Listened to this for the first time on the way to work this morning. Heavy asf and a kick to the jaw of an album. Badass record. 9/10 Listen if you like:
The Velvet Underground - White Light / White Heat
The Stooges - The Stooges
Patti Smith - Horses
The most outre, difficult, awesome album in the history of LPs.
28 tracks of crazy. This double album might be the strangest record released in major-label rock history.
As the Simpsons’ Matt Groening once said, I listened to it once and hated it, then seven more times convinced me it was the greatest album of all time.
Do yourself a favor and tune in. 🎶
this isn't a particularly rare vinyl release at all - it's still widely in print and very affordable. it's an album very very widely considered a classic. but it is, I think, the moment when I realised what makes buying music more satisfying of an experience than the lifetime of piracy I'd built up to that point. it comes with a handful of prints and illustrations that really expand upon the feeling of the album. the record itself isn't even labelled, there's no tracklist, the sides are engraved with their descriptions "nervous, sad, poor" and "bleak, uncertain, beautiful". but most notably of all, each of these releases comes with a penny flattened on train tracks behind the studio it was recorded in. I've heard stories of copies of this album coming with handwritten notes of thanks from the label. it was the first time I think I realised the love and the immense effort that goes into putting music out independently like this, even long after the recordings are done. I mean, I get that this one's a very special case - a lot of high-effort touches to really drive home the art, and to keep doing them decades after the album released. but I think picking this up is a big reason why I'm still buying vinyl ten years later. the album still absolutely rips, of course.
if Billy Strings and his Quintet come anywhere within 3 hours of you this summer, absolutely go and see them.
If you like bluegrass, country, folk, rock, or just generally a fan of improvisational jam music, Billy Strings will blow your mind.