by Mike DeFabio
Most of the music I listened to when I was a kid was either on a record or on a tape I’d made from a record, and as was typical for me, I didn’t properly appreciate it at the time. Records, as I saw it, were what you bought used because you didn’t have a CD player, and tapes were too expensive. You couldn’t dance around while they played or the needle would jump. You couldn’t bring them with you on a long car ride. You had to get up and turn them over halfway through.
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by Rich Bunnell
On Discord & Rhyme, I frequently refer to a song being “a good track two,” which may seem completely arbitrary in the era of streaming and shuffle. But I mean it every time, and I mean it even more as we get further into this epic project obsessing over the dying art of the album. Similar to how film editing is part of what turns a bunch of shots into a movie, sequencing is part of what turns a bunch of songs into an album. When a critic rolls out the cliche that an album is more than the sum of its parts, in a majority of cases it means that the album was really well sequenced.
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by Phil Maddox
The other day in the Discord and Rhyme Slack, John and I were having the kind of discussion that only two enormous music dorks would ever have - debating what the worst Yes album of all time was. John claims that it’s Union, the disastrous 1991 album that saw two warring factions of Yes coming together and producing an album that was immediately loathed by every single Yes fan that bothered listening to it. I, however, claimed it was Heaven and Earth, the 2014 album that has successfully bored every single person that’s listened to it into a coma. The crux of our debate came down to this: Union has a couple of great songs on it, but a good chunk of it is insanely terrible - some of the worst music ever released by a respectable band. Heaven and Earth, however, is just boring. There’s no good songs on it, but nothing quite as bad as the junk that piles up on Union. I thought the good songs on Union were enough to elevate it; John thought the bad songs were bad enough to sink it.
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by Chris Willie Williams
Let's say there's an artist you love so much that you are convinced that you'll always buy every album they release, for the rest of their career or until you lose all your money in some sort of medical supplement pyramid scheme. How many disappointing albums would this artist have to release before you finally gave up? I know it varies from artist to artist, depending on such things as the intensity of your bond, how much you dislike their new output, and whether you possess what scientists call The Rock Geek Completism Gene, but in general, I'm curious to know how far you all will let an artist skate by solely on long-lasting goodwill.
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by Amanda Rodgers
There’s a strange popular perception that music is for men. Even now, the majority of bands are made up of men (women tend to be solo artists), music critics are men, and most of the music podcasts these days feature an all-male panel. A lot of people seem to think that women enjoy listening to music but are not into discussing and analyzing it – and nowhere is this more true than in the world of prog rock.
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by Benjamin Marlin
The future of music consumption appears to be streaming services: Spotify, Apple Music, Google Music, and the Jay-Z one. For a few dollars each month, these services allow people to stream millions of songs to their smartphones and bluetooth speakers. It's an amazing innovation, perhaps the best tool ever invented for making music easy to access and play.
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by Rich Bunnell
Hi everyone,
I’m stunned that less than a year into this project, there are people — some of whom we haven’t even met! — who are actually willing to pay money for what we do. As much as we promote our “tip jar” on the show, Discord & Rhyme is foremost a passion project by eight friends who have kept all of this obsessive energy bottled up for years and finally have an outlet. Patreon covers our hosting and equipment costs, reimburses us for the time and work we put in to every episode, and hopefully will eventually grow to a level where we can start directly supporting the artists we cover.
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by John McFerrin
As has been the case for many a self-professed “rock lover” through the years, I had little use for jazz as a whole into my late 20s. I didn’t exactly mind its existence, but I only had interest in consuming it second-hand, through rock musicians that either came from a jazz background or who had been influenced by jazz in regards to compositional or playing style. The idea of actually listening to a jazz album for fun seemed completely foreign to me; I had a couple of Miles Davis albums on mp3 that I had listened to once or twice, but they seemed far too diffuse and too focused on superior instrumental technique at the expense of discernable melody and structure for me to enjoy them. In late 2008, though, I decided that I hadn’t given the genre a fair chance, and I asked my brother and some online acquaintances to offer me recommendations, both for individual albums and for overall listening and purchasing strategy. By the end of 2009, I could reasonably be called a jazz enthusiast, and my jazz collection and love for the genre has continued to expand at a steady pace ever since. In this post, I want to share some insights that I have picked up through the years that might help somebody unsure of how to proceed when venturing into the vast rewarding world of jazz.
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In 2002, some friends and I took a trip down to LA to go to the All Tomorrow’s Parties festival, which was curated by Sonic Youth that year. On the bill were some names that I knew and loved, like Aphex Twin and Stereolab, and a lot more that I’d never heard at all. One of these was an unassuming fellow with a laptop who went by the name of Merzbow. Merzbow’s set began with an enormous low drone, the kind earplugs are almost useless against because it makes its way in through the bones of your face. Over the course of what I think was probably a 45-minute set, that drone gradually changed and grew into its ultimate form: a wall of hissing, squealing noise. Noise, you see, is Merzbow’s instrument. He plays the noise.
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by Phil Maddox
As long as I can remember, I’ve never been satisfied with just getting a greatest hits album by a band, or even just getting a band’s most acclaimed work. Ever since I was a kid, if I got into a band, I wanted to hear absolutely everything the band ever recorded. The earliest band I can remember doing this with is the Moody Blues - I remember scouring every store that sold cassette tapes in the hopes of finding an album that I didn’t recognize. I didn’t have access to discography information at that time, so I didn’t even know what albums I didn’t have - I’d just keep checking in the hopes that I’d eventually encounter something new.
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by Chris Willie Williams
There are countless songs that have made me laugh in my rock-geek career, from Fannypack's naughty double-dutch chant “Cameltoe” to Bill Callahan's somewhat more sophisticated “Eid Ma Clack Shaw,” whose final verse cleverly yanks the rug out from under the truly affecting lyrics preceding it. But it's rare to find a song that continues to make me laugh no matter how many times I revisit it.
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by Amanda Rodgers
It’s no secret that Paul Simon was interested in world music. He was experimenting with it as far back as “El Condor Pasa” on Bridge Over Troubled Water in 1970, continuing with “Mother and Child Reunion” and “Late in the Evening,” and eventually leading to his classic Graceland, a surprising mix of South African music, accompanied by Ladysmith Black Mambazo, and zydeco music out of New Orleans.
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