser.”
He likes to say it’s post-hardcore, but anyone who listens knows this is straight-up emo. The lyrics are impeccably written from a technical standpoint, but so self-pitying that even the guy from Dashboard Confessional thought they were “a bit much.”
An ungodly hybrid of the worst aspects (i.e. all aspects) of Five Finger Death Punch and Insane Clown Posse. Unsettling number of lyrical references to sniper scopes.
First of all, he insists that every release has to be a quintuple LP concept album. Second, all the lyrics are from the perspective of teenage girls writing letters to each other, and then later from the perspective of a 20-something dude writing letters to his friend about how he wants to seduce one of them. The musicianship is sublime, but the lyrics are straight ick.
As established in his poem “An Essay on Criticism,” Pope believed that practice and finely-honed skill, not just an emotional sensibility, were the keys to good poetry, so he’s obviously now in a tech-death band that plays in time signatures no one’s ever heard of. He’s waiting to hear back from Colin Marston any day now about his band Vengeful Sylphs opening for Krallice.
The protagonists from books like “Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing” and “Are You There God, It’s Me Margaret” clearly have a lot of adolescent angst to work out. Unfortunately, the most obvious go-to for this sort of thing is Linkin Park or Slipknot style nu-metal. Judy’s band is a JNCO-clad trainwreck that sounds like a time capsule from 2001, but she’s got this kid named Farley Drexel who absolutely wrecks ass behind the drum kit, and that honestly elevates the whole project a little.
While IDLES’ fourth album is certainly not devoid of ambition, much of the experimentation that defines the record struggles to stand on two legs. On the aptly titled effort, the band seems too timid to fully explore their newfound sonic ambitions and too stubborn to completely abandon their well-worn style. This results in a discontented soundscape that is only consistent in its wavering. It’s kind of like when you spent four years of college darting between majors only to land an Associate of Arts degree; it was an important experience for your overall growth, but ultimately not your most impressive asset.
When crafting Ultra Mono, lead singer Joe Talbot wanted to present an overblown caricature of the band. A sort of purge of the most extreme conceptions and expectations of a punk outfit whose star was rapidly on the rise. For the most part, it shreds, but part of this cleansing process laid bare some of the group’s worst tendencies. The over-simplified politics on tracks like “Grounds” and the self-admitted classist undertones of “Model Village” helped to mark the band’s third full-length as one of their clumsiest. By attempting to lean hard into the lore the group had built by this point, they effectively undercut the humanity they had cultivated over their previous two records.
Yeah, here we go. Right smack dab in the middle. A lot of you will argue that this is their best record, and we won’t blame you for that erroneous thought process. Brutalism is a front-to-back rager that helped solidify the band’s aesthetic while giving their live show the ammo it needed to catapult them into the proverbial stratosphere. Still, some of the group’s most uncomfortable subject matter exists within the runtime as Talbot wrestles with sobriety and his own toxic traits. While it certainly doesn’t undercut the record’s thematic importance, it can make for a tough listen at times.
This album was such a breakthrough that it pretty much soundtracked an entire season of “Peaky Blinders.” Even though that show influenced some of your friend’s shittiest personality quirks and haircuts, it was still a pretty big accomplishment for a band to be featured within the series’ jarring modern score. There was a good reason for the sudden adoration. “Joy As An Act Of Resistance” is a nearly perfect record. Blending Stooges era punk rock with modern lyricism and an unrelenting sequence, the LP essentially cemented IDLES as a household name. Had the fat been trimmed just a bit, it would be unimpeachable.
No doubt everyone in the comments is going to have something to say about this one taking the top spot. Here’s the thing, though: Everyone knows that the people who are actively sending us death threats haven’t bothered to listen to the album. ‘Tangk’ is simultaneously the band’s most ambitious album and IDLES in their purest form. This is the pinnacle to which every other album has been building. Some will argue its instant success is due to its poppier sensibility and nothing more, to which we ask: “What pop music has ever sounded this chaotic and subversive?” Seriously, grow up.
