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.
Five Songs today features the most skippable song we’ve had yet! Enjoy!
Oh god, I’m sorry. This is from Oedipus Tex and Other Choral Calamities, the best (?) of the PDQ Bach releases, I think. Oh, this is credited to “Grandmaster Flab and the Hoople Funkharmonic”. He won a Grammy for this thing.
(NB: The video I’ve included here includes the introduction to the piece, which provides some important “context”.)
[Read More]Hell yes. Do Zu play heavily rock-inflected jazz? Is it instead jazzy avant-garde metal? Who cares, is it fun? (It is.) I wandered into Zu after learning that Mombu was a side-project of parts of Zu, and I’m glad I did. I love this kind of genre-hopping mishmash of stuff.
Black metal band out of France, Blut Aus Nord has been making an unholy racket for twenty something years now, cranking out a ton of albums including multiple trilogies. If that sounds overwrought, that’s probably because it is, overwrought theatrics being part of the classic black metal playbook, along with strangled vocals, blast beats, and furious tremelo picking. This comes from Memoria Vetusta III: Saturnian Poetry which, yeah - overwrought. This song would probably tell you if you want to listen to more Blut Aus Nord or not.
[Read More]This set was going pretty well for a while! Oh well.
Meat Beat Manifesto had a bit of a strange start to their career. Their first album was destroyed in a studio fire prior to release, a story that the band has stuck to but their label denied happened. Their debut album then instead became Storm the Studio, which was really just four songs, but they put out multiple parts and variations of everything. That was then followed by Armed Audio Warfare, which was their attempt to re-create their actual debut record, so they kind of released their first couple albums out of order.
[Read More]I really like this set a lot.
We just had DJ Logic a few days ago, and Live Human is a similar premise: a trio of a bassist, drummer, and DJ. There’s the same kind of loose, jazzy, improvisational feel to the proceedings. DJ Logic tends to be more towards the jazz end than the hip-hop end compared to Live Human, but they’re really very similar bands.
Goddamn, listen to that song. Shudder to Think, where have you gone? (looks) Apparently Craig Wedren did some soundtracks, cool.
[Read More]December! Fear not, there will be no Christmas themed Five Songs to contend with here, unless shuffle pulls something up randomly (and there’s very little Christmas music in my collection). Maybe I’ll do some obnoxious metal-themed special on the 25th though. Here’s today’s tunes.
One of the things I like doing is going through “Best of the Year” roundups from various music blogs that do good work and just trying a bunch of stuff I’ve never heard of. Mostly, I do pretty well through this process, and even if they’re not all favorites, it gives me a chance to break out of my established loops and try and find some new bands. It can be easy, especially as I get older, to just rely on the same stuff I’ve always listened to, and this sort of explicit process helps shield against that.
[Read More]First appearance for Common here, this coming from his masterpiece, Like Water For Chocolate. With production from a bunch of underground greats, Common put everything together and made a landmark of underground rap that brought back the feel of the Native Tongues bands. While it might run on a bit too long, it’s still a huge pleasure to listen to, so smooth and assured.
[Read More]From the double album The Powers That B, as with most things Death Grips, this is pretty singular. It’s really unclear what you’d call this, other than experimental. Maybe Dadaist?
This comes from Play Cell, a pop-punk album on Lookout distinguishable primarily for the rarity of a female singer in a scene where you didn’t find very many of them. It’s a decent album, but not great, and somehow I ended up with four albums from them.
[Read More]I kind of feel like I should give a Jim Anchower-style apology here for disappearing for a while, but the truth is, I was traveling and didn’t queue up any entries for while I was gone. Sorry about that! Back into the music mines with me, though!
That was not the triumphant, rockin’ return I was hoping for. Oh well. Live by the shuffle, die by the shuffle. Anyway, I like the breakdown at the end of this song.
[Read More]Just a quick one today, Five Songs is on the road!
Surf-ish instrumental band Shadowy Men On A Shadowy Planet are probably best known as the band who did the theme song for Kids In The Hall. That’s a bit of a shame, as they put together three very strong albums. Strong enough that at one time, underground luminary Steve Albini called them the best band recording. Anyway, thoroughly charming and full of personality, their albums are all worth giving a try, with Dim The Lights, Chill The Ham being my favorite.
[Read More]Just a quick entry today, but some fun songs.
An early song from Big Black, this was on the EP Bulldozer, the first one that featured Santiago Durango and so is really the first real recording from them. This song was later found on The Hammer Party, which collected the first couple (or three, on CD) EPs. It’s an interesting document of a band that is kind of finding their sound, and there are some strong songs on the collection.
[Read More]