Bill Adams, Author at Ground Control Magazine

Urge Overkill – Exit The Dragon LP – “Jaywalkin'” A deeper look into the grooves on the Porterhouse 2LP reissue of Exit Th Dragon by Urge Overkill. After the breakthrough that Urge Overkill’s 1993 album, Saturation, turned out to be [the record broke the band into the mainstream charts and yielded two singles that have since become calling card cuts for the band –ed],...

Butthole Surfers – “Thermador” – Electriclarryland LP A deeper look at the grooves pressed into Butthole Surfers’ Electriclarryland 2LP. Only in the Butthole Surfers’ world could the band’s greatest commercial success also mark the beginning of their collapse. By the time they began making their seventh album, the Surfers were finally beginning to see some...

Butthole Surfers – After The Astronaut LP – “Mexico” A deeper look at the grooves pressed into Butthole Surfers’ After The Astronaut LP. I confess that, when a vinyl copy of Butthole Surfers’ After The Astronaut arrived on my desk, I was thrilled – but I held off on reviewing it right away. I figured, “Why rush? I already reviewed the album once years ago [with...

A deeper look at the grooves pressed into Butthole Surfers’ self-titled 10” EP, released on Capitol Records in 1993. When Butthole Surfers signed with Capitol Records, it really must have seemed like anything was possible. By then, the years of living in a car, touring constantly and basically surviving on a steady diet of nothing were over; the band had unexpectedly broken through. Be...

A deeper look at the grooves pressed into the Buddha Jabba Momma LP by Chomp. As much as I like the artwork on the front cover (before I heard a note of the music on Buddha Jabba Momma, I was captivated by the cover’s similarity to some of the artwork on the interior of the Plastic Fang LP by Jon Spencer Blues Explosion), I had to remind myself that interesting aesthetics do not make a good...

A deeper look at the grooves pressed into the Hand On Heart LP by Cock Sparrer. While it would be easy for critics to claim that there are a finite number of ways to make an English-sounding or uniquely “Bostonian” punk record (see Dropkick Murphys’ catalogue for a Cliff’s Notes summary of that story so far), it should definitely go to Cock Sparrer’s credit that the band has mana...

A deeper look at the grooves pressed into the Before You Get Broken LP by Guest Directors. It has often been said that a band’s debut album is intended to introduce that band to the world – but their sophomore release is more for the band itself. It might come from a desire to push boundaries or simply to establish that the band in question is capable of doing more than just reproducing the...

A deeper look at the grooves pressed into the Do You Really Wanna Know? LP by Plizzken. I confess that European punk (the stuff from mainland Europe – not from the British Isles) has often been a pretty hard sell, to me. I don’t mean that to come off as a slight or cultural bias, the music is just often hit or miss for me; even going back to albums like The State of Punk To Come and albums b...

A deeper look at the grooves pressed into 45 Adapters’ Unstoppable LP. After having released a series of records of different sizes and speeds since the band formed in 2008 (to date, the band has released six EPs, splits and singles), it’s kind of funny when one realizes that Unstoppable is only the second full-length album which bears 45 Adapters’ name; they just always seem to...

A deeper look at the grooves pressed into the Modify The Sacred LP by Seized Up. Let’s get this out of the way first, because it’s almost never the thing that metal heads like to read: as metallic as Modify The Sacred is, it’s impossible to deny that the album has a sizable punk streak running through it too. From front-to-back, for example, it’s very easy to hear reflectio...

A deeper look at the grooves pressed into the Overtime 12” EP by SLIP~ons. It might read as being anti-climactic but, on SLIP~ons’ new Overtime EP, the Vancouver-based band establishes that its last release was not intended to establish any new musical directions for them to later explore or anything like that – the band was just being who it is, and it happened to be captured on tape....