My dadrock guilty pleasure

All Lights Fucked on the Hairy Amp Drooling

The first time I had ever heard the saying "All Lights Fucked on the Hairy Amp Drooling" was shortly after I discovered Godspeed You! Black Emperor as a teenager, around 15 or 16 (which was arou...

Deathconsciousness

Alright boys, for those of y'all who haven't been blackpilled on the tremendous emotional behemoth known as Dan Barrett, hang onto your hats because I'm gonna drop a truth bomb. Have a Nice Life is the most influential ...

Throbbing Gristle was one of the most influential figures in recorded music. They made music that was the antithesis of what most artists want for themselves - not beautiful music, or stylized music, or even traditionally composed music, but the o...

Alejandro Jodorowsky may appear like a raving lunatic, but really, he is a genius. He documents the relationship between the cerebral metaphors, symbolism, and social commentary of the conscious mind, and the primal, instinctive sexual desires of ...

The Infamous

To be 19 in Queensbridge public housing, Queens, New York City, 1995. How much death, violence, and crime were the power duo of Prodigy and Havoc actually involved in? Have they murdered people, and if so, how many? Their env...

Uh don't have much to say about Stereolab...

they're alright I guess

Xiu Xiu is like the elephant in the room. It's a whole lot of family secrets, accusations of abuse, and details of trauma, over Thanksgiving dinner, with grandma and Aunt Sally and the kids. Decades' worth of pain and terrible feelings bottled up,...

good kid, m.A.A.d City

Okay ignore my initial review for this album, I really didn't know what I was talking about. good kid, m.A.A.d City is not only Compton gang life survivor Kendrick Lamar's personal masterpiece, but among on...

Public Enemy is hip hop. They were unarguably the first hip hop group to elevate the then-adolescent genre of hip hop to artistic status, to create hip hop and rap that was not simply a trend or a fad, not materialistic or shallow, but righteous, ...

omg dood u listen to th3 new Tewl album??? like, so spiritual and meditation... open ur 3rd eye!

No for real fuck this band. This is what you listen to when you're 14 and you're slightly smarter than most kids and you have awful, relentless...

I really have no business talking about the work of Andrei Tarkovsky. It's too beautiful, too intelligent, too meaningful, intellectually challenging and disturbingly articulate. To talk about Solaris, Stalker, The Mirror<...

Are you ready for Tanner to drop some hard truths down your throats from my gaping pit of knowledge? Some of you aren't going to like this, but it needs to be said. Syd Barrett was pretty much the heart and soul of Pink Floyd, and when he left the...

"Tanner, did you really watch all of these Woody Allen movies?" Yes, I really did. Most of them more than once.

I've decided that Woody Allen was both, at different phases in his career, an idiot and a genius. He is currently my f...

David Cronenberg is a prophetic filmmaker. He keeps coming back from the dead, when you least expect it, like Jesus. He is a mastermind of the macabre: wires coming out of people's faces, bugs, ejaculating alien-beings, enormous insects, people go...

Henry Knollenberg has been my good friend of 4 or 5 years. We played in Culture Chester together with the infamous Newt Grundy, and he has made several appearances on my albums over the years. He was also, along with Davi...

Ugh, okay. I thought this was one of those bands that you don't have to explain. Like, the importance of how influential it was is very clear to people. I don't want to drone on and on about something lots of people already agree on, like I did wi...

Current 93 is fucking weird. They come from a very esoteric and concealed background. They have very strong, demanding images and themes involving cults, Thelema, Agape, uncommon Christian and Pagan mythology, Tibetan Buddhism, Gnosticism, far rig...

The following review was selected for the front page of Rate Your Music.com in August 2013. I recently recovered it from a high school document.

Faust

she wuz a FEST MACHINE she kepta MODUH clean she's a best damn wum'n that ay eva see FUCK YEAH!!!!!!

You know what's wrong with Led Zeppelin? What it really is about them that drives me nuts (besides you know, everything)? They literally plagiarized the majority of their first two studio albums and were revered as innovators and artists for re...

