Andy Chase

it’s a good thing that about 99% of the stuff coming out nowadays is utter crap, because otherwise I could never hope to keep on top of new music worth buying.I’ve been trying to break myself out of my musical heavy rotation rut over the last few days; rather than grabbing a stack of my more recently purchased CDs to bring to work (from, say, the last year or two) I’ve grabbed lots of my older ones, going all the way back to when I started buying compact discs around 1990.

Not surprisingly, I listened to a lot of the stuff and thought to myself,

“Damn, I forgot what a good album this is!”

On the heels of which I think

“Damn, I have to get the rest of their recordings!”

Then, in a lot of cases, I realize just how old some of my most recent recordings of an artist are.

Case in point, Primus. Right now I’m listening to my most recent Primus CD, Pork Soda. It was released nearly NINE YEARS AGO. Holy crap! And yet I still think of it as “the new Primus album”. How did I get so far behind? I think what happened was my being a starving college student combined with a shift in taste away from some of the stranger stuff I took such pride in listening in high school and my freshman year of college.

Actually, now that I think about it I know exactly what that shift was: I discovered Sugar, who to this day remains just about my favorite band of all time. (And finally, after a looooong three and a half-year wait, there are two Bob Mould albums on the way!)

At the time Tales From the Punchbowl came out, what I heard of the album didn’t grab me, for whatever reason. A few years later when I heard Tim Alexander had left the band, I sort of wrote them off, much to my own discredit. More recently I’ve heard some of the newer stuff with Brain on drums, and it left me wanting more… more, dammit!

Going back even further, there are so many other artists whose back catalogs I need to get; Deep Purple, Kiss (I’m doing fairly well there, although I would like to have all of the recently remastered versions), Zappa, The Beatles, Dave Brubeck Quartet, etc, etc… it’s a good thing that about 99% of the stuff coming out nowadays is utter crap, because otherwise I could never hope to keep on top of new music worth buying. It’s all I can do to keep on top of old music worth buying.