Author: Steed

The Rabbit Hole, Vol. 6: The Grind

The definition of a Rabbit Hole is similar to this: Used to refer to a bizarre, confusing, or nonsensical situation or environment, typically one from which it is difficult to extricate oneself.

While listening to music doesn’t seem like something bizarre or confusing, what I do can often be nonsensical and difficult to get myself out of, so I think it fits many of the treks I do through the Tidal streaming service. This series should be no different.

What I’m simply planning on doing with this series is having someone recommend a starting record, listening to that on Tidal and then using the “Similar Artists” algorithm to go down the rabbit hole and see what records it leads me to. The trek will continue until I hit an album that is either A) so great that there’s no reason to move forward, B) so bad that it derails me or C) feels like a natural end point. In the end, we’ll see how the records hold up and how solid the connections are.

So, to begin:

  • Stabbing Westward – Wither Blister Burn & Peel

The other day I stumbled across their biggest hit “What Do I Have To Do?” somehow (I don’t even remember how I got here) but decided to listen to the full record which I hadn’t heard since it came out and from there, thought it might be a good rabbit hole to go down the industrial rock/metal path. Now, this of course is on the more modern end of the scale since it came out in 1996 and was a heavy rock record but it still represents the era very well. Grinding riffs, drum programming, strong keyboard use and a highly mechanized feel to it. But it’s also a moody record in places, dark and creepy at times in songs that start off slow but pick up power as they go along. It’s definitely dated now but I still enjoyed it 24 years later.

  • God Lives Underwater – Empty

From there I could have went the obvious route with Marilyn Manson but I chose to try to go a bit deeper with the band God Lives Underwater. Empty was first full LP, produced by Rick Rubin and released on American records who tried to capitalize on the growing industrial market in the 90s. You’d have no idea this was a Rick Rubin record on the surface as it has none of his sound to it but it’s still pretty solid for the style. This was 1995, my sophomore year in college and an album I listened to a lot before I went to bed – probably not the greatest choice before trying to sleep for the night but these crazy kids, amiright? And this hasn’t held up well over time. There are some really cool riffs on this record but for the most part these guys have one path – industrial grind over pop hooks. The whole album follows this blueprint until the end where it goes off the rails for the last two songs. I liked this back in the day, not so much now.

  • Prick – Prick

As a Nine Inch Nails fan, I was excited about this record, produced by Trent Reznor and on his Nothing records – and I loved this record back in college. A short lived project from Kevin McMahon, he released this album in 1995, supported David Bowie on a tour and then as he was going to start work on album #2 – the label decided they wanted more radio friendly songs and McMahon refused, thus putting the band on hiatus (he would release a follow up in 2002 though). But this album is still a burst of fucking energy that lasts for the entire 43 minutes of the record. No, it’s not radio friendly but it’s almost danceable in the end and contains both heavy riffs and great hooks. It’s a fuzz blast of melodic industrial grind that still holds up great after all these years.

  • Jane Jensen – Comic Book Whore

I remember this from the cover art from my days at WTSR radio as the music director. I only remember one song from it (“Luv Song”) which is more of an alt-rock song than the pop-industrial feel the rest of the disc has. And I don’t know if we did anything with it when it came in or if I just took it because it didn’t really fit our format. The album was on Interscope in 1996, back in the time frame where major labels still snatched up every damn group in the world and gave them a one album shot. Well, this did nothing and she disappeared from music until 2003 when she finally released another disc. The major label curse actually hurt a lot of artists in the 90s. They got one shot, failed and then many of them either never released another record or waited years and years to get another one out on some indie label that no one had ever heard of before. This album really isn’t very good and has nothing on it that would seem ripe for radio play with a sound somewhere between pop and industrial but very little catchy enough to stick.

  • Leather Strip – Underneath the Laughter

This rabbit hole took an odd turn from here. The Tidal algorithm only offered me three similar artists: Stabbing Westward which is where we started, Poe, would would have taken me on a completely different path altogether and Leather Strip, who are an electro-industrial group. Maybe I understand Poe but I don’t get how either of these groups line up with Jane Jensen but if I’m sticking to the plan, this is where it took me.

I had never heard of Leather Strip but it’s apparently one German dude named Claus Larsen, who has created more than 20 albums worth of electro-industrial of which reminds me of the short period of time that I listened to Front 242, Front Line Assembly and more. Underneath the Leather doesn’t do much for me though as it’s pretty much a standard version of the genre. Apparently they are very popular though, so may I just choose the wrong album.

