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Vanilla Ice - Hard to Swallow (1998, Republic) - Morbid curiosity and a $3.99 price tag makes me buy strange things sometimes when I have 3.99 to spend. Anyway, this was pretty much the final, desperate, flailing attempt by Robert Van Winkle to make waves in rap and rap-adjacent musical forms, before he gave up and started doing home improvements or whatever the hell it is he does now. And this is an album by a dude who was the rap equivalent of hair metal trying to be some sort of Fred's Dollar Store "Karate Turtles Warriors" bootleg of Limp Bizkit, and it's as bad as you can imagine. However, I'd be lying if I said that I took no occasional guilty pleasure from "Too Cold," which is a nu-metal update of "Ice, Ice Baby." Sadly, there is no Ross Robinsoned version of "Ninja Rap" on here.

Venom - Eine Kleine Nachtmusik 2CD (1986, Neat) - This is a live double-album that pretty much came out at the exact final moments a live Venom record would be A Thing; before the lineup started changing wildly, and they dropped into the late 80s Black Sabbath "man, I wish they hadn't broken up - what the hell, they're still doing stuff?" zone. And this isn't the highest quality live recording, but Venom's actual studio records had always kinda sounded like shit, so it works. (In my mind, they spent the production budget on skulls for the sacrifice or some shit, but I bet if budgetary malfeasance occurred, it was probably for something boring like cocaine.) Anyway, this won't blow your dick to the back of the room or anything, but it's good, hail Satan, Black Fucking Metal, so on, so forth, et cetera.

Venom - Calm Before the Storm (1987, Deadline) - This came in a two pack with Eine Kleine Nachtmusik for the ~NICE PRICE~ of ten bucks or so, and anything outside of the classic earliest-80s Venom stuff was a big blind spot for me, and man, I dunno about this thing. The production is all nice and clean, which is just weird for a Venom album, and there are keyboards and times when Cronos shifts from being a gruff dude shouting gruffly to being all "I'm CronoOoOos and I'm gonna siiiing for yoooOoOooouu," and yeah, no. "Metal Punk" is good, but overall, this thing is a damn mess.

Vince DiCola - Transformers the Movie Original Motion Picture Score (2013, Intrada) - I'm pretty sure I have some latent magical and/or mutant powers, and without a Dumbledore or a Charles Xavier to guide my hand, I wasted them on frivolities. I made this Cd happen. With my mind. I'm sure of it, and you can't tell me otherwise. I wanted this Cd to exist ever since the simultaneously triumphant and traumatic time when I saw this movie in the theater, and it finally happened. Actually some version of this has been floating around since the late 90s, but those have always been multi-Cd sets that either required attending a Transformers convention or giving your soul and/or first-born to someone on Ebay. And neither of those things were ever going to happen, because I'm eternally broke, and a Transformers convention sounds like a truly horrifying place to be, second only maybe to any independent wrestling event. Thinking about it has brought back memories of gaining internet access in 1998, looking up Transformers on Yahoo, then going to someone's Geocities page, first marveling at all their pictures of crazy old merchandise and screen captures from the cartoon, then being horrified for the rest of my life when I hit the section with fan fiction about Megatron raping Starscream or some other gross, evil shit. Nerd consumer culture is a blight on humanity, and its purveyors will be first against the wall when I am king. Love this Cd so much though.

Voivod - Angel Rat (1991, MCA) - It's weird, because this is pretty much the Voivod equivalent of Load, as in it's the one that was just too weird and not-metal for everybody, and turned off all their old fans and started the ball rolling for the band to get dropped from their major label deal and eventually fall apart. But I just don't hear it, you guys. This is perfectly fine, and if anything, it seems more straightforward and less experimental and weird than Nothingface. I guess everyone's problem with this was that it was more of a rock record than a metal one, maybe? I dunno. Anyway, "Panorama" is one of the best things they ever did, and it's really weird to think back to a time when Voivod, Soundgarden, and Faith No More all went on tour, and these guys were the headliners.