Carl Theodor Dreyer is probably the most important figure in film. Everything influential, emotional, profound, painful, and intense, can be traced back to his work, as he was the first guy to do everything, and the first guy to accomplish thin...

Lars von Trier is a dangerous filmmaker. When I say "dangerous", I don't mean physically dangerous like he could hurt you or something, I mean the ideas his films present are often abusively challenging on the mind and emotional state. He dethrone...

Michael Haneke is a dangerous filmmaker, a very cold one, whose characters experience intense detachment, dissolution of love, and dissociation. His films have a remarkably brutal approach to storytelling - see the infanticide of Funny Game...

Jim Thirlwell is a mastermind of exaggeration - he has clouds of smoky charisma, red-hot testosterone, and abrasive musical debauchery, blowing out of his ears and creeping out his pores like research chemicals. He is best known (and rightfully...

Spiritualized is something that is holy, enigmatic, religious even, but at the same time depraved, sinful, tempestuous. It is music about self-abuse, neglect, love, and redemption. Psychedelic gospel music that is ridiculously over-saturated an...

The Velvet Underground was probably the most historically important rock band of all time. Pioneers of objectively original, and almost criminally subversive sound, the original quintet has achieved things that few artists in any medium are abl...

Now Frank Zappa was probably the most unique, the most uncharacteristically intellectual, and the most stylistically adept and adaptable rock composer of all time. To describe Zappa's work simply as "satire" is a profoundly lacking understateme...

"Okay Tanner, what's the deal? Where did all of this interest in black metal come from? You've been the avant-folk and psych guy for like 4 years."

Burzum, solo project of convicted murderer and arsonist Varg Vikernes, is pos...

Eraserhead

Eraserhead is a spiritual journey of a simple man. Henry Spencer, trapped physically in an industrial capitalist hellscape, and trapped emotionally in a loveless forced marr...

Animal Collective is something that is still real to me. I can sense them, the illusion of their aesthetics hasn't betrayed me yet. They come from a place of real warmth and compassion, something uninhibitedly creative. Like being 10 years old, an...

Trout Mask Replica

It baffles me, that the majority of the "serious" rock listening world has yet to truly appreciate the genius of Captain Beefheart. 95% of people who consider themselves ...

My interpretation of Woman in the Dunes: The entomologist is the working class. The village council is the handful of billionaires in capitalism. The rations delivered down are wages, and the barely-livable resources given to the working ...

It amazes me how the esoteric riddle of passion, Sun City Girls, the creative occultist engine masquerading as a rock band, has still eluded mainstream and contemporary rock listeners. This group is an endless hot spring of ideas and originality. ...

How can anyone still listen to this overhyped, substanceless, commercialism incarnate? Is anyone still under the impression that Radiohead were inspired or influenced by anything at all? Radiohead is the music industry's shallowest and most succes...

John Cassavetes is probably the single most important American filmmaker. He was a profound student of human emotion, and he insisted his audiences felt exactly what he was feeling. He did this with an inventive and frankly invasive camera techniq...

Ingmar Bergman was a genius. He was the original master of despair, the wizard of neuroses and emotional trauma. His works are inscribed with real wisdom of both romantic and family relationships. He had an empathy with women, and realistic, sympa...

It is endlessly irritating that the majority of the rock-listening world is still under the delusion that The Beatles were anything other than a well-executed marketing gimmick. These were nothing but cute white guys, factory-tested chord progress...

Swans was probably one of my most expensive and impassioned rock music fixations. While I'm not as crazy about them as I used to be, I still strongly believe in their music and will still defend it.

Michael Gira's Swans introduced a number ...

I think he has some potential, but so far he hasn't made anything too mind-blowing.

I am in love with this band. The fact that so few rock listeners have even heard of the genius of Cerberus Shoal, and even fewer took the time to appreciate or review their incredible music, only proves how moronic and clueless the entirety of the...

The Residents is a group (or rather, a multimedia art collective) you kind of have to explain to people. Over their 40-year career, the band never revealed their identities, their names and faces were always hidden. They had an anonymous approach ...