Die Rotzz/Bastard Sons of Marvin Hirsch split 7"

(Go Ape) Die Rotzz create punk so furious, thundering, and hard rocking that these New Orleans nuisances create power music that could damage a levee or level a dam. If this split 7", like all split 7"'s, is a battle of the bands, they seem too powerful to lose. But the snotty, skanky, decrepit punk projectile vomit of BSOMH is a disease with no vaccine, so I have to give them this filthy fight. But there's no losers here. or, more accurately, there are only glorious losers here!

Little Seizures "Can't Take No More" ep

(Go Ape)  It is no insult to  this Brooklyn bongo bashers to say that the Ben Lyon's Halloween freakout cover art is the best thing about this record...this monstrous masterpiece would be the best thing about Sgt Peppers if they'd wised up and hired Ben for that art gig! Anyhoo, these are four slabs of truly timeless prime Bowery punk...if these guys never shared a needle or night with Johnny Thunders they sure know how to fake it! Greasy garage for one room apartment dwellers and homeless folks who've never actually saw a real garage.

The Monsters "Masks," "The Hunch"

(Voodoo Rhythm) Certainly the two finest slices of Swiss Halloween cheese ever recorded, the Monsters 80s output is reissued with creepy love by the man responsible for the lo-fi, diseased, garage damage served up on these two slabs. A quarter century later Rev. Beat Man is an esteemed (though sinister) minister, and the CEO of the massive Voodoo Rhythm empire, but fronting the frightening Monsters (who, true to their name, did almost exclusively monster-themed music, including the evilest cover of the Sonics' "The Witch") Beat Man was merely a frog-voiced demon in the rock n roll trenches spreading evil. Elevate your Mischief Night to Mayhem Night by spinning these putrid platters...they redefine horror, in the best way.

Week of Wonders "Piggybacks" b/w "The End of the Day"

(HHBTM) Making the guitar sound like a bouncy happy steel drum but with a spare indie pop lo fi vibe means this sounds like Trinidad and Twee-bago. Or maybe like Ghanaian highlife meets Miller High Life.

Black Time "Blackout"

(Monolith Sound) Remember when the Cramps played that insane asylum? This sounds like the patients subsequently covering the Cramps.  If you've never heard this lunacy before you now have no excuse as this deluxe-ish vinyl reissue exists. Do you?

Zacht Automaat "S/T"

(GUEST REVIEW BY ROBERT DAYTON) (Calico Corp) Paint if you will a picture of a band that’s recorded 11 albums of material that you need to hear.  They heard a new world as well and they heard it prolificallaexpiallidociously. Here’s some magick mmmoments from those albums made accessible as a double LP, limited edition 333 copies (plus a CDR of other stuff, plus download code). Distill it, shake it up, and double up. The front sleeve initializes the name of Zacht Automaat. ZA it says, but it ain’t the PIZ or the PITS, it’s a PARTY, an ever shifting moody party with a ring that fits just right! Mostly organ/synth and drums with other instruments careening in and out. Sounds of science coming to fluid fruition, all organic like, processionals, cartoon free jazz liberation marches, feather s falling, seaside strolls under a Chroma key mountain, song titles like "Reprise Surprise/Brief Resolution." Gawwwd, this ain’t a big pot of soup stretching out to simmer, it’s a grab bag, a bursting box of chocolates, and they’re all winners, there is that Soft Machine influence, but just before they turned to wank fusion, and c’mon guyyyyys, it’s just one of many leaping off points, and they don’t just look, they touch, it ain’t no doppelgang, but I must say, at times they sound like actual soft machines, not the band, but actual soft machines! It’s really alive! You know something, I once went to New York City in search of the last automat, I really wanted a fully vended meal in an establishment of stainless steel, and couldn’t find it, it was gone, I was empty handed with an empty stomach but, here all along was Zacht Automaat -in Canada no less! Hooray!

Lindsey Buckingham "Songs From The Small Machine: Live In L.A." DVD

(Guest review by Gary Pig Gold)  (Eagle Rock Entertainment)

For all intents and purposes, Lindsey Adams Buckingham has lived a charmed life.

Raised in the comfy Bay Area opulence of 1950's Atherton, California, a handsome, athletic golden boy suddenly and forever sidetracked by his elder brother's Elvis and Buddy 45s. He quit the school water polo team, transferred with his guitar into a local hotshot band called Fritz, left for L.A. with their singer Stevie, produced with her the magnificently stunted Buckingham Nicks album, was soon after asked to join Fleetwood Mac with whom he helped craft a 40-million-plus-selling album called Rumours and, by 1978 at the age of twenty-nine finally found himself at the very tip-top of his game.

For all intents and purposes, that is.

But Lindsey's next creation was a great big deluxe Christmastime four-vinyl-sider called Tusk. It was, to hijack a young Neil analogy, the sound of a band steering off the well-beaten MOR and heading straight for that ditch. Costing over a million dollars to make then selling less than a fifth of what Rumours had, the anticipated blockbuster was considered a failure, and its prime architect was to take the blame – and the fall, only reluctantly being allowed to occupy the Big Mac driver's seat ever again.

Of course as we can all plainly see, and even more easily hear from a 21st Century perspective especially, Tusk was in fact only the kind of "failure" Pet Sounds or Around The World In A Day had been for their respective resident genii. Realizing as much before most everyone else had however, Lindsey promptly struck fully out on his own with a grand little album called Law and Order in 1981 and has ever since led a kind of dual musical life, dividing his time between solo projects and Fleetwood Mac "reunions." Or, as he himself calls it, the "small machine" and the "large machine."

