#everyrecordiown

Every Record I Own - Day 876: Elliott Smith Either/Or

It was July 1997, the day before my twentieth birthday. Me and my bandmate Dave drove down to Olympia from Tacoma for the annual Yoyo A Go Go festival at Capitol Theater. Built to Spill were headlining, having released Perfect From Now On to widespread acclaim earlier that Spring. Dave was obsessed with that album and had played it pretty much anytime it was his turn to drive on our first US tour a couple of months prior. I was more interested in catching Monorchid, who were also on the bill.

At some point in the early evening before the Monorchid and Built to Spill sets, a guy got on stage with nothing other than an acoustic guitar. I was just getting into songwriters like Bob Dylan and Phil Ochs around then, and the room hadn't really filled up yet, so I secured a spot up close to the stage. I didn't know anything about Elliott Smith at the time. Yoyo A Go Go leaned heavily on the K Records roster, so there were always some outsider artists doing their weird solo ventures, but it was clear from his first note that Smith wasn't just another Evergreen College student who'd heard Beat Happening and decided to give music a try, technical ability be damned.

It was really a magical moment. The quarter-full theater was dead quiet... transfixed. The music was hushed and delicate without being precious. It was pretty and sweet without being saccharine. It was smart and unorthodox without being flashy. It was intimate music, which isn't generally a festival vibe, but we were a captive audience for the duration of his set. I remember looking over at my nearest neighbor at one point to do the whole "are you seeing this? isn't this amazing" thing and realizing I was standing next to Ian Mackaye, who was every bit as engaged in the show as I was. My teenage years would come to a close that night, and as part of my transition into adult maturity, I refrained from bugging Ian to talk about how awesome Smith was. Or how awesome Fugazi was, for that matter.

I turned twenty at midnight. Built to Spill went on sometime around 1am. It was the first night of the festival... a Tuesday. Which meant I didn't get much sleep before going to my house painting job the next morning. Monorchid and Built to Spill were both great, but Elliott Smith was the artist I couldn't stop thinking about the next day. I think Dave might have even bought Either/Or that following afternoon, and since we lived in the same punk house, that effectively meant that Either/Or would also be in my general rotation that summer, along with Perfect From Now On and the early Modest Mouse 7"s. Between those three artists, you really have the Pacific Northwest music scene of the late '90s encapsulated in a perfect trifecta.

Things would change dramatically for Smith within the next year. The Good Will Hunting soundtrack introduced his music to a much broader audience. "Miss Misery" even landed a Best Original Song Oscar nomination, resulting in Smith playing the Academy Awards ceremony. A deal with Dreamworks followed. Our favorite Portland hipster troubadour had been given the Hollywood stamp of approval.

Dave moved out of the punk house, taking Either/Or with him. Smith's follow up album XO was too ostentatious for my tastes... too many strings and auxiliary instruments. I like my singer-songwriter stuff to sound like it's someone singing to themselves in their apartment, not to a full house at Carnegie Hall.

Every Record I Own - Day 875: Various Artists Cosmic American Music: Motel California

Here we have the 2024 follow up to Numero Group's initial compilation of long-lost private press nuggets of late '60s / early '70s psychedelic-steeped country music, Wayfaring Strangers: Cosmic American Music. Like its predecessor, Motel California is a collection of songs from the lysergic countercultural alternative to the Nashville country scene. And like Wayfaring Strangers, it's highly unlikely you've heard of a single name on the comp, even if every song has that comforting familiarity woven into its Americana fabric. I mean, you can't tell me that "Second Look" by Jim Spencer doesn't sound at least a little bit like The Stones' "Dead Flowers."

A large part of the charm of this stuff resides in the notion that there are these small-run LPs and 45s somewhere out there with these modest songs etched into their grooves, just waiting to be rediscovered by nerds like myself who have exhausted their Flying Burrito Brothers and New Riders of the Purple Sage LPs. Is any of this stuff gonna change your life? Absolutely not. Hell, even Numero Group didn't even deem this stuff worthy to repress in its original form. And that's fine. We probably don't need to hear the entire recorded output of Country Spice, even if "Clouds" is a pretty sweet little fix of twangy pop.

But here's the sad thing: in 2026, I can't help but wonder how easy it would be to feed a bunch Gram Parson's material to AI and ask it to crank out a collection of vintage alt-country knock-offs. How much longer are we gonna be able to enjoy these kinds of collections of obscure deep cuts before we start growing suspicious of its authenticity?

