O!HTT's 2015 Haunted Halloween Playlist

I hope you all have an awesome evening planned for tonight. Just in the nick of time, I wanted to share with you a little Halloween playlist. Mr. Bungle, The White Stripes, Joy Division, Fantomas, and of course heaping helpings of Tom Waits... I've ransacked my music library to find for you guys the spookiest, most danceable, mood-setting songs for whatever you find yourself doing tonight: manning your homemade haunted house, throwing a Halloween party, or snacking on your candy haul.

Tell me in the comments below what I should add to the playlist for next year! Til then, have a Happy Halloween!

O!HTT's 2015 Haunted Halloween

1. The Heavy - "The House That Dirt Built"
2. Mr. Bungle - "None of Them Knew They Were Robots"
3. Tom Waits - "Bad As Me"
4. Tomahawk - "101 North"
5. The White Stripes - "Little Ghost"
6. Dead Kennedys - "Halloween"
7. Deerhunter - "Snakeskin"
8. Ariel Pink's Haunted Graffiti - "Fright Night"
9. Modest Mouse - "This Devil's Workday"
10. Smashing Pumpkins - "The Beginning Is the End Is the Beginning"
11. The Heavy - "Sixteen"
12. Mr. Bungle - "Golem II: The Bionic Vapour Boy"
13. Talking Heads - "Psycho Killer"
14. Gorillaz - "M1A1"
15. Tom Waits - "Whistlin' Past the Graveyard"
16. Chelsea Wolfe - "Carrion Flowers"
17. Charles Sheffield - "It's Your Voodoo Working On Me"
18. Smashing Pumpkins - "We Only Come Out at Night"
19. The Automatic - "Monster"
20. The Who - "Boris the Spider"
21. Beck - "Scarecrow"
22. Joy Division - "Shadowplay"
23. Tom Waits - "God's Away on Business"
24. Fantômas - "Cape Fear"

Top 5 "Mellon Collie & the Infinite Sadness" Songs

Twenty years ago this past Friday, Mellon Collie & the Infinite Sadness was released by the alternative rock megastars Smashing Pumpkins. Billy Corgan, frontman of the band and certified musical genius and megalomaniac, stated prior to the its release that the 24-song, 2+ hour double album was destined to be "The Wall for Generation-X." While the music itself is hardly similar to Pink Floyd's magnum opus concept album, the influence of Mellon Collie more than comparable.

My wife and I were celebrating the birthday of this album this morning by discussing the influence this album has had on modern rock music, from Fall Out Boy to Between the Buried and Me and Titus Andronicus, and on our lives personally.

Myself, I first picked up Mellon Collie as a 16-year-old, really the perfect age for listening to this album. I had already fallen head over heels for Mellon Collie's predecessor, Siamese Dream, with its incredible musicianship and scope of influences. Mellon Collie, though, felt like an entire micro-universe all its own, where weird cat-headed children picked flowers in dark meadows and were frequently interrupted by an army of butterfly-winged bullets thundering down on them. The strange mix of piano pieces and gorgeous pre-post-rock guitar ballads with straight-up metal headbangers and face-melting guitar solos seemed to musically capture the wonder, beauty, heartache, and frustration of adolescence.

Now, almost a decade later for me, and two decades for its first listeners, the album remains a classic, just as relevant and powerful as ever. So, I thought I'd share my top 5 favorite Mellon Collie & the Infinite Sadness songs and why they still hold a special place in my heart, even after the angst and confusion of adolescence is behind me:

5. "To Forgive"

Even if you knew nothing about his parents' divorce or physically abusive stepmother, you could guess that Billy Corgan had a troubled childhood. This song is perhaps his best and most beautiful ode to that dark foundation of his life. The lyrics are wistful, perhaps deliberately attempting to replace the pain of his memories with cathartic recollections of being "a bastard son of a bastard son of a wild eyed child of the sun." Even still, there's no escaping the infinite sadness of lines like "I knew my loss before I even learned to speak. And all along I knew it was wrong. But I played along with my birthday song." The sincerity of this loss is undeniable and I found it very therapeutic for me as a teenager dealing with my own teenage heartache.

