Newburgh, N.Y. — Kirsten Emery, guitarist in local punk band Feral Insurgence and vocal critic of Valentine’s Day, curiously embraced the “sham” holiday now that she is in a relationship, report sources who are rolling their eyes.
“I first noticed something was off when she didn’t punch the Whitman’s Sampler chocolate display at CVS,” said friend and bandmate Arlo Woodward. “Look, it’s totally fine to be into silly traditional Valentine’s Day things, and it’s also fine to hate it. But Kirsten’s timing here is so obvious. I guess last year she wasn’t that sincere about destroying ‘evil patriarchal consumerism’ and was just bitter about being single when she suggested stealing all the rose bouquets for sale outside the gas station and dousing them in drain cleaner and throwing them on her ex’s car.”
Emery denied that her sudden pro-Cupid attitude was related to her new boyfriend Tom Stantevich.
“Participating in the most disgusting corporate capitalist scams is a valid form of protest,” she said, pausing to text kissing-face emojis and a shopping link to a large heart-shaped diamond pendant to Stantevich. “If Tommy buys me this necklace for Valentine’s Day and I wear it everywhere, it raises awareness, okay? It raises awareness of how much he loves me. And the whole diamond mining thing. Right?
“And Huggy Teddycakes is a punk icon,” she added, pointing to a giant stuffed teddy bear next to her. “We’ll put him on stage at our next show to prove that bears wearing heart bandanas that say ‘You Are Beary Special to Me’ are so subversive. Wild bears don’t use money, so Huggy here is the realest anti-capitalist symbol.”
Relationship expert Dr. Fitzgerald van Herk confirmed that new romantic love can transform even the most aggressive Valentine’s Day haters.
“It happens a lot in cultures where there was a built-in excuse for disliking the holiday before, such as punk groups that object to mainstream trends, societal expectations, or consumerism,” he explained. “All that goes out the window once you’re getting that committed sweet sweet lovin’ every night. Suddenly in February we see newly boo’d-up punks in Hallmark stores tenderly grabbing anything sugary or heart-shaped. Not even stealing it, actually buying it! Miss Emery’s transformation is very common.”
At press time, following her first big fight with Stantevich, Emery had returned to calling Valentine’s Day a scam and was spotted flinging Huggy Teddycakes into the Hudson River.
Growing pains isn’t just a show featuring demigod Kirk Cameron, and “Resolver,” Veruca Salt’s third LP altogether and first of two without Nina Gordon, who was riding a super pop solo wave of her own around that time with “Tonight and the Rest of My Life,” is good, but not great, and as you know, good is the enemy of great. Still, Veruca Salt doesn’t have a bad record, and this full-length, or at least 66.66% percent of it, deserves your time; the band is chock full of born entertainers and you’d be hard-pressed to argue with that assertion. Produced by Brian Liesegang, founding member of fellow ’90s peers Filter, “Resolver” sounds really good, and the catchiness of the songs are counterbalanced with a tried and true rocker grit. In closing, Inferior publications were divided regarding this record but that’s how they typically are so we can’t fault them.
“IV,” Veruca Salt’s, uh, fourth full-length studio album is not only, in a display of extreme wit and cultivated vigor on our end, ranked in the fourth position right here and right now, but it is the band’s sole release via the curiously named label Sympathy for the Record Industry, former home to Rocket from the Crypt, Turbonegro, Holly Golightly, and Polly Goheavily. However, for some sad and alarming reason, “IV” is not on DSPs like Spotify or Apple Music, and that’s a low down dirty shame making us not feel very blissful… Fix that and get your ish together, SFTRI! Anyway, six years after this LP came out, the band took a short break, but reformed with Nina Gordon, and announced their reconciliation to the world exactly one year and one month after they publicly took a hiatus. Coincidence? Not sure. Cool circular trend? Very, very much so.
Despite what many might think, but likely not you, you smart warrior of a rock hepcat, Veruca Salt has a song other than “Seether,” and released a full-length, their FIFTH altogether known as “Ghost Notes” in the year of our lord known as 2015, a full twenty-one years after their debut LP “American Thighs” hit stores. Overall, “Ghost Notes” is an underrated highlight, and truly closed the museum of their own broken yet mended relationships with a smile and a ghoul. We here truly clamor for more, we’re telling you know, we implore the band to create another with both lead vocalists. El Camino Records released this gem of an album to minor fanfare, and producer Brad Wood, who also worked behind the boards for VS’s debut record and ones by Liz Phair, Sunny Day Real Estate, and Big Bird, majorly shone in the greatest way.
