Discord and Rhyme: An Album Podcast

We’ve held off on R.E.M. for a while, because the Athens, Ga., quartet is just such a heavyweight in the rock canon. They’re so huge, in fact, that they merit two episodes: one for the mumbly, Byrdsy alt-rock troubadours of the ‘80s, and one for the slightly less mumbly arena rock titans of the ‘90s and onward. We’re starting off with their 1983 debut Murmur, which fueled the rise of college radio...

Rich, Mike, and Amanda answer a bonanza of questions from listeners. Topics include retro prog, great live albums and not-so-great live shows, fantasy supergroups, synesthesia, our favorite recent releases, and no fewer than three questions about the Moody Blues. Listen through to the end for a special request to listeners!  Clips:  Peter Gabriel - Start  Def Leppard - Animal  The Moody Blues - He...

Peter Gabriel is a favorite artist of many of us here at Discord & Rhyme, but we’ve saved him for our own 138th Episode Spectacular. Peter Gabriel III (aka Melt , so called because half of Gabriel’s face on the album cover looks like a melting candle) isn’t just John’s favorite Peter Gabriel album; it’s an album that made him reconsider (in a favorable light) the entirety of popular music in the 1...

Hear that? There goes the siren that warns of the air raid – or maybe that’s just Bruce Dickinson’s voice. This week, Mike continues his quest to make Discord & Rhyme more metal with the album Powerslave by Iron Maiden. In the popular consciousness, Maiden are known for their goofy album covers and hits like “Bring Your Daughter … to the Slaughter.” But if you dig just a little deeper, they were v...

Kylie Minogue had a big comeback last year with the Grammy-winning TikTok hit “Padam Padam,” so Rich decided that it was finally time to give the Discord & Rhyme treatment to one of his favorite divas. Kylie’s 2007 album X wasn’t just an artistic comeback, but a physical and emotional one, recorded in the wake of her grueling but successful treatment for breast cancer. At the time, there was a gro...

Amanda has been threatening to talk about bluegrass on the podcast for years, and we finally settled on the perfect album to start with: Live!!!! Almost!!! by the Dillards. Half a comedy album and half a virtuoso performance by expert musicians, it’s a fantastic introduction to the genre. It was recorded in front of an audience completely unfamiliar with bluegrass music, so the band chose songs th...

Uriah Heep were never critical darlings, but for a brief period in the early seventies, they were making some absolutely killer fantasy-tinged rock. Phil has always had a soft spot for 1972’s Demons And Wizards , which is probably the best example of what could happen when this band was truly firing on all cylinders. He, along with Dan and Mike, makes the case for why this album should be a staple...

Rodgers and Hammerstein’s musical Oklahoma! was a massive hit on Broadway in 1943. It changed musical theater forever and inspired a well-remembered 1955 film. Ben hasn't seen the musical or the film, and he doesn't know the plot or the names of the characters. But he loves the music. He and Rich and John dive into a 1964 studio recording of the Oklahoma! soundtrack and make a case for why the sho...

Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel were gifted musicians with a deep and complicated personal relationship, which makes them perfect subjects for a Discord & Rhyme holiday episode. Their magnum opus, Bridge Over Troubled Water , was a huge hit in 1970 and is still as beautiful, innovative, and occasionally silly as it ever was. Ben, Amanda, Rich, and John love this album dearly, and discussing all its s...

1 2 X U! As punk was just beginning to take off in the UK, Wire was already looking ahead, itching to push the genre toward artsier, more abstract frontiers. Their 1977 LP Pink Flag planted the seeds for post-punk and hardcore before most kids had even had a chance to spike their first mohawk. Boasting a dizzying 21 tracks at an economical 35 minutes, Wire packed more into one album than some of t...

It’s time for a psychedelic podcast extravaganza, five years and two recordings in the making! The album Chips from the Chocolate Fireball by XTC’s alter-egos the Dukes of Stratosphear was supposed to be our fifth episode, but technical difficulties turned the episode into a splendid cream bun. But Rich, Ben, and Mike are finally back for a second round discussing a collection that perhaps isn’t X...

Gentle Giant comes up so often on Discord & Rhyme, especially considering how obscure they are outside the world of hardcore prog rock fandom, that it’s amazing we haven’t covered them yet. Many 1970s prog rock bands aspired to combine rock with classical (and jazz among other things), but unlike most of their contemporaries, Gentle Giant actually knew enough about classical music to make the comb...

