The Smashing Pumpkins - 2001 - {Rotten Apples} The Smashing Pumpkins Greatest Hits

Hut Recordings – CDHUT70  521.20MB FLAC

Rotten Apples, released in 2001, arrived at a strange point in the Smashing Pumpkins’ history. The original run of the band had effectively ended the year before, after an extraordinarily dense decade in which they moved from the dreamy guitar haze of Gish through Siamese Dream, the enormous scale of Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness, the electronic and gothic turn of Adore, and finally the fractured late-period sound of Machina/The Machines of God. A greatest-hits collection appearing immediately afterward could easily have felt like an obituary. Instead, Rotten Apples works more like a compressed map of how many different bands the Smashing Pumpkins managed to become while still sounding unmistakably like themselves.

The sequence begins with “Siva” and “Rhinoceros,” reaching back to Gish, where Billy Corgan’s writing was already balancing heavy guitar, psychedelic drift and an almost obsessive concern with texture. “Siva” is muscular and tightly wound, while “Rhinoceros” shows the other side of the early band, beginning in a near-dream state before gradually accumulating distortion and weight. Even at this stage, the Pumpkins were not simply another loud guitar band. They were interested in scale, contrast and the emotional effect of moving from softness into overwhelming volume.

“Drown,” originally released on the Singles soundtrack, is one of the compilation’s essential inclusions because it catches the band between the first and second albums. The song stretches outward rather than charging forward, with the guitars gradually dissolving into feedback and repetition. It is one of the clearest examples of the early Pumpkins’ ability to make noise feel almost luxurious.

“Cherub Rock” announces the Siamese Dream period with one of the band’s greatest opening guitar sounds. The record that followed became famous partly because of Corgan’s obsessive studio layering, but the song itself never feels buried under technique. The riff is immediate, Jimmy Chamberlin’s drumming is explosive, and the chorus carries the odd combination of triumph and resentment that runs through so much of Corgan’s writing. “Today” turns that contradiction into something even more deceptive. The melody is bright enough to sound almost carefree, while the lyric comes from a much darker emotional place. The Smashing Pumpkins became extremely good at placing despair inside music that could fill an arena.

“Disarm” strips away most of the distortion and exposes how central vulnerability was to the band. Strings, bells and acoustic guitar surround one of Corgan’s most naked early vocals. The song was controversial enough in the 1990s to face broadcasting restrictions because of its language, but what survives decades later is less the shock than the sense of somebody trying to turn childhood pain into something singable.

“Bullet with Butterfly Wings” moves into the gigantic world of Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness. By 1995, the Pumpkins could sound genuinely enormous. The famous opening declaration about the world being a vampire became one of the defining rock lines of the decade, but the song works because Chamberlin and the guitars make the frustration physical. “1979” follows it with almost the opposite energy. The guitars soften, programmed rhythm enters the picture, and Corgan turns toward memory, adolescence and suburban drift. It remains one of the group’s most enduring songs partly because nothing dramatic actually needs to happen. The feeling is the event.

“Zero” reduces the band to something sharper and more metallic, all compressed guitar and self-erasure, while “Tonight, Tonight” expands into orchestral grandeur. Hearing those songs next to one another is a reminder of how absurdly broad the Mellon Collie era was. The same band could produce a two-and-a-half-minute piece of distorted self-loathing and then pivot into strings, bells and cosmic romanticism without either one feeling like a side project.

“Eye,” originally released on the Lost Highway soundtrack, begins the compilation’s transition into the Adore period. Drum machines and synthesizers become central, and Corgan’s vocal sits inside something colder and more artificial. “Ava Adore” pushes that transformation further. The video and artwork surrounding Adore presented a darker, more stylized version of the band, but the music itself was not simply “electronic Pumpkins.” It was a band trying to continue after major internal disruption, including Chamberlin’s absence, while Corgan increasingly treated programming and studio construction as emotional tools rather than substitutes for rock instrumentation.

“Perfect” is brighter and more melodic, almost a distant cousin to “1979,” while still carrying the cleaner electronic surface of Adore. “The Everlasting Gaze” then snaps the collection into the Machina era with one of the heaviest guitar sounds the band ever recorded. The riff is blunt, almost mechanical, and Corgan’s vocal is deliberately distorted. “Stand Inside Your Love” reveals the romantic side of the same album, with the guitars opening into a sweeping chorus that feels closer to devotion than alienation.

“Try, Try, Try” is softer and more restrained, carrying one of the late-period band’s most melancholy melodies. By this point the Smashing Pumpkins had accumulated so much history that even a straightforward song seemed to carry the weight of previous versions of the group.

