Invent a band & album

[Steve]

After the lukewarm reception to their debut album, Pharmas Nokturns, Lithuanian 3-piece Lovely By Surprise spent 2 long years in the studio working on a follow up. Was it worth it, pop-pickers? Not 'arf! Of a Balanced Diet opens with with cool strings and a hypnotic jazz-like beat, lulling the the listener into a false sense of security before Lorelei Svingeborgen's glass-shattering vocals smash their way through the cerebral cortex with the subtlety and enthusiasm of Jack Regan delivering a kicking to a villain. The title track, which stormed into the charts this week at number 7, thrashes and writhes like a wounded beast, well aided by one-time Kristianstaat Irregulars axe-man Torsten B'lokskratcha's clashing fretwork.
This is an album to be reckoned with - my mate Tony who works on the bins reckons that one listen to it will have you strangling your cat by tea-time.

[Carnage Visor]

This one, surprisingly, just happened to make very much sense. The picture and the album title mysteriously fit together...



The Ricketts Baronets - "Shots You Never Take" (1992)

This East Manhattan grunge band got their big start with the single, "Shots You Never Take", a five-minute long anthem that booted them into star status.

The roots of the band can be traced back to the group "The Housecats", formed by the high school friends of lead singer Al Smithee in the late 1980s. After a fairly long stint, the group was renamed "The Ricketts Baronets" after the departure of the rest of the bandmates, one of whom went on to form the more popular "Nirvana".

After rapidly switching record contracts and losing his home, Smithee decided to quit his own band, leaving the rest of the group to work on their own. The band recorded three more LPs and then broke up for good, stating "I'm not sure how many people actually like full-album instrumentals...it's kind of hard to find lyrics for songs with no words..."

Here is the album cover, complete with the stain from a years-old sticker pricing. (The marking reads "99 cents").

[Carnage Visor]

OOps...killed it.

[Steve]

bump!!


Finnish dead metal combo Thiara were thought to have lived up to their musical style, and pronounced dead by press and fans back in 1989 when they delivered their third strike of ingenuity "Red skies over HIM". But as the game of monkey see monkey do lead to sheer tons of followers, claiming to have invented polar metal - which is in fact power metal pronounced with a heavy finnish accent - it was time for Thiara to set the records straight. And their record does.
As times have changed, even for our finnish hang bang posse, the comeback album takes on another course from where they left off back in the haydays of Bon Jovi and Guns 'n Roses. "Safe, expedient and thin" is a musical indictment to the current rock scene with its lack of courage, innovation and experiment. Guitar breaks are cut down to the bone and intermingled with samples of Nokia adds, twisted Botnic soundclips and "saunds", as they named their recordings of hissing sauna sounds. This is not only mandatory material for oldskool brain wreckers, also you, dear reader of Barbie Collector Magazine, should crack your daddy's iTunes account and download this. In full!