Hey Sputters—

Welcome back to Neek’s 1st Listen, where I listen to an album for the very first time while my fingers fly across the keyboard, generating near-thoughtless spur-of-the-moment takes. It’s messy, stream-of-conscious, and only very lightly edited. You’ve been warned!

FOXING
Foxing

Full disclosure:
I love Foxing. Well, for brevity’s sake, I love Nearer My God, and most of their other stuff with the occaisional asterisk. Perhaps I shouldn’t have heard “Hell 99” first but it left just a bad taste in my mouth that ran through “Greyhound” and it never left. Still, I don’t expect this to be the first Foxing album I’m not into, I’m just worried that their scattershot freneticism might be more frustrating than captivating this time around.

Without further ado…

“Secret History”:
The scratchy record vocal sample playing under Conor’s voice suddenly makes me realize why Sowing cites “Vices” in his opening paragraph, but I wonder if it’ll have the same “surprise explosion.” And there we go. Ok and it’s already gone! So like, I’m not sure that counts as a surprise after “Hell 99.” Alternating between two very disparate sounds and genres and melodies on the same track is an interesting opening statement for sure, but I fail to see this having the same lasting impact as, say, “737” did for both me and its parent album. 6/10

“Hell 99”:
Ok well that…

OK Fellow Sputters—

It’s been years since I’ve last done one of these, and it’s certainly the first since I’ve been a staffer, so welcome to the first official blog post for “Neek’s 1st Listen”!

As a reminder for those new to this long-dormant series, this closer to a stream-of-consciousness series of rants that flow from my very very tired brain edit-free onto the page the very first time I hear the album in question. So please forgive my ridiculous comparisons and questionable turns of phrase.

THE SMASHING PUMPKINS
Aghori Mhori Mei

Full disclosure:
The Smashing Pumpkins are one of my favorite bands, and while I was an apologist for their post-breakup era a good long while, the most recent run of albums left me completely cold. I didn’t even bother checking ATUM: Act III, and this is someone who ranked all 200-something of their songs in 2018. But after skimming Johnny’s excellent review and peeping the opening track, Edin I decided it was about time to finally break out this blog feature (and all the formatting fun that comes with it).

Without further ado…

“Edin”:
Johnny’s line about Tool and Kyuss is spot on; these fuckin riffs are buttery but sharply wielded. Corgan’s vocals kinda shatter the fun—even on his better moments in these late albums his performance sounds AI-generated. You could predict his cadence by…