lawl.

Funny coincidence: Eminem's "Cleaning Out My Closet" came up on the computer while I was actually cleaning out my own closet! That's right up there with hearing The Clash's "Lost In The Supermarket" over the local grocery store's Muzak system, and the times I've heard "Closing Time" by Semisonic (or better yet, "Tired of Waiting For You" by the Kinks) very close to the store's actual closing time. Stuff like that makes my day, especially when it's actually random (and not just some smart-assed music dork (like me) trying to be clever with the "now playing" post tags)...

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Not much going on, which is fine by me. Taking a break from everything to finally go through several crates worth of crap from high school/college. When I moved I just stuffed it all in there and took it with me, figuring I'd organize it later. It's later enough, years later, and with my girlfriend planning to go to school - she'll actually be able to use some of the stuff I've been holding on to. My parents raised me to be thrifty so I hoarded pens, pencils, notebooks and office supplies like a guy that survived the Great Depression. Found some other useful stuff mixed in, like the rest of the mailers I'd kept from the music I'd bought back in the day. Apparently I was OCD enough to make a list of all the albums I got in the awesome $40 score, which turned up in one of the notebooks, so I'll write about that whole story on here. Not until I finish with these crates though...

Review: White Zombie - "Let Sleeping Corpses Lie"

I bought this even though I still have my old copies of "La Sexorcisto..." and "Astro-Creep 2000..." and I normally only re-buy stuff if there's lots of b-sides and live bonus material added. Practically every White Zombie song is on this thing, including the soundtrack material. The DVD is good, too, since I'd never had the chance to see the band live and only saw their videos in teeny low quality flash files. That's right, I never even saw the famous Beavis & Butt-head reaction that's mentioned in damned near every article and interview about the band!

After getting my copy of this, my excitement over finally hearing the early stuff in an 'official form' pretty much outweighed everything else. In the spirit of Beavis and Butt-head, this (the music) rules. Personally, I like all of it. The only WZ songs I still need to hear are on the rumored "Forgiven" demo that J.G. Thirlwell produced that got the band signed to Geffen in the first place. Yes, there are 2 songs from "Gods on Voodoo Moon" that were left off of "...Corpses..." but if you can do a blogsearch and are patient, you can find those.

Of course, that brings me to the stuff that sucks. Where the hell is the original artwork?? Since this 4-CD and 1 DVD set comes in a similar format to the "Deluxe Edition" reissues of other Geffen albums, with a slipcase that has the complete tracklist on the back, I'd expected more details than what are in the booklet. Instead of lots of awesome color art like what we got in the "Astro Creep..." booklet, all we have is a black and white collage of band photos and early flyers. While the basic info that should be on any box set/comp like this is there (like which tracks came from which albums, production credits, original year of issue, etc.) that's all there is! Instead of the treatment that Sonic Youth got (lots of pictures, art from the singles, pages of interviews with the band/someone who's a huge fan talking about how awesome the band is/was) there's pretty much nothing. At the very least, I was hoping for reprints of the artwork from the early albums. You didn't have to reprint the whole booklets for "Astro Creep" and "La Sexorcisto" since even the casual "their early stuff suxx0rz!1!!" WZ fans still own these or can rebuy them for cheap, but how's about something more than a monochrome collage that I could've done a better job on if I had access to a bunch of old gig flyers and the original releases? Part of the fun of WZ is the artwork, and after finally getting to see Rob Zombie's "El Superbeasto" comics (which rule), I'd expected way more from this comp, art-wise.

In the interest of full disclosure, I did pick this up used at a local record store. For what I paid ($50), it's well worth it. For $70-$80? Not without the artwork that it should have had.

White Zombie - "Psycho/Soul"

White Zombie was always one of my favorite bands, and has the distinction of being the first band I learned about out-of-print releases by. (The second was KMFDM, with their "Naive"album.) I remember checking used record stores constantly in hopes I'd be able to find their pre-"La Sexorcisto" albums. At the time, I didn't even have a record player, so I was mainly searching for the one I knew came out on CD: "Make Them Die Slowly." I was thrilled to find a copy of "Nightcrawlers: The KMFDM Remixes" and a numbered limited tour version of the "Electric Head Pt. 2" single that I haven't seen on any of the fansite discographies.

A couple of years ago I found a bootleg for supercheap that claimed to have all the tracks from "Soul Crusher" and "Psycho-Head Blowout." I'm glad it was only $2.50, since it was actually a bootleg of a bootleg! Whoever put it together had a really bad quality scan of the back cover art, and of course the tracklist doesn't match. Mine has 10 tracks, instead of the 9 listed on that link. The CDDB listing that comes up doesn't quite match the corrected tracklist on that site, either... I'm kinda surprised this disc made it to the shelves at the used shop, since it's obviously a CD-R with a printed paper sticker on top... you can clearly see the 74 through the label! Decent sound quality, though. It was enough to hold me over until the release of the WZ boxset, "Let Sleeping Corpses Lie." You'll notice there is no link to download this bootleg. Reason being, the box set is still in print and worth it. (A review of that will be forthcoming...)

