Hello music enthusiasts and welcome to the third instalment of Dr.Gonzo’s ‘Diagnosis Series’, where I go through a band or artist’s studio recordings and find their strengths and weaknesses, recommending a few things along the way. Today we’ll be looking at San Francisco’s venerable legends Faith No More to unpack their capricious career, which ultimately led to a sublime streak of near-perfect albums, as well as the iffy ones. So grab Bjork’s fish and prepare to gasp in excitement or terror.
Band/Artist: Faith No More
Origins: San Francisco, California, U.S.
Founded: 1979
Current Members: Mike Bordin (drums)
Billy Gould (bass)
Roddy Bottum (keyboards, rhythm guitar)
Mike Patton (vocals)
Jon Hudson (lead guitar)
Previous members:
Mike Morris (guitar, vocals)
Wade Worthington (keyboards)
Courtney Love (vocals)
Mark Bowen (guitar)
Chuck Mosley (vocals)
Jim Martin (guitar)
Trey Spruance (guitar)
Dean Menta (guitar)
Studio albums: 7
Active: Hiatus(?)
We Care a Lot (1985)
The Doctor’s rating: 2/5
Analysis: I feel like Faith No More’s trajectory was very similar to how Iron Maiden started out their career. Like Iron Maiden, FNM started out with a very different sounding vocalist for their first two albums, and although Di’Anno and Mosley both bring…
Hello music enthusiast, and welcome to the second edition of Dr.Gonzo’s ‘Diagnosis Series’ – where I go through a band or artist’s studio recordings and find their strengths and weaknesses. Today we’ll be looking at the eccentric El Sobrante trio, Primus, delving into their weird and wonderful world filled with renditions of old children’s stories, big brown beavers, race car drivers, and fishermen. So grab a cold one and prepare to sail the sea of cheese.
Band/Artist: Primus
Origins: El Sobrante, California, U.S.
Founded: 1984
Current Members: Les Claypool (vocals, bass)
Larry “Ler” LaLonde (guitars)
Tim “Herb” Alexander (drums)
Previous members:
Todd Huth (guitars)
Vince “Perm” Parker (drums)
Peter Libby (drums)
Robbie Bean (drums)
Tim “Curveball” Wright (drums)
Jay Lane (drums)
Brain (drums)
Buckethead (guitars)
Danny Carey (drums)
DJ Disk (turntables)
Studio albums: 9
Active: Yes
Frizzle Fry (1990)
The Doctor’s rating: 5/5
Analysis: Primus are one of those rare cases where an act will walk right out of the gates with their sound, ready and willing to discharge it onto the placid masses. Unlike Paradise Lost who spent decades honing their craft, Primus busted out Frizzle Fry and unleashed a sound so idiosyncratic, it’s eccentricities would blindside an entire…
By absolutely no demand, welcome to Dr.Gonzo’s Diagnosis series, where I go over a band or artist’s career and by the end of it pick out their roaring strengths and vulnerable weaknesses. Today’s edition follows Northern England hard-lads Paradise Lost, on their epic thirty-five-year peregrination that sees a sprawling sixteen studio albums, a fuckload of drummers, and an impressively disparate array of genres to pick from. So sit still and await the verdict.
Band/Artist: Paradise Lost
Origins: Halifax, West Yorkshire, England
Founded: 1988
Current Members: Nick Holmes (Vocals)
Gregor Mackintosh (Lead guitar)
Aaron Aedy (Rhythm guitar)
Steve Edmondson (Bass)
Guido Montanarini (Drums)
Previous members:
Matthew Archer (Drums)
Lee Morris (Drums)
Jeff Singer (Drums)
Adrian Erlandsson (Drums)
Waltteri Väyrynen (Drums)
Studio albums: 16
Active: Yes
Lost Paradise (1990)
The Doctor’s rating: 3.3/5
Analysis: Lost Paradise is the very definition of diamond in the rough. A good chunk of the band’s adulated elements are present here, but they are ill-defined and go largely unchecked. Lost Paradise’s biggest crime is its myopic scope which becomes samey after a while and lacks the distinction their other works would later seize. That said however, this thing can be fucking heavy at times and the band’s proclivity for turning their death metal leanings into this Sabbath-styled sludgy, doom-y dystopia serves them well overall.…
Back at university, I remember there being a point at which my dissertation tutor told me to put the whole thing on hold and read up on the meaning and application of arthouse. I spent approximately two hours of my life reading relatively uncomplex definitions and unpackings, but damn would it have been easier if he’d just sent me away and told me to check out Blonde Redhead (I’m sure he could have done, too – he pitched surrealist film to me using Pixies lyrics and half the reason I originally asked him to help me out was over a rant we had about the bonus tracks on Sonic Youth’s Bad Moon Rising, but I digress).
Sorry, what’s arthouse?
One big hybrid, innit. A bastard product of ‘high’ and ‘low’ art that’s not pure enough to satisfy elitists, too edgy to sell to the mainstream, but an exciting box of treats for anyone who doesn’t mind getting their paws a little muddy. It derives most of its innovation from pastiche and appropriation rather than groundbreaking originality, and the styles it draws from are often both a little behind the times in their sourcing and a cut above in the way they’re dealt with. Bonus points for any cross-cultural, trans-geographical or oh-it’s-quite-hard-to-label-comprehensively content, all of which amounts to a notoriously broad collection of categories. You get the picture.
