ALBUMS WITH AWESOME COVER ART NOW HAVE FULL STREAMS: PUSCIFER, GIANT SQUID

These albums might even have some good music on ’em, too!

ANYWAY:

• As I’ve said before, I’m not really a fan of Maynard James Keenan’s Puscifer project, but my man crush on Keenan is such that I actually feel severe guilt over said lack of fandom. And Pusicfer’s latest, Conditions of My Parole, might have the best album art of the year. Spin (still a thing!) is now streaming the entire record in advance of its release on October 18 via the cleverly named Puscifer Entertainment. I’ve listened to a lil’ bit of it and I feel about it pretty much the way I feel about all Puscifer, which is that it’s not bad, but not interesting to hold my attention against all the other great music out there right now, and really Maynard just get back to the business of TOOL as soon as humanly possible.
• Giant Squid’s Cenotes comes out October 25 on Translation Loss, and also has totally bitchin’ album art (above… FUPAs for the win). Now the whole thing is streaming at NPR (New slogan: “NPR… it’s not just for old people anymore!”). I’m actually listening for the first time now, and while Giant Squid have yet to produce anything that I love as much as Metridium Fields (“Ampullae of Lorenzini” might be one of the most beautiful songs in any genre written in the past ten years), they’re still way out ahead of most of the pack, so you should at very least give this a listen and see if you dig it. I mean, you’d do as much just to be able to make fun of Design the Skyline, so, y’know, fair is fair.