Voivod - The Outer Limits (1993, MCA) - This was apparently much more well received than Angel Rat was, despite not being all that different as far as the sound goes, except for better production. Even as someone who didn't hate the previous record, I'd have to say I like this one more overall. It pisses me off though, because I picked this up used, and my copy is the somehwat harder-to-find version with the 3D booklet, (the glasses were long gone by the time it was in my hands, though) but some previous owner wrote all over the goddamn thing. I don't know if this was a radio station's copy or something, but it has "K6CR IN 3-D" in big letters on the front, "K6CR" on the disk itself, and "DON'T STEAL" in similar fashion inside. WHY CAN'T I HAVE NICE THINGS?

Voivod - Negatron (1995, Mausoleum) - I'll be real with you, I've had this album for a hundred years now, and I can't recall a single thing about it. Voivod did two albums with Eric "E-Force" Forrest on bass/vocals in the nineties, and it's frustrating, because this one is just sort of boring, but I've only heard rave reviews of Phobos, which was the one that never popped up in any used CD bins in my area. Also, this allegedly has some ancient form of enhanced Cd content, but I've never had a PC that could access any of it. Like I put it in the CD-ROM drive, and it just comes up as a normal audio CD with no extra files or whatever. Weird. For all I know, the goddamn secrets of the universe could be on there, which would be a very Voivod thing for them to do.

Voivod - Voivod (2003, Chophouse) - This was when Jason Newsted quit Metallica in disgust, then realized he had thirty wheelbarrows of cash from the Black Album to do with as he pleased, so why not get Voivod back together? And the video for "We Carry On" was probably the first time I had heard them since childhood Headbanger's Ball experiences, and it was so damn good, and I went out and got this CD, even though I was working at Petsmart for $6.20 an hour and really couldn't afford it, but this Cd rules, and I love it, but I don't think the internet likes it, but fuck the internet, who did they ever beat? Later that winter, I decided I needed a wintry hat (I was still shaving my head at the time) and I decided to splurge on a cool band hat, and it came down to a choice between one with this album's logo on it, and one with a Blood for Blood logo. And I went with Blood for Blood, which sucks, because I still have it, and it's in decent shape, but I can't wear it, because the singer tried to force himself on a preteen. Voivod would never touch the children. Voivod is for the children.

Voivod - Katorz (2006, The End) - This was crazy when it came out, because people were all "oh man, Piggy died, does this mean Voivod is going to break up?" and they were like "hell naw, not only are we going to stick around, we're going to keep putting out records with the dead guy playing on them." And it's crazy, because on one hand, this album sounds like shit, owing perhaps to how the guitars were literally recorded on a laptop computer in a bathroom by a dude who was not long for this world, but on the other hand, it is so good. It was like they knew they had no choice but to knock this one out of the park, because it would be disrespectful to do anything less. They owed it to Piggy, maaan.

Voivod - Infini (2009, Relapse) - This is the second of the two albums made with Denis D'Amour's bathroom guitar tracks, and man, I hate to say this, but I think they used all the best stuff for Katorz, and just had to piece together the B-material, or maybe they were hamstrung by a bass player who was more focused on reality TV game show shit than on Voivod, because this was a huge step down. Not that it sucks or anything, but it's easily the least good of all the Newsted-era Voivod records. That being said, the last track, "Volcano," however, is the beeeeesssssssssst.

Voivod - Target Earth (2013, Century Media) - Whoa. This is the first one with the new guitar player and the only one with the original bass player back in the band, (which didn't last long) and allegedly, those two did all the writing on this, and they killed it, man. This thing sounds like Nothingface if Nothingface was heavier than shit, which is at least in theory the most perfect possible Voivod album. It just occurred to me now that since this came out, they did an EP (with the new new bass player, apparently) that has them doing a cover of "Silver Machine" by Hawkwind, which seems like something this band was formed specifically to do, and I never checked it out, and I have failed you all, pretty much.

