Discord and Rhyme: An Album Podcast

We're starting on the second half! In which we get very fussy about punctuation, express our relief that the Golliwogs changed their name, and wonder how the Sir Douglas Quintet didn't get sued for plagiarism. Also, TWO of these songs contain well-known rock stars in disguise! The Hombres - Let it Out (Let it All Hang Out) The Golliwogs - Fight Fire The New Colony Six - At the River's Edge The Dai...

Discord & Rhyme’s panel is just a power trio this week of John, Rich, and host Producer Mike, but that didn’t stop them from covering an album with some of the headiest concepts in popular music. On 1982’s The Dreaming, Kate Bush opines on the futility of squeezing the totality of human knowledge into your puny brain; tells a tale of a heist caper that’s more about the anxiety of pulling off a...

In this round, we have another frat party song, an early effort from a very weird genius, some wildly obnoxious shrieking, and a surprisingly catchy song from a very bad movie. Also, you get Amanda and Rich freaking out at Will for mispronouncing "Live," one of the most hilariously insulting reviews any of us has ever heard, a surprise guest appearance by Will's cat, and a lengthy and ir...

Yeah, yeah, we know, I got a fever, yadda yadda. At this point, Blue Öyster Cult are probably best known for the 2000 Saturday Night Live sketch “More Cowbell,” where Christopher Walken repeatedly demands that the band play up the faint cowbell in their 1975 hit single “(Don’t Fear) The Reaper,” and we all had a good laugh. But the sketch barely scratches the surface of the fascinating, strange de...

Several really excellent songs, and one example of extreme plagiarism - only Amanda didn't notice it and had a nervous breakdown when Phil pointed it out. Plus a love song to a speckled egg. You won't want to miss this one. For early access to these bonus episodes, visit https://www.patreon.com/discordpod ! (Warning: The first artist on this set was a sexual predator, and we discuss it a bit, thou...

The Magnetic Fields' fastidious idea-geyser Stephin Merritt decided to preempt anyone else's attempts to pay tribute to his music by doing it himself. The result was 1995's indie-pop classic Wasps' Nests, recorded under the tongue-punishing name the 6ths, for which Merritt wrote and recorded all original songs, but recruited the cream of the who's-who of mid-'90s indie-rock to sing each of the tra...

This is a fantastic batch of songs, including both Love and Strawberry Alarm Clock. We're getting good and psychedelic in this one! (For any listeners who might be a bit confused at the radio station talk, Amanda and John both grew up in the Chicago area. John is still there, but Amanda has defected to Canada.) For early access to these bonus episodes, visit https://www.patreon.com/discordpod .   ...

Remember when Amanda said T-Bone Burnett is her favorite producer? She’s proving it this episode by walking Rich, Will, and John through Raising Sand, the unlikely collaboration between blues-rock god Robert Plant and bluegrass goddess Alison Krauss. These two found the common ground between their respective genres by covering artists from the Everly Brothers to Sam Phillips, and found their own b...

We're venturing into uncharted territory: Expanded Nuggets! Lots of great tracks on here, including one you might know from The Office. For early access to these bonus episodes, visit https://www.patreon.com/discordpod !   The Music Machine - Talk Talk The Del-Vetts - Last Time Around The Human Beinz - Nobody But Me Kenny and the Kasuals - Journey to Tyme The Sparkles - No Friend of Mine The Turtl...

Good morn and evening, friends, and get ready for a super-sized episode. Stevie Wonder has a deep catalog of classic, beloved LPs, but since this week’s host, Ben, follows the “because it’s there” approach to choosing albums for this podcast, we’re tackling the longest, most epic one of all: 1976’s Songs in the Key of Life. Encompassing two LPs and a bonus EP, Songs is “massive and meant to be mas...

Continuing our Nuggets discussion with tracks 19-27 on disc 1. This is a great batch of songs and includes a callback to our Todd Rundgren episode! Also several jokes at Ted Nugent's expense and Will briefly forgetting how to say "mojo." Visit https://www.patreon.com/discordpod for early access!   The Amboy Dukes - Baby Please Don't Go The Blues Magoos - Tobacco Road The Chocolate Watchb...

Put down that chainsaw, and listen to us — it’s time for Discord & Rhyme’s guide to Devo! You probably best know Devo for their 1980 hit “Whip It,” but that song is only the tip of the Devo iceberg, which is red and shaped like an energy dome. This episode, Dan skews from the standard Devo path, choosing neither their critically adored debut Q: Are We Not Men? A: We Are Devo nor their commerci...

