Green Day - American Idiot - VINYL LP

Heldon - Stand By [VINYL LP] date 02/21/2020

Green Day's second full album was the perfect dry run for the band's later assault on the mainstream, containing both more variety and more flat-out smashes than previous releases had shown. With Tre Cool now firmly in place as the drummer, the lineup was at last settled, and it turned out Cool and Mike Dirnt were a perfect rhythm section, with the former showing a bit more flash and ability than John Kiftmeyer did. Together the two throw in a variety of guitarless breaks that would later help to define the band's sound for many - warm and never letting the beat go. As for Billie Joe Armstrong, his puppy-dog delivery and eternal switching between snotty humor and sudden sorrrow was better than ever, as were his instantly memorable riffs. The metal-strength chug that always informed the band's best work isn't absent either - check out Armstrong's opening riffing on InchChristie Road.Inch the whole thing starts with a note-perfect bang - Inch2000 Light Years AwayInch is the absolute highlight of the group's premajor-tag days, with a great chorus and classic yearning lyrics. It got buried in the wave of Dookie's success a bit, but one other number didn't - InchWelcome to Paradise,Inch also a standout on that album, appears here in it's original form. Rob Cavallo punched up the radio-friendly sound on the latter take, but even here it's a treat and a half - quick, rampaging, and once again with a great stop-start chorus to spare. This vinyl version is on pressed on 180 gram vinyl.

Extended Field unites Horse Lords and Arnold Dreyblatt for the eighteenth volume of FRKWYS, an intergenerational collaboration of adventurous musicians drawn to the sonically radiant world of just intonation-an ancient tuning system in which scale intervals are derived from whole-number ratios. Dreyblatt first immersed himself in this approach in New York during the 1970s, while Horse Lords began exploring and applying it's possibilities nearly four decades later. Together, they create a vibrant harmonic environment, fueled by a shared devotion to rhythm, achieving a marriage of discreet but related aesthetics for the ages.