R.E.M. – Reckoning
Way back when my music brain was still forming, I remember R.E.M. being one of the earliest bands I’d ever heard described as “post-punk,” which is maybe kind of funny since that’s rarely how they’re recognized anymore, and for most of their career they were something else. That something else tended to change from album to album, but they never really went back to the sound of Murmur, which has some of their most wiry and taut material (though Document has the most Wire-y, since they covered “Strange”…I’ll see myself out).
But in high school I heard Reckoning for the first time—all the way through, anyhow. I had already known the singles, “(Don’t Go Back to) Rockville” and “So. Central Rain”, but the twanginess of those singles didn’t really prepare me for the jangle pop energy of “Pretty Persuasion,” the driving post-punk (there it is!) of “Little America” or the almost ska-like rhythms (but still post-punk-y) “Harborcoat.” And goddamn, I pretty much fell for this record right away. What a stunning set of songs.
After working on an article about the best live albums, and listening to R.E.M.’s Live at the Olympia, I was reminded of how driving and urgent a song “Little America” is, and it’d probably be in my top 10, maybe top 5 R.E.M. songs. For some reason I tend to like a song even more when it’s the best song on the record, or one of them, and it’s the closer. For marketing’s sake, labels always want the bangers at the beginning, but there is an art to making an album, and R.E.M.’s better at it than most.
When I bought this…I suppose I was just poking around on Discogs, between all the various noisy punk records, and thinking “oh, that record rules and I don’t have it” and that was probably it. I’ve been doing that a lot lately as well, for somewhat different reasons, but let’s just say there’s going to come a point where I’m writing about a lot of Tom Waits records. But if anything this is just making me realize there are some more R.E.M. records I need to pick up.
Rating: 10.0
Sound Quality: Great
Pharmakon – Contact
This is the last of my Pharmakon posts, since it’s the last record I needed to finish the catalog. She has four albums to date; I expect she’ll release more music at some point, but as of right now, her most recent album is 2019’s Devour. Contact was released in 2017, and unlike her debut, Abandon, is pretty consistently strong and fascinating all the way through rather than being a more polarized set of tracks. But it also doesn’t have a real knockout moment like “Crawling on Bruised Knees,” which just floored me when I first heard it. Regardless, this record is great, and I’m always kind of surprised by how much I enjoy it whenever I hear it. “Enjoy” being a very subjective term here because, of course, industrial noise albums are not for everybody. That’s putting it mildly, but this is great stuff. I’ll close by saying this has the grossest cover of any Pharmakon album. For some reason a bunch of greasy fingers in someone’s face bothers me more than maggots in a lap. Chalk it up to that old saw about how “Hell is other people” I suppose. Or Covid.
Rating: 8.9
Sound Quality: Great
Destruction Unit – Negative Feedback Resistor
Back in 2017, I think, I saw Destruction Unit play a show with Power Trip, and somehow DU were still the loudest band at the gig. Maybe the loudest band I saw that year. They were loud. Really fucking loud. Just colossally, intensely loud. Really loud band.
Which makes them awesome, of course. I apologize for starting this off with some steam and then letting it fizzle out by saying: I’ve only actually listened to this album a few times and it’s not one I return to a whole lot, but it does kick ass. I got it for $7 or so on Discogs, packaged with the Pharmakon record, and really how can you turn down a deal like that? You can’t. (Both Sacred Bones releases!) Not when the band is this loud: A driving blend of noise rock, punk and hardcore with some squealing psychedelic elements. A bit like that Geld record I wrote about yesterday but a little more Americana between the peals of feedback. They’re from Arizona, so it’s hard not to read into it some romantic desert thing. Even though they’re literally called Destruction Unit. They live up to the name, too.
Rating: 8.7
Sound Quality: Great
1000 Times Jeff 
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