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"Weird Al" Yankovic - The TV Album (1994, Volcano) - One of the most inexplicable things (of many) about my CD collection is that there are only two Weird Als (Weirds Al?) in the entire bunch, and no actual albums. Like there are no others, even illegally-obtained. Sad. Even going back to small times when I couldn't pretend to give the slightest shadow of a damn about music, the dude has been a staple of my life, and stands with Mr. T as one of the two dudes that would severely ruin me if they were among the next celebrities to get outed as sex pests. Anyway, this is one of the themed compilation CDs they put out back in the day, (I know there was a Food Album, I don't remember any others) and despite the narrow scope, it did manage to hit a couple glaring omissions from the big two-disk compilation. ("Money for Nothing/Beverly Hillbillies" and the full-length version of "UHF" - UHF was the best goddamn movie, and literally the first DVD I ever bought, before I had a DVD player, even) I really need to go back and get more Weird Al.

"Weird Al" Yankovic - The Essential "Weird Al" Yankovic 2CD (2009, RCA/Jive) - I guess if you are going to only have the minimum possible amount of Yankovic material, this is the one, right here. These "The Essential" deals seem to do a good job getting everything you can cram on to two disks, and whenever you go "oh, but they left _____ off," you look back, and it's actually on there. Not to mention that the 2009 release date cuts things off perfectly before the time when I became utterly unaware of and unconcerned with anything happening in popular music. You see, I used to be with it, but then, they changed what it was, and now it frightens and confuses me. AND IT'LL HAPPEN TO YOU. Aw man, "Christmas at Ground Zero" isn't on here.

White Zombie - La Sexorcisto: Devil Music Vol. 1 (1992, Geffen) - The funny thing about this is that I fully remember it being out for at least a year - hell maybe even close to two years - before it became a giant hit and "Thunderkiss '65" became utterly inescapable. I can remember my brother and his heathen friends all having this tape, by virtue of heavy Headbanger's Ball rotation, but out in the world of the normals, no one gave a drizzling shit about this until it came up on a Beavis and Butthead episode. And man, that's crazy to think about. Rob Zombie sold millions of records and became a big enough celebrity off the back of that for people to allow him to make movies with budgets and everything, and none of that shit would exist had it not been for two episodes of a cartoon about kids chainsawing grasshoppers and whackin' off in the tool shed. This opens a door to a frightening alternate reality where Beavis and Butthead had been more kind to Crowbar, and Kirk Windstein was directing romantic comedies or some shit right now. Man, I need some Crowbar albums. ALL I HAADD I GAAAAAAAAAVE.

White Zombie - Astro Creep:2000 - Songs of Love, Destruction, and Other Synthetic Delusions of the Electric Head (1995, Geffen) - This was one of the Bonus Stolen Two of my Original Eleven CDs, but I think I've been over that story a hundred times by now. And while this didn't have anything as strong as "Thunderkiss '65" or "Black Sunshine," this was a more solid record in terms of having anything worthwhile past the two singles, even if it did get kinda far into over-sampled techno-ish nonsense. Of course, after this, Rob Zombie was all "hey guys, gonna make a solo album, but don't worry, White Zombie is still a thing," and the other band members were all "okay man, cool, good luck," and then he was like "well, Hellbilly Deluxe was huge, so you fuckers can all go screw, I'm a solo artist now." Rob Zombie might be an asshole, you guys.

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ZZ Top - Tres Hombres (1973, London - I have the 2006 Warner Bros version with bonus tracks) - Just thinking about ZZ Top makes me sad for the plight of the big, shaggy beard in modern pop culture. It's a "ZZ Top Beard," you pricks, not a "Duck Dynasty Beard." It was once a thing represented by the monumental beards Billy Gibbons and Dusty Hill (Hank's cousin in King of the Hill canon; never forget that. R.I.P., Cotton's Cadillac Car.) had cultivated out of love and devotion. It was something so important that they turned down untold piles of cash from Schick or Gillette or whoever when asked to shave for a commercial. It was not some ol' bullshit that a bunch yuppie millionaire racists affected because they thought it would be a wacky trademark for their stupid fucking reality show. I hope those dudes all die and have their corpses violated by a duck's corkscrew penis. This is perhaps harsh, but I feel that it is ultimately a fair punishment.