  • Die Krupps – Volle Kraft Voraus!

I could have went further down the grinding electro-industrial hole but didn’t think that was a good choice, so I pivoted to Tidal’s recommendation of Die Krupps – also German EDM but instead of picking an album in the same general mid 90s time frame, I went back to their second record released in 1982, with hopes of changing the path a bit.

I had a Die Krupps moment in time at some point in my life, back when I would get on a genre bandwagon and have to go after everything that sounded like it but I can’t remember when that was – certainly not back in here in 1982, for damn sure. But maybe I should have ventured back this far and maybe I will not as this is pretty awesome. Aside from the overly busy “Wahre Arbeit, wahrer Lohn” the rest of the album is less grinding industrial like this rabbit hole started out and more EDM (Electronic Dance Music) and/or Neue Deutsche Welle at the most. But it’s catchy, weirdly “fun” if you can say that for this style and even though all the lyrics are in German, it still mesmerized me for a little more than a half hour.

  • Throbbing Gristle – 20 Jazz Funk Greats

Moving to Die Krupps took me on the path I wanted to go on from the start but took a long while to get to – back to the late 70s and early 80s of industrial music of all sorts. And well, I’ve heard that this record may be the best industrial record of all time and I’ve never heard it before – so it’s about time I got to it, which made choosing this path down the rabbit hole pretty simple.

And…I don’t “get it.” I’m pretty open to most genres and I was surely open to this but this is a stark, minimal, industrial record with elements of synth-pop but an it’s surely good but not nearly the experimental grind I was expecting out of the group.

  • Einstürzende Neubauten – Ende Neu

I actually bought this record the day it came out in 1996. To people that know me and know this era of my musical collection – I bought, sold and traded constantly to pick up almost any new release that fit in any sort of genre I was into at the time and at this point I was 20 and in college and the dude that came to our student center every week with the releases knew me very well. I can’t imagine how much money I would have saved had Tidal existed back then. I can’t say I wouldn’t have bought this as my tastes have changed so many times over the years that it’s hard for me to say what my mindset was at the time other than “oooohhh new! Shiny!” but this doesn’t do much for me at all right now. I remember liking one song in particular though – the 11 minute “NNNAAAMMM” which I actually still do like quite a bit but the rest is dull experimental rock music, varying between industrial, rock and ambient and sort of just there.

And with that, I’m going to end this Rabbit Hole. I wanted to go down this path and get to some of the classic Industrial bands but once I got there, maybe I should have let the algorithm take me down the more modern path. But what fun is that really?

Tidal Catalog #39: The Cure

Introduction: For those of you that have stumbled across this website and are interested in reading about my trek through the universe of the Tidal streaming service, let me tell you a bit about what I did. Back in 2016 I thought it would be kind of cool to listen to an artist’s catalog from start to finish and rank them from best to worst. After all, who doesn’t like a good list? I thought I might do a few of them and see what happened, hoping it would introduce me to records that were foreign to me in the arsenal of an artist I was familiar with. I also thought that it would be pretty cool to get out of the “one off” mode of listening to a new record, years after the previous one, in order to get a true sense of how the artist matured over time. Fast forward to June of 2019 and 250 catalogs later, I ended the trek. I posted these all on Facebook over the years as they were completed but I’m going to move them all over here, starting with #1, in order to expand them out a bit more. Facebook doesn’t exactly allow for too many details.

As with all my catalogs, to be considered in the ranking, an album has to meet certain criteria:

  • The artist must actually perform on 80% of the tracks (soundtrack and rap provision)
  • No compilations of previous released material will be included.
  • However, compilations of previously recorded material will be included if they are remixes, bonus tracks, outtakes… mostly music that hasn’t been part of a main release before.
  • The album must have been released officially and within the realm of the label that the artist would have been on at the time or official releases posthumously (normally applies to a slew of live records)
  • Any EPs must contain new new music and be relevant to the catalog, not be more like a single with a b-side or two.

Entrance Point: The Cure are one of my favorite bands of all time, so I had heard all of their material before. This catalog was basically just an excuse to listen to them again.