For this year’s Halloween episode, we wanted to go with an artist who scares the living daylights out of us, and what better choice than Nick Cave? After all, this is a man who once recorded an entire album of murder ballads, and whose legendary single “The Mercy Seat” charts a killer’s stream of consciousness as he is led to the electric chair. We could have picked almost any of Cave’s albums wit...

Beatles For Sale is a relatively obscure album, to the extent that any Beatles album could be called obscure. This album was recorded at a time when the Beatles were creatively exhausted and almost half of it is covers, which is why it’s often dismissed as one of their weaker efforts. But we don’t think that’s fair. It’s not world-changing, that’s true enough, but it doesn’t have to be. They were...

Slint are a true one-of-a-kind band - they showed up seemingly out of nowhere, singlehandedly defined an entire genre on a single album, and disappeared before that album was even released. What happened? Why is Spiderland so influential? And, beyond its influence - does the album still hold up today? Phil certainly thinks so - in his opinion, its grandeur has been frequently imitated, but never d...

It's Discord & Rhyme's 125th episode, and we are marking the occasion with one of our favorite recording strategies: tackling a famous band by discussing two of their albums while making an end-run around their most critically acclaimed period. In this episode, Ben talks about the 1964 Beach Boys album All Summer Long , where the band really shifted into second gear, while John talks about the 197...

Whether he likes it or not, Warren Zevon will forever be most remembered for his surprise hit “Werewolves of London,” but he’s a far more complex and interesting songwriter than most folks are aware. Forever a musician’s musician, Zevon’s unique voice has influenced scores of artists although he himself has remained something of a cult figure over the decades. While 1978’s Excitable Boy does indee...

Are you ready to do the Dap Dip? This week, the Discord & Rhyme Super Soul Revue travels back to 2005 to discuss Sharon Jones & the Dap Kings, who play sunny R&B that sounds like it came straight out of the late ‘60s or early ‘70s. But despite the retro sound, there’s nothing retro about this band, who were just playing the music they loved and recording it the way they loved it. And S...

We're on summer vacation after finishing our King Crimson episode, so please enjoy this release from the Patreon vault! We call these our Mad Libs episodes, where we pick a category and discuss songs that fit that category somehow. This is one of our favorites, so we hope you like it! (Please note that we recorded this in September '22, before we did the Rumours episode and before Gordon Lightfoot...

It's only talk! This week, Mike rounds out our fifth-anniversary triad of King Crimson discussions with some dialogue, duologue, diatribe, dissension, and declamation about the band's 1981 album Discipline . On this album, bassist Tony Levin and guitarist and vocalist Adrian Belew joined Crimson veterans Robert Fripp and Bill Bruford to produce some of the most complicated music in the Crimson oeu...

Part two of the Discord & Rhyme celebration of King Crimson brings us to the 1974 album Red , the band’s final studio(-ish) album before it disbanded for 7 years. John’s history with King Crimson began with this album, and while he didn’t initially like it, it’s long become his favorite King Crimson album, and the ‘72-’74 King Crimson lineup especially has long become one of his favorite bands...

As frequently as we mention King Crimson on this podcast, you’d think we would have done a proper episode on them by now. But we wanted to hold off until we could really do it up right, so this is the premiere of our three-episode series on the greatest pioneers of progressive rock. They didn’t fully invent prog, but they did more to solidify the genre than any group that had come before them, to...

It’s time to follow the Moody Blues into the 1980s. After a long hiatus and a disappointing comeback album, the Moodies reconvened with a new keyboard player and a new producer to start a new decade in their long career. Music production styles had changed quite a lot since their classic period in the ‘60s and ‘70s, and the new personnel came with a new aesthetic that sounds quite different from t...

By the time he recorded his third solo album, After the Gold Rush , Neil Young had already been part of successful records by the Buffalo Springfield and Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young, and his second album had hit the top 40. As great as that music had been, though, Neil hadn't yet reached his peak - at least according to Ben. Ben explains why After the Gold Rush is a high point in a career full...

Phil Ochs, perhaps more than anybody else in the 1960s Greenwich Village folk scene, believed that he could end the Vietnam War and change the world through his music. He offered deeply critical insight both of mainstream society and of the folk scene itself, calling out hypocrisy where he saw it and asking his listeners to consider questions and issues without easy solutions. He did this through...