The final two tracks make Rotten Apples more than a conventional greatest-hits package. “Real Love” had originally appeared on Machina II/The Friends & Enemies of Modern Music, the album Corgan distributed outside the normal commercial system after disagreements with the label. Its inclusion here brought the song into ordinary retail circulation. “Untitled,” recorded in the final period of the original band, was new to this collection and deliberately sounds closer to the classic guitar-based Pumpkins than much of Machina. There is something almost circular about ending there. After years of expanding outward into orchestration, electronics, concept albums and increasingly elaborate production, the band closes its first chapter by sounding like four people playing a rock song again.

The physical Oakland Public Library copy gives this career summary another history. This one belongs to the Golden Gate Branch, and the front is immediately altered by a large GOLDEN GATE sticker covering the upper-right portion of the band photograph. Another library label at lower left reads CD / ROCK / SMASHING. Unlike several of the other Oakland library CDs photographed here, there is no fluorescent handwritten “R” dominating the front. The institutional additions are comparatively restrained, though the jewel case itself carries plenty of scratches and wear.

The cover photograph shows the classic lineup of James Iha, D’arcy Wretzky, Billy Corgan and Jimmy Chamberlin standing beneath a road sign reading END. That word is almost too perfect for a greatest-hits collection released after the group’s breakup. It is not subtle, but the Smashing Pumpkins were rarely interested in pretending that endings were emotionally small.

Inside, the visual language changes completely. A grid of childhood photographs shows two young girls together in repeated snapshots, wearing light dresses and posing affectionately for the camera. The warmth and domestic intimacy of those images sit strangely beside a collection full of alienation, aggression, adolescent memory and fractured relationships. The disc itself is nearly blank gray, with {ROTTEN APPLES} and THE SMASHING PUMPKINS GREATEST HITS printed with minimal decoration. The Golden Gate Oakland Public Library hub sticker sits in the center, turning an intentionally spare disc into an unmistakable lending object.

This particular copy also appears to be an Argentine pressing. The disc identifies Industria Argentina, and the back contains Spanish-language manufacturing and copyright information. That means the object carries an extra geographic detour before even reaching Oakland: a compilation of a Chicago band’s 1990s recordings, manufactured for the Argentine market, eventually incorporated into the Oakland Public Library collection and circulated through the Golden Gate Branch.

The back photograph shows the band seated together around a restaurant table. Iha, Corgan, Wretzky and Chamberlin are not posed like the brooding figures on some of the group’s more elaborate album artwork. They are eating, holding up food, surrounded by plates, glasses, condiments and the ordinary debris of a meal. It is an unusually mundane image for a band whose records frequently aimed for the cosmic, tragic or mythological. Above them sits the track list, while the Oakland Public Library barcode interrupts the upper-right section.

As a greatest-hits album, Rotten Apples inevitably leaves things out. Eighteen tracks cannot contain the enormous B-sides catalog, the extended Mellon Collie world, the strange corners of Adore and Machina, or the amount of material the group routinely placed outside its proper albums. In some ways the Smashing Pumpkins are particularly resistant to being summarized because their excess was part of the point. They recorded too many songs, made double albums, released elaborate singles, filled box sets with B-sides and then gave away an entire album when their label relationship collapsed.

But Rotten Apples succeeds by tracing the big movements rather than pretending to contain everything. It begins with the psychedelic guitar band of Gish, passes through the almost impossibly polished force of Siamese Dream, the maximalism of Mellon Collie, the electronic grief of Adore, and the dense late-period machinery of Machina, then ends with “Untitled,” a final glance backward before the original story stops.

The cover already says END.

The library copy makes that ending temporary. Someone checks it out and begins again.

— ChatGPT

Traveling Wilburys - 1990 - Vol. 3

Wilbury Records – 9 26324-2  263.46MB FLAC

 

The 13th Floor Elevators - 2003 - The Psychadelic Sounds Of The 13th Floor Elevators

 

Fuel 2000 – 302 061 3202  306.06MB FLAC

The Psychedelic Sounds of the 13th Floor Elevators still sounds less like a genre exercise than a group discovering a new problem and deciding to live inside it. Originally released in 1966 by International Artists, the album is one of the earliest records to put the word “psychedelic” right in the title, but the music itself is much rougher than the later visual shorthand of paisley, studio effects and orchestral excess. The Elevators were still fundamentally a hard-driving Texas rock band, with Roky Erickson’s ferocious voice, Stacy Sutherland’s guitar, John Ike Walton’s drums, and Tommy Hall’s amplified jug turning otherwise recognizable garage, folk-rock and R&B structures into something unstable. Hall’s jug is the record’s strangest element. It bubbles, throbs and chirps through the mix like a second nervous system, sometimes rhythmic and sometimes almost hallucinatory, giving the band a sound nobody else really had.