Just to kill some time...

Here's a partial list of stuff I can't help collecting. By "can't help," I mean that whenever I find these things for free, I have to keep them, no matter how many I already have in my possession.

Key rings/ball chains
Tire valve covers (I can usually find these near the air machines at gas stations)
Coins (US and foreign) and old arcade tokens
Paper coin wrappers (especially ones from defunct banks)
Milk crates (best modular storage/shelving units ever.)
Pens (especially advertising ones)
CD and DVD cases
Coke Rewards codes (technically I only keep these long enough to enter them)
Matchbooks (Remember the days when smoking wasn't banned everywhere and companies used these for advertising?)
Lighters (I used to collect the metal tabs off of the disposable ones and crimp them to my car's sun visors - stopped doing that when they started rusting)
Books (Usually can't find these for free, but sometimes I'll get lucky. The ones I have no interest in reading go straight to Goodwill, though)
Sheets of paper with one blank side (I use these as printer paper 'cause I'm cheap. I can honestly say I don't hate junk mail because of this.)

Most recent score - found a copy of Metallica's "...And Justice For All" in its case! Scratched up, but doesn't skip!

Obligatory excuse for no updates.

Someone with more time on their hands should put together a blog that collects the best/funniest excuses that people use for the long time between posts. I have a lot of respect for those who keep plugging away and have new content every couple of weeks, even when it's not something I like.


With that in mind, it's a new year and I'm gonna try to start over and actually do something with this. When I was a teenager I always wanted to self-publish something but never did much other than a few notebooks with half-baked ideas that I never came back to. I found an old envelope with some random clippings and bits of collages inside that I had started way back then, and it reminds me of how I used to have a need to create stuff. I don't know what the hell happened to me in the years that followed... and I don't have the wife/kids/"grew up" excuse that many people my age have now. With this thing here, I don't even have to bother photocopying anything and stapling it up and trying to mail it out to people... once I learn how to put graphics on here, I could do just about anything on here that I could've done back in the day, and people can ignore it for free!

A small package of value will come to you, shortly.

I've always been kinda behind the loop when it comes to technology... never been one of those guys that had to have the latest thing right when it came out. So: no pager, no cell phone (not even the giant honkin' 80s model), the last game system I had before I got a PS2 was an Atari 2600 that my parents picked up at a rummage sale back when everyone ditched 'em 'cause the NES came out.

So it follows that in spite of my huge music collection on both hard copy and mp3, my only "mp3 player" was my rapidly aging desktop computer. Most of the components were hand-me-downs from a friend of mine and it works well enough for what I use it for. I've gotten used to burning stuff to disc when I want to listen to it somewhere else (like in my car) and I'm too cheap to justify shelling out the cash for an Ipod or any competing players when I already have a working burner and player. While I like the idea behind those new phones that also play music, I'm a social reject who doesn't like spending time on the phone in the first place, and wouldn't get any calls anyway from people that aren't my parents or my girlfriend. I'm old enough that I don't get the point of this constant texting that everyone seems to do these days (and my fat fingers would miss the right keys even if I did try to do any of that)...

So, I wound up with a cheap COBY mp3 player that I got free for entering in about 2,500 or so of those reward codes from Coca-Cola products. So far, for the price, I can't complain. It has 4GB of space which means it should hold about as much music as a DVD of mp3s. It has some other features that I haven't messed around with yet, like a tiny video screen and a text reader function, and an FM radio receiver.

Now, of course, the big question is which tracks do I fill this device up with? I recently read one of John Sandford's books, Broken Prey, which besides being a good book, has a nice little subplot bonus of "Lucas Davenport's Best Songs of the Rock Era," a list of songs based on the premise that Lucas' wife bought him an Ipod with an Itunes gift card good for 100 mp3s, so he's trying to fill it up with what he and his friends/partners/etc. feel are the best 'rock' songs. I passed the book along at PaperbackSwap, but actually took the time to copy down the whole list (which appears as an appendix in the back of the book) because there are some great songs on there that I'd forgotten about. There's a few on there that, in my opinion, just don't fit and of course there's certain artists/groups on there that I just can't stand (Bruce Springsteen and John Mellencamp, for example). I'm not copying the list on here since oddly enough, the book is missing the usual copyright disclaimer in the front that lets you quote parts of it in the context of a review.

Looking through it again, I find myself wondering what exactly constitutes "the rock era," anyway? Does that end in the early '70s with all the singer/songwriter stuff? Does punk rock bring it back, since the Ramones and the Sex Pistols (among many others) played closer to the roots of rock with their covers of older songs? And while I still like some songs off the list (The Eurythmics' "Sweet Dreams" and Tracy Chapman's "Give Me One Reason") I wouldn't consider those "rock songs," exactly. There's other songs listed that I'd consider to be folk or soul or blues, not rock and roll... and I'd be perfectly fine if I never heard "Unchained Melody" by the Righteous Brothers again the rest of my life.

More on this list later, once I've heard every song on there and have my own take on it.