Every Record I Own - Day 874: Various Artists Aloha Got Soul (Soul, AOR, & Disco in Hawai'i 1979-1985)

My dad got stationed in Hawai'i back in 1982. The whole family up and moved from Washington DC to Oahu shortly after I turned five. We spent the first several weeks staying at the Hale Koa Hotel in Waikiki--a hotel designated for active duty military--before settling in the then-sleepy beach town of Kailua on the windward side of the island. Some of my earliest memories involve our brief stay in Waikiki--the busy crosswalks, the city lights after sunset, the bustling street markets.

I started collecting music around the age of 8 or 9. I'd ask for cassettes for my birthday and Christmas. Saved up allowances. My first purchases were '80s FM radio rock staples--stuff like Survivor and Chicago. As adolescence loomed, I dabbled in hair metal. And then I found punk and everything changed.

Punk was undisciplined and anti-aspirational. They sang about things other than falling in love and having a good time. It screamed authenticity at a time when I was beginning to suspect that most things were kinda bullshit. It wasn't music you'd hear on the radio or when you were out shopping at department stores, which meant it wasn't the ubiquitous soundtrack of Top 40, reggae, and island music I was used to on Oahu.

Skip ahead a decade or so. I'm an adult living on the mainland. Still buying hardcore records, but coming to terms with the fact that a lot of "punk" seems to be kinda bullshit. My musical horizons expanded. I learned about Fela Kuti, who was way more of a rebel than any of the mohawked artists I listened to. Krautrock was way more out there than any of the alternative rock I championed in my younger years. Free jazz was as abrasive and violent as the noise artists I liked.

And let's be real. The handful of punk bands I saw in Hawai'i were passing through on their way to Japan and Australia. They were international artists. Meanwhile in Waikiki, you had artists like the ones featured on Aloha Got Soul just jamming away in the various hotel bars and nightclubs around town knowing this was the ceiling to their popularity.

Sure, maybe some of this stuff was basically musical wallpaper. It was constructed to get people to shake their hips on the dance floor but it was also designed to sit in the background while sunburned tourists drank Mai Tais at the bar. But I'll be damned if Roy & Roe's "Just Don't Come Back" doesn't feature one of the tightest and funkiest drum and bass breaks I've ever heard. Or how about the pastoral prog vibes and freaky synth solo in Brother Noland's "Kawaihae"? Even if this was meant to be tourist-friendly fare, there are little hints of the musicians letting their freak flags fly sprinkled throughout the album.

Every Record I Own - Day 873: The Album Leaf Lines in a Leaf

This is a favorite of 2025.

Like The Texas Chain Saw Massacre soundtrack, it feels a little like cheating to include this short LP by the San Diego project The Album Leaf in my list of favorite albums from 2025. These recordings capture some of the earliest solo recordings by songwriter / composer Jimmy LaValle, dating back to the project's genesis in 1998. But for whatever reason, these recordings weren't available to the public until they were unearthed and reissued by The Numero Group in 2025.

The Album Leaf was in my orbit of musical peers back in the early '00s. My old band would crash at the apartment of their guitarist's girlfriend when we'd pass through San Diego on tour. We'd occasionally hang out with Jimmy and Drew when we were in town and even wound up on a couple of shows together. Yet somehow I never wound up with an Album Leaf record in my collection until last year.

When this limited edition hand-printed LP of early four-track recordings was announced, I was intrigued. By the time The Album Leaf were on my radar, they were a polished enterprise that had flown to Iceland to record at the Sigur Ros studio. I was curious to hear what LaValle's work would sound like in its rawest form.

And in a way, Lines in a Leaf really does sound like the genesis of something much grander. The opening track "2145 E St." is more of a sketch than a song, sounding like a hazy late-night attempt at getting a song idea documented for later workshopping before sleep sets in. In fact, much of side A sounds unfinished, like something meant to be shared with a bandmate for their input. It's evocative in its stark and unrefined state, but it relies on the three tracks of side B to demonstrate the potential of these rough ideas.

Side B opener "Writing in the Sand" is the real highlight here, a study in the most reductive brand of slowcore that taps into the murky and repetitive beauty of artists like Grouper. "Knots in a String of Beads" taps into a similar energy, sounding like an early post-rock composition dubbed off a college radio station and bootlegged a half dozen times. Album closer "A Crumpled Piece of Paper, Slowly Unfolding" is a simple, graceful piano piece of humble beauty that recasts the scrappy front-end of the record in a whole new light. There is a potential here that gradually reveals itself over the course of the album, and when I flip the record back over to side A, I find myself hearing phantom melodies in the background of these sparse recordings, as if picking up on LaValle's grander ambitions left unfinished and unattended in the unused tracks of his Tascam cassette machine.