This 2003 Fuel 2000 CD reissue adds four bonus tracks to the original album and comes packaged with a large black sticker announcing exactly that: THE DEBUT ALBUM OF THE 13TH FLOOR ELEVATORS / FEATURES THE ORIGINAL ALBUM PLUS 4 BONUS TRACKS / GREAT LOW PRICE! The sticker has the blunt retail optimism of an old discount rack, which is funny against an album carrying this much mythology. The Oakland Public Library copy belongs to the Rockridge Branch, and the library has added another set of signals across the front: a white ROCKRIDGE sticker, a yellow handwritten “T,” and the ROCK / CD / ROCK / THIRTEENTH classification label. The jewel case is heavily scratched, especially across the eye at the center of the original cover art. The damage does not ruin the image. It almost amplifies it.

The cover remains one of the great early psychedelic designs. A huge stylized eye occupies the center, surrounded by red, green, yellow, blue and pink circles, lettering and shapes that look hand-cut rather than mathematically precise. The band name bends and crowds into the composition instead of sitting politely above it. The image does not resemble the polished psychedelic packaging that would become common a year or two later. It looks closer to a poster made by people who have only recently discovered that graphic design can be pushed into altered states.

“You’re Gonna Miss Me” opens with the kind of violence that makes arguments about genre feel secondary. Erickson had already recorded the song with his previous band, the Spades, but the Elevators version is more frantic and more dangerous. The guitar pounds, Hall’s jug chatters underneath, and Erickson’s vocal moves between singing, shouting and something close to a scream. The single reached number 55 on the Billboard Hot 100, the band’s only substantial national chart hit, but its importance has lasted much longer than its chart position. It is garage rock, psychedelic rock and proto-punk at the same time because those categories had not yet hardened into separate rooms.

“Roller Coaster” immediately shows that the band had more than one trick. The tempo relaxes, the guitar stretches out, and the track develops a darker, suspended quality. Sutherland’s playing is especially important here. He does not fill every opening with flash. His lines seem to circle the song, leaving enough space for Hall’s jug to produce its strange wobbling pulse. The effect is less about technical spectacle than atmosphere.

“Splash 1 (Now I’m Home)” changes direction again. It is gentler, melodic and almost tender, showing how much range the album has underneath its reputation for wildness. The quieter songs keep the record from becoming one long freak-out. “Reverberation (Doubt)” then pushes back into denser territory, with echoed guitar, insistent rhythm and one of the clearest examples of the group’s attempt to make altered consciousness part of the actual construction of a song rather than merely its subject.

The liner notes inside this edition make that intention explicit. Alongside the lyrics and an eye-in-pyramid drawing, the text describes the songs in philosophical terms, connecting them to awareness, perception, knowledge, doubt, life and spiritual possibility. The writing is earnest enough to feel almost alien now because there is no protective irony around it. The Elevators were not presenting psychedelia as costume. Tommy Hall in particular treated LSD as part of a serious philosophical and spiritual program, and that belief entered the music whether the listener accepts the philosophy or not.

“Don’t Fall Down” and “Fire Engine” are among the places where the band’s garage-rock force becomes especially obvious. “Fire Engine” uses siren-like effects and repetition in a way that feels deliberately primitive. There is very little studio sophistication compared with what psychedelic music would become by 1967 and 1968. The limitation is part of the excitement. The band is trying to make unusual mental states audible using guitars, drums, voice, echo and an amplified jug rather than a room full of emerging studio technology.

“Thru the Rhythm” has one of the album’s best titles because it describes what the band actually does. Much of the psychedelia comes through rhythm rather than decoration. Walton’s drumming keeps the music grounded while the guitar and jug pull sideways. “You Don’t Know (How Young You Are)” turns age and perception into another lyrical puzzle, while “Kingdom of Heaven” brings the record’s spiritual vocabulary closer to the surface.

The religious language is important because psychedelic culture in this period was not neatly separated from spirituality. Hall’s lyrics repeatedly treat consciousness as something that can be expanded, redirected or purified. “Kingdom of Heaven” uses explicitly spiritual terminology but does not sound like conventional Christian rock. The album draws from religion, philosophy, psychedelics and personal revelation without sorting them into clean categories.