Obviously it's the former on joyous display throughout Eagle Rock's Songs From The Small Machine: Live In L.A., a two-hour-plus, 19-song DVD of the show Lindsey and his compact combo toured with in support of the Seeds We Sow album.   

I had the pleasure of attending both a recent concert of Lindsey's, and even more enjoyably – and quite revealingly – an intimate lecture/performance held in New York City's 92nd Street Y, I kid you not. Both settings showed a man who in many ways remains the awestruck kid who long ago checked into Heartbreak Hotel with Peggy Sue. Or, as he himself explains by way of introducing Live In L.A.'s "Trouble," "Before there was a band, before there was any commercial success, before there was songwriting, production, there was a boy listening to his older brother's records and teaching himself to play guitar. I guess as I evolve and mature as an artist, one of the things that I come to appreciate is that you must look for what is essential. You must look for the center. And, for me, it becomes increasingly apparent that that center is, and has been, the guitar."

Lindsey of course, like most things he does both on stage and off, never fears to play his guitar in vividly wild extremes. The five-song, totally LB-only prelude which opens his show not surprisingly finds Lindsey delicately whispering upon his fretboard one moment, then thrashing his instrument like a deranged, prancing ostrich the next (an engagingly terrifying contrast he often brings to his songwriting itself; witness "That's The Way Love Goes" later on in the set). Remember, though, that this is a man who in another time and place dared follow "Never Going Back Again" with "The Ledge."

He is also a man who considers himself more a song stylist than a song writer; a subtle but meaningful distinction perfectly illustrated at Lindsey's recent Y lecture as he performed an utterly sublime version of the Rolling Stones' "I Am Waiting." As the man explained, that song, along with "She Smiled Sweetly" (the final track on Seeds We Sow) represent to him the Stones at their absolute creative peak under the guidance of the brilliant Mister Jones who, like Lindsey, specialized in styling a song with exotic musical and tonal textures. Lessons, no doubt learned early by the young Buckingham via Aftermath and Between the Buttons, which remain apparent throughout the man's recorded work to this day.

Conversely on the concert stage however, it's Lindsey's "small machine" (as in bass/keyboardist Brett Tuggle, guitarist Neale Heywood, and drummist Walfredo Reyes "the groovin' Cuban" Jr.) who are relied upon to provide perfect instrumental/vocal accompaniment, be it by channeling Brian Wilson and his Friends during "All My Sorrows," the Quiet Beatle's "I Need You" A-chord for "Turn It On" …or simply by getting wisely out of the way as their fearless leader's four-and-a-half-minute (yikes) guitar solo plows "I'm So Afraid" to its logical concussion.

All four guys also treat the crowd-pleasin' classics "Tusk" (just as delightfully silly as ever – even without USC's Marching Trojans) and "Second Hand News" (what better way to salute Buddy Holly's anniversary?!) with due respect yet renewed enthusiasm. But, say what they often will about that large machine, the small one still must rely upon the Big M's "Go Your Own Way" to get the asses filling Beverly Hills' Saban Theatre completely erect as this particular show, and DVD, draws to a close. It is my prediction that as Fleetwood Mac tours become less frequent in years to come, Lindsey will lean more and more heavily upon his long-ago work with the large machine to ensure a feasible small-m touring career. I mean, even Sir P McC more or less performs nothing more than a Beatles tribute show nowadays, doesn't he?

"For myself, I know that I have made quite a few bold choices," Lindsey says introducing "Seeds We Sow" Live In L.A. "Choices that were not always popular. But I think time does have a way of revealing things." Songs From The Small Machine surely reveals one adult child still reflecting upon his brother's record collection but still active, still flourishing and still reveling in the now. And still painting from, as he likes to call it, the far left side of his palette. The days of forty, or even four-million-selling albums may be long gone for one and all. But you just watch, and listen: I bet Lindsey outruns, and outlasts, them all.

After all, that's still how they do it in L.A.

Dolemite weird wobbler, Blowfly weird Wobbler

(Cult Collectibles) Though the Laff reissues may be the most historical activity Cult Collectibles has unleashed so far, co-credit MVD a bit for their release. But the bread and butter (outside of working on Dolemite’s legacy) of the CC bizness is releasing bobbleheads of exploitation movie figures. These have been ultra-obscure, mostly honoring the gory 80s horror films by Italian director Lucio Fulci (plus a doll celebrating the ultra-offensive pseudo blaxploitation film Black Devil Doll). But considering Cult Colectible's Mark Jason Murray’s relationship with Moore (he is his post-mortem biographer)  it’s no surprise that the real triumph of this series is Dolemite! Granted, this does not look like Rudy Ray Moore. Bobbleheads rarely are strong likenesses, as the balance of cartoony and portrait-y is super hard to negotiate. Few baseball bobbleheads triumph, and non-sports ones (other than cartoon-based ones) generally suck. There is no bigger Redd Foxx fan in the US of A than I, yet I CAN NOT buy the Foxx bobblehead because the likeness is so awful. But Moore’s pummeling pimp (he actually has a springed arm so his fist bobbles as well) looks like Dolemite thinks he looks – beautiful, with a smooth, rich complexion, and a trim, sexy figure. If there is a frame of film where Dolemite doesn’t act like he looks like this good I’ve never seen it. This is a triumph! It was followed by a Blowfly issue, and though Blowfly had some OK records back in the day (more misses than hits, as 3rd grade-level naughty word comedy has some funny deficiencies built in), but his dreadful current act, playing with an inept punk band, in a not cool inept way, is no way to go through life. But his bobbler is pretty boffo, so I recommend getting this instead of a new CD or concert ticket.