“I remember a very specific time as an adolescent when records, tapes and CDs all had their own sections of my local music store. Deciding between the three musical mediums was extremely confusing, and often limited to genre specifications (as if puberty wasn’t already hard enough). I was attracted to the physical size of records, but new releases were often pricey. And I never thought that CDs would truly catch on. Tapes became my preferred aural delivery method; cheap and they’d play in my General Electric boom box.”

“Spending a lot of time in the basement, I slowly started to creep my father’s record collection. It was a standard “dad” collection, featuring plenty of Doors, Moody Blues, Jim Croce, and Simon & Garfunkel…all things that were not very exciting to a 6th grader who just saw Nirvana play on TV. Then, I found a copy of Molly Hatchet’s Flirtin’ With Disaster. Never actually hearing the band before, I remember thinking that my dad was a secret hesher, based off of the album cover alone. I had to hear this!

http://youtu.be/XjOYkchybOw

After a couple of seconds into side A, I was convinced that the record in the jacket was not the correct match. I kept looking at the cover while listening, getting frustrated that there was no mention of warlocks, death angels, and danger. So, I did what any normal kid would do–buy another Molly Hatchet album to see if their earlier records sounded anymore like their album covers.

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Some call it an inspired gag, others dismiss it as a mediocre lark and a few select oddballs are downright determined to overpraise it to the rafters, but one thing’s certain; “I’m a Cult Hero” b/w “I Dig You” is a true curiosity. Perhaps that should read Cure-iosity, for Cult Hero was a brief early digression for UK Goth titans The Cure, featuring the band with a handful of added help, most notably a pub-haunting postman named Frank Bell on lead vocals. While it’s not really well-suited to accompany the midday mope of a cardigan-clad sad sack as they sip from a cup of lukewarm Earl Grey tea, the appealingly minor charms of the 45 are surely worthy of a retrospective salute.

Back in the second half of the ‘80s, as part of a small group of post-punk acts that managed to hang around long enough and grow in stature to become one of the initial bands in the first wave of the marketing-based non-genre known as Alternative music, The Cure came to be esteemed by quite a few as underdog survivors. But simultaneously, the outfit was on the receiving end of an uncommonly high level of flack.

They were reliably disparaged for such miscalculations as horrid dress sense, ludicrous hairstyles, overzealous and poorly applied makeup, banal subject matter, trite lyrics, ham-fisted song construction, and brazen music-video clowning. And these assessments were often spouted from folks who actually professed to like the band.

Observers who did not enjoy or even downright hated The Cure could frequently be found seething over the very existence of the group, deriding them as an affront to the cherished modes of acceptable rock and roll behavior. The derision of these bitter sorts reliably focused upon bands of the Alternative persuasion (to say nothing of newfangled Rap music), but The Cure seemed to catch a little extra opprobrium, many because they seemed to have no problem with being perceived as ridiculous.

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Folks holding a fondness for cerebral yet non-forbidding instrumental music just might find the debut LP from Baltimore duo Peals very much to their liking. While guitar focused and wielding a palpable experimental bent, the record also features a naturally-derived accessibility that compromises their ambitions not a bit, and if somewhat brief in impact, Walking Field successfully whets the appetite for further material.

Peals are composed of William Cashion and Bruce Willen, their individual résumés each essaying prior musical successes which sprang from the fertile environs of the Charm City. And while not at odds, the dissimilar genres of their past achievements sorta predicted that a stylistic merger of their extant work was highly unlikely.

However, it would still be understandable for those familiar, either in part or in full, with the pair’s previous activities to expect some sort of overtly digestible progression from either the brainy synth-pop Cashion deals out as part of Future Islands or the aggressively arty post-hardcore (think McLusky or Wire’s recent output) that was Willen’s specialty via the now defunct Double Dagger.

But interestingly, Peals essentially registers as a clean break from what both of the participants have been up to in the recent past. The biggest surprise isn’t the lack of vocals, for neither Cashion nor Willen were the singing members of the combos listed above. For Willen, the lack of bass is a considerably bigger change in tactics, for he swung the four-stringer rather mightily in a group that lacked any other guitars.

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When discussing an interstellar spaceship manned only by modern electronic music’s musical elite, there’s no guesswork involved with what voice would be heard over the intercom saying “This is your captain speaking.” Of course it’d be none other than the funky vocoder stylings of Daft Punk.

The duo who pioneered digital disco are back yet again with today’s release of their highly anticipated 4th record, Random Access Memories. They’ve released a teaser video for the packaging, causing every lover of their catchy rhythms to drool uncontrollably.

Random Access Memories has been highly buzzed about through the past few months, and for good reason. Sans their original soundtrack to Disney’s Tron, it’s their first major effort in eight years, with 2005’s Human After All hitting store shelves well before the Kanye West Grammy appearance and the blogosphere’s more or less unanimous acceptance of Daft Punk as the electronic overlords. Not only that, the record is packed with collaborations, some relatively predictable like house producer Todd Edwards, and some way out of left field like Animal Collective’s Panda Bear.

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