4. "Bodies"

Billy Corgan might have singlehandedly defined the emo/hardcore scream on this song as he tears his throat apart on the line, "No bodies ever knew, no bodies. No bodies felt like you, no bodies." And who among us, at some point in our adolescence, couldn't relate to the chorus and whine along "Love is suicide!"

We could talk about how "Bodies" powerfully represents the romantic disillusionment of youth, and how this theme ties into the rest of the songs on the album. But really, this is just a killer song that is fun to feel pissed off to.

3. "An Ode to No One"

When I first heard this song, my poor 16-year-old brain almost exploded. I had no idea you could do this sort of thing with guitars and drums. It's physically impossible for me to hear Jimmy Chamberlain's drumming on this album without trying to mimic him on my steering wheel or on my lap. Nor is it possible for me to hear Billy's blistering solo without noodling my fingers along with it in the air.

If anyone wants to argue that Jimmy Chamberlain was not the best drummer of the 90s, I humbly submit this song.

2. "1979"

The first Smashing Pumpkins song I ever heard, back in the 90s listening to my local "80s, 90s, and today" radio station in my mom's car. "1979" is arguably the most perfect pop song the Pumpkins ever wrote, which makes it standout in a brilliant way on an album filled with misfit songs.

There's something enchanting and timeless about this song. Wherever you are, as soon as you hear the opening riff with it's iconic little vocal flip (you know exactly what I'm talking about), you are transported back in time: to 1979, 1995, 2008, your adolescence, your childhood, wherever you were when you first heard it.

1. "Bullet With Butterfly Wings"

At the end of the day, this is really it. The song that defined the album, the band, the generation.
Billy's The Wall of Generation-X found its thesis statement in the iconic chorus of "Bullet With Butterfly Wings": Despite all the rage, the 2 hours of music, the successful career ending in a band imploded, the years of adolescence, we're still just rats in cages.

Billy doesn't provide any answers, here or throughout the album; indeed, it seems at almost 50-years-old, he's still trying to find his way out of the cage. What makes Mellon Collie important is that, for a moment or two, in 1995, Billy Corgan and his band of miscreants summed up perfectly life in this cage. It's ugly, it's beautiful, it's frustrating, it's profound. It's human. We've all been there and are there. It sucks and we're confused. But that's okay because we're in this thing together. 

Battles - La Di Da Di: ALBUM REVIEW

The first thing to say about Battles is that their album art makes me hungry (check this one, too). The first thing to know about Battles is that they are a supergroup math and experimental rock band, comprised of three obscure and insanely talented muscians, drummer John Stanier from Helmet and Tomahawk; guitarist, keyboardist, loopist Ian Williams from Don Caballero; and bassist/guitarist Dave Konopka from Lynx.

And before we go any further, the second thing to know about Battles is John Stanier's epic crash cymbal.

Fun Fact: He's seriously one of my favorite drummers ever.

For three LPs now, Battles have been honing their sound, which is an eclectic mix of experimental rock, math rock, and house EDM. The best way I can put it is this: hearing a Battles song is like listening to a chocolate robot punk dance party. Sometimes, their sound has been more "robot," like on their 2007 debut LP, Mirrored; sometimes, it's been more "chocolate," like on 2011's Gloss Drop. Here they go full dance party.

Now, we need to keep in mind what Battle's idea of a dance party is. It's not a mindless, talentless, purely visceral pop venture. Rather, it's stripping their sound down all the way to the barest of bones, relying only on their instrumental chops, grooves, and ability to make weird sounds. In fact, for the first time in their career, they have developed a veritable formula for their songs to follow:

Step 1: Glitchy, catchy keyboard intro
Step 2: Hi-hat, kick, and snare-only beat
Step 3: Dynamics and more layers of glitches
Step 4: Repeat

This formula can be heard to a T on a majority of La Di Da Di, on tracks like "FF Bada," "Non-Violence," "Dot Com," Tricentennial," and "Megatouch." This predictability and straightforwardness has rubbed many a Battles fan the wrong way, myself included, at first.

