Up until a few weeks ago, I had been selectively listening to Stevie Wonder’s Innervisions and Songs in the Key of Life.

You can buy them online if you’re lazy, but I found both records for around 5 bucks each at the Half Priced Books on the Miracle Mile in St. Louis Park and I’m sure they have em at Cheapo as well.

This is a perfect moment of Mutually Assured Dopestruction, does it make Sesame Street cooler? Or Stevie Wonder? Or Both? It’s yours to decide.

Anyway, in the past few days I’ve bought some records by local rockers.

It’s my 18th birthday in a couple weeks, which means I’ll soon be a legal adult and I’ll have to be kicked off WACTAC. but before I go down in a blaze of glory, I decided to make a list of records I wanted to get as presents from my family. I couldn’t wait, so I decided to get them for myself.

Even though this record came out in 2007, I’m pretty sure, I had never really given Gay Beast a good listen after I saw them play a sweet house show a year n’ a half ago or so. I linked their myspace because I heavily discourage looking them up on google for fear of trekking onto the wrong website. Anyway, I bought Gay Beast’s LP Disrobics at Treehouse records yesterday. It’s pretty raw and not what I usually get my jam on to, but I think it’s pretty fun and the music is more interesting and spontaneous than the usual guitar rock you’ll find in every local section of the record store. You can buy the record directly from the band at one of their next shows, just check up on that myspace, baby.

I also bought Skoal Kodiak’s album Three People Are Keep Having Grape Emergency’s. There’s something about local music that gets me to buy stuff I wouldn’t usually listen to and get excited about. Skoal Kodiak played at the March of Madness: Bands on the Run! event 2 odd years ago.

Here’s some pictures from that day, the singer uses this clorox bottle contraption to wail through. I think the sunglasses are just for practical reasons.

The music’s got a weird, primal feeling to it but then there’s all this electronic manipulation that brings us back to the future. But again, it proved to be a promising purchase, and each album is hand screen-printed, so no two albums are alike. You can find it at Treehouse as well, but I bought it at Cheapo, and ended up paying almost 5 extra dollars for it. If you keep up on these sweet band’s shows, you can probably buy their albums directly from them, and probably at the best price possible. You might be able to get it signed, too! Wow that’s cool!