I’ve been getting kind of down on music, the inevitable by-product, I think, of reviewing 4-5 CDs a week and sometimes 6, for weeks and weeks on end. So the yellow manila envelopes that used to be almost like Christmas, every single day of the week, have been starting to feel like obligations. Great, another fucking record. Thanks. It’s a sickness. But anyway, these sorts of ruts are not u
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I'm reviewing this 3-disc Big Dipper retrospective that Merge is putting out in March...which, given the normal publication schedule, means that I am not really listening to much else at the moment. But damn, it couldn't be more fun, obsessing over this early 1990s, jangly, jittery, goofy post-punk-with-a-spoonful-of-sugar band.Anyway, I have a new favorite song, built around the lyric for the...
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Big DipperSupercluster[The Big Dipper Anthology](Merge)US release date: 18 March 2008UK release date: 18 March 2008by Jennifer Kelly For a song to be beautiful ... the artist must be brave.The late 1980s and early 1990s will probably be remembered mostly as the onset of grunge, the years when Nirvana and Pearl Jam duked it out for the top of the alternative rock heap. And yet, there were alte...
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I know I've been on and on and on about this big Dipper reissue, Superconductor, a 3 CD set of the band's long out of print (and some never in print) output. It's my favorite music so far this year. Anyway, this is probably my last post about it, unless it figures in the year-end wallow. It's a feature, based on interviews with Gary Waleik and Bill Goffrier, and I wrote it on my MOG holiday ...
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Sometimes you hear a band at just the right age. I first bought a vinyl copy of Big Dipper, Heavens, during my freshman year of college (1987: yikes!). In the tumultuous years to follow, when I traded in and sold many CD's and records I cherished, I clung to my copy of Heavens long after I donated my broken turntable to Goodwill. Now it sits on an IKEA bookshelf, shredded by our cat (who pas...
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Here's one of the other gems from Heavens. I knew a girl in the marching band at Boise High School named Jennifer Fanning. She wasn't really a popular girl, but she wasn't really a nerd either. Just a very nice, beautiful person. Anyway, after I went off to college, I imagined that this song could have been written for her: "She's fetching/She may not know it now/Watch out if she finds out...
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I couldn't let a year go by without posting something here at MOG. I've been listening to the exciting Big Dipper retrospective on Merge records called "Supercluster". Look for that in the recent add section of my music collection.
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