Listening to an album is kind of like moving into a new apartment. Maybe. I guess. Hey, how the hell am I supposed to know? I've still got one year of guaranteed dormlife ahead of me. The closest I've ever gotten to that particular harsh reality of life was the summer I spent squatting at my brother's place in Boston, and I'm kind of dreading that last step into the real world. But still, I imagine they're similar processes-- you start out by getting to know the general quirks of the thing, moving in your own baggage as you go, and, hopefully, you eventually come to inhabit the thing.

I moved into Nebula's Charged (a 10-track, one-bathroom, stoner-metal type place) last night at around 10:30. It smelled funny. Everything was a little fuzzy around the edges; I kept finding little Dorito-flakes stuck to my socks, so I put my shoes back on. But what did I expect from these guys?

The thing is, the band came back this morning at around noon. They looked at me like I'd just woken them up or something, all standing under the sagging doorframe. "Ummmm... we forgot to take out some stuff," guitarist Eddie Glass mumbled.

"Damn straight, you lowlifes!" I (or the more mature version of me, wearing loafers and a slacks) huffed. "Explain that!" I barked, jabbing my cigar toward "Travelin' Man's Blues." It was a ragged little thing that was leaned up against the TV, covered with peeling Soundgarden stickers. A sickly little potted cactus perched on top.

"Huh?" gasped the drummer, Ruben Romano. "It's not a bad song!"

"Right, till you spend the last two minutes repeating the same riff. Just because you add some solos and say 'Ma ma ma ma yeah!' a lot over it doesn't justify its existence. Take it out. And that extraneous little instrumental thing attached at the end-- get that out of my sight."

"Man, you aren't our dad, man, so stop acting like it," said Mark Abshire, massaging the Marlboros rolled into his right sleeve.

"And you! With the fancy bassline in that quiet part near the end of 'Instant Gravitation'! You were building tension! How could you let the song just fade out like that?"

"You probably didn't like the wind chimes in 'All the Way,' either, eh, gramps?" sneered Romano.

"No!!! And the tempo change sucked! Completely obvious!" Maybe I should take off the ol' belt, I thought, put the fear of God into these punks.

"Dude, we're pretty tight..."

"Tight shmight. I've heard all these riffs before."

"Alright," conceded Glass, "maybe we should have taken some of this stuff out." He was rummaging through "Goodbye Yesterday," trying to remove the piano part that was already buried deep in the mix.

"Jesus, no!" I yelped. "Keep that in there! Maybe it'd even be worth it to mix something above the guitars once in a while!" Perhaps I was being a bit of an ogre. "Goodbye Yesterday" was a pretty damn good song, as was the first track, "Do It Now"; I was glad to see that they could sound both lumbering and lithe at the same time. Sloppy as they were, I really wanted to like these guys. They reminded me of... well, previous forms of me-- longhaired kids wearing flannel long past its expiration date.

"Well, you've got to be able to hear the vocals..."

"AAAAHHHH!!!" With a violent glint in my eyes, I pulled a nine iron out of my expensive new golf bag and shook the thing menacingly at them. "First of all, you can't sing very well. Second, this is the first album I've listened to in a long time where all of the lyrics are clearly audible, and you give me crap like..." I gave a little thrust towards the band, asking them to fill in the blank, and they backed away slightly.

"Ummm..." Romano stumbled, "I am here with nothing to do/ Looking for something, something to do/ I hear this voice speakin' in my head/ And it says yeah! yeah! yeah!"

"And you're telling me you couldn't use a little lyrical ambiguity?" At this point, I knew I had what are properly termed "the crazy eyes." Desperate. Only one thing could save them. "There's this one line I couldn't figure out... on the second song, are you saying 'phallus of the mind?' Because that would be kind of cool..."

"No, dude," said Abshire, clearly disturbed. "It's 'valleys of the mind'."

"AAAAAHHHHH!!!" I charged, swinging the club. But they were faster than they looked. Before I could reach them, they'd already slammed the door behind. Cries of "We used to be in Fu Manchu!" reverberated in the stairwell. The door creaked a little, then fell off its hinges.

I looked around the place, catching my breath a little, and then I lit another cigar. Actually, not a bad place. Still, I think I'll be out in a day or two...

-Brendan Reid