Sorry not sorry for the wank onslaught, but all this fits Blonde Redhead down to…
This feature is part of a hopefully ongoing series aimed at exploring the discographies of interesting and/or important bands whose wider body of work is often overlooked on this site. There will be lots of words and a few pictures, but the main deal is that if a band features here, they are good and you should listen to them! And if you already jam them, hit up the comments and explain where and why this is wrong! Get going!
Few projects inspire childlike wonder quite like San Francisco’s Sweet Trip. Comprised of multi-instrumentalist/programmer Robero Burgos, vocalist Valerie Cooper and a slim roster of session contributors, this project’s respective forays into indietronica, shoegaze, IDM, glitch and dream pop are so richly atmospheric and emotively crafted that they breeze effortlessly over listener preconceptions and strike to the heart of that early-teen feeling of awe at the sheer expressive and imaginative power of music. For those whose childhoods followed the correct timeline, this should align neatly with your first-time-hearing-Dark Side of the Moon memories.
Fortunately, Sweet Trip come with none of the teenage baggage – there’s something deeply cleansing about their approach to simple melodies and sophisticated arrangements that, even at their most intense or erratic, never fails to make me feel as though some previously unnoticed weight has suddenly disappeared from my shoulders. Roberto Burgos has a talent for imbuing mechanical sounds with a human…
This feature is part of a hopefully ongoing series aimed at exploring the discographies of interesting and/or important bands whose wider body of work is often overlooked on this site. There will be lots of words and a few pictures, but the main deal is that if a band features here, they are good and you should listen to them! And if you already jam them, hit up the comments and explain where and why this is wrong! Get going!
“I saw Stereolab in Bellingham and they played one chord for fifteen minutes / Something in me shifted / I brought back home belief I could create eternity.”
This is unfortunately not my anecdote, but rather a disconcertingly well-timed snippet from Phil Elevrum’s reminiscences on the new Microphones album. It stands out as the only moment on that record that I paused and rewound on first listen last night to confirm that I had heard it correctly, and it solved the problem I had been grappling with as I came to the end of marathoning the Stereolab discography: how on earth do you go about writing a fresh introduction to such an iconic, influential and well-chronicled band?
Fortunately, Phil was so kind as to answer this question by (probably) confirming my loose theory: pick out any forward thinking artist active in the indieverse over the last two and a half decades or so, and…
Slowdive, in my opinion, are perhaps one of the premier shoegazers of the initial wave of the genre. Recording one of the landmarks with 1993’s Souvlaki and following it up with the radically different Pygmalion, Slowdive have cemented themselves as one of the giants of the effects-obsessed artform. Sometimes drifting in between heavenly dream pop bliss with cuts such as “Machine Gun” and the Eno-produced duo “Sing” and “Here She Comes”, to the abstract ambiance that permeated all of 1995’s Pygmalion, Slowdive can easily be not only the definitive entry-point to any curious onlooker, but the ultimate crossover from more conventional rock music to the incredibly diverse/divisive shoegazing genre.
In consideration to the amount of time I’ve spent listening to Slowdive – a whopping thirteen months (according to my last.fm: about 407 plays as of this writing; since Oct. 31st of 2016), I’ve still found myself somewhat overwhelmed with the near-abrupt shifts in their repertoire from album to album, although their catalogue is rather minuscule and far more accessible than some of their other contemporaries. Plus, they have the benefit of not promising an album to their fanbase, then pulling off the most drawn out disappearing act on them over a course of two decades, so Slowdive already have their priorities straightened out quite nicely.
This guide, in keeping with the recently established tradition I’ve forced upon myself (and will most likely alter in future iterations), will give a streamlined overview of the band’s works, along with a sampler that will hopefully guide…
In acknowledging I’m most likely the website’s local stan for this guy, and the point that I’m writing such an article solely due to the fact I seriously can’t stop listening to his rather plentiful back catalogue, I’ve come to have certainty in the idea that David Sylvian is quite possibly one of the greatest and most ambitious artists to come from his respective generation. There’s so much I could (and will) say, but considering the scope that his works have offered listeners for the last forty-plus years along with the various artistic overhauls that have accompanied Sylvian’s output — both solo and with others in the band format — it seems quite necessary that I provide somewhat of a guide to the works of someone I hold in high esteem. For the sake of not rambling on longer than I really need to, we shall begin with a quick glimpse of where Sylvian began: in the art rock group Japan. Formed in 1974, Japan had their roots in the glam rock scene and took to their influences quite clearly with their initial outfitting, which would come back to embarrass the group upon their identity shift to new wave/synthpop auteurs that often rejected the New Romantic culture and the following that came with it:
Following two albums’ worth of middling glam worship blended in with some worthwhile tunes, Japan had finally found their sound with their third album, 1979’s Quiet Life; along with this futuristic sound, Sylvian had eschewed the slurred vocal…
