Three 65, Day 50
Nirvana, In Utero

I've reached Day 50, and cannot believe I've gone 49 full days without once covering a Nirvana album. Granted, they don't have the largest discography in history - they're no Grateful Dead - but they are one of the most important bands in history.

The metalheads all love Bleach, and everyone loves Nevermind; no one but a weirdo would state that Incesticide is their favorite Nirvana record. But it takes a true punk to prefer In Utero over anything else in the band's recorded output. For me, this album - the last one the band put out, before vocalist/guitarist Kurt Cobain screwed the pooch and blew his brains out - is the epitome of Nirvana-ness, the ultimate sound the band wanted to produce.

Atonal and dissonant, intentionally abrasive, In Utero is Nirvana at their snarly best. Take a look at the first line on the album: "Teenage angst has paid off well / now I'm bored and old." Unlike other bands who only played at discomfort (namely Pearl Jam), Nirvana was genuinely shocked at their success, and a little more than off-put by it, too. So they responded to their newly found fame by putting out the rawest, angriest album possible.

In Utero has no accessible "in," other than maybe "All Apologies" (and even that ends with feedback); it's all sharp edges. And even with that intentional fuck-you posture, it still comes off as a pure pop-rock album. Take "Rape Me," for example, which caused such a consternation with big chain retailers: a song with such a violent subject comes off as a total anthem, a document of vulnerability so poignant it could only have come from Cobain.

I'll be honest. I prefer the difficult stuff to the easy stuff, any day of the week. But Nirvana sugarcoats its jagged little pills so well, it's hard to tell the difference here.

Three 65, Day 49
Big Black, Songs About Fucking

All the great, great music you love, the Nirvanas, the Tools, the Ministrys, the Nine Inch Nails... all of them have at least one of their roots traced back to Big Black. Steve Albini's band of pranksters from Illinois were the first at marrying electronics to sheer guitar angst, and some would say they were the best.

The central conceit behind Big Black is simple: thrash out on guitar, set the drum machine to maximum, sing about whatever makes the audience uncomfortable, and fuck all the rest, including production values. That Albini ever became the go-to production guy for a generation of alternanerds looking to get street cred for their debut is one of the biggest jokes in rock music. The guy turns on a microphone and leaves the room; simple as that. Fuck Pro Tools, fuck processed sounds, fuck polish: Just record it, slap a sticker on it, and sell it.

Fucking was Big Black's last album - they knew it at the time, the audience knew it at the time, and Albini was determined to go out with a bang (pun most definitely intended). "Bad Penny" is the ultimate synthesis of Black's sound, the final snarl: "I think I fucked your girlfriend last night / Then I fucked all your friends' girlfriends / Now they hate you." The song topics here are about murder, debauchery, sex and death, the ultimate pigfuck anthems for a group of Midwestern teens to disaffected to care about much of anything. It's no accident that of all the bands to cover Kraftwerk, Big Black were the only ones able to inject pure hatred and evil into it (see "The Model").

The album ends with "Bombastic Intro," thirty or so seconds of pulsing drum machine and screaming guitar. That they ended their career with an intro is an insight into Albini's modus operandi: be contrary, and confound at all costs. One can now find Albini fronting Shellac, and doing things like playing bowling alleys at 10 am on January 1st. Fuck you? No, fuck you.

Three 65, Day 48
Rollins Band, The End Of Silence

I first got into Rollins Band shortly after high school; I thought, based on the title of the song "Blues Jam" and Rollins' poetry, that he was going to be some kind of grizzled, laid-back jazz/blues dude a la Tom Waits. God, how wrong was I.

Henry Rollins (or just Rollins, as he prefers) was the frontman for the influential punk band Black Flag. When that band imploded, he formed Rollins Band, a hard rock / funk metal collective that carried the "Rollins message" to the four corners of the universe.

"Low Self Opinion," the first song, hit me like a ton of bricks, because after high school, I had no esteem for myself - at all. "If you could see the you that I see / when I see you seeing me / you'd see yourself so differently / believe me" is the ultimate line; I nearly broke down crying when I understood it. Because there were people in my life that felt that way, I just had to find them. Corny as it sounds, the first song on Silence was the beginning of the end for the high school bullies that sought to keep me under foot.

Rollins also tackles relationships on songs like "Grip" and "You Didn't Need." But the real meat of the album comes towards the second half, when the songs slow down, get all groany and feedbacky, and it becomes a grind of pain and loss: "Obscene," "Just Like You" (about Rollins' relationship with his much-hated father), and the aforementioned "Blues Jam" (anything but).

True, Rollins' lyrics are a bit hokey, and the music is a bit same-y over the course of the album. But if you're going to have just one album by Rollins Band, forget something like Weight, which was successful only thanks to the videos, and pick up End Of Silence.

