Bad Religion – No Control

by Sophia Sheinin

 

No Control is possibly one of the best political punk albums of all time. Bad Religion’s eloquent commentary on political and social issues, along with intricate melodies and strong vocals, is something that’s rare in punk. They don’t just angrily shout about how the system is f*cked. Bad Religion’s lyrics are poetic and honestly kind of freakin’ brilliant sometimes. Take the title track “No Control”: 

 Culture was the seed of proliferation / But it has gotten melded into an inharmonic   whole / Consciousness has plagued us and we can not shake it / Though we think       we’re in control / Questions that besiege us in life / Are testament of our           helplessness / “There’s no vestige of a beginning, no prospect of an end” [Hutton] / When we all disintegrate it will all happen again, yeah.

“No Control” in its essence is about how as a society, we’re desperate to grasp for semblance of stability, power, and well, control. How we want to believe we do and can have control over our life, the universe, other people. While this theme is repeated throughout the album, it’s most obviously called out in this track.

If you came to conquer, you’ll be king for a day / But you too will deteriorate and quickly fade away / And believe these words you hear when you think your path is clear / We have no control / We do not understand.

Basically, it doesn’t matter if you manage to grab hold of power, or you think you’ve got the universe figured out. In the end we all die and the world keeps turning without us. We have no control in this universe or its plans — we’re all just along for the ride. These lyrics have actual substance. A meaning that you can actually take and examine. Digest and consider. Most punk bands don’t bother or simply can’t reach that level of thought. 

 

Bad Religion.  “No Control.” No Control.  1989. San Fernando Valley/Los Angeles, CA.

Hutton, James.  “Theory Of The Earth.” 1795. Edinburgh, Scotland.

 

Sandwiches

EYEHATEGOD: Take As Needed for Pain

Take As Needed for Pain

by Brynn Stewart

Take As Needed for Pain by Eyehategod, is a super energetic disgusting sludge metal album. This album has heavy chunky riffs, but what makes it different than other sludge albums is that it’s faster than the doom influenced sludge metal. The two best songs on this album are “Blank” and “Southern Discomfort.” Another cool thing about Eyehategod is that their lyrical themes aren’t about wizards and stuff like other doom and sludge bands they just have lyrics about meaningful things and world issues kind of like punk and grindcore. If you are going to listen to Eyehategod you should listen to them with your speakers in your house as loud as they will go.

Supernatural (Review by Ana)

 

If you’re looking for a great show that will keep you hooked for the long run, Supernatural is the place to go. The story revolves around two brothers, Sam and Dean Winchester as they follow their father’s footsteps, hunting down evil supernatural creatures such as monsters, demons, and even fallen gods while trying to save innocent people along the way. It’s an ongoing series of now 14 seasons with usually 23 episodes in each one. The episodes usually last around 42 minutes, so it’s a great show to binge on the couch with some snacks and or friends. So grab the popcorn, a nice comfy blanket and strap in for this awesome show called Supernatural. 

— Ana Bloxham-Davis

War Robots (Review by Riley Robertson)

War Robots is a challenging game, but it’s fun to play with your friends. You can level up and better loot, better weapons and upgrade your robot. The stronger your robot gets, the harder the competition gets. You can also start a clan with your friends that have the game. You can spend hour on end grinding at the game and leveling up. You can get War Robots on iPhones and Androids but you can also link your Facebook to it so you can share your progress with people and earn achievement and save all of your hard work. So what are you waiting for: go download the game War Robots and grind to the best.

Fishmans (Music Review by Colin Allen)

98.12.28 男達の別れ (Otokotachi no Wakare) is the third live album, final overall album, and final live performance by Japanese dream pop/dub band Fishmans. It was performed and recorded on December 28, 1998, and released on September 29, 1999 (Sharifi).

This is the last performance Fishmans ever undertook before their enigmatic singer and frontman Shinji Sato tragically died of heart problems he suffered from since birth. 98.12.28 男達の別れ is more than just an album. It’s a eulogy. It’s a love letter. It’s a retrospective. It’s a funeral. It’s a wedding. It’s oh-so-very bittersweet. It’s absolutely perfect. Fishmans had a habit of having live performances that were monumentally better than their already amazing studio recordings. They’d make their songs longer and more expansive, becoming dancier or dreamier or more beautiful in the process. 男達の別れ is no different, and in fact expands upon every single thing that made Fishmans amazing in the first place. It’s a journey through the Fishmans discography, and shows their evolution from a traditional dub/reggae sound, to alternative rock, to dream pop and experimental rock. It’s like a journey through space and time, visiting every single planet along the way, visiting all the weird little aliens and their different quirks and weird music.