Veruca Salt’s sophomore LP, is the band’s best-produced album for sure via King Bob Rock of Metallica, Motley Crue, Bon Jovi and Canadian fame, and contains, in our opinion that literally/figuratively doubles as a fact, their most superior song and single, “Volcano Girls.” Still, it has a few songs worthy of skipping we can’t give it the Subway-sponsored and endorsed Michael Phelps gold medal slot here, but silver ain’t too shabby either. One more hot take for good measure and good clean fun: If “Eight Arms to Hold You” was a four song EP consisting of tracks 1-4 back to back to back to back, it would be one of the better ’90s EPs for sure, along with Salt-N-Pepa’s screamo classic “Jar of Flies”.
Veruca Salt’s first full-length studio album, and likely the reason you’re here and actually read this piece for as long as you have, is truly a “no skip” effort from the band, and provided the globe with a solid vocal harmony driven rock band with a fantastic and delectable combination of saccharine and sour. Seemingly coming out of nowhere, the band initially released this LP in late-1994 via indie Minty Fresh Records, and re-released it on their then-new label Geffen Records, who also put out Weezer’s self-titled debut in ‘94 along with (not joking) Slash’s Snakepit the following year, and “American Thighs” eventually and justifiably earned a Gold-certified record. Plus, its epic album cover could unironically be showcased more than seasonally in an art museum and certainly on an overpriced crewneck at a high-end clothing store. Control your car and don’t spin out.
“Tales from the Crypt” is known for its puns, but you gotta respect putting one right there in the title of the episode. That being said, this one was a letdown, brief nudity-wise. You know there were boobs on set. Bill Paxton and Brad Dourif? They were probably beating off boobies left and right just to get to and fro. I bet they even had a cool nickname for themselves, like the Boobie Brothers or something. Would it have killed you to put just one of those boobs on camera HBO? Our free weekend ends tonight, thanks for nothing!
No boobs. Superman is in it, but he doesn’t fly or anything. Zero stars.
If you’re gonna have a horror anthology show, you gotta have a couple creepy doll episodes. This particular one features an embarrassment of riches when it comes to talent. Directed by Richard Donner, co-written by “The Shawshank Redemption” scribe Frank Darabont, and starring legendary insult comic Don Rickles playing against Bobcat Goldthwait. It’s a stacked episode, except when it comes to stacks. Not a single boob in the whole damn thing. I stayed up past 11 on a school night for this?!
This was Tom Hanks’ directorial debut, and we have just one note: boobs! Come on man, you were in “Bachelor Party,” you know how this works! It’s a satisfying ‘con-man meets macabre demise’ tale, but since it revolves around a black widower targeting rich old women, it’s almost impossible to masturbate to. 2 stars.
Over the years we’ve come to respect the hell out of character actor M Emmet Walsh’s work. At the age of 12, staying up past bedtime with HBO on mute literally praying to see breasts, we hated him. One look at him and we thought “Great, another boobless episode of “Tales from the Crypt,” why do they even do these?!”
There was a time in this country when hard-hitting shock-journalists dominated the media landscape. In this episode, we meet reporter Horton Rivers, who is filming on location at a supposedly haunted house. What does his crew find? Not a single goddamn boob that’s what. Big points for incorporating the found footage horror style years before “The Blair Witch Project” but if there’s one thing a sleazy early ’90s journalist should understand it’s “sex sells.”
Another Richard Donner/Frank Darabont collaboration sees an old west gunslinger confronted by the ghosts of his past. Well, apparently no one in this dude’s past had big ol’ titties. Negative 4 stars.
We had high hopes that “top billing” was a trademark Crypt Keeper pun of some kind, and that the episode would feature lots of babes tops. As soon as the name Jon Lovitz came on the screen we knew that could not be the case. Jon plays an annoying actor who can’t get a part because of his looks (big stretch) and decides to murder his competition. We turned it off halfway through to see if we could make out any action from the static on the Spice channel.