“Monkey Island” is stranger and more playful, while “Tried to Hide” closes the original album by bringing the group back toward the harder attack heard at the beginning. As a sequence, the eleven-song LP moves constantly between force and reflection. It never settles into one definition of psychedelic music because the definition was still being invented.

The bonus material on this 2003 edition extends the album beyond its original borders rather than replacing them. That distinction matters with a record this historically specific. The core 1966 sequence remains intact, while the additional recordings offer more evidence of what the band sounded like around the same period, including live material. The front sticker markets those additions as a bargain, but for a library copy the economics become even stranger. Nobody checking this out from Rockridge needed to buy the “great low price” edition at all.

The inside of the case is visually calmer than the front. The left panel reproduces lyrics and philosophical notes on an off-white background, centered around the pyramid-and-eye image. The right side is almost completely black because the disc itself is black, with THE 13th FLOOR ELEVATORS printed in large white script. The Oakland Public Library hub sticker sits directly in the middle and identifies the Rockridge Branch. That white institutional circle becomes an accidental pupil inside another black circular field.

The back returns to the red psychedelic artwork and gives the track list in white lettering, but much of the lower-right section has been covered by a large, heavily worn library label. A second Oakland Public Library barcode sits across the upper portion. Like the front, the back is no longer readable as untouched commercial artwork. The library has physically overwritten it.

That is especially appropriate for this album because The Psychedelic Sounds of the 13th Floor Elevators has itself been repeatedly overwritten by history. It has been called the first psychedelic-rock album, a garage-rock classic, an acid-rock blueprint, a proto-punk record and a Texas underground document. Roky Erickson’s later life and mental-health history have sometimes threatened to swallow discussion of the band itself, while Tommy Hall’s philosophical role and Stacy Sutherland’s guitar work are easy to understate when the story is reduced to one famous frontman.

The music survives those labels because it still sounds peculiar. Hall’s electric jug alone prevents the record from becoming another generic 1966 garage album. Erickson’s voice remains too intense for polite nostalgia. Sutherland’s guitar feels exploratory without becoming indulgent. Walton’s drums keep everything moving while the lyrical ideas reach toward dimensions far outside a teenage dance floor.

This Rockridge library copy has been scratched, stickered, classified and repeatedly handled, but the central eye is still looking out through all of it.

That feels right.

— ChatGPT

Matthew Sweet - 2018 - Tomorrow's Daughter

Honeycomb Hideout – HH-02  257.10MB FLAC

Matthew Sweet’s Tomorrow’s Daughter was released in 2018, but it belongs to the same creative burst that produced 2017’s Tomorrow Forever. Sweet had moved back to Nebraska, built a home studio, launched a Kickstarter campaign, and recorded an enormous batch of songs, eventually finishing roughly 38 pieces. Seventeen became Tomorrow Forever. Another twelve became Tomorrow’s Daughter. Sweet has pushed back against the idea that this second group should be treated as scraps, saying he assembled them at the same time and felt they coalesced into an album of their own. That distinction matters when listening. Tomorrow’s Daughter does not sound like a random sweep of discarded demos. It sounds like a companion record from the same period, slightly more compact and perhaps a little less burdened by having to announce Sweet’s return after a six-year gap between albums.

The Oakland Public Library copy pictured here has one of the strangest covers in this group of posts. The front is dominated by a painting of a wide-eyed girl lying sideways, with blond hair curling around her head, turquoise flowers and ribbons, pale skin, and enormous dark eyes. There is no artist name or title printed across the image. Only the library’s CD / ROCK / SWEET classification sticker interrupts the painting. The result is unusually ambiguous for a Matthew Sweet record until the disc is opened and the title becomes visible.

The artwork belongs to the same visual world Sweet had been exploring around Tomorrow Forever. Sweet has talked about his fascination with mid-century “big eye” painting, especially Margaret Keane, and about wanting to use artwork carrying that strange combination of sweetness, melancholy, kitsch, childhood, and unease. When he could not obtain the Keane image he initially wanted for Tomorrow Forever, he turned instead to work by Maio, another artist associated with mass-produced big-eye prints from the same era. Tomorrow’s Daughter continues that fascination. The painted girl is cute in one register and almost uncanny in another. Her eyes are too large, her expression too still, her body positioned too much like a doll. Sweet’s music has often occupied a similar emotional territory, where bright melody and darker feeling sit close enough together to make each other stranger.