The entire album is amazing, but there’s one piece that just absolutely blows literally every single piece of music ever composed out of the water. It is Long Season. Long Season is the sixth studio album by Fishmans, but it is composed of one, 35 minute song. The studio version is absolutely amazing, but on 男達の別れ, Long Season just becomes completely transcendent. It is extended to 41 minutes, and god, there’s just absolutely no way to describe how completely amazing this song is. Long Season is just so very beautiful, it’s the best song ever made, and I say that as a fact. It’s everything I’ve ever wanted from a song. It’s impossible to do it justice in a writing format; through one’s own ears is the only way to truly experience Long Season. It’s so good I can barely write about it. It makes me feel more than human emotion. The song surrounds oneself with absolute euphoria, as if the universe was closing in to a warm, tight embrace. It’s a hug from the mother universe, telling you that you can let out all your emotions and cry, and everything will be okay.

Rest in Peace, Shinji.

Bibliography

Sharifi, Hossein.  Rate Your Music.  “Fishmans: 98.12.28 男達の別れ (98.12.28 Otokotachi no Wakare)”

Sonemic.  2018.

 

https://rateyourmusic.com/release/album/fishmans/98_12_28-%E7%94%B7%E9%81%94%E3%81%AE%E5%88%A5%E3%82%8C-98_12_28-otokotachi-no-wakare/

Paper Town (Book Review by Haily Hughes)

 

Paper Towns by John Green is a good book if you like a lot of action and drama. This book has a good protagonist. The protagonist is every smart and funny. The characters are engaging.  Margo and Quentin have a fun time in high school. They meet new friends and make enemies. They go on a lot of adventures in different cities. In Paper Town you will get to experience all the mysteries and clues that Margo and Quentin go through. You will learn how to deal with different situations and how to conquer them.

Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness (Music Review by Colin Allen)

Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness is the third album by American alternative rock band The Smashing Pumpkins. It was released on October 23, 1995 (Sharifi).

Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness is one of those corny but charming high school dramedy movies, but as an album. It’s a lot of things at once; angry, sad, beautiful, rebellious, sentimental, anguished, and introspective. The instrumentation varies from song to song, but is mostly composed of the masterful guitar work of Billy Corgan and James Iha, the incredible drums of Jimmy Chamberlin, and the satisfying bass lines of D’arcy Wretzky. Billy is also the lead singer, and his voice can take some getting used to, but personally I absolutely love it. He can sing softly and beautifully, on tracks such as “Cupid de Locke”, or he can scream and go insane on tracks like “Tales of a Scorched Earth”. The album is composed of six sides; “Dawn”, “Tea Time”, “Dusk”, “Twilight”, “Midnight”, and “Starlight”. “Dawn”, “Twilight”, and “Starlight” are all soft and dreamy. “Tea Time”, “Dusk”, and “Midnight” are all hard and intense. Every single side represents its own certain time frame perfectly. Mellon Collie is like a big clock of adolescence, cycling from caring too much, to caring not enough, to caring just enough. Billy Corgan’s sentimental lyrics somehow masterfully represent every facet of the teenage experience, and in doing so, made a mature record that feels like it’s not.

 

There’s 30 tracks in total, and out of that, there’s not a single track I wholeheartedly dislike. But some are better than others, those being: “Tonight, Tonight”, “Porcelina of the Vast Oceans”, “Cupid de Locke”, “By Starlight”, “X.Y.U.”, “Stumbleine”, and “Lily (My One and Only)”. For time’s sake, I’ll go over my top two favorites; “Porcelina Of The Vast Oceans”, and “Cupid de Locke”. The former is a 9 minute, dynamic as hell, progressive, intense, dreamy epic of a song. “Porcelina” has a lot of really beautiful vivid imagery in the lyrics, describing a beautiful woman named Porcelina, who is able to bring forth higher realms of thought and love because of her relationship with the vast blue oceans. “Cupid de Locke” is one of the most beautiful tracks on the record, with interweaving soft guitars, an amazingly whimsical and pretty synth lead, expansive drums, and soft silly vocals. The lyrics describe Cupid and Satan, love and death, all in olde english, and it’s quite pretty. At the end of the song, there’s a spoken word section, and it’s one of my absolute favorite moments on the entire record.

 

Mellon Collie And The Infinite Sadness is one of those very special, once-in-a-lifetime albums. It’s an album that transcends age and time, it’s an album that people now and people twenty years from now will relate to all the same. It’s a lush but intense album that has been the soundtrack to many personal experiences I’ve had.

