To whom it may interest, It's Wednesday evening, three days before we stick a pin in 2021, which has largely been a garbage year. My day-well-into-night job drudgery has been excessive over the course of the pandemic and its viral offshoots that keep Americans both stupid and sick. The professional imbalance of my life was significant enough this year that I didn't feel I could even come up with a good list of favorite listens for 2021. I did, however, contribute to this year's round-up for No Ripcord. It's worth a look . When the aforementioned pandemic was at its peak in 2020, live music was obviously not happening. So, when vaccination efforts began and some live venues began opening their doors back up this year, I was planning on getting back to writing concert reviews. It was naive of me to think I could that, understanding that my profession doesn't allow the phrase "after work" any gravity or consideration. And then Phawker , the Philly-based out...

Indie or punk records pressed to vinyl were almost always guaranteed to fit onto a single side of a 90-minute cassette. I couldn’t tell you who lent it to me, but I had access to a cassette copy of Fugazi ’s Repeater and dubbed it easily onto the A-side of a blank tape, (the B-side would later be used to fit a copy of Death ’s Individual Thought Patterns , a weird “any port in a storm” decision). I didn’t properly own this record (or really even give it a full, undivided listen) until a little while later, after In On The Kill Taker sold me on the genius of this band. After that, I was all in and listening nonstop. CDs seemed to starve for content, the 70-minutes of allowable space enabling an excess of additional tracks at points. If you purchased CDs in the 1990s, how many of them were overlong and packed full of songs, or featured that “hidden track”? And, if they weren’t, how many music-buyers out there felt ripped off? Surely you weren’t all that thrilled to pay the asked for $...

If you follow me on Instagram , you may have seen that my family and I spent two weeks in Italy, fulfilling a lifelong childhood dream of my wife's and enabling our 11 year-old to experience life beyond the comforts of her suburban upbringing. She even got to end her school year a day early. While I won't bore the two people reading this with the details of our trip, let's just say that being thrust back into our routine following our flight to Philly and the ensuing days at the office and home have left us a little sad. Following an impossible night of sleep the day after we landed, (the jet lag took a little while to overcome), I drove to the nearest Wawa for some breakfast, my mood in descent as road rage managed to take hold during a 5-minute drive along with the realization that I was back to Keurig cups and fast food after having treated myself to a series of sunny mornings, sitting outdoors and swallowing fresh cappuccino with fresh fruit and prosciutto. I know tha...

60, 65, 55, 67… If you want to know why I've been silent for some of March and most of April, those are the number of hours I've had to work for past few weeks, my laptop open till midnight most nights and my weekends justifiably left to tend to dad/husband/homeowner things. I've been spread a tad thin, not too reliable on the home front or available for anything social while ever ready to take on whatever day job-related task handed to me. With that said, writing hasn't been a priority lately. Which sucks because I've still been listening to so much good shit that I want to write about.  My hope is that I'll be able to spare an hour here or there to catch up on what I've been hearing for the remaining weeks. The avalanche of work requests and deadlines to meet have thankfully subsided for the time being, so I'd like there to be some activity in the weeks ahead. Though, I'll be honest, with the increased popularity of vlogs and podcasts, ...

Back in 2006, Henry Rollins exposed me to The Fall via his Harmony In My Head radio show at the now-defunct Indie 103.1 . For a while, each episode would feature at least one Fall track and his fanaticism with this band was enough to convince me to run out to the sorely missed Tower Records in King of Prussia and pick up A Part of America Therein, 1981 , which is a compilation of live performances. I was not immediately taken with the album, nor the material per se, so I chalked this venture up to just being at odds taste-wise with a diehard fan. The Fall just wasn’t for me. The first time I listened to Get Up With It , an electric era double-LP from Miles Davis , ( I’ve written about the record before, so sorry being redundant ), I couldn’t get through the first track. “He Loved Him Madly,” which was written as a meditation on the life of Duke Ellington , was over 30 full minutes of ambient sound and icy guitar notes, scattershot snare rolls arbitrarily placed throughout t...

I was in Ocean City, New Jersey with a friend, sitting outside on a deck with a boombox resting between us. It was 1993. On this particular evening, I had something new that I wanted to pop into the tape deck I’d picked up earlier at the Surf Mall, a boardwalk superstore packed with clothing, posters, and other youth-marketed, alterna-junk. It was a cassette of Fugazi ’s latest release, In On The Kill Taker . I didn’t really know what to expect, but I was eager to hear it. In the song “Facet Squared,” frets are gently tapped, a couple sharp notes are plucked, a relatively understated rhythm gains traction and the sounds gradually build. And then all you hear are guitars cycling through a couple of glorious phrases as all other elements go silent. I felt elated when those riffs peaked, as if triumph had beset my ears, offering assurances that I’d found something for me, something that was going to be important to me for the rest of my life. I’m admittedly romanticizing this ex...

As a perpetually bummed out teenager, I’d like to pretend that I wasn’t culling my chosen social identity from MTV’s hit parade, but that wouldn’t be true. I was as tuned in as most of my peers, especially once the channel began to venture beyond the plasticity of pop music and expose us sheltered types to the language, garb, culture, and sounds of the underground. The college set of the late 80s were already up on 120 Minutes , but us budding types were suddenly becoming hip to it as well, a younger generation now fascinated with Seattle’s dirt rockers and a sudden slew of maverick bands whose preceding years of blood and sweat was suddenly paying off. You know the rest. In 1994, the same year Green Day released its major label colossus, Dookie , I pulled the cellophane off of a CD called Stranger Than Fiction , another major label debut but from a veteran band whose origins dated back as far as 80s hardcore. The band was Bad Religion . As the majors continued to hit ...