Bad Brains
Bandsplain is Back with Road Trip-Worthy Music and Talk
After almost four months off the air, cult music guide Bandsplain is back with new episodes each Thursday. The show went on hiatus when its parent company, Spotify’s Studio 4, disbanded earlier this year. But host Yasi Salek wasn’t ready to quit just yet, so she revived the program via Ringer Podcast Network last week. The first episode of the reboot: a four-hour, part-one crash course on Smashing Pumpkins. Bandsplain maintains its original mission of acquainting outsiders with subculture-spawning groups like Insane Clown Posse and My Chemical Romance. When it started in February 2021, the show operated under a somewhat traditional structure – it switched off between music and talk, but all episodes were roughly an hour long. They did open with an intro song composed and voiced by Bethany ...
The 50 Best Albums of 1982
Looking back at 1982 in music, the headline is obvious: Thriller Sells A Bajillion Copies, Becomes World’s Biggest Album. But is it the year’s best album? Funny enough, Michael Jackson‘s sixth LP hardly even affected the charts that year — it snuck out in late November, just as Men at Work’s 1981 blockbuster, Business as Usual, began its commercial stranglehold in the U.S. Only one record on our list, Fleetwood Mac‘s chart-targeted Tusk follow-up, Mirage, hit No. 1 on the Billboard 200. (Doesn’t it seem weird, looking back, that Prince‘s 1999 peaked at No. 9?) Lots of fascinating shit was happening in 1982, and you didn’t always find it on the radio. On our list, we included everything from early hip-hop (Grandmaster Flash) to horror-punk (Misfits) to lo-fi synth-pop (Solid Space). Revisit...
The Reissue Section: Fall 2021
Vinyl sales have gone up 94% this year, according to a report by the RIAA. That helps the massive flux of reissues that dotted the fall. But that’s not the good news. What really makes this column hum remains the variety of choice titles that are released on CD, and sales of that sturdy little plastic silver disc went up 44% in the first half of 2021 as well. And with the slew of choice archival titles that dropped like so many acorns across the autumn landscape, both formats will certainly be seeing a significant bump in those numbers as the holiday season closes in. Now let’s get into it. Here are the best reissues of Fall 2021. Violent FemmesWhy Do Birds Sing? Expanded Edition (Craft Recordings) For a lot of kids who came of age in the 1980s, the first real taste of college rock came co...
The Reissue Section: Summer 2021
From deep jazz spiritualism to big dumb rock, Summer 2021 has been chockfull of archival releases of old favorites, obscure discoveries and newly unearthed recordings that will appeal to a vast array of music fans with ice cream money to burn. I keep hearing about how the CD era is dead and all that stuff. But this current cache of archival titles continues to prove the compact disc is very much a format that continues to bring joy and happiness to a large swath of the music-buying public. So yes, CD players still belong in cars, you savages! Stone Temple PilotsTiny Music…Songs From The Vatican Gift Shop Deluxe Edition (Atlantic/Rhino) Third albums are the ones that tend to cement an act’s career in a way that either helps them ascend to new heights or sink like a stone. For Stone Temple P...
Sid McCray, Original Bad Brains Singer, Dies
Sid McCray, the original Bad Brains singer, has died. The band confirmed the news in a Facebook post, which you can see below. No cause of death has been revealed. R.I.P to the Don, my brother – sail on Posted by Bad Brains on Saturday, September 12, 2020 McCray led the band from 1977 to 1978 and helped write some of their early songs, including “The Regulator,” which he performed with his former bandmates during a secret show in 2017. As New York Hardcore Chronicles wrote in a touching Facebook tribute, McCray “was also part of the Brains road crew. He was also the one responsible for introducing Punk rock & Metal to their fusion and helped create the template for what the Bad Brains became.” According to a GoFundMe set up to help cover burial costs, McCray “Passed on September 9...
Return of the Justice Keepers: Bad Brains’ God of Love at 25
It should have made headlines all over the American music press, from CMJ to Raygun. After spending the first half of the decade apart, the original members of Washington D.C. hardcore legends Bad Brains reunited in the studio with the late, great Rock for Light producer Ric Ocasek for an album boosted by an even more unlikely ’80s icon: They joined the likes of Meshell Ndegeocello, Alanis Morissette, and the Prodigy on the roster of Madonna’s Maverick Records. And, apparently, it was another brand new Maverick signee in Deftones frontman Chino Moreno who convinced them to draw up the papers. “We had just gotten signed to Maverick Records in ’95, and one of the first conversations I remember having with [label head] Guy Oseary was him asking me what my biggest influences were,” Moreno expl...