 

Bibliography

Sharifi, Hossein.  Rate Your Music.  “The Smashing Pumpkins: Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness.”

Sonemic.  2018.

https://rateyourmusic.com/release/album/the-smashing-pumpkins/mellon-collie-and-the-infinite-sadness-16/

Sorry (Game Review by Riley Robertson)

Sorry is a fantastic game first introduced 1934 by Parker Brothers. This game is a fun to play with family and friends when having get togethers and is a very interesting game because the players use counting, strategy, probability and tactics. It is for anyone of almost any age, from ages 6 to adult.  The only way for you to get out of start is by drawing a 1 or a 2. When you play, you should think about what you do to the other players because it could either help you win or bite you in your butt. The goal of the game is to get all your pieces to home to win. If you like competitive games, then Sorry is right for you!  

In The Aeroplane Over The Sea (LP) Review by Colin Allen

In The Aeroplane Over The Sea is the second album by American indie folk/indie rock/lo-fi band Neutral Milk Hotel. It was released on February 10, 1998 (Sharifi).

In The Aeroplane Over The Sea is one of the most emotionally compelling, passionate, poetic, sad, whimsical, surreal, and lovely albums ever made. With a soundtrack composed of a single acoustic guitar, fuzzy bass, drums that are a lot more interesting than they would appear, all variety of horns, singing saw, organ, tapes, banjo, accordion, bagpipes, and last but not at all least, the raw, nasally, enchanting vocals of Jeff Mangum; ITAOTS is a vintage postcard to a beautiful young girl who was taken too early from this world. This young girl spent most of her time alone, writing to herself about her wishes to experience life and go to penny arcades, to go to the circus, travel to Spain, and ride high above the sea in an aeroplane, but most of all, to experience love and sex and everything human under the sun, to explore her body, to explore the feelings and colors that come with the human condition; to love and to lose, to weep and to laugh, to break and to be rebuilt, to die and to live. If it was possible to save her in a time machine, she would have been. She would’ve been loved, she would’ve laughed, she would’ve been rebuilt, she would’ve explored her body under the sun, and experienced what it’s like to grow up and realize that life isn’t supposed to be spent running away and hiding from people who want to kill you. And when she wasn’t saved, when she was killed, her ashes were finally brought onto an aeroplane, dropped onto the fires of a piano played by a boy with two marvelous heads, observed by her own red daughter, Goldaline. As the ghost of her ashes rises up to the eternal white light in a synthetic flying machine, she bends her back and twists around the sky, bubbling and bright, feathers and fruit surrounding her. She lands on a cloud and meets her lover, laughing, smiling, crying tears of joy, and making love to him above the rain and thunder providing a silly musical accompaniment to the cars sliding across the water beneath.

 

Every track is amazing and worthy of praise in its own way. I guess I’ll say my top three, which are “Communist Daughter”, “Oh Comely”, and “Two-Headed Boy Pt. Two”. “Communist Daughter” is a beautiful and emotional track, wrought with ambient horn noises and waves crashing, a trumpet solo, and the alluring, low vocals of Jeff Mangum. The song is about sex, masturbation, and purity. “Oh Comely” is the longest track on the record, and is an epic in every sense of the word. Its emotional, it’s seductive, it’s pretty, it’s bright and dark, and very surreal. With some of the most beautiful and interesting lyrics on the record, “Oh Comely” keeps the themes of sex and purity, and also details love and death, and adultery and pregnancy, and music, and softness, and most importantly, longing for someone you’ll never ever be able to save from death. The song starts out with just Jeff’s raw nasally vocals and his guitar, but evolves to include horns and such. “Two-Headed Boy Pt. Two” is the final track on the album and is an extremely good conclusion. It is hands down the most emotional track on the record, and is just Jeff and his guitar. It has surreal lyrics, describing love, fatherhood and motherhood, loss, sadness, voices and kisses, beautiful eyes, longing, God and death, and leaving.

 

In The Aeroplane Over The Sea is a collection of lovely fractals that blend and morph to create a beautiful experience that is one of the most compelling, impressive, and honest vintage postcards ever made. I cannot even begin to describe the influence this record has had on me personally. It has settled into the attic of my brain and isn’t leaving anytime soon. ITAOTS is so very beautiful and all I can do is thank Neutral Milk Hotel for creating such an amazing postcard.

Bibliography

Sharifi, Hossein.  Rate Your Music.  “Neutral Milk Hotel: In The Aeroplane Over The Sea.”

Sonemic.  2018.

https://rateyourmusic.com/release/album/neutral-milk-hotel/in-the-aeroplane-over-the-sea-10/