The Nicsperiment’s Top Nine Albums of 2012

No matter what anyone says, music reviews are an incredibly subjective thing. Depending on personal tastes and experiences, one man’s masterpiece can be another man’s meh. I hate that sentence, but I needed an intro. With that said, these are the nine albums released this year that I heard and liked best. That’s it. Oh

Random End of the Year Musing

Have beards officially gone from a sign of manliness, to the exact opposite of that? When is the last time you’ve seen a guy with a beard who was actually manly? If you have, you must still admit that the amount of absolutely, unquestionably unmanly men you’ve recently seen with beards highly outnumbers the number of bearded

Winding Down

In three days, the most productive year in the history of The Nicsperiment will come to a close. If anyone had told me I would be releasing this many posts, receiving this much consistent traffic, or being contacted and thanked by as many bands as I have this year, I would have been shocked. Just thinking about

Face to Face — Reactionary

7/10 After Face to Face released Ignorance is Bliss, not only the best album of their career, but one of the best rock albums of all time, they were rewarded with a vitriolic fan-base who now hated them. Apparently going from a very good punk band to a great rock band was not acceptable. Face to Face

Face to Face — Ignorance Is Bliss

10/10 Here is the line that divides those who like good music from those who simply like genres. Before Ignorance Is Bliss, Face to Face were only known as a punk band who played punk music. Ignorance Is Bliss is not a punk record. If a punk rock fan takes the angle, “This band completely

The Nicsperiment’s Favorite Christmas Album

I am just going to be honest. I am not a huge fan of Christmas music. It’s the same songs every year, concentrated over and over again for a month. On top of that, some of the songs are dreadful. “Silver Bells?” Awful. “The Little Drummer Boy?” How about I throw your drum into a trash

Face to Face — Face to Face

7/10Good punk album, but feels a little perfunctory, especially compared to the grittier, more passionate Big Choice. Still, it’s fun to listen to, and it has some great songs, particularly “I Won’t Lie Down,” which my particularly bad punk band attempted to cover. Unfortunately, our singer was flat and had an ego problem. He writes blog

WHY WEREN’T PEOPLE TELLING ME THINGS LIKE THIS TEN YEARS AGO?

If you are in your early 20’s, you need to read this. I turned 31 yesterday, and though I do have a wife and child through some strange grace, I am only now beginning to take steps that will allow me to offer something to the world, and honestly, to them. I am so angry

Face to Face — Big Choice

9/10 During my first first college degree tenure at LSU, the outer rim of campus was a gritty ghost of 70’s grandeur. Now it’s a corporate mega-beast of shiny strip malls, but back then the buildings were rundown, and few businesses remained. Paradise Records was one of the few survivors, though it shutdown my sophomore year. Paradise

So Much for E

Well, that’s done. Short letter, but a lot of fun. Time to begin “F,” one of the strangest letters. “F” isn’t composed of a bunch of weird artists, but I find the combination of the artists I own who begin with “F” to mix weirdly together. Should I have used “whom” in the previous sentence? Is “whom”