Category Archives: Arts

by Dr. Spin

Although the sign on my door said “Assistant Band Director,” I was taking an indulgent moment to cling to my past career as a rock star, and for that fleeting moment, I was feeling pretty confident. The refrain from Radiohead’s Street Spirit (Fade Out) was dying away in the speakers, and I had nailed it on piano by ear in the first run-though.

I was actually quite impressed with the elegant simplicity of the song and, emboldened, I put in another favorite: Follow Me from Jason Falkner’s 1996 release Presents Author Unknown. As seemingly simple and catchy as the song was, I thought that I might have similar success.  I was dead wrong...  it’s a dead mans party over at the pharmacy

by Dr. Spin

I put This Is Where We Are on my list early this year after countless ringing endorsements from many people whose musical opinions I respect, but I just never quite got around to ordering it. It’s not that I didn’t try – I looked into Seryn on a few occasions, and there was nothing about them that I didn’t like, but, despite having some common ground with the Fleet Foxes (whose album Helplessness Blueswas my top album of 2011), they didn’t quite hook me into taking the plunge.

Still, advocates of the band were unrelenting. Finally, one devoted fan, who is an ex-student and fellow blogger, was insistent enough to send me a copy of This Is Where We Are through the mail. You can’t get much more fervent backing than that feel the fervor over at El Pharmacio…

by Dr. Spin

Although I like to keep things positive on the blog, I have to admit that October has been a particularly trying month. In many facets of my life, I have a lot of people that rely heavily on me, and usually, I don’t mind being the person that plays an active role in holding things together. There are stressful and seemingly endless details with the house that need ironing out, though, and with the move coming up next month, it’s probably going to get worse before it gets better. Along with that, it feels like my work responsibilities have taken more energy than usual. With all of these stressors, being “the rock” seems a little overwhelming, and I’m a little ashamed of feeling that way….retro and timely at the pharmacy

by Dr. Spin

Perhaps over the years, I’ve just become a stick-in-the-mud.  Unless I have a really clever costume, I don’t usually dress up for Halloween, and, at least in recent times, I make a concerted effort to avoid refined sugar. To most, it would seem that the holiday is a bust for me, but I do have a few very specialized traditions that I keep every year.

During my more bachelorish times, I would invite over some unsuspecting victims and watch Peter Jackson’s voodoo zombie splatterfest Dead Alive. That ritual has fallen by the wayside in recent years, but another that still remains is to put Oingo Boingo’s1985 classic Dead Man’s Party in rotation for a few days….rotate to the Pharmacy

by Dr. Spin

In 2001, on an uninhabited stretch of road between Denton and Allen, I decided that Amnesiac was a bust. Radiohead had presented rewarding challenges with every album up to that point, but after struggling with it for quite awhile, I could not convince myself that the jarring differences between its burbling sound experiments and jagged songwriting would have a payoff like Kid A did. I shelved it and forgot about it. Don’t forget to stop by the Pharmacy…

by Dr. Spin

Jellyfish deliberately used the familiar melodic and harmonic conventions of yesteryear as a nostalgic vehicle for expressive musicianship. That band cratered under the weight of its own talent, but a few years later, keyboardist Roger Joseph Manning Jr. and touring guitarist Eric Dover reconvened under the name Imperial Drag.

Although this project was stylistically different from Jellyfish, it operated under a similarly constructed identity. Instead of recalling The Beatles and other late 60s/early 70s pop groups, however, Imperial Drag’s image scaffolded on the conventions of T. Rex and glam rock….   go velvet over at The Pharmacy.

by Dr. Spin

I was primed for a new release from a band like Änglagård. Despite my efforts to keep my prog box shut with the Jellyfish project, its top was blown off by the release of Rush’s Clockwork Angels and Astra’s The Black Chord earlier this year. Once I caught wind of Viljans Öga, I became determined to purchase a legit copy, hopefully from as close to the band as possible. Unsurprisingly, however, getting a hold of a new release by this incredible but relatively obscure Swedish band involved a little more diligence than a simple trip to the local record store. I lurked and lurked on their site, and when the CD release was announced, I placed my order immediately ….and waited.

by Dr. Spin

In 1993, I took a hiatus from my undergraduate studies and moved back to Austin.  By this point, I had listened to Bellybutton hundreds of times, and I was fortunate to pick up a promo copy of Jellyfish‘s follow-up.  There was a lot that I liked about Spilt Milk.  It had the same amazing songwriting, and in terms of its production, it was a major step forward from Bellybutton. Initially, however, I did not connect with it in the same way as I did its predecessor, mostly, I think, because I did not share it amongst a circle of friends.

Coming from the close quarters of Bruce Hall and its denizens to living at home with the fam, I had relatively little time to hang out and listen to music with a close community of people… hang over at the Pharmacy