I mean, c'mon, if I wanted to hear safe, 4/4 grooves I would go to Ratatat or something! The only song here that is remotely boundary pushing is "The Yabba," which breaks just about every rule in the book! It begins 5/4, it has about 5 fake starts, about 7 different sections, it's as brilliant as "Atlas" or "Sundome." Where did the Battles I used to know go??

However, once I got used to the idea that this is the most straightforward experimental rock album I'd ever heard, La Di Da Di began to reveal its gems of subtle brilliance. "Dot Com" is a perfect example: it basically defines this little song structure formula, but it also fulfills it. Each build of energy and new layer of keys are not surprising when they come, but they are so rewarding to listen to and masterfully executed. You know without a doubt that these guys know what they're doing on each moment of the album, like when they cleanse your palette with "Dot Net" after "The Yabba." Not always do their deliberate ideas excite or enchant, like on their previous LPs. But always they display mastery of their own, inimitable genre.

At it's best, it's a series of experiments with some genius moments. At worst, it could be said very simplistically that La Di Da Di is the same awesome idea repeated 12 times. It's magic at some points. It drags at others. It leaves me wanting more moments like the final section of "The Yabba" or the time signature splicing of "Flora > Fauna." But, at the end of the day, even if I wish there were more of them, these moments of genius do exist here and I keep finding more each time I listen.

OVERALL SCORE: 7.7
Battles – La Di Da Di
1. The Yabba 2. Dot Net 3. FF Bada 4. Summer Shimmer 5. Cacio e Pepe 6. Non-Violence 7. Dot Com 8. Tyne Wear 9. Tricentennial 10. Megatouch 11. Flora > Fauna 12. Luu Le	O!HTT's COLORFUL SCORING SYSTEM 9-10 Holy. Crap. You must hear this song. One of the best of the year. 7-8 I'm so glad I have ears so that I can listen to this wonderful song. 5-6 Yeah, it's passable. Contributes to the vibe of the album, but not anything to write home about. 3-4 Ehh very mediocre or seriously flawed, there's a lot better music out there, or even on this album. 0-2 Good gravy, why must this song exist? One of the worst things that will enter your ears this year.

Death Cab for Cutie - Kintsugi: ALBUM REVIEW

This review comes at the request of a good friend. Which reminds me: if any of you reading have any requests for album reviews, playlists, listening suggestions, etc., by all means comment below!

Kintsugi is the eighth (wow, eighth!) studio album from indie rock kingpins Death Cab for Cutie, released this past March. It comes at a low point in the band's career and in the life of frontman Ben Gibbard: it's been years since their last successful album, Plans; second-in-command Chris Walla announced his departure from the band; and Ben is still in the wake of his divorce with his ex-wife, Zooey Deschanel.

It's understandable, then, that this album sounds moody and forlorn. The sadness even leaking into the symbolism of the album title -- kintsugi is a Japanese art form of repairing broken ceramics using flecks of gold.

Somehow, though, even with real loss and personal tragedy fueling it, the music ends up hollow and uninspired. As Ben chants on lead single "Black Sun" the chorus "How could something so fair be so cruel," I know why he's hurting, but I don't feel it. "You've Haunted Me All My Life" is bafflingly forgettable, when an earlier Gibbard would've spun gold from that song title alone.

Most of these songs, with about three exceptions, lack notable hooks, creative presentation, fresh ideas, artful compositions, or Death Cab's formerly-trademark clever and quirky lyrics. Listen to "Good Help (Is Hard to Find)" three times, wait a day, then hum it to me.

