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.
There’s only so much one can say about a 40 second hardcore song.
From the New Pornographers’ sixth album, Brill Bruisers, this album felt like something of a return to form for the band. I don’t think Challengers or Together were bad, but they didn’t really seem to have quite the same energy as their previous records. This song isn’t a barn burner, but the record overall is quite good.
[Read More]I’m pleased to announce that I managed to post an entry for every day this month. Not bad! I can’t imagine I’ll manage to keep it up for the whole year, but still: solid work, me! Here’s our final entry for January.
It seems like just yesterday I was saying I liked it when electronic music met rap, and this beat here is a fine example of that kind of thing. This is from Detroit rapper Danny Brown’s debut album, The Hybrid. I haven’t had this album long, and damn, there’s some bad shit in these lyrics. Hadn’t noticed that before.
[Read More]From rap’s origins to its future.
It sounds downright primitive today, but this album (Run-D.M.C., their debut) was a massive milestone in the development of rap as a cultural force. Somewhat forgotten now, Run-D.M.C. were the first rap act to have a gold record, proving that this new genre could have significant commercial appeal. They would follow that up with rap’s first platinum album and first multi-platinum album, as their sales and fame kept increasing (they would, alas, peak with that third album, Raising Hell). Run-D.M.C. changed the way rap sounded, the way it was made, and the way it looked. Rap wouldn’t ever be the same.
[Read More]Another good one, as Five Songs continues its roll.
A charming little pop song from matt pond PA.
Here’s a delightful song off that second album that the Presidents made that nobody really paid attention to. The loose charm is still present, the hooks are solid, and the wordplay is fun. Basically, this album is a goofball winner.
[Read More]A hint for anybody trying to sell records to Five Songs International: get somebody to drop “noise rock” somewhere in your review, and I’m all over it. Wiccans fit that category. And yeah, they basically sound like a vintage Amphetamine Reptile band. Maybe a little shoutier than some, AmRep bands often had the vocals buried in the mix, but musically it’s very much in that tradition. So, of course I like it!
[Read More]We’ve had Mos Def, we’ve had Talib Kweli, but now it’s time for their collaboration. Black Star loomed large over the later careers of both men, and for good reason: this is easily one of the greatest hip-hop records ever made. Off the top of my head, there are only a very small handful of records I’d put ahead of it. The spare, precise, jazz-inflected beats married perfectly with the impossibly deft rhyming from Mos and Kweli. This album is basically perfect.
[Read More]Every now and again, we get a huge band around here, and I’m never really sure what to say about them. I mean, sure some random-ass Canadian punk band, I can give a little capsule biography, talk about their discography. The Foo Fighters, though? Everybody knows them. Or, probably everybody reading this. So, I guess I’ll just say that I only have this album, The Color and the Shape, which I like just fine. But I never got around to picking up other albums.
[Read More]Peter Christopherson is one of the true innovators of underground music, performing as a member of industrial/noise pioneers Psychic TV and Throbbing Gristle. He then went on to become part of Coil, a band dedicated to electronic music in all its forms. Coil worked with an impressive list of collaborators over the years, and their career is hard to describe. While usually lumped in with industrial acts, usually due to the company they kept, Coil was much more organic and human than most of industrial music. It usually made them all the more unsettling as a consequence. Coil tended to explore the underbelly of human existence, and their lyrics were usually pretty unflinching and often pretty out there.
[Read More]Prolific post-punk act Two Inch Astronaut are keeping the Dischord sound alive. It’s interesting to me how subgenres of rock splinter off and just keep going forward once established. All it takes is a band or two to set the template, and we’ve got an entire new set of bands to keep track of. Anyway, I like this album, it sits squarely in my interests.
[Read More]A song from Low, the collaboration with Brian Eno that I brought up last time. A record jammed full of synths and ideas, this might be the most conventional and accessible song on the album. I’ll be honest, I kind of don’t feel totally qualified to talk about Bowie. I like a lot of his music, but I’m far from an expert.
This song gives a good idea of what Pussy Galore sounded like when they kind of had their shit together. To the extent their shit was ever together. Manic garage rock with atonal shouting was basically the order of the day.
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