The Melvins Melt Banana/vaz Live @ Ground Zero: 8/4/99 By: Eric G. Spartanburg, South Carolina is a pretty unlikely place to attract shows of this caliber, but I won’t question it because I don’t want to jinx it. Ground Zero looks like a converted roller skating rink with a dancefloor still intact, so it was […]

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The Magnetic Fields 69 Love Songs (Volume One) Merge By: Eric Greenwood The big one. The leviathan. Finally, it’s here: 69 Love Songs. The Magnetic Fields’ follow up to Get Lost is an ambitious undertaking to say the least. It’s been four years since we’ve had a full album of Stephin Merritt’s lovelorn and twisted […]

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The Magnetic Fields 69 Love Songs (Volume 2) Merge By: Eric Greenwood 69 Love Songs is a literal title with blatant innuendo, but amidst Merritt’s masterwork are a few songs that seem forced and self-indulgent, which is easily overlooked when you compare the hits versus the misses ratio on an effort this colossal. It’s almost […]

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The Magnetic Fields 69 Love Songs (Volume 3) Merge By: Eric Greenwood Stephin Merritt has pulled it off- the most ambitious pop concept album of the decade. Saving the best for last, Volume 3 of 69 Love Songs is far and away the finest batch of tunes in the collection. Following the cheesed-up dub-reggae of […]

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Mr. Bungle Dillenger Escape Plan Live @ Ground Zero: 8/10/99 By: Eric Greenwood With cops chasing people through the parking lot and a huge line out the front door to the club, Dillenger Escape Plan started its set oblivious to the entire ruckus. The band’s not so subtle approach to the soft/loud dynamic wore thin […]

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Jeff Mueller Fold And Perish Monitor By: Eric Greenwood Jeff Mueller comes from that lineage of bands influenced by the legendary Kentucky band Slint. First there was Rodan, which briefly donned the post-Slint flag before the band disseminated after only one full length, and then Mueller joined June Of 44, whose first LP, Engine Takes […]

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Pavement Terror Twilight Matador By: Eric Greenwood For some ridiculous reason someone associated the term ‘slacker’ with lo-fi music, specifically of the indie rock nature, but there has never been anything slack about Pavement’s music- not even when it was clouded with blistering shards of noise about eight years ago. Pavement is too smart to […]

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