hold you like a dog

Why were all CDs from the 1980s mastered so quietly? Pump up the gottdamn volume already. Howard Jones & Dale Bozzio albums most recently sent me diving for the volume control.

Whereas the latest two Cure reissues sound AWESOME. If you add all the b-sides from Join the Dots, you get the, like, total package. I love all that shit so much, it's like religion to me. In 1987 I stopped liking KISS & started liking XTC, the Cure & the Damned. It gives me a soul-boner to revisit the oldies on occasion. The live version of "Fight" lets you hear the fine detail of Boris's drumming. What a great song, why don't they play shit like this now.

There was also a 2-CD retrospective of the Damned's two prolific years on the Stiff Records label. Which, the first two albums are my personal least favorites. A lot of people only like the first two. Ha.

New Lamb of God, sure. It's pretty smoothed out from what I remember of their early stuff. Some of it sounds like black metal.

Downloading now: Tom Waits's set at House of Blues in Cleveland, the same night we saw him in Akron. Everyone is still freaking out about the House of Blues set he played, apparently it was the best of the tour & maybe his best ever. I wouldn't know. To this day I still couldn't name a Tom Waits song if my life depended on it. I like him & his music quite a lot, I just don't know anything about it. Until now, anyway. My Tom Waits phase starts now. And since 300+ people have already downloaded the show from dimeadozen, my download speeds are impressively hovering around 500 kB/s. I'm pretty sure that the Cleveland taper was the guy who sat in the row behind us in Akron. Although it's possible someone else made the 8-hour drive from New Jersey, I suppose.

Uploading now: R@TT! I got this 1997 DVD in a trade last year. I loved the first three Ratt albums, so it's fun to check this shit out, from long after the glory days. The site I'm uploading to is mostly, um, Van Halen, Dokken, hard rocky type 80s metal. Which is cool is measured doses. Also what I like about this Ratt show is you can see Warren DeMartini playing all the guitar parts by himself. His playing is awesome, the chords & fills & riffs he came up with are almost like Voivod. & it's no wonder I could never figure out shit like "You're in Love". I'd have a hard time with it even now. Warren's solos are so melodic. I don't take it for granted now.