Eels : EELS TIME!

Mark Oliver Everett has quietly amassed an impressive discography over the last 30 years, first with two albums under the moniker ‘E’ and then in 1996 debuting EELS. Despite the shift from singer/songwriter pop-inflected songs to a more gruff, alternative vibe both iterations of Everett’s curmudgeon poet laureate remained steadfast. Sad and melancholy but with […]

Strand Of Oaks : Miracle Focus

Timothy Showalter has been kicking around as Strand of Oaks since his 2009 debut Leave Ruin. Starting out with a folksy, singer/songwriter vibe he shifted focus into more synth and pop touches on the project’s breakthrough record Pope Killdragon. His Neil Young affectations were replaced by Tangerine Dream and Kate Bush as influences on his […]

I Do Not Like The Heat

With every passing year and season I’m coming to the conclusion that heat is just not my friend. Granted, last January’s polar vortex certainly made me pine for warmer days(or at least temps in the single digits) but now that we’re currently in a heat wave I’m thinking single digits are doable. You Florida and […]

Long Weekend…28th Wedding Anniversay…Father’s Day

At the last minute last Thursday I decided I was going to take Friday off. It wasn’t like I had any plans, it just hit me that I needed to take a 3-day weekend. Not much going on at work, and my son and his girlfriend were leaving at 7am Friday morning for Tennessee for […]

It’s Hot Out…So Stay In And Watch A Horror Movie

Today is the start of the official “hot” season around here. Temps are climbing into the upper 80s/low 90s and lots of humidity. I know my elder dog won’t like it, and I know I’m not gonna like it either. It’s supposed to stretch clear into next week and even get those “feels like” temps […]

Elephant9 : Mythical River

I discovered Elephant9 a couple years ago via the great and powerful algorithm. Spotify was playing in the house while I did my Friday afternoon cleaning. Not sure what I was listening to, but it ended so the great Spotify algorithm started spitting like-minded artists out at me. One was a song called “Sojourn” by […]

Watch For Deer, Hello Anxiety My Old Friend, Rocky Mountain Way

A couple weeks ago my wife was heading home in the evening after going to our daughter’s place when a deer ran out in front of her. The deer took off, but left some hair and some damage on the right front hood, grill, and fender. It could have been a hell of a lot […]

Covered Bridges And The World of Comfy Synth

A couple weeks ago I had someone comment on a post about dungeon synth, and whether I was familiar with it. I’d heard the term, but was not familiar with it. I imagined it to be some friends in a partially finished basement playing D&D and listening to 8-bit electronic music. Like the music you’d […]

Relax, It’s Friday

We made it. It was yet another month-long week and our souls have been nearly sucked dry by the punch clock, but no corporate vampire is going to keep us down. We’ve got 48 hours of sunlight, so while our blood-sucking overlords sleep the sleep of the (spiritually) dead we can bask in extra sleep, […]

MIDI Janitor : Holy To Dogs

There’s something eerie – almost ghost-like – to the music of MIDI Janitor, aka Jonathan Orr. It’s like music made of spare parts; ancient, broken down machines wheezing out bygone melodies to steam-powered beats. Sometimes the eerie gives way to the ethereal, as if Orr was soundtracking a digital sunset in some early 80s Capcom […]