At its best, like on "Ghosts of Beverly Drive" and "Little Wanderer," Kintsugi shows the band locking together and creating memorable pieces of rock. Ben's imagery on the latter is reminiscent of his lyrical heyday, compiling a story of a modern, longing, long distance couple having separation anxiety and Skype issues, which was very relatable for my wife and I who basically lived six months of that. And "El Dorado" is probably the catchiest track on here. Definitely check out those three.

As a whole, the album can function as a statement by the band that the days of Manic Pixie Dream Boy rock are over. If that didn't do it, I think Ben hammered in that last nail at their performance at the Twilight Concert series this summer when he admitted to the audience with apparent chagrin, "I'm old enough now to be some of you guys' dads."

Death Cab are now focusing their creative energies on making Manic Middle Age Man indie adult contemporary (how's that for a genre?) So, if you want to forget Transatlanticism or The Photo Album and turn your head to the side and try to twist the point of view, then Kintsugi can be relevant. But if you look at it dead on, with the same cold starkness that Ben examines his life herein, you'll see broken porcelain and some gold flakes.

OVERALL SCORE: 5.8
Death Cab for Cutie – Kintsugi
1. No Room In Frame 2. Black Sun 3. The Ghosts of Beverly Drive 4. Little Wanderer 5. You've Haunted Me All My Life 6. Hold No Guns 7. Everything's A Ceiling 8. Good Help (Is So Hard to Find) 9. El Dorado 10. Ingenue 11. Binary Sea	O!HTT's COLORFUL SCORING SYSTEM 9-10 Holy. Crap. You must hear this song. One of the best of the year. 7-8 I'm so glad I have ears so that I can listen to this wonderful song. 5-6 Yeah, it's passable. Contributes to the vibe of the album, but not anything to write home about. 3-4 Ehh very mediocre or seriously flawed, there's a lot better music out there, or even on this album. 0-2 Good gravy, why must this song exist? One of the worst things that will enter your ears this year.

Tiny Reviews: Beach House, Deradoorian, The Sword, Destroyer, Panda Bear

Beach House - Depression Cherry

Oh man, what a disappointment. You'll remember from my "Get Pumped!" feature from August that this was one of the the albums I was looking forward to in the second half of the year. Beach House had enchanted my heart and ear with their beautiful, retro style of dream pop and Victoria Legrand's gorgeous alto voice. 2010's Teen Dream, my first Beach House record and definitely the zenith of their sound, hooked me in and set the bar high for whatever they would put out next. After 2012's Bloom, which was essentially more of the same, I was ready to see what else the band could do, and I definitely wasn't the only one getting tired of the same sparkly, dreamy keyboards and chord progressions.

Well, wouldn't you know it, with Depression Cherry, we get Teen Dream III: Revenge of the Synth (or Bloom II: Attack of the Clones). I didn't think they could do it or would do it, but they have taken the exact same songs with the exact same sounds and made the exact same record. I swear I've heard that electronic hi-hat in "Space Song" in fourteen other Beach House songs. And I'm not exaggerating. That's basically all there is to say about this album. Yes, it's beautiful sounding. Yes, it was interesting the first time. In fact, if you've never listened to Beach House before and are interested, this wouldn't be a bad place to start. But Teen Dream would be better and you'd get everything they give you here (five years later...)

Definitely Check Out: "Sparks"

OVERALL SCORE: 5.7
Beach House – Depression Cherry

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Deradoorian - The Expanding Flower Planet

A very surprising and fresh release. Deradoorian is the truncated nome-de-music of singer-songwriter Angel Deradoorian, who is basically exclusively known for her incredible vocal performance in Dirty Projectors' masterpiece Bitte Orca. You know, "Two Doves?" She sang that. This performance landed her rather unlikely spots on recent Flying Lotus and the Roots albums.

