Couldn't You Wait? The Story Of Silkworm

Word of a documentary about Chicago by way of Seattle and Missoula indie rock juggernaut Silkworm has been wending through the internet for a bunch of years now. Finally, the end result is here and I'm pleased to be able to say that Couldn't You Wait: The Story Of Silkworm is pretty damn great.  Not that JS-NYC has a lot of perspective on the whole thing. To paraphrase, one of the talking heads herein, not many people have heard about Silkworm, but those that have are pretty much obsessed with them. As a record nerd who spent a lot of time in the brick and mortar shops back in the day, I definitely drank the koolade.

So did a lot of people, including Steve Albini, Jeff Tweedy, Steve Malkmus and a host of others. I only got to see the gents play three or four times before the tragic accident that took the life of Michael Dahlquist took the band out of active rotation, but treasure all of them and was pretty chuffed that they included footage of the SXSW show I was at with ex-original member Joel Phelps sitting in for the first time in years. Couldn't You Wait is pretty damn comprehensive, although arguably somewhat lacking in Phelps footage, but still gets the JS-NYC nod as best rock doc since the Minutemen opus We Jam Econo. The film is available in a couple of different digital forms, whether it be just the doc or the nerd cornucopia that is the extra live, bonus, song discussion and/or deleted footage. Treat yourself and snap this up immediately.

Get Couldn't You Wait: The Story Of Silkworm here

R

Bottomless Pit - Lottery (2005-2012)

While I was over at the Comedy Minus One web presence grabbing the new Karl Hendricks Trio record, I was also greeted with the exciting news that CMO were re-releasing some of the Joel R.L. Phelps catalog and a Japanese label was releasing all of the Bottomless Pit releases to date as a limited two-disc set called Lottery 2005-2012. Even better, there were three unreleased tracks.

Small progress was made in the JS-OCD in that I didn't get Lottery 2005-2012 for nerd completist cred, but I think we both know that the three new tracks were not not going to be coming down the pike to JS-NYC HQ. They did, and I suspect that there might actually be a small insurrection in my building if they have to hear me play them any more. I'll give the nod to the amped-up version of Winterwind as the best of the three, but the other two only serve to assert that Bottomless Pit are a band with few peers in the rock landscape of today.

Buy the Bottomless Pit catalog as Lottery 2005-2012 or separately here.

R