I know, Francoise, I know. If you’re going to buy an album by the late French Chanson singer Serge Gainsbourg, you would have to be crazy not to buy 1968’s Bonnie & Clyde, his collaboration with Brigitte Bardot, or 1969’s Jane Birkin/Serge Gainsbourg, which includes the notoriously salacious (as in hubba hubba) “Je t’aime… moi non plus,” which was so orgasmic the Vatican actually felt compelled to issue a public statement declaring it offensive.

But I am crazy, certifiably so, and I heartily recommend that while you get your hands on the aforementioned LPs as fast as possible, you also pick up a copy of 1975’s extraordinarily surreal Rock Around the Bunker. Where else are you going to find songs like “Nazi Rock,” “Rock Around the Bunker,” and “S.S. in Uruguay”? Nowhere, that’s where.

Rock Around the Bunker purportedly looks back at Gainsbourg’s experiences as a Jewish youth growing up in Nazi-occupied France. But I’ve read that Gainsbourg’s real intent in releasing Rock Around the Bunker was to mock both the “Nazi chic” of the era, as personified by the film “The Night Porter” and David Bowie’s outrageous statements about wanting to become a fascist dictator, as well as the fifties rock’n’roll revival. Nazism and “Rock Around the Clock” may be an odd couple to satirize, but Gainsbourg was an odd guy. And in creating Rock Around the Bunker, the singer managed to produce an LP whose only real antecedents are The Rocky Horror Picture Show and the imaginary play Springtime for Hitler from Mel Brooks’ The Producers.

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Press Play is our Monday morning recap of the new tracks received last week—provided here to inform your vinyl purchasing power. Click, preview, download, purchase.

The Fraidies – Never Love Again (It’s Doubtful)
Joanne Weaver – Sway
Gwen Stefani – The Sweet Escape ft. Akon (SMLE Remix)
Radio Birds – Hold On Me
Between Mockingbirds – Do You
Nicki Minaj – Only (Whiiite Remix)
Geezer – Ghost Rider Solar Plexus
Vincent Colbert – Rose Yellow Moon
Dan Deacon – Feel The Lightning
Sigrid Zeiner – Overload

TVD SINGLE OF THE WEEK:
Antimatter People – No Need To Be So Small

Ki:Theory – The Way It Was
Gosh Pith – Window
Stamping Mill – Earnest Roam (Fear to Action)
Rachel Lynn – Tend To The Flame
Her Habits – Dolla Sign
L.E.D. – Mirror Mirror
XYPO – Can You Feel
Skye Steele – Growing Song
Mackenzie Shivers – Orphan Song
Danglo – “Swept Away” EP Minimix

7 more FREE TRACKS on side B!

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I’ll never forget the first time I heard 2004’s Altamont Diary by Melbourne, Australia’s Black Cab. I was stunned, stunned to the point of total stupefaction. At long last, a concept album about one of my all-time favorite fiascos! And it was great, grand, a total triumph! My heart went pitter-patter. My brain throbbed, thrilled. And I developed a rare case of instantaneous tumescence, of the sort best described by the legendarily libidinous Henry Miller as “a piece of lead with wings on it.”

Okay, so I made up the part about the hard-on. But it really was a spectacular case of smitten upon first listen. And I’ve been smitten ever since. The band’s sound is a seemingly impossible fusion of electronica, Far Eastern instrumentation, and Krautrock, but Black Cab possesses the uncanny ability to strike precisely the right balance between those influences, producing electronica-flavored songs that evoke both midnight candles bobbing on little platforms in the river Ganges and the droning propulsion of those prophets of the Autobahn, Neu!

That’s the great news. The not-so-great news is that their latest release, 2014’s The Games of the XXI Olympiad, is largely a venture into pure electronica. Don’t get me wrong. The album is a pleasure to the ears and was good enough to garner them a gig as openers for Tangerine Dream. But I miss, oh how I miss, the Eastern influences and Krautrock trappings that made Altamont Diary so brilliant. Which is why I’m ignoring their latest to review 2006’s Jesus East. It’s Krautrock-heavy and has been shown scientifically to provoke dancing in laboratory mice, who are notoriously picky when it comes to their tastes in music.

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Sometimes I like to imagine how concertgoers, newbies unfamiliar with San Francisco’s Flipper, responded to their first exposure to the band’s murky and monolithic songs. I mean, like, fast and hard like RULED, man, and how could you mosh to this shit? I can almost see the band’s throbbing toothache of a sound pressing all those poor punkers into a corner of the club, where they could whinge and boo hoo about the band’s failure to provide the soundtrack for them to kick somebody in the head, before finally collecting their Mohawks at the door and heading home. Meanwhile Flipper was having a grand old time, giving what in effect was a great big fuck you to the very people who had paid good money to see them.

It’s hardly possible to say too many good things about Flipper. Their grinding din grated on the ears of the hardcore crowd; their lyrics were an intelligent spew of black humor and utter nihilism; and their singing was deliberately abominable. They were the bleakest, funniest, and most annoying band out there, and hence the greatest band out there, because like their spiritual brethren in D.C.’s No Trend they spit in the faces of hardcore conformists: you know, the ones who thought slam dancing and wearing the same badges and patches made them unique, which it did if by unique you meant exactly the same as everybody else.

Most people remember the grimly hilarious distortion rockers (who included Will Shatter on bass and lead and backup vocals, Bruce Loose on bass and lead and backup vocals, Ted Falconi on guitar, and Steve DePace on drums and percussion) for “Sex Bomb,” perhaps the catchiest dance single to never be played on a dance floor. (Or may be it was. The thought of it makes me happy.) But “Sex Bomb” is just one of the wonderful songs on Generic Flipper, one of the best—and most out of step—LPs of the hardcore era. While everybody else was out to set land speed records, Flipper was slowing it down to a Thorazine shuffle; theirs was no rocket to Russia, it was music for mental patients looking for music slow, sludgy, and unrelenting enough to drown out those evil voices in their heads. Henry Rollins said of them: “They were just heavy. Heavier than you. Heavier than anything…” By definition, a monster is a singularity, something that is sui generis. Hence Flipper was monstrous, and happy to be so.

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