You may have, like me, held the assumption that Angel Deradoorian was only a folky, acoustic singer-songwriter type, especially after listening to her first solo album Mind Raft. One of the best qualities of The Expanding Flower Planet is how it absolutely destroys that assumption. There is hardly an acoustic or even folk song in sight.

In a lot of ways, Deradoorian's songwriting here continues the technically complex and often odd compositions of her former Dirty Projectors' bandleader Dave Longstreth. Opener "A Beautiful Woman" certainly shows it, as well as "The Expanding Flower Planet," "Grow" and my personal favorite "Your Creator." The latter sounds to me like it could be the beginning of a Battles song, it's that good.

If the whole album was as good as these four tracks, it would be one of my favorites of the year. Unfortunately, the other tracks on the album, while still technical and ambitious, are really boring and fall flat. "Komodo" and "The Eye" in particular come to mind. All in all, it's an extremely praiseworthy album with some incredible tracks that any Dirty Projectors, tUnE-yArDs, Glasser, The Knife, or Bjork fans will enjoy

Definitely Check Out: "A Beautiful Woman," "Your Creator"

OVERALL SCORE: 8.1
Deradoorian – The Expanding Flower Planet

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The Sword - High Country

At their best, The Sword have been a band that draw the best of 60's heavy metal, prog rock, and sludge metal and bring it into one place. Though grounded and often bogged down in very accessible and digestible blues progressions and melodies, what has set them apart from other bands similarly bogged down is their ear for writing good riffs, prog sensibilities, and interesting fantasy-inspired lyrics.

Unfortunately, on High Country, they shed all of these strengths and deliver an album that is almost entirely made up of entry level, dime-a-dozen blues rock. It's not even metal at this point; it's so watered down, this record could make for a bad Wolfmother or Birds of Avalon B-side collection. Some songs, like "Suffer No Fools," do exhibit their penchant for good riff writing, and the production remains sparkling clean and crisp as a bowl of Rice Crispies. But it's not enough to make this record really stand out in anyway.

BUT, as I said, it's almost entirely made of this bland blues rock, and if it was it wouldn't be that bad. The rest of the album, though? Well, I guess they realized they were writing themselves into a rut like this. So what did they do? Rather than scrapping these and writing actually good songs, they devoted their creative energies to completely awkward meanderings in random genres:

• synth rock on "Seriously Mysterious" 
• ska/rock-with-a-brass-section on "Early Snow" 
• and... hip hop on opener "Unicorn Farm"??? 

I don't know what is going on with that track but it makes me want to cry. And don't even get me started on these songs' lyrics...

Please, The Sword. What on earth happened?

Definitely Check Out: "Suffer No Fools," "Unicorn Farm" (just because it's that bad)

OVERALL SCORE: 4.2
The Sword – High Country

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Destroyer - Poison Season

You may have heard of Destroyer in the way I did: through frontman Dan Bejar's membership in the New Pornographers

However, that connection won't help you any on Poison Season: the two could hardly sound further apart on the indie spectrum. The New Pornographers are fun, bright, pop-y, and inexplicably tongue-in-cheek, like everything's a joke, including their band name.

Poison Season, though, is serious, heady, adult-ish, and inexplicably sober, even in its energetic and odd moments.

I have hardly heard an album that is as mature musically as this one: Dan Bejar has crafted a rich blend of adult contemporary, jazz, Latin, Springsteen-esque folk rock, and Billy Joel-esque poet rock. The lyrics give credence to calling Bejar a rock poet too: the beginning, middle, and end tracks, the three "Times Square's" feature the lines, "The writing on the wall/ Wasn't writing at all/ Just forces of nature/ In love with a radio station/ You can follow a rose wherever it grows/ Or you could fall in love with Times Square."

I'm still dissecting this beautiful, incredibly dense piece of music. But that density is one of the album's best characteristics. In fact, it's so dense, it took me 3 or 4 listens to feel any connection at all, like listening to Classical music is for me. But now, I'm finding the fun of this album is peeling back more layers with each listen. This is a release that any music lover, especially a lover of the above mentioned genres, should not pass up. Just be patient with it.