Every Record I Own - Day 872: Geese Getting Killed

This is a favorite of 2025.

I'm generally adverse to hype in the indie world. I don't think there's been a "hot" album in that sphere that I've enjoyed since The National's High Violet. Generally speaking, the more people are talking, the less likely I'm listening.

There was no shortage of discourse surrounding Geese in the final months of 2025. On the one hand, you had folks like Elton John and Lee Ronaldo of Sonic Youth heaping praise on the young New York City band, celebrating their ability to make the often-cold world of art rock feel soulful and human. On the flip side, you had folks like my friends chalking them up as industry plants that sound like "a shitty Radiohead with white boy blues riffs."

Personally, I think Geese have arrived at a sound that's worthy of all the praise. I don't love every single song off Getting Killed, but the bulk of the album deserves all the accolades. My simplest assessment of Geese is that they sound like a New York proto-punk band from the late '60s / '70s taking a stab at the classic era of Rolling Stones. But even that description frequently falls apart. Hell, the first song on the album---the rowdy and ramshackle "Trinidad"---reminds me of the first track off This Heat's Deceit album... a tape-spliced collage of post-punk's jagged spikes and fits of contained rage. But then the album segues into the approachable balladry of "Cobra." The band has gone so far as to admit that the opening one-two punch was meant to establish the polarity of the album by putting the most abrasive track off the album next to their most digestible pop tune.

From there, the album zones in on a tighter spectrum of stylistic choices. Throughout Getting Killed, you're likely to pick up on a few key influences. There's certainly some Talking Heads worship in tracks like "Husbands," some stripped-down Television on "Islands of Men," some Velvet Underground peeking through songs like "Half Real"---but the more you listen to Getting Killed, the more reference points you're bound to hear, until you eventually realize that Geese don't really sound like anyone but themselves.

You can't really talk about Geese without talking about their singer Cameron Winter, a vocalist whose particular timbre, vibrato, and delivery looms so large that one's enjoyment of the band could easily boil down to whether or not you're buying what Winter is selling. Like some strange amalgam of Thom York and Tom Verlaine, Winter stretches cryptic lyrical snippets into strange proportions, dragging a loaded but ultimately curious statement like "all people in times of war must go down to circus" across multiple measures, disregarding any obvious cadence or rhythm, dragging it out so that every word becomes isolated and divorced from the larger statement. The band is equally elastic, with instruments dropping in and out of the mix, drum fills staggering the arrival of the next section, evolving verses, devolving choruses.

One gets the sense that, much like the Stones, Geese never play a song the same way twice. During their peak, The Rolling Stones would start writing songs when they arrived at the recording studio in the morning (or realistically, late afternoon, or midnight) and then burn through fifty takes until they captured the right feeling, even if that particular iteration of the song would never be recreated. There's a looseness to the songs on Getting Killed, as if the members are still trying out ideas, that harkens back to Mick and Keith circa '68-'71. And of course, there are a few classic rock blues riffs to be heard on songs like "Horses" and the title track that only reinforce that comparison.

Every Record I Own - Day 871: Vulture Feather It Will Be Like Now

This is a favorite of 2025.

Of all the new records I heard last year, the sophomore album by Northern California post-hardcore trio Vulture Feather had the most immediate impact on me. From the opening bars of "Blood Knot" where a simple drum beat, steady singular guitar octave, gritty bass chords, and Hüsker Dü-like vocals lock into a repeating pattern of Lungfish-indebted cycling minimalism, every aspect of It Will Be Like Now felt like it was deliberately fashioned to appease my yearning for a band that harkens back to DC post-hardcore / Revolution Summer-style emo while simultaneously existing as a modern, relevant, and mature rock outfit.

By the time "Blood Knot" finished, I was almost a little sad. It was everything I loved about the '90s wrapped up in one perfect song, but what a shame to put such a great song first. Surely a band couldn't make that formula work for an entire album. Well, Vulture Feather rises to the challenge. Every song is cut from the same cloth: a guitarist trying to play as few notes as possible, a bass player providing the chord progression, a singer channeling Bob Mould, Daniel Higgs, and Michael Gira, a drummer who plays with metronomic understated grace, and a general sense of well-honed melancholic introspection on par with Jawbreaker's saddest jams.

