On recommendation from Pitchfork, I tried out this album by a band called Quannic, which is a young guy making shoe gaze-adjacent guitar music on his own. I’m really enjoying most of this album, alhtough it gets a little weak towards the end. Apprently he toured with Slowdive, which sounds like it would be a great fit.
I was a big RHCP fan back in the late 80’s, when they still had the original lineup, moving into their first album after the death of Hillel Slovak. At Lollapalooza in 1990, I bought an overpriced RHCP hat that never fit my head correctly, and which I later sold—an expensive lesson I took to heart. My taste for the band tailed off pretty quickly after that, to the point of indifference and outright distaste. They’ve had some highlights in the intervening years, however, and this song was one of my favorites when it was released almost a decade ago. It’s gotten stuck in my head this week, and it makes a good companion for gray fall days: it’s propulsive, but (to my ears) melancholy, almost sad, especially if you ignore the lyrics. When this band hits on all cylinders, they are still amazing.
Massive Attack just announced the release of new music in 2026, available digitally. Their last full album release was 2010.
Lights Out, by Royal Blood. It’s amazing how much great music two guys with a bass guitar and drums can make. When I first heard this track I thought there must’ve been at least three people in the band, but he’s using a combination of pedals to both mimic a guitar and bass and widen out the sound. And the drumming is really tasty. Their first two albums are killer, and then they changed their sound up a little bit, leaning into disco, which I didn’t enjoy as much.
…that I’m in my mid-50’s: Shopping for food at the Trader Joe’s last night, they played Milquetoast by Helmet.
(this video is a tie-in with the movie The Crow, the thought of which makes me feel even older).
I’ve got a bunch of open browser tabs here so it’s time to clean up.
After years of litigation, a fleet of abandoned surplus planes went to auction in Greybull, Wyoming, including a pair of KC-97 freighters (essentially a B-29 with an extra deck), a trio of C-199 Boxcars, and a pair of P2V Neptunes, as well as multiple fuselages of other models. Oh, to have the money and space to save one of those planes.
Brian started a build thread about his EV project, and our video already has more comments than any of the others I’ve posted over the last two years (sniff!) We’ve got a couple of leads on how other people have wired up their projects, and I’m currently diving into those threads to learn as much as I can.
And in musical news, Alex and Geddy from Rush announced yesterday that they’re going back out on tour ten years after the death of Neal Peart. I’m happy for them; they’re working musicians and deserve to be playing live, which they both excel at. They’ve recruited a drummer who has been playing with Jeff Beck and teaching for over ten years; she looks like she’ll be an excellent fit.
I had a Spotify playlist going while I was working in Brian’s garage and this tune came up, and now it’s stuck in my head: Phantogram’s Howling at the Moon.
One of my favorite songs of all time. XTC wasn’t playing much live after releasing The Big Express, two albums before this one, but this is a rare live acoustic version of King for A Day, written and sung by Colin Moulding. Oranges and Lemons is one of the GOAT albums of the 1980’s, right behind Skylarking.
Damn. Brent Hinds, founding lead guitarist of Mastodon, left the band this March for unknown reasons, and all parties were initially quiet about the reasons. More recently he started posting angry tweets about being kicked out of the band, and things got uglier. Yesterday he was killed in a motorcycle accident, when a woman turned left without signaling in front of him.
It sounds like he had a lot of stuff to work out, and like any band breakup, I always have hope they can sort their differences and work together again; I do hope the band can continue making excellent music. Several of their albums have been inspired by personal tragedy, but this just seems cruel.
Huh, I must be on some kind of Soundgarden/grunge kick these past couple of weeks. The excellent Hands All Over is currently stuck in my head, and I’m not complaining.
As I mentioned earlier, I bought Louder Than Love in ’89 right after was released and it was on heavy rotation for the next couple of months. This was a welcome antidote to the heavy diet of hair metal I’d been exposed to in high school, and was one of several I bought at the same time: Nothing’s Shocking, Gish, and Pretty Hate Machine, which were definitely not being spun on local radio. Sadly, at that time Baltimore was not a regular stop on the concert circuit for most of these bands, so it was difficult to see them without going to D.C., which was difficult as a broke college freshman without a car.