Oracular Spectacular

As I recall I think we both kind of liked it. Well that's one thing we've got!

What's the saga? I need a saga. It's Songs for the Deaf - you can't even hear it! Re-Listen takes a look at the Queens of the Stone Age album.

This episode we're taking a look at the Scottish synth-pop group Chvrches album "The Bones of What You Believe". We'll examine the juxtaposition of bright and dance-able tracks with the darkness of the lyrical content.

This week on Re-Listen, we're going back to 2006 and cracking open what many consider the definitive Chicago punk record of the 2000s — Oh! Calcutta! by The Lawrence Arms. Released on March 7, 2006 via Fat Wreck Chords, it's the band's fifth studio album, and the one that Punknews would eventually crown the single best album of the entire decade — beating out American Idiot, Take Off Your Pants and Jacket, and everything else that came out between 2000 and 2009. We dig into why this record hits so differently from everything else in the Fat Wreck catalog, and why it still sounds urgent nearly twenty years later.

We revisit Cold War Kids’ 2008 sophomore LP “Loyalty to Loyalty,” a darker, more insular follow-up to “Robbers & Cowards.” We track how Nathan Willett’s ragged tenor, Jonnie Russell’s angular guitars, Matt Maust’s prowling bass, and Matt Aveiro’s clattering drums frame stories of paranoia, economic anxiety, and moral ambiguity. Standouts include “Something Is Not Right With Me” (manic urban claustrophobia), “Every Valley Is Not a Lake” (swung minimalism and tension), “Against Privacy” (surveillance dread), “Dreams Old Men Dream” (weary elegy), “Relief” (gospel-tinged lift), and “Avalanche in B” (slow-burn catharsis). We examine the band’s live-room production—air in the mics, piano thump, and percussive clink—plus their Tom Waits/Delta-blues DNA filtered through late-2000s indie. Sequencing arcs from jittery opener to desolate mid-album valleys and a bruised, resilient close. Context covers the blog-era indie boom, the pressure of a breakthrough debut, and how the group doubled down on mood over polish. We finish with how it plays today, three entry tracks for new listeners (“Something Is Not Right With Me,” “Relief,” “Dreams Old Men Dream”), and where to go next in the catalog.