Rocket From the Tombs, the Cleveland band that featured a pre-Pere Ubu David Thomas and future members of the Dead Boys, has been hailed by numerous serious rock critics as overlooked punk and new wave forefathers. They never entered a recording studio, however, and for the most part their scant body of demos and live tapes have been heard only by serious collectors, though some were available on the 1990 album Life Stinks (itself hard to find now). The Day the Earth Met the Rocket From the Tombs does not issue every tape known to exist by the group, and is not perfect from the standpoints of fidelity and performance. The 74-minute disc does, however, finally make a reasonably comprehensive document of their work widely available for the first time. The first half is devoted to a February 1975 loft rehearsal, and though the sound is on the muddy side, the ... Read more »

Simultaneously hailed as an underground classic and cast aside as poorly produced backpack rap, Operation: Doomsday inaugurated the reign of MF Doom in underground rap from the early to mid-2000s. The pretext for the album is very similar to that of Marvel Comics supervillain Dr. Doom; after MF Doom, then known as Zevlove X, had been devastated by the death of his brother and K.M.D. accomplice, DJ Sub-Roc, in the early '90s, Elektra dropped his group and stopped the release of its second album, Black Bastards, due to its political message and, more specifically, its cover art. Doom was left scarred with a lingering pain that didn't manifest until the late '90s as hip-hop's only masked supervillain on Bobbito Garcia's Fondle 'Em Records. Carrying the weight of the past on his shoulders, Doom opens and closes Operation: Doomsday with frank and sincere lyric ... Read more »