Category Archives: album

Roy Budd: Get Carter

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Morricone rightfully gets a ton of respect for his soundtracks, but by comparison fellow soundtrack wizard Roy Budd is woefully underrated. Check out this trailer for Get Carter, which features great soundtrack sounds by Budd throughout. Budd has a nice double disc set featuring some of his best work.

Get Budd: The Soundtracks is a worthy investment if you love those 60s action/heist/gangster movie sounds, or if you want to see what else Budd got up to after Get Carter. The movie itself is excellent, Michael Caine really tops himself in this…he’s the prototype for Bruce Willis, Stallone, even Arnold had to take some cues from Caine in this film.

Chuck Norris is a toffee-nosed stripling compared to Caine in Get Carter…Nobody in the entire world comes as close. Standout moments in the trailer include the totally naked Caine chasing a couple of gangsters out of his room with a shotgun…let’s see Norris try THAT. On second thought, maybe not.

Introducing Bubblegum Records

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Glasgow was my first exposure to Scotland, and I’ve loved it ever since. I’ve heard since visiting that it’s the Scot version of Limerick in Ireland, AKA “Stab City” but I never say anything remotely ugly in Glasgow. Besides, Belle and Sebastian are from there so it couldn’t possibly be all that bad, could it? 

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But I digress–Glasgow is also home to the new, fun, and very cool record label Bubblegum Records.  This is a label worth watching. The first release by Bubblegum is from none other than Texas-based Hyperbubble, with a glorious five-song maxi single CD/download titled Better Set Your Phasers To Stun.

Transparency alert–the photography for the Hyperbubble CD is by none other than yours truly–I shot the band while on a recent trip to San Antonio. But this five-song release is a perfect new wave/synthpop confection. (It also features a vocal guest appearance by the great Helen Love. If you don’t know who she is, Helen’s the one who claims to listen ONLY to the Ramones.)

Listen to two of the great tracks from this five song maxi-single and get hooked.  The official release is June 8. ..three cheers to Bubblegum Records in Scotland and three more to Hyperbubble and Helen Love. RECOMMENDED.

Zombie Disco June 20 Chicago’s Viaduct Theatre

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Here are the gory details I promised earlier about the Chicago Horror Society birthday bash, Zombie Disco. I’ll be DJing this on Saturday June 20th at the Viaduct Theatre. Admission is a mere ten bucks for all the undead fun you could ever want, plus Italian horror movie soundtrack sounds mega-mixed with disco and other craziness. Expect to hear Goblin mashed up with Daft Punk, Lipps Inc, the Cramps, Morricone mashed up with Aphex Twin, James Brown and Paisley Babylon.

Check the flyer for all the deets and don’t forget to wear your zombie makeup!

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WTF: Denmark Vs. Sweden

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Crap album art isn’t always about the thing itself. Sometimes a merely nauseating album cover can reach dizzying new lows when compared side-by-side to equally barf inducing artwork. Submitted for your approval, all the way from Denmark–the cover of Laid Back’s Keep Smiling album. This isn’t the most rotten thing ever made, but let’s call this artwork…uninspired:

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Now compare it to the utterly goofy and craptacular cover for this Swedish nonsense– Kjell Kraghe’s Vind I Seglen. This album cover takes the seafaring them to a similarly fucktarded new low. We’re faced with a serious chicken-and-egg question here. Which wretched cover came first? Was this some kind of harmonic convergence of dumbass graphic design? Or was somebody thinking, “No way is that OTHER windmill-and-wooden-shoes country going to show US up in the dumbass graphics department!”

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This album cover reminds me of Beavis and Butthead episode where Butthead delivers a stunning critique of a bad 90s music video by merely uttering the phrase, “Look at his FACE!” That’s all we really need to say here, isn’t it? Except those two sails placed so perfectly in symmetry next to this hambone Ricky Schroeder lookalike makes it appear this guy has some kind of freakish protruberances connected to that suit of his. 

So perhaps these are both, on their own,  merely lame-o record covers. But viewed side by side they give me the horrors. We know Sweden and Denmark are capable of better than this…but then again, we haven’t even started looking at the bad death metal album covers from these two countries. Just you wait, this stuff looks tame (well, it IS tame) by comparison.