It's our second bonus episode! This batch of Nuggets features not one but TWO drummers with hooks for hands, so you're in for a good time. Don't forget, if you want to hear these episodes a whopping six weeks before everybody else, head on over to https://www.patreon.com/discordpod like all the rest of the cool kids. The Barbarians - Moulty The Remains - Don't Look Back The Magicians - An Invitati...

Discord & Rhyme is breaking format this week to talk about ... a video game soundtrack! This week’s host, Rich, has a love for the classic Capcom NES series Mega Man that may run even deeper than his love of music, and composer Takashi Tateishi’s legendary soundtrack combines the two with panache. Mega Man 2 was a true passion project, developed on the side while its team worked on games that...

It's the first episode of This Is Comp, our new series of bonus episodes devoted to Various Artists compilations! In between our main album discussions, we'll be making our way through the classic Nuggets compilation a few tracks at a time. These are available over a month early for our Patreon subscribers, so if you like what you hear and want early access, head over to https://www.patreon.com/di...

British art rock band Procol Harum is remembered today mainly for its 1967 single, “A Whiter Shade of Pale,” and for almost nothing else. This is a mistake; far from a one-hit wonder, Procol Harum established itself from 1967 to 1974 as one of the more consistently solid album-oriented bands of the era, even as their style shifted from art rock to hard rock and back. In this episode, Prog John mak...

You can’t have the funk unless you have the whole funk and nothing but the funk, so Discord & Rhyme is treating you to a second round of P-Funk. This time, Mike rounds out the story by discussing Parliament, who are tighter and much more orderly than the looser, rougher Funkadelic, and feature a truly excellent horn section. Their 1975 masterpiece Mothership Connection officially declared Parl...

Do not attempt to adjust your podcast apps. Discord & Rhyme is devoting the whole month of January to the world of George Clinton’s Parliament-Funkadelic, better known as P-Funk. Though P-Funk eventually came to comprise a single, massive collective of musicians releasing records under the names Parliament and Funkadelic, the two sides of P-Funk have different sounds and histories, and in this...

Happy holidays from Discord & Rhyme! When we realized our schedule had us releasing an episode on Christmas, we had no choice to but to plan the episode accordingly. Instead of talking about a specific album, we’ve each picked one or two of our favorite holiday songs to share with the class. We really enjoyed sharing all these great songs with each other — and because we are incapable of stayi...

MEAT!!! 1991’s Forbidden Places was the major-label debut for Meat Puppets, a critically adored 1980s Phoenix alternative rock band known for its mixture of country and psychedelia — then, three months later, Nirvana’s Nevermind came along and changed the face of music. Acknowledging the Puppets as an influence, Kurt Cobain invited Curt and brother Cris to Nirvana’s MTV Unplugged sessions to play...

American folk music has always been heavily influenced by black musicians, many of whom have been largely forgotten — especially the women. Rhiannon Giddens is aiming to change that by using her phenomenal voice as a spotlight and shining it on the artists that came before her. In this episode, Amanda leads the Discord & Rhyme team through Giddens’ 2015 album Tomorrow Is My Turn, a mix of well...

Joni Mitchell's fourth album, Blue , is host Ben Marlin’s favorite Joni album and one of his favorite albums of all time. But it's also the Canadian singer-songwriter’s most accessible album, direct and hooky in a way she would rarely allow her music to be, before or since. For that reason, it's probably the best gateway to Joni Mitchell for listeners who aren't familiar with her. Aside from the c...

DISCOOOORD AAAAND RHYME! ONE, TWO, THREE, FOUR! This is our shortest, leanest episode to date, and it’s a rush! This podcast isn’t just prog, soul, and synths. We’re also into punk rock, and if it happens to have saxophones, well, that only sweetens the deal. In his first outing as host, Dan leads Rich, Mike, and Will through Germfree Adolescents by X-Ray Spex, a London punk quintet that existed a...

We’re sorry, Miss Jackson. For nearly two decades, Janet Damita Jo Jackson was one of the world’s most reliable hitmakers, but her reign came to a complete halt after the Super Bowl XXXVIII halftime show and its infamous “wardrobe malfunction.” After a stunning career spent deliberately pushing boundaries, somebody else took it a step too far and she suffered the consequences. However, her legacy...

Discord & Rhyme is excited to welcome its first guest co-host! David Weigel is a politics reporter for the Washington Post, but more importantly for our nefarious purposes, he is the author of the truly excellent progressive rock history The Show That Never Ends: The Rise and Fall of Prog Rock. But this episode is also a reunion: Dave used to geek out about music with your hosts on the teeny-t...