This is the newly rebuilt Five Random Songs: chock full of posts, each featuring five random songs from my collection of music. Along with some other junk. Everything is tagged by artist. Poke around some, it’s been here since 2017. Starting in 2026, I shifted to twice-weekly posts with a little longer format. If you want to keep up, you can use RSS, sign up for email, or follow me on Bluesky.
Well, it’s not as good as yesterday.
Pretty much what it says on the tin. I knew today wasn’t going to be as good as yesterday, but this is not a great beginning.
This comes from an album called One Way Ticket To Skaville. Say what you want about Skaville, but it’s very clean. Basically no litter. After all, everybody there is just so willing to pick it up, pick it up, pick it up.
[Read More]Run The Jewels 2 is just perfect. El-P’s beats have never sounded better, Killer Mike’s rhymes have never soudned better, the guests are fantastic. It’s just such a great album, one of the highlights of music this decade.
It’s a repeat! Still, Hepcat is always welcome around here.
I always feel like categorizing the Minutemen as a hardcore band is such a bad idea. They get lumped in there because they would occasionally take that tempo, and of course they were labelmates with a bunch of hardcore bands. But they’re so much different, so much more open to experimentation. Just listen to this!
[Read More]Six songs today! I should probably just automatically skip everything with Jay-Z in it.
I don’t listen to Close My Eyes very much. Primarily because the second song on it, “Old Dog”, really kind of upsets em. It’s a good album, though, and I really should listen to it more often. Here, we catch the Slackers going into dub some, which they do every now and again.
[Read More]I mentioned last time Unsane came up that they didn’t evolve that much between albums. And this song (from their second album) is a good example - this could easily have just slotted into the first album without skipping a beat. Finding your lane and staying to it is fine, of course, but it does mean that maybe you’re not going to want to keep up with a band for forever.
[Read More]Your Blues is maybe the most Bowie of Destroyer’s albums, which is really saying something. I feel like I’ve made that comparison before. (looks) Hey, I haven’t! Anyway, this is very Bowie-ish. BOOM FRESH INSIGHT
“Samiam or 411” would be a challenging game at times. It’s also a game that, like, four people are qualified to play.
Listen to how huge those guitars are, they wound like the inside of an industrial machine. And then they all lay out and let the drummer have some? Bliss! It’s a move that so many bands have pulled, and it’s because it works. If I were in a band, I’d have everybody get out and let the dummer have plenty! In fact, maybe we should just have the drummer! Hell yes just drums.
[Read More]I think this is the longest Five Songs yet!
Oooh, have we got a treat today! Doom metal band Inter Arma have always played around with doom’s template and exploring where it could go. On today’s track, they check in on what happens if they stretch things out to 45 minutes. That’s right, this is the entirety of the album as one single track. It’s a delight, and I’m just going to let you all lean in to it.
[Read More]Entertainment!, from 1979, is one of the keystones of post-punk, a wiry, edgy blast that countless followers would attempt to mimic. The sort of vaguely dance-y rhythms, the bursts of guitar, the monotone singing, these would become hallmarks of bands even down to today. As a consequence, it’s an album that still sounds pretty fresh.
Gang of Four would keep coming and going, with hiatuses of various lengths, but I’ve never really listened to anything beyond the first two albums.
[Read More]The name A Tribute To The Ska-talites probably would get you (rightfully!) worried that it would just be a bunch of lame covers of the greatest ska band of all time. But no, instead, this is a bunch of artists from the actual first wave of ska doing Skatalites tunes. Including several, you know, actual Skatalites such as Tommy McCook here. So, what could have been a lame record instead turns out to be a super warm slab of the original stuff.
[Read More]Five Songs took a little break there. Had to recharge our batteries. It’s a grind getting out here and writing nothing of consequence about music nobody has heard or cares about! Well, we’re back!
A programming note: I’m really tired of doing the “previously"s. I think they’re charming, but they’re also a hassle to put together manually. I’m going to use the tagging on this platform instead. It’ll take a while to convert all the old entries, but this will make it easier for me going forward.
[Read More]Welcome to Five Songs, where we have six songs for you!
A repeat! Since there’s not much to say about it exactly, I’ll instead mention that Kid Koala did the score for the video game Floor Kids, which I haven’t tried yet, but will.
Listen to the space on those drums. They sound so live! Awesome.
Leading force behind Norwegian black metal legends Emperor, whose In The Nightside Eclipse is one of the touchstones of the genre, Ihsahn has continued forward as a vital force in metal over the decades since. His solo work has tended more towards the progressive and symphonic end of things rather than the black metal grime of his earlier career, but he’s shown a pretty wide range in general.
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