Three 65, Day 47
Stone Temple Pilots, No. 4

A lot of people don't like Stone Temple Pilots (henceforth referred to as STP for the sake of my carpal tunnel syndrome), and that's okay by me. I get it. I mean, they started off as a cash-grab - Pearl Jam, Soundgarden, and Alice In Chains were all original bands, and STP raped their sound for everything it was worth on their debut album, Core.

But a strange thing happened over the next few albums: the outer STP, the grunge-clone, stripped itself away - molted - and a real, honest-to-goodness band emerged. The fully formed STP explored its softer side on their second album, Purple, and found melody with their third album, Tiny Music. But it was their fourth album (rather anticlimactically named No. 4) where everything came together.

Sure, the first three tracks bring the hard rock goods - "Down" is one of the heaviest songs they've ever recorded - but I want to talk about the pop. "Church On Tuesday" closes with vocalist Scott Weiland singing "na na na na," which is... weird for a band as overtly hard rock as STP. "Sour Girl" takes things even farther, with a psychedelic pop sound that, minus the studio polish, could have made it to college radio in the late 80s. Elsewhere, "No Way Out" is a mix of both styles - heavy on the verses, atmospheric and psychedelic on the choruses. And "Atlanta," the closing ballad, sounds almost exactly like The Doors - no mean feat for a band that started out aping the Seattle sound.

Three 65, Day 46
The Flaming Lips, The Dark Side Of The Moon

Being a huge Pink Floyd fan, and a huge Flaming Lips fan, I was all over this shit the day it came out. The two seem like perfect companions; after all, the Flaming Lips are practically a latter-day Floyd, minus the internecine tensions.

Too bad that it's ultimately disappointing. Certain substitutions work: the wailing klaxons and coughing that replace the clocks at the beginning of "Time," the spoons that are substituted for the cash register at the beginning of "Money," etc. These are all nice little touches, but when it comes to soul, when it comes to depth, the album ultimately fails.

Take the vocals on "The Great Gig In The Sky," for instance. Peaches is an interesting choice, but as a substitute for Clare Torry, she just doesn't cut it. Her shrieks sound like an animal in pain, instead of a woman in ecstasy, and it just doesn't work. The same goes for the substitution of all the male voices interviewed on the original album with Henry Rollins - sure, he's saying the same thing, but he comes off as gruff and confrontational instead of affable and warm.

Pretty much everything on this record plays out this way. Sounds good, don't get me wrong, but this is tough stuff the Lips are tackling, and they're just too out there to handle the more grounded elements of Pink Floyd's sound.

Three 65, Day 45
Miles Davis, Bitches Brew

I wanted to write a lot about this album, but unfortunately don't have the time. Which is just as well, because I don't really have the vocabulary to describe it perfectly. I'm not one of those jazz-bo nerds who will tell you about "tonal modalities" and "arpeggiation." I just know what I like, and I love this album.

This is nearly the first in a long round of "jazz-rock fusion" albums that Davis and the jazz community produced in the 1970s (if not the actual first). The musicians sought to unleash the chaos of jazz over the chaos of rock and roll and perhaps merge the two. It works better than you might think. Although nothing here "rocks out," per se, all of it sounds a lot more energetic than regular jazz. And it sounds dark, too, in a way jazz never really sounded before, dark and haunting. Horns pierce the gloom of dark keyboard and percussion runs, sounding like whales dying in a sea of ink.

Davis would release other jazz-rock fusion albums, including the excellent In A Silent Way and The Complete Jack Johnson, but none of them hold a candle to this milestone. Not just another jazz album, Bitches Brew is an iconic display of talent from one of the greatest musicians of all time, and thus defies categorization as either jazz or rock.

Three 65, Day 44
Sleigh Bells, Treats

Sleigh Bells slay, simple as that. They sound like what would happen if the Powerpuff Girls smoked angel dust and were unleashed on Ministry's battery of studio sound effects.

Treats is their first and only LP, and boy, is it a doozy. Their basic sound involves a lot of distortion, furious guitars, clattery percussion, and the vocals of Alexis Krauss, who sounds like a vapid teenage bombshell in the mold of, oh, say, Lindsay Lohan?

That's okay, though - it's kind of the point. The dichotomy produced by the vocals and music is sharp enough to make your ears bleed. "Tell 'Em" blasts off like a jet fighter; "Rill Rill" rides a wave of victorious synths into a sea of vapid vocals. And "Straight A's" is just psychotic, as Krauss screams what sounds like "Ain't got sleep / I got straight A's!"

The album closes with the title track, which M.I.A., who first "found" Sleigh Bells, used as a basis for her song "Meds And Feds." Here, the drums just pound like sledgehammers, proving this band to be a two-person wrecking crew. Although a little more maturity could go a long way in this group's hands, the fact that Sleigh Bells don't take themselves very seriously - and sound great doing it - is a blast of fresh air in a cloud of over-indulgent hipsters.