Time travel is possible!

It's another one of those time-wasting days at work, so yet again, I turn to recreating 120 Minutes & searching for videos from the Bill Clinton era. Did you know that a power trio of Kim Gordon, Spike Jonze & Richard Kern directed the "Divine Hammer" video for the Breeders? Naturally, it's awesome (and it also screams "Mid-'90s!").



Then of course, there's the "Cannonball" video.

Somewhat Less Than 120 Minutes.

My new favorite internet time waster is the 120 Minutes Playlist Archives. Beware, because it's very easy to spend hours alternating between it & YouTube in search of all of those Mudhoney & Dinosaur Jr. videos you never knew you couldn't live without. Three gems I found:

Brainiac - "Vincent Come On Down"


Sebadoh - "Rebound"


Husker Du - "Makes No Sense At All" (BOW DOWN TO GREG NORTON'S MUSTACHE!)

1995 Called & They Want Their Records Back.

I went on a big (well, bigger than usual) '90s indie rock nostalgia binge on my show this week, so I figured I'd make another post of nostalgic visual accompaniment. I'm getting paid to sit here at work & watch Robert Pollard do high kicks on the internet, so why not? The following looks suspiciously like one of the dozens of mixtapes of songs that I would have taped off the local college radio station when I was in the seventh grade.

Superchunk - "Precision Auto"


Sonic Youth - "Bull In The Heather" (with Kathleen Hanna!)


Guided By Voices - "My Valuable Hunting Knife"


The Halo Benders - "Don't Touch My Bikini"

Gold Star For Robot Boy.

While I'm definitely not a Guided By Voices obsessive, I have a serious soft spot in my heart for basically everything up until about the Mag Earwhig-era (I still haven't fully gotten over seeing Bob Pollard in a bright green "Ladies' Man"-style satin shirt on the Conan O'Brien show after Do The Collapse came out - totally shudder-inducing). I will also maintain that if you can listen to Bee Thousand & not fall in love with it, then you have a heart of stone, you cold, horrible person. This makes me extremely nostalgic for simple, low-budget 90s indie rock videos (complete with high kicks):



What triggered this post was reflecting upon the highs & lows of the 2007 music year, particularly the last ...And You Will Know Us By The Trail of Dead album & how they managed to rape my memories by covering/butchering Guided By Voices' "The Gold Heart Mountaintop Queen Directory" (in the middle of what looked like a overly ambitious pseudo-concept album too, making it all the more inexplicable & out of place). As luck would have it, that Trail of Dead record actually came out in late 2006 & thus narrowly escaped earning a top spot on my 2007 shit-list. But that cover was so mind-blowingly awful that I'm going to call them out entirely on their own right now, exact release dates be damned. Attention, Trail of Dead: Stop adding cheesy, dramatic strings to songs that were beautiful & haunting precisely because they were originally so sparse & lo-fi. Please just go back to pretending to be a Sonic Youth tribute band.

If You Want To Write Rock Lyrics, You Must Learn About Where The Hobbits Dwell.

I was nerding out over indie rock from the Clinton era with my friend Charlie today & we were inspired to go digging for some lost 90s treasures from back in the day when you could actually catch a Swervedriver or Shudder To Think video on MTV (the mind boggles).

Yo La Tengo - "Sugarcube" (featuring the cast of Mr. Show!)



Chavez - "Break Up Your Band"



Superchunk - "Watery Hands" (with Janeane Garofalo & David Cross!)



Jawbox - "Savory"




To be continued.