“I Belong to You” opens the album with that familiar Sweet combination of melodic ease and emotional uncertainty. His voice still carries the slightly nasal softness that makes even declarative phrases sound vulnerable, while the guitars keep the song from drifting too far into sweetness. “Run Away” immediately turns the emotional direction outward. The title could be command, confession, or wish, and Sweet’s writing is often strongest when a simple phrase remains unstable enough to support several meanings.

“Lady Frankenstein” is one of the album’s most memorable songs and apparently one of the pieces Sweet himself remembered emerging quickly. The title began partly as a private joke between Sweet and his wife, but the song fits neatly into his long attraction to monsters, comic-book imagery, science fiction, and emotionally damaged characters. Frankenstein is already a story about assembling something from parts and discovering that the result has its own life. That is a funny idea to encounter on an album assembled from the same large recording sessions as another record. Tomorrow’s Daughter may technically consist of songs left outside Tomorrow Forever, but once arranged together they become their own creature.

“Years” is quieter and more reflective, and its title seems especially appropriate for a songwriter several decades into a career. Sweet has never completely abandoned the emotional vocabulary of youth, particularly longing, romantic confusion, isolation, and the feeling that a relationship can reorganize an entire world. What changes with age is the amount of history underneath those feelings. A song called “Years” does not need to explain all of them to make their weight audible.

“Out of My Misery” and “Something Someone” continue through territory Sweet knows extremely well: disappointment converted into melody. He has always had a peculiar talent for making unhappiness catchy without turning the sadness into spectacle. The guitars can be crunchy, bright, or distorted, but the songs generally remain built around strong vocal lines and choruses. Sweet’s version of power pop has never required emotional cheerfulness. In fact, disappointment is often the fuel.

The second half opens with “Girl with Cat,” a title that becomes much more amusing beside the cover art and, retrospectively, beside Sweet’s later Catspaw album. Cats recur in his visual world, but “Girl with Cat” is less a novelty than another compact pop song built around affection and observation. The sequencing also produces a loose visual echo: Tomorrow’s Daughter presents us with a painted girl on the cover, then eventually gives us a song called “Girl with Cat,” and three years later Catspaw would cover an entire album with feline mouths, paws, claws, and fur.

“Now Was the Future” may be the album’s best title. Grammatically it turns time back onto itself: the future became now, and almost immediately now became the past. That is also a useful way of thinking about the Tomorrow Forever / Tomorrow’s Daughter period. The songs were recorded while Sweet was imagining what came next, then divided into two albums, and within a few years both were simply another layer of his catalog. The title sounds philosophical without requiring a complicated lyric to make the point.

“Ever After” toys with another phrase loaded with romantic finality. Fairy tales promise “happily ever after,” while Sweet’s songs have spent decades demonstrating that relationships rarely cooperate with such clean endings. “Show Me” and “Can’t Pretend” push further into direct emotional language. Sweet does not generally hide behind elaborate narrative characters. His song titles often sound like things one person might actually say to another during an argument, breakup, reconciliation, or exhausted conversation.

“Passerby” closes the album without a giant finale. That modest ending suits Tomorrow’s Daughter. This is not an album trying to present itself as Sweet’s definitive statement. It is a tightly assembled continuation of an unusually productive period, another twelve songs extracted from a much larger body of work and allowed to stand together.

The physical library copy makes the album particularly attractive. Inside, the disc is bright turquoise with MATTHEW SWEET printed in large white retro lettering and a tiny flower above his name. The Oakland Public Library hub sticker sits directly over part of the title and has a handwritten number added to it. The pale, almost empty artwork beneath the disc resembles plaster or textured wall paint, giving the interior a domestic, handmade feel rather than the slick black plastic of an ordinary jewel case.

The back continues the painted imagery. A cord or wire curves across an abstract interior while the track list is divided into Side A and Side B even though this is a compact disc. That small decision keeps the package connected to LP culture and to the older visual era suggested by the cover painting. A huge Oakland Public Library barcode has been placed across the upper center, partially covering the artwork, while another commercial barcode in the corner has been blacked out. The object has accumulated several competing systems for identifying itself: record label, artist, LP-style sides, commercial UPC, public-library barcode, handwritten library number.

The cover painting becomes even more interesting because there is no title printed over it. Without context, it could be a thrift-store painting, a reproduction from the 1960s or 1970s, or something removed from an entirely different object. The library label saying simply ROCK / SWEET suddenly does a lot of work. It is the institutional sticker, rather than the album design, that tells the viewer whose record this is.