Not Included: Boys Don’t Cry – which was a compilation of their first album and a few other one off tracks as their first album wasn’t released in the states. But thanks to the digital age, it’s available in the U.S. now, so I didn’t include this version. Entreat is also not included as it was a live album released only in the UK (France only at first) and thus not actually widely available)

All albums ranked on a 10 scale:

  • Disintegration (10)

There’s no better album in the history of Goth rock than this one. The Cure already had hits leading up to this 1989 gem but this make them reluctant superstars. “Lovesong” “Fascination Street” and “Lullaby” are all fantastic tunes but really, every track on this disc is. This record was the soundtrack to one of the oddest times of my life – the year I went to private school and sat next to two goth kids, including one dude who style and hair mimicked Robert Smith’s completely. Both of the kids were very weird and total assholes and one day the Smith clone came into school with a knife and started threatening people. He ended up getting expelled within a few days and that was it but I will always tie this album back to that memory and yet, I still love it. Funny how these things work sometimes.

  • The Head on the Door (9.5)

The Head on the Door was the album that gave the Cure their first Hot 100 hit in the US, with “In Between Days” peaking at #99! Okay, so “hit” is a relative term there but this was their first real taste of success in the US. This album stands out to me because it’s consistently upbeat. That doesn’t mean the lyrics are all about kittens and roses but musically, it’s not nearly as gloomy as much of their material and it’s very consistent in quality. Robert Smith was listening to Elvis Costello and the Psychedelic Furs at the time and that influence shows in what’s simply a great pop record. (It’s regularly labeled as post-punk, which I don’t necessarily agree with). The second and final single, “Close To You” is as bright and sunny as they had been up until that point (and until “Friday I’m in Love”), the Spanish arrangement on “The Blood” is a fantastic twist and the one truly post-punk track (“Screw”) is led by an awesome bass line.

  • Bloodflowers (9.5)

Despite loving Disintegration so much, I think Bloodflowers is the album I’ve listened to the most in my lifetime. This was released about a week after my 24th birthday in 2000 and maybe six months after I graduated college. I remember getting this record and laying on my Mom’s sofa feeling quite emotional about this one. At the time, this was billed as the final Cure record as evidenced as quickly as the opening words of the first track, “Out of this World,” “When we look back at it all as I know we will / You and me, wide eyed / I wonder/ Will we really remember how it feels to be this alive?” There’s an overall somber mood to the record and wandering passages over the course of nine songs that average more than six minutes in length. It’s hard to explain in words but it definitely has the feel of a band making an exit. Of course four years later they put out a new record so it’s a moot point now. Some critics at the time thought is was a lazy record from a band that had given up but I find most of these tracks to simply have some wonderful melodies and is the kind of album that you can really get kind of lost in.

  • Faith (9)
  • Pornography (8.5)
  • Wish (8.5)
  • The Cure (8)
  • The Top (8)
  • Paris (8)
  • Join the Dots (7.5)
  • Kiss Me, Kiss Me, Kiss Me (7.5)

Most Cure fans would consider this to be one of the classics in the catalog but it’s not in my mind. It’s definitely a good album and surely adventurous but it’s really long at 18 tracks and 75 minutes and with that, there’s a very scattered feel to the whole record. There’s a lot of really moody songs but with upbeat, horn filled tracks breaking that mood quite often. “Just Like Heaven” is one of their best pop songs but it almost seems out of place on this album. And a song like “Hot Hot Hot!!!” which is one of their most upbeat tracks but more like a late 80s Red Hot Chili Peppers song instead of the Cure, also doesn’t fit well on the record. If you take songs individually, a lot of them stand nicely alone but the lack of flow on this album is a sticking point for me.

  • Bestival Live 2011 (7.5)
  • Seventeen Seconds (6.5)
  • Mixed Up (6)
  • Concert (6)
  • Torn Down (5.5)
  • Three Imaginary Boys (5.5)
  • Show (5.5)
  • 4:13 Dream (5)
  • Wild Mood Swings (5)

If you broke down Cure records, “Wild Mood Swings” could describe many, if not all of them. Throughout their career, they have went back and forth between dreary and dreamy but it all came to a head here. The title certainly applies here as there are a bunch of upbeat tracks and a bunch of moody tunes. But there’s seemingly no rhyme or reason to the order and many of the upbeat tracks simply aren’t very good. Lead single “The 13th” is easily their worst single and one of my least favorite cure songs and “Mint Car” sounds like a B-52’s outtake rather than a Cure single. There’s quality song scattered throughout the disc but not enough to warrant any further listens.

Summary: 20 albums, average 7.3