Definitely Check Out: "Times Square," "Dream Lover," "Solace's Bride"

OVERALL SCORE: 8.4
Destroyer – Poison Season

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Panda Bear - Crosswords EP

My honest opinion and review? I don't remember a single part of it. I listened to it four times and I can't tell you how one song goes.

This was essentially the case for me on Panda Bear vs. The Grim Reaper (PBVGR), the mother LP from which this EP comes. The dude's from Animal Collective, and Panda Bear in particular, are sliding into a very sad comfort zone. They blazed musical territory before them for their entire careers until the monumental Merriweather Post Pavilion, and since then, they've halted in the realm of bloopy, blippy psychedelic electronica. The fact that each LP since then (Centipede Hz, Avey Tare's Down There and Slasher Flicks, and Panda Bear's Tomboy and PBVGR) have had standout tracks shows that the guys are certainly talented and have it in them.

On releases like this, though... I can't help but feel Panda Bear's on auto-pilot. I sincerely hope they find their way out of this for the upcoming new Animal Collective album

Definitely Check Out: "No Man's Land" I guess?

OVERALL SCORE: 5.1
Panda Bear – Poison Season

A New Direction

I'm announcing a new direction and purpose for this blog. I love writing about music and these past three months of getting my feet wet in music criticism have been challenging and exciting. I really want to get this off the ground and, accordingly, I've been trying to find a good, exigent niche for my blog to fill. There's dozens--hundreds, even--of music reviewing websites, blogs, journals, magazine, etc., and it's practically impossible as a one man band to compete with them in terms of volume of music reviewed or content posted.

I mean, we can't all be "The Internet's Busiest Music Nerd."

So, how can I stand out? The answer to this question has been sitting, elephantile, in the room of my mind for months now.

This blog, as will my music library generally, will henceforth be devoted to finding the best of uplifting, clean, vulgarity-free music. And by this, I don't at all mean purely religious or nauseatingly overdone "family friendly" music. I mean simply music whose messages and lyrical choices uplift and don't degrade.

I came to this conclusion while listening to a talk by a religious leader of my church, the LDS Church, this weekend. In the talk, Larry Lawrence (I know, why would you name your kid Lawrence, Mr. and Mrs. Lawrence?) spoke on the subject of drawing closer to God, asking a question a man once asked 2000 years ago: "What lack I yet?" For months now, as I've been delving into popular music after returning from my mission, I've felt a nagging at my mind that I need to cut out vulgar music from my life. These feelings particularly came after falling in love with Kendrick Lamar's To Pimp A Butterfly, which follows the unfortunate trend of hip hop being unnecessarily vulgar and crude, and Father John Misty's I Love You, Honeybear, which is a brilliant but incredibly crass album.

I tried to slip these thoughts under the rug because these albums, and several others similar, were so good, even if they were offensive.

But even if I don't mind being offended, I know God does, and where this language is, He withdraws. After all, I know songs like "For Free?" ("This d*** ain't freeee!") and "Nothing Good Ever Happens at the Goddamn Thirsty Crow" will not be played in heaven. So, why not get a head start and give them up now?

So, I went through my Spotify playlists and removed all of the vulgar music. I was amazed to find that this only require removing a dozen or so albums, and even fewer songs, from my "Favorites of 2015 (So Far)" playlist.

I know it may not seem important to my agnostic or atheist friends, or others who don't feel vulgarity makes any difference in art and entertainment. But for my friends who, like me, thinks it makes a big difference, I hope you'll find the blog a haven of refreshingly clean, cutting edge music.

As part of this change, I'll be adding a content rating to my scores (probably something like G, PG, PG13, R, or maybe A, B, C, F etc.) and I might even change up the name of the blog to better promote this aspect. Anyway, thanks for your support! Long live good music!