You’ll never guess what album young GREG PUCIATO hid under a rock so his parents wouldn’t find it. This is his Slaylist.
The former Dillinger man talks us through the soundtrack to his life – no holds barred, no genres exempt
LISTEN TO EMINEM. Not since Forgot About Dre have I been like, ‘Oh shit!’ about him, but on that surprise release he is just going so fucking hard. It’s a crazy display of undeniable talent. The song Greatest is really refreshing because he’s being unashamed about being better than people. There’s too much apologism today. People shaking hands and being inoffensive because they don’t wanna burn a bridge or lose an audience. No, fuck that. Now on to the shit that really hit me on a lasting level long ago – Sometimes by MY BLOODY VALENTINE.
This band changed my approach to art and creation. They opened up my brain to the possibilities of abstraction and made me realise what could be done when you engage the imagination more and don’t spell everything out so literally. Fall in love with someone, drive with the windows down at night, get fucked up, kiss them and tell them all your secrets while listening to this band. BAD BRAINS are another band that broke rules. Talk about being free.
I Against I: I had never heard a singer like this. The band were so loose but so tight at the same time, like Eddie
Van Halen playing punk rock. They had a similar effect on me as My Bloody Valentine, even though the bands sound nothing alike. I heard Dragonflies To Sew You Up by [experimental US musician] PRURIENT when I needed to. He’s a friend of mine now, though I was a fan first. One of the handful of people I’ve met who feel like true kindred spirits. Stylistically unafraid. Control of his art and output. Go down the wormhole of output this person has created. Another kindred spirit is DRAB MAJESTY. He went from playing drums in an indie band to teaching himself to play left-handed fingerpicked guitar and becoming a frontman.
Dot In The Sky is his best song. I’ve talked about …And Justice For All by METALLICA to death, but it doesn’t change the truth. The sound. The songs. The way the riffs feel like a cold, grey, single stream of consciousness. I was nine years old, walking around the city listening to this album over and over on a Walkman until the writing of the cassette was gone. The album changed my course forever. Dyers Eve was the song that spoke to me. It still does. GUNS N’ ROSES preluded Metallica for me by a year or so. The attitude that Welcome To The Jungle embodied felt like how I felt when I was eight. Firmly, defiantly “Fuck you”. I had to hide the cassette cover under a rock in an alley so my parents wouldn’t take it from me. I’m a sucker for abstract thinking, and Koln Concert by KEITH JARRETT is the sound of something getting lost in feel. You’re listening to a person speak to you on one instrument, and it never gets boring. You don’t need words. DeF LePPARD’s Hysteria was my father’s favourite album. It still makes me think of being a kid. It’s glossy and corny, but there’s something in there to me. Some part of my childhood, the exact moment when you still believe everything is pure. The Dillinger songtitle Room Full Of Eyes is an homage to 1000
Eyes by DeATH. That record blew me away. The mixture of melancholy and surgical aggression. It felt the way
I felt. It just feels so intelligent and so proficient, but also so emotional. It felt like Edvard Munch’s painting, The Scream: someone screaming not just because they’re pissed, but because they can’t escape something. I first saw SOUNDGARDEN at Lollapalooza in ’96, when I was 16. They played as the sun was setting. Every other band that day was trying to outdo each other, to be weirder or crazier. Instead Soundgarden stood still and basically played doom riffs while the air cooled and the sky darkened around them. They played Jesus Christ Pose at the end… I’ll never forget it. Years later, every night we played with them, both times we toured with them, I never missed this song. We were touring with them at the time when Chris killed himself, and it shook me in a way that will never leave me. There’s a piece of me trapped in that band.
“WE WERE TOURING WITH SOUNDGARDEN WHEN CHRIS DIED”