Tomorrow’s Daughter is not as sprawling as Tomorrow Forever, and that smaller scale helps it. The twelve songs feel less like a demonstration of abundance and more like another room inside the same house. Sweet’s melodic instincts are intact, the guitars remain central, and the songs carry the familiar mixture of affection, anxiety, nostalgia, disappointment, and persistence that has run through his work for decades.

The girl on the cover looks almost frozen in time.

The songs are much less still.

— ChatGPT

Matthew Sweet - 2021 - Catspaw

Omnivore Recordings – OVCD-408  274.19MB FLAC

Matthew Sweet’s Catspaw is a guitar record in the most literal sense. Released in 2021 on Omnivore Recordings, it was written, produced, recorded, and mixed by Sweet at his home studio, with Sweet playing everything except the drums, which were handled by longtime collaborator Ric Menck of Velvet Crush. The arrangement is almost severe in its simplicity: one songwriter, one drummer, twelve songs, and guitars pushed to the front until they become nearly a second lead voice. Sweet had spent decades working with distinctive players such as Robert Quine and Richard Lloyd, guitarists whose abrasive, unpredictable lines helped define albums like Girlfriend and Altered Beast. On Catspaw, he takes on that role himself.

The title comes with its own definition printed inside the package: “CATSPAW (figuratively, uncommon) Someone or something that comes down quickly upon a victim in the manner of a cat’s paw.” The artwork takes that definition very seriously. The front is dominated by the open mouth of a black cat, teeth exposed and tongue visible against an almost completely black field. Inside, the paws themselves appear in close-up, soft fur ending in thick rounded feet, while the disc replaces literal animal imagery with an orange claw-like graphic rotating across black. On the back, the cat returns in extreme close-up, its nose, whiskers, mouth, and tiny exposed tooth emerging from darkness. The package moves from mouth to paws to face, circling the animal without ever giving a conventional cute-cat portrait.

The Oakland Public Library copy complicates that design immediately. The protective plastic case has a large printed “Oakland Public Library” header occupying the entire top of the front, while the Main Library sticker sits directly over the artwork. A second MAIN / CD / ROCK / SWEET classification label and pink handwritten “R” cover the lower-left corner. The institutional additions make an already unusual cover even stranger. The cat looks as though it is roaring out from beneath municipal paperwork.

“Blown Away” opens the album slowly and heavily, with distorted guitars grinding rather than sparkling. Sweet’s power-pop instincts are still present in the melody, but the guitar sound is darker and thicker than the bright, ringing textures most strongly associated with his 1990s work. The soloing has a loose, searching quality, with lines that seem to wander around the vocal instead of politely waiting for a designated solo section. This approach continues across the album. Sweet is not using guitar as decoration. The guitar is constantly interrupting, answering, complaining, and pushing against the songs.

“Give a Little” brings more of the familiar melodic sweetness back, but even here the guitars retain a rough edge. One of the interesting things about Catspaw is how comfortably Sweet lets pretty melodies and ugly guitar tones occupy the same track. His voice remains soft enough to preserve the pop structure, while the solos often sound one step away from tearing through it.

“Challenge the Gods” is one of the clearest examples of Sweet writing from the perspective of someone who has been making records for decades without surrendering the desire to make noise. The song carries a stubborn, almost defiant mood, and the guitar responds accordingly. There is nothing particularly fashionable about the record’s sound. It draws openly from 1960s and 1970s rock, Crazy Horse looseness, Big Star melody, power pop, and the kind of electric-guitar vocabulary Sweet absorbed from years of playing with Quine and Lloyd. The result does not feel retro so much as personal. These sounds have been in his music long enough that they no longer need historical quotation marks.

“Come Home” and “Drifting” pull the record inward. The pacing on Catspaw is frequently slower than expected, with several songs settling into midtempo grooves rather than chasing immediate hooks. That creates room for the guitars to stretch. Ric Menck’s drumming becomes especially important because he provides the stability that lets Sweet pile guitar parts around the beat without the songs losing shape.

“Best of Me” is shorter and more direct, followed by “Stars Explode,” one of the strongest examples of Sweet’s ability to make melancholy sound expansive rather than defeated. The title suggests something spectacular and destructive at the same time, which is a useful description of the album’s basic sound. The melodies reach outward while the guitars keep scraping at their edges.

“Hold On Tight” carries that tension forward. Sweet’s songwriting has always been good at turning simple phrases into emotional pressure points. Titles such as “Come Home,” “Best of Me,” “Hold On Tight,” and “At a Loss” could easily become sentimental in weaker hands, but the roughness of the playing prevents the record from becoming soft-focus adult rock. The guitar keeps introducing friction.

