A couple of years ago, I thought No Knife was finally going to get a shot. I thought their last record, Fire in the City of Automatons, was one of the best albums of 1999. Their label, Time Bomb Recordings, got some major label support. Popular indie band Sunny Day Real Estate signed to Time Bomb, and proceeded to take No Knife out for a tour of the States.

Then all hell broke loose. Time Bomb spent waaaay too much money pushing a bad record (Peter Searcy's Could You Please and Thank You, now available in large quantities in the dollar bin) and their major label deal collapsed. When the deal collapsed, Time Bomb lost most their roster, including Sunny Day Real Estate and No Knife. (Time Bomb may have shut down, but their website still exists, so I'm baffled. Arista may just be using the name like Interscope does with Geffen.)

Then, if that wasn't enough, No Knife inadvertantly allowed their domain name (noknife.com) to expire, and it was scooped up by a Malaysian company who tried to sell it back to them for a "fee". (No way they could afford the "fee", so they picked up noknife.net instead.) Then, the guys started talking about getting day jobs and just playing around San Diego.

I thought they were done.

Imagine my surprise when I hear that a Czech label has signed them to record a new album, Riot for Romance!. (It's distributed in the US by Better Looking Records.)

I haven't heard the album yet, but the first I've heard, "The Red Bedroom", is amazing. No Knife's one historical flaw is that their vocals aren't always so strong, but they sound great here. (I think this song was previously released in demo form on another EP, and that version is circulating via MP3. The final version, produced by Greg Wales, sounds even better.)

Listen here: "The Red Bedroom" (MP3)

Unless you live under a rock, you've probably heard by now that the mythical last recording of Nirvana has finally surfaced.

For the last eight years or more (but particularly in the last year, thanks to the legal wranglings surrounding the tune), people have been salivating to hear the song. A live version, recorded in Chicago in October of 1993, was the initial teaser. For a while, it was believed to be the only recording of the song. Then, the rumor mill started generating word that they recorded the song during a January 1994 demo session. Then the waiting game began, until the song finally surfaced in complete form this past weekend.

The verdict? I think it's good. I don't think it's great, though.

The main problem is that I first heard that live version in 1995, and I've spent the last seven years imagining how the song might sound in official form. The arrangement of the studio version is much, much simpler than my imagined version. (I thought the final chorus would have four "you know you're right"'s, hit the last part of the chorus again, then kick into a huge solo, finishing with a quiet repeat of one of the verses.)

Plus, this thing's been hyped like hell. Courtney claimed in court that it would sell fifteen million records, which is absurd, granted that "Smells Like Teen Spirit" didn't sell that many, and it's widely considered the greatest song of the 90's.

YKYR sounds kinda strange. Truthfully, it's a demo. But it's been given the full mixing treatment that a fully-recorded song would have. (At first, I thought it might have been mixed by regular Nirvana mixer Andy Wallace - after further listening, I doubt it. His mixes tend to sound more full. I'm leaning toward the session's producer, Adam Kasper, as the song's mixer.) It's not terrible, it just sounds odd, particularly the doubled-vocals.

I don't want to sound like I'm trashing the thing, since I really do like it. But I think I like it in the way I like most of the unreleased outtakes and b-side material - as an exposure to the odds and ends of Nirvana. In my book, "Oh, the Guilt" and "Verse Chorus Verse / Sappy" rank higher on the totem pole of Nirvana's studio output than this song. And I wouldn't trade it for any of the songs on Nevermind.

I wasn't going to buy this. I liked "No One Knows", but not enough to buy the album. Then, I heard about the DVD that was included in the first pressing, and how it was getting harder and harder to find, and broke down. Plus, I'm a fan of Dave Grohl's drumming, so why not?

I'm glad I picked it up. Okay, so it sounds kinda weird. It's fairly heavily compressed, almost to the point of sounding like AM radio. And some of the songs go in unexpected and less-than-pleasing directions.

But there are enough winners to keep me interested. "No One Knows" has grown on me, and is probably my favorite of the disc. The songs where Mark Lanegan appears are great, too, particuarly "Song for the Deaf". (I think Lanegan's voice is one of the greatest voices of rock music ever. His solo song "Carnival" was a regular on my old radio show at school.) "First It Giveth" is also a winner.

And the DVD? Enh, it's okay. You get to watch Dave Grohl play drums, and some of the recording studio footage is fun to watch. But it's largely comprised of live material from their last record, which isn't that interesting to me granted that it A) doesn't include Dave and B) I don't own their last record.