Every Record I Own - Day 866: The Texas Chain Saw Massacre OST

This is a favorite from 2025.

It feels a little like cheating to include a soundtrack from 1974 in my list of favorite albums from 2025. But here's the thing: the soundtrack to Texas Chain Saw Massacre has been on every horror movie soundtrack buff's wishlist for decades. Unfortunately, the score, composed by director Tobe Hooper and sound crew member Wayne Bell, was applied to the overall mix of the film and, supposedly, never preserved as its own independent recording. So unless you wanted to hear the creepy proto-industrial soundscape with the accompanying audio of screaming women, roaring chainsaws, and cackling redneck psychopaths, you were shit out of luck.

I'm not sure how Waxwork Records managed to extricate the clamorous experimental soundtrack from the film's final mix, but they managed to crack the code. Even in this day and age of noise barons like Merzbow and Wolf Eyes, this strange and unnerving collage of heavily manipulated instruments and found-object racket crafted by two film school students with minimal musical background still sounds completely alien and terrifying.

Then again, pretty much everything about The Texas Chain Saw Massacre is a magical anomaly. Not only did Tobe Hooper never make another movie with the same paralyzing degree of terror, he never made another movie that was as visually compelling. So much of what makes the film work is that it's shot on location with actors who either faded into the background or hammed it up to such a degree that you were genuinely convinced that there was something mentally wrong with them. Hooper's subsequent films always had a bit of Hollywood set design blandness to them. But part of Texas Chain Saw's enduring power is that even when you remind yourself mid-viewing that this is just a movie, you're still a little freaked out that these weirdos felt compelled to make something so disturbing and misanthropic. Throw in the subtext of vegetarianism, rural vs urban life, late stage capitalism, and the dark end of the '60s optimism, and the film feels less like grisly exploitation and more like a harsh and stark reflection of America's history of violent desperation.

Every Record I Own - Day 865: Pissgrave Malignant Worthlessness

This is a favorite from 2025.

There wasn't much in the world of contemporary death metal that interested me back in 2015. Sure, there were records like Gorguts' Colored Sands from a few years prior that were satisfyingly punishing and boundary-pushing. But I kinda just wanted something that seemed overwhelming and intense in the way death metal came across to me as a kid back in the early '90s. Then Pissgrave's debut album Suicide Euphoria dropped. It was ugly and nasty to the point of almost being an unlistenable blur of corrosive distortion and inhuman vocals, but there was just enough structure and hooks laced throughout to keep me coming back.

By the time their follow-up Posthumous Humiliation dropped in 2019, I was basking in the rising tide of OSDM bands. There was a ton of great new stuff coming out but Pissgrave's sophomore album was such a feast of sick riffs and misanthropic production that it still stood out as a highlight. I remember doing a UK tour that August where I listened to Suicide Euphoria and Posthumous Humiliation back to back every day on my headphones. It was so acidic, so caustic, that it felt cleansing. I feel like it dissolved a layer of rust off my soul every time I listened to them.

It's hard to believe it's been six years between albums, but Pissgrave returned with another great record. Once again, there is a layer of abrasion to the album that feels like a deliberate move to frighten away the weak of heart. The vocals are obscenely loud in the mix and treated with a layer of distortion and octave manipulation that renders it more as some horrific texture than a human component. The guitars are still steeped in so much gain that they almost sound like they're dissolving, but a discerning ear will find that the twin guitar attack is impressively razor sharp, lashing out some truly warped and corrupt tremolo-picked harmonies that would give early Cannibal Corpse a run for their money.

An audio engineer friend of mine complained that the album was "unlistenable" because the guitars are out of phase. For the non-engineers out there, that means that the two guitar channels have opposing waveforms that essentially suck the body out of the instruments, depleting the good frequencies from the tones and leaving you with a less "present" sound. Maybe it was deliberate? I wouldn't doubt it.

In the last six years, it sounds like Pissgrave became proficient enough at their trade that they could actually write and execute a more dazzling version of their smeary machine gun tempo death metal, but rather than glossing it up with decent production, they pushed everything into the red, deliberately compromised the recording process, and planted the vocals front and center. The grime is no longer a matter of masking technical ability or side-stepping studio costs. Now it's a conscious decision to make the band as unapproachable as possible, even as the songs themselves seem more nuanced and structured.