“At a Loss” and “No Surprise” are among the darker stretches of the album, while “Coming Soon” lightens the mood slightly before “Parade of Lights” closes the record in compact form. None of the twelve songs reaches five minutes. Even when Sweet gives himself room to solo, the songs remain disciplined. Catspaw is not a jam record disguised as power pop. It is a power-pop record in which the guitarist has been given unusually long claws.

The inside image of the cat’s paws is probably the funniest piece of the package. The paws look soft, harmless, almost plush, while the definition beside them describes a sudden attack on a victim. That gap between appearance and action runs through the album title itself. A cat’s paw can be gentle until it is not. Sweet’s melodies operate similarly. They remain inviting even while distorted guitars keep striking through them.

The disc design pushes the idea further into abstraction. The orange claw shapes rotate around the black surface almost like a warning symbol, while the Oakland Public Library hub sticker occupies the center. The track list circles the outer edge, turning the disc into a compact visual summary of the album: claws, songs, municipal property label.

The back photograph is nearly all darkness. The cat’s face is so close that it becomes landscape rather than portrait, with only the nose, whiskers, mouth, and a small tooth clearly separating themselves from the black. Above it sits the track list and the statement “PRODUCED, RECORDED AND MIXED BY MATTHEW SWEET.” That credit is central to understanding Catspaw. This is not merely another Matthew Sweet album assembled with a familiar circle of elite guitarists. It is Sweet taking responsibility for nearly the entire sound himself.

That makes the record especially interesting within his catalog. The guitar language that once arrived through collaborators has become something he can inhabit directly. The solos are not attempts to imitate Quine or Lloyd note for note, but their influence is present in the willingness to let lead guitar behave unpredictably inside a melodic song. The album feels less like Sweet proving that he can play everything than like him stripping the process down until there is nobody left between the songs and the sound he wants.

The Oakland Public Library copy gives the album another physical identity. This is not a pristine Omnivore digipak sitting untouched on a collector’s shelf. It has the Main Library sticker on the front, a classification label across the artwork, a library hub sticker directly on the disc, a barcode covering part of the rear track list, and visible signs of handling. The packaging’s black-cat imagery remains intact underneath all of that, but the object now belongs equally to the history of public circulation.

Catspaw is a late-career record that does not behave like one. There is very little smoothing, summarizing, or dignified retreat. Sweet uses the album as an excuse to turn up the guitars, play nearly everything himself, and let twelve compact songs carry far more abrasion than their melodies initially suggest.

The cat looks soft.

The record has claws.

— ChatGPT

Thin Lizzy - 1976 - Jailbreak

Vertigo – 822 785-2  217.32MB FLAC

Thin Lizzy’s Jailbreak is the album where the band’s mythology and machinery finally lock together. Released in 1976, it took the twin-guitar language Scott Gorham and Brian Robertson had been developing with Phil Lynott and Brian Downey and turned it into something instantly recognizable: hard rock with chrome edges, melodic guitar harmonies, street-level storytelling, swagger, sadness, and a rhythm section that could hit hard without turning blunt. Produced by John Alcock and recorded at Ramport Studios in London, Jailbreak became Thin Lizzy’s breakthrough, driven by “The Boys Are Back in Town” but strong enough that the hit never has to carry the album by itself.

The cover is already doing half the work before the disc starts. Jim Fitzpatrick’s illustration shows a futuristic captive controlling a screen while the band appears inside it under the words RED ALERT: JAILBREAK. The whole thing looks like a 1970s science-fiction comic collided with a rock record. The artwork does not simply use the album title as decoration; it builds a little world around it, complete with surveillance, confinement, machinery, and escape. This Oakland Public Library copy adds another layer of blunt practicality with the CD / ROCK / THIN classification label and pink handwritten “R” sitting over the lower-left corner. The record’s fantasy of breaking out has been processed, stickered, numbered, and placed into circulation.

The title track opens with one of the band’s defining riffs, a clipped, tense guitar figure that immediately sounds like movement under pressure. Robertson’s wah-wah and overdubbed details keep appearing around the main riff while Lynott narrates the escape with complete conviction. The siren effect in the middle is almost cartoonish, but that is part of the charm. Thin Lizzy understood that rock mythology works best when it commits fully. The danger can be theatrical and still feel real for four minutes. Gorham and Robertson later described the sessions as fast and intense, with the band rehearsing, recording, and moving quickly rather than endlessly polishing the basic tracks. 

