Unbelievably, It's been almost exactly 8 years since I last shared an album by Hüsker Dü in this parts, and at the time I was surprised I hadn't already gotten around to it. That actually means that the amount of time between these two Hüsker Dü posts is longer than the band itself existed, and twi…
I love it when I stumble across an album that got regular play in my house growing up in the KEXP stacks - especially when the super-cool college DJs of yore actually thought it was pretty good! I'm certain that by the time my parents were buying records by The Human League they were getting plent…
There's not a lot of information out there about Gibson Bros. (not to be confused with The Gibson Brothers), but they seem to have been purveyors of the low-fi psycho-bluesy-rockabilly-ish sound that college radio stations saw a fair amount of in the '80s and early '90s. A quick YouTube survey of s…
Sometimes I really wish I could jump in a time machine and visit the Seattle of yesteryear. Not because the traffic was better, and there were fewer condos, and people argued on album covers instead of the Internet, but because I really wish I could witness firsthand the version of this city - and …
The KCMU reaction to this 1990 album by New York punks Alice Donut is, as often happens in college-radio-land, quite varied, from "their best yet" to "a step back." For what it's worth, the historical record, as far as my quick survey has revealed, seems to lean toward the opinion that Mule, the ba…
Every so often (OK, fairly regularly) I pull out a record with a name that seems vaguely familiar only to realize that I am way out of my depth. Peter Hammill has a long, storied, and critically acclaimed career that is pretty much the reason they invented things like Wikipedia and Allmusic.com. I …
Sometimes, even when you're an ever-so-independently-minded DJ at a fancy college radio station in the '80s, you just want some AC/DC. I like to think that whoever brought this little gem - the band's first live album, and the sixth album they released between 1975 and 1978 - into the station grinn…
I could have a whole sub-category of this series called "why didn't I listen to this band in high school?" If I did, this record by the Hard-Ons (Or is it just "Hard-Ons"? a quick survey of Internet usage is inconclusive.) would most certainly be part of it. Loud, fast, guitar-driven songs ping-pon…
You've got to admire the chutzpah of a British singer-songwriter who names himself after a song and album by one of the most revered American singer-songwriters of the 20th century. (And I suppose you have to admire the chutzpah of an American singer-songwriter who names his song and album after a …
In 2018, KEXP celebrated the 30th anniversary of local record label Sub Pop with a four-month retrospective, "counting up" every catalog number in their vast discography of over 1,200 releases. Dig into the archives of our catalog coverage, featuring in-depth coverage on the history of their releases.