• The No Thanks punk rock set -- "In the late '70s, punk made it so that you had to have an extramusical reason for being in a band--a manifesto, as it were. It was no longer credible to say in interviews that your primary concern as a musician was to "explore the Stratocaster's bridge-pickup setting in a more tonally coherent fashion.""
• A Yes tour preview/reissue roundup -- "Thirty-six true summers ago, Jon Anderson tired of being a milkman, so he decided to combine the Mars Volta with the Outfield, and the mighty riff machine YES went into overdrive with riffs like "Owner of a Lonely Heart," where Trevor Rabin took a flare gun and burned the corrupt apartheid state to the ground!"
• A Fleetwood Mac tour preview/reissue roundup -- "Christine McVie could be meaner than a junkyard dog sometimes. She was the keyboard player, so she was probably responsible for taking nine days to tune the piano during the Tusk sessions. Why wasn't that recorded and included on a third Tusk CD? And why did LaMonte Young hide his piano-tuning tapes? Maybe Christine would've sued his ass. Or maybe they were just boring."
• Heart's Jupiters Darling -- ""Hello Moonglow" (This features Nancy on lead but enmeshed in a complicated vocal arrangement, Dennis crawling from the briny deep into Karen Carpenter's golf bag saying come on, Miss World, let's get high a while)"
• Bad Wizard's #1 Tonight -- "Kiss were on Casablanca, the greatest label of its day. Appropriately, BW's "Helpin' Hand" has congas; it sounds like the stuff on side two of Kiss' Unmasked. (People hate that album, but it's got some good Gene songs on it. "Talk to Me" is the best Ace song there, but the best Paul song is by Gerard MacMahon. Imagine if Unmasked had included an Eric Carr song just to fuck with people.)"
• Dixie Witch's One Bird Two Stones -- "Oddly enough, the more bands play in strict regimentation, the more it sounds like they fight a lot. Then again, Lynyrd Skynyrd used to beat each other up with pool cues, and they invented this stuff, so there's that theory shot to shit. Beer rock lyrics also have a better-adjusted outlook on life - no darkness and drugs and death. (Pace Skynyrd again. They really had somethin' evil goin' on! They "paid dearly," though.)"
• Lindsay Lohan's Speak -- "LiLo sings the cage-dance soundtrack "Rumors" like she's feeling emotional also."I just want to dance and have a good time," she says, like she's praying to Sigourney Weaver before leading an android-slave revolt on an asteroid mine colony, or in the church scene in Disney's reimagining of I Spit on Your Grave."
• U2's How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb -- "Atomic Bomb is what U2's third album, 1983's War, would've been if they hadn't gone all the way into the mystic. Producer Steve Lillywhite once made a cruel parody of U2 called Sparkle in the Rain with Nazareth, which may have been an oblique strategy. U2 only refrain from down-tuning, Black Sabbath/Melvins.style, to respect the Damascene experience of learning to tune the normal way in the first place."

All selections of Dave's are his alone! All links to outside sites, that's under their copyright deal. Anything else, I guess that's copyright me, 2004-whenever.