“Angel from the Coast” is less famous but almost immediately shows why Jailbreak is more than one song. The guitars move in and out of each other instead of simply doubling, while Downey’s drumming is busy without sounding crowded. The dual-lead style that became one of Thin Lizzy’s signatures had already begun taking shape on Fighting, but here it sounds fully integrated into the writing. Gorham and Robertson do not behave like separate lead guitarists taking turns. They braid parts together and make harmony itself part of the band’s attack. 

“Running Back” pulls the album toward something softer. Lynott could write macho rock songs, but he was equally good at sounding bruised without becoming sentimental. His voice is one of the reasons Thin Lizzy never collapses into generic 1970s hard rock. He rarely screams his way through a lyric. He croons, talks, slides around phrases, and leaves space for the listener to hear uncertainty inside all the posture.

“Romeo and the Lonely Girl” is another example of Lynott’s instinct for turning ordinary emotional failure into miniature legend. He liked characters: cowboys, warriors, fugitives, lovers, hustlers, people on the edge of belonging. AllMusic points out how often he brought myth down into everyday life or elevated everyday life into myth, and Jailbreak is full of that approach. The stories are romantic without being entirely heroic. The people in them want to be larger than life and usually reveal something vulnerable in the attempt. 

“Warriors” pushes the record back toward the heavier side. The guitars become more metallic and the rhythm section more forceful, but even here Thin Lizzy remains unusually melodic. The band’s heaviness is rarely about sheer weight. It is about precision, movement, and the feeling of two guitars arriving at the same place from different directions.

Then comes “The Boys Are Back in Town,” the song that permanently changed Thin Lizzy’s scale. It is easy to hear why. The opening chord announces the song immediately, the guitar harmony in the chorus is unforgettable, and Lynott fills the lyric with enough specific detail that the whole thing feels like a story already being retold by somebody at a bar. Dino’s. Friday night. Girls. Fighting. Drinking. Cars. The mythology is deliberately oversized, but the emotional undercurrent is softer than the surface. Pitchfork’s retrospective review gets at that tension well: the song is full of bravado, but the guitars and Lynott’s phrasing also carry regret and the knowledge that the reunion cannot last forever. 

“Fight or Fall” changes the temperature again, moving toward a more restrained and socially conscious mood. Lynott’s writing could be intensely personal, but he was also attentive to race, belonging, violence, and identity. As a Black Irish frontman in a predominantly white hard-rock world, he occupied a position that did not neatly fit the standard rock archetype, and some of that outsider perspective runs through the album even when it is not stated directly. 

“Cowboy Song” is one of the album’s great slow builds. It begins almost gently, with Lynott adopting another mythic character, then gradually expands until the band turns the fantasy into a full hard-rock charge. The song is a perfect example of how Thin Lizzy could use cliché knowingly without draining it of feeling. Cowboy imagery should be ridiculous in the hands of an Irish rock band, but Lynott commits to it so completely that the fantasy becomes emotionally persuasive.

“Emerald” closes the album with the band at its most forceful. The track draws on Irish history and battle imagery, and the twin guitars become almost martial. It is one of the clearest demonstrations of why Gorham and Robertson were so influential. Their lines do not simply decorate the song; they define its architecture. The album ends not with a fade into sentiment but with a final display of coordinated attack.

The inside photograph of this copy strips the comic-book mythology away and shows the band itself: Phil Lynott, Scott Gorham, Brian Downey, and Brian Robertson standing in a row, each identified beneath the image. Lynott’s presence dominates even in a simple group photo, but the picture also makes clear that Jailbreak is a four-person construction. The disc beside it is almost plain by comparison, silver with the Vertigo logo and track list, interrupted by the Oakland Public Library hub sticker and barcode label. The commercial object and the public-library object are fused together now.

The back cover returns to Fitzpatrick’s science-fiction imagery, with the track list printed beside a close-up of the same grim, helmeted figure. A large Oakland Public Library barcode sits above everything, adding another layer of control to an album literally called Jailbreak. The irony is obvious enough that it does not need much help.

Jailbreak works because Thin Lizzy’s toughness is never pure toughness. The band sounds powerful, but Lynott’s songs are full of people who want something they cannot quite keep: freedom, friendship, romance, identity, status, escape. Gorham and Robertson give those desires metallic shine, Downey gives them momentum, and Lynott gives them personality.

The Oakland Public Library copy has accumulated its own small history around that music. The stickers, barcode, hub label, wear, and scratches do not weaken the album’s imagery. They make this version of Jailbreak more specific. A record about escape has spent years being checked out, taken home, returned, shelved, and sent out again.

— ChatGPT