A rich elderly man undergoes an experimental procedure to make himself young again in order to satisfy his much younger girlfriend. Okay, we get that not all of these can have boobs in them, even at 12 we understood it’s a roll of the dice, but this one was directed by Arnold Schwarzenegger! The guy who gave us 3 breasted women in “Total Recall!” Thanks a lot, Governator, how am I supposed to pump my iron to some young bodybuilder with William Hickey’s voice?
This might be the first thing Traci Lords was in where she doesn’t show her boobs. This one hurt.
Ugh, I don’t know, this one looked like it was gonna have boobs like there was this hot lady on top of this lumberjack guy and they were doing sex stuff in their underwear, but then I heard my mom come down the stairs so I had to change the channel and pretend to be asleep. Thanks mom. Lame.
A tale of jealousy and murder set in the modeling world that somehow manages to lack even the briefest of nudity. Really dropped the ball here Mr. Crypt Keeper.
Tim Roth stars as Jack Craig, a struggling artist who can still afford a huge studio space because it’s a TV show. When Jack finds that only his most macabre paintings sell he realizes he has no choice but to kill for inspiration. It’s an interesting commentary on our obsession with death and the role of the artist, which raises a lot of questions. Questions like “Why couldn’t he just paint boobies?” This episode could be wall-to-wall boobs, and then like a ghost or whatever, but sadly they went a different way. There is a sex scene where you do see a lady’s butt which is super cool, but her nips stay just out of frame. 2 stars.
A farmer tries to sleep with a blackmailed semi-captive girl on his farm by exploiting her mental illness. It’s a pretty messed up plot, but when it first aired and we were in middle school we thought the plot was just “Patricia Arquette is in a wet tank top.” Anyway, he gets what’s coming to him.
A miserly and abusive funeral home owner takes in his nephew after his parents are killed in an accident. The boy clashes with his uncle over his miserly habits, like stealing the corpse’s gold teeth and embalming them with tap water. When he threatens to go to the police the mortician murders him, which is a big mistake in “Tales from the Crypt” and sure enough his nephew’s ghost comes back for revenge. It’s a thrilling episode and the parts where we weren’t frantically scanning the screen for a nipple had us on the edge of our seat. In other words, at no point were we on the edge of our seats.
Sorry to any “Hymns” truthers out there, but one of these has to rank last. This one is the clear winner of the categorically worst. It’s not the most inferior piece of music you’ve ever heard. It’s just that when you’re listening to it you’re reminded that you could be spending your time with other more satisfying Bloc Party releases that made you fall in love with them in the first place. Life is too short to listen to a band’s sixth-best album.
“Alpha Games” may be their latest full-length album but, perhaps surprisingly, it contains some legitimate classics from the band. All you have to do to identify them is listen to more than the 10 seconds of each track that you did when you first perused this album. How dare you skim a Bloc Party album. Show some damn respect.
With Bloc Party’s fourth official release, we see the band evolve yet again, despite some fans’ desire to keep them in a little box that just has the year “2005” written on it. The album still contains energetic and eloquent songs like they always do, but this release also gets heavier at times with songs like “Kettling,” “We Are Not Good People,” and “So He Begins to Lie.” At this point, it’s almost like Bloc Party is showing off how much they can evolve in a single lifetime. Stop making us all feel bad for not changing our ways or trying new things in decades.
If we were ranking Bloc Party album covers by horniness, this one would easily win. Unfortunately, we’re judging on musicianship here. With “Intimacy,” Bloc Party seemed to have combined the raw energy of “Silent Alarm” with the technological advances of “A Weekend in the City.” The result is a nice compromise of what Bloc Party fans want (more “Silent Alarm”) and what Bloc Party actually wants (I have no idea. Something with electronics maybe?). Either way, this one is more enjoyable than what some curmudgeons might have you believe.
The further you dig into Bloc Party’s discography, the more you realize their B-side game is one of the strongest in music history. And one of the greatest parts about “A Weekend in the City” is the tracks they recorded that didn’t even make the cut. It’s almost like the band has a terrible gauge of which of their songs actually belong on the main album. Finally, we figured out something Bloc Party is bad at and a weakness in their process.